Innholdsfortegnelse for Almanac 2024 i ArtAsiaPacific

ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is an educational platform committed to spreading awareness and understanding of modern and contemporary art through publishing projects and public activities. Art plays a vital role in creating and maintaining a tolerant and inclusive society, and for that reason we are dedicated to embracing the diverse ideas and points-of-view that are intricately woven into the art of today in Asia. A sibling organization to the 31-year-old bimonthly magazine, ArtAsiaPacific Foundation is a nonprofit that offers a unique platform and voice in the fast-expanding field of contemporary art. At the heart of our mission is the advancement of knowledge about contemporary visual art from Hong Kong, Asia and beyond, through research, scholarship and the dissemination of information about culture today to the wider public. The Foundation initiates its own…

Participating Artists (as of 16 October 2023, subject to change) Hamra Abbas Sara Abdu Irene Agrivina Alia Ahmad Azra Akšamija Nabila Al Bassam Dhali Al Mamoon Reem Al Nasser Rasha Al-Duwaisan Abdulrahman Al-Soliman Mohammad AlFaraj Abdulla Buhijji & Noor Alwan Aseel AlYaqoub El Anatsui Nazgol Ansarinia Rasheed Araeen Siah Armajani Martha Atienza Tarek Atoui Dana Awartani Armin Linke and Ahmed Mater Liu Chuang Mariah Lookman Taus Makhacheva The Migrant Ecologies Project (Lucy Davis and collaborators Zai Tang, Kee Ya Ting, and Zachary Chan) Małgorzata Mirga-Tas Regina Maria Möller James Morris Tania Mouraud Zarina Muhammad Dala Nasser Hind Nasser Hussein Nassereddine Asma Bahmim Sammy Baloji Zarina Bhimji Ursula Biemann Safeya Binzagr Rossella Biscotti Britto Arts Trust Abdulla Buhijji Muhanned Cader María Magdalena Campos-Pons Tiffany Chung Ade Darmawan Priyageetha Dia Ibrahim El-Salahi…

Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952–2023 World-renowned composer, music producer, artist, and actor Ryuichi Sakamoto passed away on March 28 at the age of 71 after a two-year battle with cancer. Sakamoto is most recognized for his work with the Yellow Magic Orchestra and his film scores, including 1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Cho Yong-Ik 1934–2023 Known for his colorful, geometric compositions, South Korean artist Cho Yong-Ik died at the age of 89 on July 2. A pioneer of abstract art in Korea, Cho was one of the earliest participants of the Dansaekhwa movement. Vivan Sundaram 1943–2023 Regarded as a leading artist of the post-1968 generation in India, Vivan Sundaram used his art to tackle major societal events, including the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and its aftermath of communal violence.…

Despite apprehension about the post-pandemic economy, cultural organizations saw returns on their investment in new ventures. After a three-year renovation, Artspace, a contemporary art center in Sydney funded by the New South Wales government, reopened its Woolloomooloo headquarters, the Gunnery, on December 15, coinciding with the institution’s 40th anniversary. Artspace now occupies all three floors of the heritage-listed building, providing increased exhibition and multiplatform space, a learning studio, an accessible archive, and ten subsidized artist studios to combat the city’s raising rent prices. Receiving a total architectural revamp by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Istanbul Modern returned to its base in Karaköy after a five-year absence to a new 10,500-square-meter, glass-walled complex inspired by its waterfront location on the Bosphorus. The private museum reopened on May 4 with a chronological showcase…

JANUARY 4 Over 12 countries imposed Covid-19 testing requirements on arrivals from China 5 Funeral for Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican 6–15 SEA Focus & Singapore Art Week 9 Exhibition “Goodbye in Seoul” closed for artworks criticizing the Korean president and first lady 9 MMCA Korea reprimanded by Ministry of Culture for illegal or unfair practices over acquisitions 12 Maōri tribe demanded repatriation of treasured taonga auctioned at Sotheby’s London 12-15 Mumbai Gallery Weekend 12-15 Inaugural edition of Art SG fair in Singapore 15 Yeti Airlines Flight 691 crashed in Pokhara, Nepal, killing all 72 passengers 19 Jacinda Ardern resigned as New Zealand’s prime minister 22 India banned BBC documentary about prime minister Narendra Modi FEBRUARY 3 Pakistan banned Wikipedia for three days over “blasphemous content” 3-11 Dhaka Art…

When it comes to art fairs, size is everything. How many people attend? How many collectors fly in? How many galleries haul works across continents? How expensive are the booths to rent? How much carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere? These muscular, corporate displays of global commerce, at the largest end, occupy major trade-industry halls, with their utilitarian decor and generic, overpriced food. And yet people come on mass, in the tens-of-thousands. Gargantuan, however, is not the only model in town, as there are fairs for every price-point, and much more room to maneuver and compete among the regional start-ups as companies continue to tap each segment of the market. Godzilla vs King Kong Since Frieze arrived in Seoul in September 2022 to rival Art Basel Hong Kong (ABHK),…

