The Altersea Opera
A Comparative Dialogue Act
At its heart, The Dark Current honors the ancient, embodied connections linking Pasifika women across the fluid realms of time and space. Unscripted scenes of dancers breaking their synchronized, floral-like formation to the call of Tiatia’s directorial “cut” express those relations in grounded terms. Laughter, clapping, hugs, and conversation dissolves the boundary between the real and iconic, highlighting the co-creation of Pasifika representations by Pasifika artists for a Pasifika gaze.
“The endless symbolism of forests lies in their low visibility,” writes Anna Arabindan-Kesson, “to move through the dense entanglements of these spaces we need all our senses.” The same might be said of Colomboscope, Sri Lanka’s interdisciplinary arts festival now in its eighth edition. Dense, multi-sensory, and rhizomatic, it speaks through entanglements and intersections, and flows beyond exhibition spaces to wetland walks, conversations with forest gods, and other “mushroomings.”
olivas presents new work while summarizing projects spanning at least the past six years, and honoring relationships that point back still further. (In a concrete insistence on intergenerational debt, olivas’s family truck parks outside: an acknowledgment of origins registered as a structuring presence in the artist’s paintings of its seeping oil, among others.) The titular Gilded Dreams (2024) bisects the front room, smartly installed as a barrier that is nevertheless askew, torqued from instead of parallel to the entry.
“Mineral Lick” is the first UK solo show for van Imhoff, whose previous work has focused on hierarchies of value within collecting institutions such as museums and archives. Here, she foregrounds unexpected material combinations underpinned by a fascination with grafting, hybridity, and the recontextualizing of materials. GRIMM’s street-level windows have been washed with white shading paint and the interior glows with pink-red light—both echoes of the forced growing conditions of commercial greenhouse production.
Karol Woller Reyes’ “generational imagination” belongs to artists who have “naturally incorporated some creative strategies” such as digital montage and circuit bending into the production of paintings and sculptures that also abound with references to pop-cultural figures from Pokémon to Pepe the Frog. The implication is that the art of today is shaped by the technologies and media environment of its makers’ adolescence.
Instead of leaning in to look, Clark has us leaning in to listen with Monitors, a freestanding pair of unvarnished, hollowed-out, and reconstructed steel doors. By outfitting the doors with audio transducers, the artist transforms them into speakers that fill the space with chatter and laughter. Closer listening reveals the voices of spectators at a zoo. One deep, unimpressed voice rises above the din: “You’re boring.” It’s unsettling. Unseen and unheard, the observed animals are made present only by the exclamations and comments of passing visitors.
The standout works in an exhibition curated by Nontobeko Ntombela do not fit neatly into the narratives for which Mahlangu has often been claimed. The first of these pleasant surprises comes in the second room, with an AK47 rendered in Ndebele beadwork and resembling a glittering soft toy. By transforming phallic armament into flaccid ornament, Beaded Rifle (2013) offers an alternative take on the artist as a proponent of “soft power.”
They say ghosts, vampires, and the soulless cast no shadows. Shot in a Vatican City emptied of visitors during the pandemic summer of 2021, Catherine Opie’s new photographs provocatively reshuffle different threads of her longstanding inquiries—the spectrum from transparency to opacity; communal spaces; the body as/and architecture; queerness and institutions.
How might our understanding of education better incorporate communication, participation, and play? And what would be the consequences of that expanded approach? Such questions have been at the center of Amalia Pica’s work for many years, drawing partially on her early experience as a primary school teacher. Her first solo exhibition in New York attends to the manifold aspects of learning across a group of collages, sculptures, and video works organized around a new interactive installation.
The history of avant-garde museology begins after the October Revolution, when the Russian champions of new art proposed the establishment of a network of Museums of Artistic Culture. Not much later, a group of New-York-based modernists and Dadaists started the Société Anonyme, a collective that sought to establish the first American museum of modern art. The successive chapters of this story were written by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, who designed the Kabinett der Abstrakten at the Hanover Provinzialmuseum, and by the avant-garde a.r. group, whose efforts began the International Collection of Modern Art at the Łódź museum now known as the Muzeum Sztuki.