Informed by his critical engagement and close collaboration with individuals and communities suffering from intergenerational trauma brought about by colonialism, war, and displacement, Tuan Andrew Nguyen investigates the ramifications of memory and the erasure of place and identity through film and sculptural works. Born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in the mid-1970s, Nguyen moved with his family to the United States, studying fine arts at the University of California Irvine before earning an MFA from CalArts. A member of the Propeller Group, an artist collective and faux advertising agency that critiques contemporary Vietnam, Nguyen’s recent solo practice has addressed the reverberations of 20th-century Vietnamese history with a combination of poetic seriousness and visual clarity. Coming off the back of a successful 2022, in which he participated in the…

The Jakarta- and Bandung-based trio of Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans, and Ruddy Hatumena, who have worked together since 2006 as the collective Tromarama, are fascinated by the hyperreal intertwining of digital media and technologies in our daily lives. With humor and pathos, they attempt to untangle the wires and URLs that connect us to alternative virtual realms. In the installation Contraflow (2023), for instance, shown in their May solo exhibition at Hong Kong’s Kiang Malingue gallery, a wall of Himalayan salt lamps—reputedly boosters of energetic calm—blink whenever someone tweets #power, while in Pacupicu (2023), a latex horse’s head affixed to the end of a tripod emits children’s voices when anyone tweets #contest. The digital world is one of continuous, added disruption. For Tromarama, one urgent issue is how social media…

On March 11, 13 years will have passed since the triple nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)-owned Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan. In response to the ongoing ecological contamination, a collective of artists and cultural workers established “Don’t Follow the Wind,” an exhibition that “opened” on March 11, 2015, inside the exclusion zone—the inaccessible area surrounding the nuclear power plant that is over three times the size of Hong Kong Island. Organized by eponymous collective Don’t Follow the Wind (comprising Chim↑Pom from Smappa! Group, Kenji Kubota, Jason Waite, Eva & Franco Mattes), with contributing artists such as Miyanaga Aiko, Koizumi Meiro, Trevor Paglen, and Taryn Simon, the project cannot be seen in person as the area remains off-limits to the public due to high levels…

The return of onsite art events and exhibitions across the Philippine islands finally happened in 2023, with a renewed focus on specific localities beyond Metro Manila. The country had suffered through the longest community quarantine in the world during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and art institutions were among the last the government allowed to reopen. While partial re-openings had occurred in early 2022, with Art Fair Philippines leading a hybrid event alongside many institutions trying to seek balance, most smaller-scale and independent art institutions only found the confidence to launch their events and projects in 2023, once they could fully expect onsite participants from across the regions. The Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference (VIVA ExCon), initiated in 1990 by Black Artists in Asia (BAA) and presently…

What are your reflections on the curatorial process of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022–23), and what particular moments and artworks from the Biennale inspired you the most? A biennale isn’t just a collection of artworks, but a sharing of an ethos, of ways to make and survive, even flourish, and of finding voices to amplify. Curating 90 artists means creating a community within that moment, and my conviction grew ever stronger that the most powerful way to create is by making a commons. It may be an overused word but still apt when examining where power resides with seemingly powerless people. And the other thing is satire—when you have no clout, the ability to mock the people who have authority over you is incredibly powerful. Originally the commons was not just an…

A sure sign that the Indian art world had finally emerged from its Covid cocoon was the staging of the India Art Fair, on schedule, in February 2023. Attracting 85 exhibitors, the fair nudged New Delhi’s galleries to mount a slew of noteworthy exhibitions at their own premises. Making up for two years of doom and gloom, there was a notable air of celebration at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), which hosted “Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular.” Curated by artist Iftikhar Dadi and KNMA’s Roobina Karode, this large-scale exhibition highlighted pop art in the region by bringing together works by artists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, from the sharply satirical installation Happy New Year (2013) by Anant Joshi, to Ramesh Mario…

Austerity is a policy that seeps into your skin and mushrooms in your flesh and bones. It tenses the muscles in your rib cage and drives schisms between your actions and your values. As a Londoner of one year, I now embody these conditions, like so many of the capital’s artists, art workers, and institutions large and small who are facing soaring living costs and severe public-funding cuts. Among those whose funding support was slashed by the Arts Council England in November 2022 was the Whitechapel Gallery. In mid-March, just six months after newly appointed director Gilane Tawadros took the reins, the gallery fired six of its employees, including chief curator Lydia Yee, citing sizable budget deficits over the past two years. The priority is to survive, Tawadros made clear;…

DEC 23 APR 10 The fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB), curated by Singaporean artist and writer Shubigi Rao, “In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire,” focused on the power of storytelling during global crises, celebrating optimism and satire in a time still dominated by Covid-19 and its related discourse. After postponing three times due to the pandemic and organizational challenges, the KMB finally debuted in 12 venues across India’s historically rich port cities of Kochi and Ernakulam, including the repurposed factory Aspinwall House, multipurpose space Pepper House, and the industrial Anand Warehouse. The fifth edition featured 80 artists and collectives with more than 45 new commissions, including Sahil Naik’s installation All is water and to water we must return (2021–22), using salvaged stones to evoke the remains of…

FEB 7 JUN 11 Inspired by the curatorial concept of the late Okwui Enwezor (1964–2019) to reimagine the emancipatory potential of postcoloniality, Sharjah Biennial 15 (SB15) “Thinking Historically in the Present” was led by Sharjah Art Foundation director Hoor Al Qasimi and a working group of Enwezor’s past collaborators. With more than 150 artists, SB15 was staged at five locations across the emirate. The Sharjah Art Museum hosted thematic, museum-like presentations of artists working primarily in figurative or abstract painting or photography to address brutal histories of racial, ethnic, and Indigenous repression, social resistance movements, and the struggles of migrant communities. SB15 featured powerful stand-alone installations. Bouchra Khalili investigated the Movement of Arab Workers in mid-1970s France in her dual-channel video The Circle (2023) featuring two young people of Algerian…

OCT 6 NOV 25 The 17th edition of the Jogja Biennale—titled “Titen: Embodied Knowledge, Shifting Grounds”—saw curators Eka Putra Nggalu, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Hit Man Gurung, and Adelina Luft explore the decolonization of knowledge production through notions of locality and, in the process, pose the question: how can artists strive toward a collaborative understanding of such places? Across a wide range of artistic practices and presentations by 70 artists, their particular approach was to unpack the politics of soil-based practices and agricultural histories. Lembâna Artgroecosystem collective’s large-scale installation, Bhâko: So Which of the Favors of Your Land Would You Deny? (2023) featured a canopy covered in dry tobacco leaves, a subsistence crop that fuels a kretek (clove cigarette) industry that has remained pivotal to Indonesia’s economy since the colonial era. Meanwhile,…

DEC 9 APR 30, 2024 The third Thailand Biennale, titled “The Open World” and led by artistic directors Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gridthiya Gaweewong, took place in heritage-rich sites around Chiang Rai and the Golden Triangle region, as well as in the newly built Chiang Rai International Art Museum, with curators Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram drawing inspiration from the 13th-century bronze Buddha at Wat Pa Sak, whose posture represents the enlightenment of humankind by opening the Earth to the heavens and underworld. Hosting 38 international and 22 Thai artists and collectives, the festival explored local histories to probe globalized perceptions on mythology, geopolitics, animism, and ecology. Among the large-scale projects was one of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s iconic netted installations and Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist Michael Lin’s public project, weekend is…

mOTHERTONGUE Australian Centre for Contemporary Art APR 22 JUL 18 “mOTHERTONGUE,” curated by Max Delany, assembled 40 artworks and 12 new commissions that span Mithu Sen’s two-decade-long career. It explored a vast range of politically loaded themes in Sen’s works, which interrogate power structures within linguistics by intentionally misusing the English language. Her series of large-scale drawings and instructional diagrams, UnMYthU: UnKIND(s) Alternatives (2018), for instance, uses an incorrect prefix (“un”) to investigate, or un-make, social conventions, while MOU (Museum of Unbelongings) (2023), a giant circular vitrine of modified figures and found objects, and the work on paper Museum piece #4 – (un)drawing (2018) uses symbolism to unearth the hierarchies in collecting and archival documentation at the heart of museums. Sen’s video How to be a SUCKcessful Artist (2019) critiques…

THE THREADS OF DESTINY BANK JUN 10 JUL 23 “The Threads of Destiny” at BANK was the first major exhibition to display the collaborative works of the influential artistic couple who bridged China’s and Europe’s postwar cultural landscape. The exhibition told a story of artistic collaboration through their handwoven fiber sculptures, including Maryn Varbanov’s Bleu Mise en Rapport (1978), a drapery-like structure that deconstructs itself into tangles to suggest botanical forms, and a series of eight gravity-defying, felted lambswool cylindrical columns in suspension above the floor. Song Huai-Kuei’s Butterfly tapestries, inspired by Zhuangzi’s classical Chinese prose, are erotic and boldly feminist. Their works echoed the postminimalist movement of the 1970s and showcased the couple’s transformation of craft techniques, materials, and processes into avant-garde sculptures that defied the boundaries between genres…

TIME & THE TIGER Singapore Art Museum NOV 24 MAR 3, 2024 Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s midcareer exhibition “Time & the Tiger,” curated by Eugene Tan, alluded to his fascination with the symbolism of tigers and the cultural history of time in the region—from the aporia of imperialism and colonialism (such as the modern history of Japan’s wartime occupation of Singapore) to the trajectory of postwar capitalism in East and Southeast Asia. Ho’s Hotel Aporia (2019) is a multichannel video installation tracing the history of Japan’s subjugation of various Southeast Asian countries during World War II, while in his newly commissioned two-channel video installation T for Time (2023), Ho engages with “time-keeping traditions” across Asia after being inspired by personal memories of growing up in a middle-class household in…

On October 7, Hamas militants launched an attack on Israel, killing 1,200 people and abducting hundreds more. In response, Israel initiated a retaliatory offensive that decimated a third of Gazan infrastructure and killed more than 20,000 Palestinians by mid-December. Watching these horrors unfold in real time sparked tensions in the artworld and beyond. Amid the violence, artists became victims of war. Thirty-six-year-old filmmaker Yahav Winner was shot dead in the Kfar Aza kibbutz on October 7 after protecting his wife and newborn daughter from militants who invaded their home. On October 13, Heba Zagout, a 39-year-old Gaza-based painter of vibrant cityscapes, self-portraits, and symbols of Palestinian identity, was killed in an Israeli air strike along with two of her four children. Regional organizations voiced support for Palestinians, including the AM…

Uncover shared connections between the seemingly distant realms of Southeast Asia and Latin America with the latest blockbuster exhibition curated by the National Gallery Singapore. “Tropical” showcases the defiant attitude of artists, dreamers, and writers who challenged colonialist stereotypes perpetuated by famous painters like Paul Gauguin. Embracing this anticolonial spirit, the exhibition spotlights the works of cultural icons such as Frida Kahlo, Helio Oiticica, Latiff Mohidin, Cheong Soo Pieng, and more, who asserted their identity by offering a more truthful representation of their societies, responding to the issues of the time and the desires of their people. Explore over 200 artworks, sculptures, drawings, performances, and immersive installations by more than 70 artists, encompassing the breadth of the 20th century. Audiences will be treated to an extraordinary museum-going experience with “floating”…

With internecine conflagrations raging on multiple fronts, the world, at times, can feel dangerously close to having a nervous breakdown. With stoic pragmatism, Simone Fattal, who believes “one must first learn to govern oneself,” has tirelessly excavated both the throughlines and the fault lines of our shared, troubled histories. Born in Syria, Fattal emigrated to California with her partner, the late poet and artist Etel Adnan (1925–2021), amid the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90). Incorporating the philosophies of Plato, Socrates, Heidegger, and Baudelaire into her paintings, collages, and sculptures, Fattal refracts the particularities of the present by way of investigations into the past. Evidenced most in her recent collages, where Greek mythology, Sufi mysticism, high fashion, the dancer Merce Cunningham, and the swollen cadavers of dead tyrants vie for attention, her…

In a world where digital devices dominate the means of communication and disrupt the exchange of information, ideas, and images, the nuanced alteration of our perceptions caused by such high exposure to virtuality can at times seem abstract and intangible. Boston-born artist Tishan Hsu has attempted to grapple with the impact of technology on our bodies for more than three decades. His visual works at once incorporate surrealistic elements of television and communication devices, reimagining the human face and limbs in a unique, morphological style, much of which predates internet aesthetics by a decade or more. And having studied environmental design and architecture at MIT, Hsu roots the technological presence in his practice in his interest in mass media and film. His sculptural installation Virtual Flow (1990–2018), for example, features…

In India, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, more than 70 percent of the population use social-media networks as a news source, compared to just 21 percent in Japan, according to Statista. In Türkiye (Turkey), where the internet is highly censored (more than 700,000 URLs are officially blocked) and 95 percent of the major media outlets are government controlled, nearly half of adults reported using YouTube as a news source, followed by Instagram and Facebook, at 40 and 32 percent, respectively. Pew Research found that in the United States, Facebook is the regular destination of news consumption for nearly one-third of the population. At the same time, as social-media giants have de-emphasized news in their algorithms to battle dis- and misinformation, digital advertising has declined, and many early 2000s online platforms…

Barely a week into 2023, Youn Bum-mo, the director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), South Korea’s premier public art institution, found himself in hot water after a special audit conducted by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism found numerous instances of “illegal and inappropriate actions” in the museum’s management. The revelations came as a surprise to most members of the Korean art world who broadly considered Youn an effective, if somewhat uninspiring, museum leader. Following the presidential victory of conservative candidate Yoon Suk Yeol in 2022, however, Youn was increasingly perceived as a holdover from the previous liberal administration of Moon Jae-in, and it would only be a matter of time before he was ousted. He stepped down from his post at the…

Enzo Camacho and Ami Lien opened their exhibition “Offerings for Escalante” at the Hong Kong nonprofit space Para Site in late October. Featuring handmade paper works and a 16mm stop-motion animation, the exhibition centered around a new film Langit Lupa (2023) that they shot on a sugarcane-plantation in the Philippines island of Negros, where paramilitary forces had massacred at least 20 protesters on September 20, 1985, in the small city of Escalante. While in Hong Kong, Camacho and Lien also organized workshops and a fundraiser for SAKA and MARTYR to bring together labor-activist networks in the Philippines and abroad. What is “critical listening” and how did you practice it in addressing the Escalante Massacre in your experimental documentary Langit Lupa? AMI LIEN: The term came out of a conversation we…

Your solo exhibition “Matrilineal” at 100 Tonson Foundation was one of three shows, along with Flowers Gallery and CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts & Textile) in Hong Kong, that opened in November. What is this exhibition built around? This latest series builds on a work that I created for the Asia Pacific Triennial 9 at the Queensland Art Gallery, 18/28: The Singhaseni Tapestries (2018). During that project, I pivoted towards focusing on my personal history, which coincided with my mother’s passing in 2016. The more recent tapestries are a homage to her and the women who were instrumental in raising me. In particular, I had one remaining aunt, my mother’s older sister, who was able to share stories from their past and reminisce on everything they went through. Unfortunately, she…

When a wave overwhelms you, you forget your voice and surrender to the void. Tempestuous events have penetrated my being, reaching deep within, hitting that infinitesimal point in a relentlessly throbbing nerve whose beats never cease to haunt me, even when I shut my eyes. I have been thrashed by momentous waves since 2019; my body pulled and tossed by the events in Beirut. My legs have carried me to the Corniche; my hands have alternated between flipping the circuit breaker and carrying gallons of gasoline. My breathing is busy, drawing in rancid air into my two panicked lungs. We have now all become hunchbacks. My eyes greeted the owner of the neighborhood’s supplier of power with contrived gratitude. How can I not be grateful when he, alone, holds the…

Sim Chi Yin had an active year in 2023, participating in nine group shows, including at the Barbican in London, Gropius Bau in Berlin, and Camera Austria in Graz. Meanwhile, M+ in Hong Kong acquired 17 works from across the ongoing One Day We’ll Understand (2015–) project, including photographic prints, glass works, and a video installation about the “Malayan Emergency” and her grandfather’s deportation to China by the British colonial government in Malaya and his subsequent execution. Working with director Tamara Saulwick and dramaturge Kok Heng Leun, Sim is reimagining her lecture-performance from One Day We’ll Understand as a 60-minute fully staged performance, which will have its world premier at the Esplanade in Singapore in August 2024. She is also working to publish the second of four books from that…

JAN 10 APR 10 Led by Guangdong Museum of Art director Wang Shaoqiang, the 7th Guangzhou Triennial featured works by 59 artists from across the globe. “Symphony of All the Changes” took inspiration from Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s idea of permanence in change as the “only way to endure” in an ever-shifting environment. The triennial was composed into four sections: Wu Hongliang’s portion on cultural memory, “Bumps on the Edges”; British curator Philip Dodd’s craft-focused “In Praise of Slow Art: When All That is Solid Melts into Air”; German artist Thomas Eller’s “Touch Screen/Me”; and curator Jiang Jun’s “Immanence,” which together resembled a four-movement symphony. A scaffolding of fragmented metal pieces representing finger prints pressed into in clay, Sui Jianguo’s six-by-four meter The Garden in Data Cloud – 24 Moments (2022)…

APR 7 JUL 9 For the 14th Gwangju Biennale, artistic director Sook-Kyung Lee took inspiration from the Tao Te Ching for the event’s theme, “soft and weak like water,” highlighting the aqueous nature of power and art’s role therein. Across five venues in Gwangju, the 14th edition reflected changes in Korea’s sociopolitical landscape by highlighting a diverse group of 79 international artists, many with new commissions, alongside older works from the region. The Malaysian collective Pangrok Sulap’s commission Gwangju Blooming (2023), for instance, reinterpreted the political history of Korean artists through their production of large woodcutprint banners reminiscent of imagery from democratic student movements. This new installation was complemented by its reference, Minjung art pioneer Oh Yoon’s iconic woodcuts critiquing Korea’s postwar society, such as Dance 1 (1984). Meanwhile, Japanese…

NOV 9 MAR 31, 2024 Led by artist-curator and e-flux cofounder Anton Vidokle, with a curatorial team of Zairong Xiang, Hallie Ayres, and Lukas Brasiskis, the 14th Shanghai Biennale took place at the Power Station of Art. Vidokle’s research into Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s concept of cosmism fed the Biennale’s exploration of various cosmologies and cinematic languages through artworks by over 80 artists showcased across three floors of the museum. The Biennale was divided into nine subthemes that reflected the nine spheres of Heaven in ancient Chinese cosmology and Dante’s Paradiso. Trevor Paglen’s large-scale installation the spherical Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 4) (2013) and the geometrically shaped Orbital Reflector series (2015–18) marked his decade-long project to design a satellite as an art object and launch it…

How many people experience contemporary art around the world? As Art Basel Miami Beach concluded on December 10, the giant commercial event reported that 79,000 collectors, professionals, and scenesters had strolled the aisles, with tickets costing USD 75 and upwards. In Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which opened its Sydney Modern campus in December 2022, counted more than two million people who enjoyed the free admission in the first year since its expansion. M+ in Hong Kong reported a similar figure in its debut year of 2022 despite nearly three months of closure due to local Covid-19 restrictions. At the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, in Seoul, Choe U-Ram’s exhibition of mechanical sculptures “Little Ark” in 2022 was a blockbuster, with an attendance of…

WHAT CAN I DO? Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery OCT 13 DEC 24 Despite the prolific nature of Mao Ishikawa’s photographic career, “What Can I Do?” was her first solo exhibition in a Tokyo museum. She joined the Workshop Photography School 50 years ago to study with Shomei Tomatsu—whose documentation of American military bases on Okinawa (where Ishikawa was born) inspired her own practice and approach to the medium. This retrospective showcased old and new works, including her ongoing The Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll (2014–), a series of restaged historical events, and Here’s What the Japanese Flag Means to Me (1993–2011). With a sharp political bent, Ishikawa is also known for immersing herself in environments to capture the lives of those on the fringes of society, such as dockworkers, dancers,…

THE SECOND INTERROGATION Blindspot MAR 21 MAY 6 Conceptual artist Wang Tuo’s short film The Second Interrogation (2022) is a timely investigation into the pernicious realities of censorship in China and a deconstruction of art as a vehicle for collective and personal expression. The two-channel video considers notions of authorship from the polarized perspectives of an artist and a government censor who attempt to understand each other’s contrasting viewpoints. Referencing a series of historical performances known as the “Seven Sins” at the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition in Beijing in 1989, Wang’s film is a metanarrative that adroitly argues whether or not art can serve as an agent of change and find its place within a socialist framework. Wang also exhibited paintings of his counterculture friends in China, highlighting his preoccupation with forms…

Walker Art Center / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art MINNEAPOLIS APR 15 SEPT 3 SAN FRANCISCO OCT 21 JAN 28, 2024 This comprehensive retrospective of Pacita Abad (1946–2004) tracked the late artist’s diasporic, feminist practice, beginning from her departure from the Philippines in the 1970s to periods of stay in 60-plus countries. Large-scale, vibrant, and geometric silkscreens of quasiceremonial masks, her series Bacongo (1986–88) found inspiration in the Congolese Songye and Luba peoples; she developed these forms further in the Masks from Six Continents (1990–93). Abad’s signature “trapunto” technique incorporated quilted canvases and surfaces adorned with beads. Narratives of immigration abound, as in L.A. Liberty (1992), a “Latin American” reimagining of the famous monument. Drawing on Sinhalese rituals, Abad based the highly adorned Marcos and His Cronies (1985) on…

“How long is forever?” asks Alice. “Sometimes, just one second,” replies the White Rabbit. There are dreams lasting an instant in which everything seems frozen for an eternity. Time is elastic in our personal experience of it. Hours fly by like minutes, and minutes are oppressively slow, as if they were centuries.1 INSIDE BURGER COLLECTION For her 2021 commission at Turner Contemporary in Margate, England, artist Sophie von Hellermann exhibited a series of paintings that framed a seafront once described by JMW Turner as “the loveliest in all Europe.”2 Immediate and active, the exhibition’s title, “Sirens,” evoked sound—from emergency signals to mythological creatures who lure sailors to their death with the sweetness of their songs. Perspectives fluctuated as vast canvases scaled the gallery walls in an expanse of color and…

Every two years the global art world falls into the clutches of the Venice Biennale industrial-complex, an ever-expanding network of national pavilions and off-site exhibitions that keep the sinking city’s industries above water. There may be drama in store for 2024, as Italy’s rabidly anti-immigrant government appointed the right-wing cultural provocateur Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as the Biennale organization’s next president. His post commences in March, less than two months before the Biennale’s first Latin American curator, Adriano Pedrosa, opens his edition titled “Foreigners Everywhere.” On April 20, the Biennale will honor Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino and the Paris-based Turkish artist Nıl Yalter for works opposing military governments and spotlighting migrant communities, respectively. The event seems unlikely to conform to the political agenda of the far-right. Barring a major cancellation,…

The growth of the global economy in 2023 declined—inflation, wars, the costly impacts of climate change, low birth rates, and a possible recession in the United States undergirded the problem. Additionally, in Asia, the Chinese property market’s meltdown and the high unemployment rate among young adults further exacerbated the situation. With the delayed reopening of the country in January 2023, the consumption habits of Chinese citizens have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic levels. Corresponding to the global economic downturn, art sales were slower at auctions and art fairs with many collectors adopting more conservative approaches. According to The Survey of Global Collecting 2023, a report by Clare McAndrew published by Art Basel and UBS, sales at all major auction houses in the first half of 2023 were subdued. Christie’s…

“An eye for an eye, leaving everyone blind.” Attributed to Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of civil resistance, satyagraha, the lines appear faintly on a nearly pitch-black screen at the beginning of Hajra Waheed’s 11-minute projection A Letter From My Sister, November 16, 2015 (2023). As the screen is illuminated, clouds appear in a darkened sky accompanied by a deep, resonating soundtrack, and a narrative of colonial violence and displacement unfolds, based on a correspondence with the artist’s sister, a scholar studying Muslim communities across the India-Pakistan divide. The video debuted in Athens alongside a companion work, The Spiral (2019), in November, in the solo exhibition “Witness Lines,” curated by iLiana Fokianaki at the nonprofit State of Concept. The visual and narrative darkness of A Letter From My Sister and The Spiral…

Kohl-lined eyes framed by a leopard-print hijab; a tomato carved into the shape of a rose; an Islamic prayer rug draped over a stack of plastic chairs. These are some of the subjects featured in the richly textured, unabashedly colorful photographs and videos of Abu Dhabi and Brooklyn-based artist Farah Al Qasimi. Warping the everyday into the extraordinary, she depicts the kitsch and often self-contradictory ethos of postmodern life. Beginning the year with her first solo exhibition in Australia at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, titled “Star Machine” after her self-portrait (2021) of the same name, Al Qasimi displayed an installation of photographic and video works inspired by the titular, escapist machine, which projects light into hypnotizing constellations. Also in February, she presented her 30-minute, two-channel video Mother of…

As the first exhibition in the newly renovated galleries of Artspace Sydney, can you speak about the way on which your multipart project untitled (transcriptions of country) bridges colonial history and contemporary society? The installation is a part of an extensive research project that has taken on numerous forms in recent years. The overriding form or concept is translation and its ability to infuse new life and context into something, or conversely, to distort it by stripping away subtext. These 306 embroideries of colonial-era collections and archives, based on the material collected during the French expedition (1800–03) to Australia, are an example of this call-and-response idea. Much of what the French collected was lost, along with the expedition’s historical significance after the demise of the Napoleonic Empire. One remaining archive…

After the unexpected complete lifting of Covid-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, Shanghai, due to the subsequent Omicron wave, did not immediately resume production or schooling for almost two months until after the Chinese New Year in early 2023. The situation gradually stabilized only near the city’s first anniversary of the 2022 Covid-19 total lockdown, euphemistically nicknamed “Shanghai Spring.” Despite the existence of online censorship, authorities still could not completely prevent people from posting related commemorative messages. However, while remembering that traumatic period, professionals in the arts, pressured by the critical economic downturn, stopped discussing the pandemic and delved into a busy schedule of exhibitions and art fairs once again. Beginning the belated year of renewal, Yuz Museum Shanghai, founded by widely respected art collector Budi Tek, who died…

Ho Chi Minh City—known more colloquially as Saigon—never fails to reinvent itself. Dubbed “the city that never sleeps,” Saigon and its inhabitants wasted no time rebounding from the dark gloom of alternating lockdowns and economic uncertainties, and as soon as the government relieved locals of their confinement, the previously empty streets came alive again. Street vendors set up shop, stores reopened, taxi drivers mingled about, and locals enjoyed eating out. It was almost as if the pandemic had never left its horrific mark. As Saigon shook itself awake, the art scene rejoiced in its moment of revitalization, with new players entering the local art market. The pandemic lockdown seemed to have the unexpected effect of sparking the local business world’s appetite for art’s investment potential, as new galleries mushroomed and…

We are dismayed by the decision of the director, Yasmin Meinicke, and the board of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie, taken in consultation with German state authorities to unilaterally cancel the 2024 edition. For 18 months, we worked with 44 artists, six partner organizations, three advisors and various colleagues to bring the Biennale to fruition. As the curators, we only found out about this cancellation through a press release in the public domain, published without our consent, on November 23, 2023. We find the conduct of the director and the board of the Biennale to be a breach of trust and antithetical to the very premise of the theme we were intending to explore in this edition. Further, it is in violation of our contractual agreement, which states, “All press…

In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, there are nine circles of hell. After the May election defeat of Turkey’s unprecedentedly optimistic opposition reaffirmed the illiberal authoritarianism of President Erdoğan, the nation’s residents, including citizens, refugees, and migrants of all kinds, might have felt that they had descended more than one rung lower from Limbo to Treachery, perhaps landing somewhere between Greed and Anger. Following the twin earthquakes that struck Turkey’s southeast on February 6, politicization reduced over 50,000 deaths to the promise and privilege of the powerful few from construction zones in Antakya to palace backrooms in Ankara. This merely served to muffle and transmute the severity of the hell that the country has coped with into a new normal rivaling the self-aggrandizing shamelessness of any post-pandemic self-help guru. In…

Biennials keep surfacing, reaching new audiences around the world. The first edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale debuted in Jeddah in January 2023, organized by the Diriyah Biennale Foundation. Titled “Awwal Bait,” or “First House,” after the sacred Kaaba in Mecca, the Biennale was held at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in the Western Hajj Terminal, a structure of tent-like canopies designed by the architectural firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill that opened in 1981. During its four-month run, the event attracted more than 500,000 visitors who saw artworks by more than 60 artists from 30 countries, as well as 280 artifacts loaned from local and international museums, including the Louvre and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. The Islamic Arts Biennale’s mission was to portray aspects of Muslim culture,…

FEB 3 FEB 11 With the climate crisis at the forefront of the collective conversation—no more so than in Bangladesh, a country prone to severe flooding—the sixth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) excavated the ramifications of adverse weather. The title, “Bonna,” a Bengali word meaning “flood,” is also a popular girl’s name, here highlighting the devastation wrought by natural phenomena on young children. In 2023, under the curatorial direction of Diana Campbell, DAS proposed “Bonna” as a challenge to extant social and political binaries—necessity and excess; regeneration and disaster; adult and child; male and female—and explored the relationships between gender, the built environment, and climate change. Welcoming around 500,000 visitors, the 2023 edition featured more than 120 artists—from New York-based figurative painter Salman Toor and Mumbai-born Rithika Merchant,…

SEPT 21 NOV 19 In the 12th edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SMB12), “THIS TOO, IS A MAP,” artistic director Rachael Rakes, along with associate curator Sofía Dourron, explored the potential cartography of speculative histories and subjective knowledge. Centered at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) and five museum locations plus collaborating spaces, SMB12 sought to find ideas of translocality beyond the Western world through the delineations of narratives across diverse ranges of media. At the opening event, the Singapore- and Amsterdam-based artist Kent Chan curated the radio program with Seoul Community Radio about the “future tropics,” Frequency Tropics Radio, with remixes of sounds and beats, in collaboration with music artists Karllll, Ejo, NET GALA, and Yuzo. The Yogyakarta-based artist Natasha Tontey presented her new video work, Children of…

NOV 18 MAR 24, 2024 For co-curators Freya Chou, Brian Kuan Wood, and Reem Shadid, the title of the 13th Taipei Biennial, “Small World,” contains both “a promise and a threat.” Reflecting on the pandemic era, they explored ideas of scale, intimacy, proximity, and isolation through the works of 58 artists and musicians at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (TFAM). Taiwan’s tense geopolitical situation in the run-up to the January 2024 presidential elections was echoed in the pairing of theorist Paul Virilio’s black-and-white photographs of abandoned German bunkers located on the coast of France, with Hong Kong artist Nadim Abbas’s giant installation in steel and sand recreating a semiconductor—the key element in Taiwan’s “silicone shield.” Su Yu-Hsin’s 19-minute film Particular Waters (2023) looked at the ecological issues around the country’s…

Ishara Art Foundation JAN 18 JUN 2 In “Notations on Time,” co-curators Sandhini Poddar and Sabih Ahmed surveyed 20 artists from South Asia who explore the political and philosophical dimensions of time and the ontological vagaries between the past, present, and future. But time often breaks through the strict confines of linearity. The precepts of some Asian philosophies can be read in the passing clouds, in the falling ash of incense, or, at Ishara, in the slow drift of a river shrouded in mist in Soumya Sankar Bose’s somber photograph Where the Birds Never Sing (2017–20), or in the small of an old man’s back, all wrinkled skin and knotted joints, in Sheba Chhachhi’s poignant monochrome photograph Silver Sap (2007). Zarina’s Ten Thousand Things III (2016), a set of 100…

TIME MACHINE Hayward Gallery OCT 11 JAN 7, 2024 While some photographers lean toward instinct, reaction, and immediacy (Cartier-Bresson, Moriyama, Maier), others are more considered; metaphysical, even. After all, the medium is by its very nature concerned with the act of looking, as well as with notions of time. Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto has mastered both over the course of half a century, and at the Hayward Gallery in London his prodigious body of work was assembled for his largest retrospective in the UK to date—from Theaters (1976–), photographs of projected films exposed for their entire run-time to produce transcendent light to the expansive views of the sea and the horizon in Seascapes (1980–). His studies of Dioramas (1976) and waxwork Portraits (1999) capture figures with a quiet, almost uncanny…

PROLOGUE TO THE STORY OF THE BIRTH OF FREEDOM The Museum of Contemporary Art NOV 12 JUN 16, 2024 Honolulu-born multimedia artist Paul Pfeiffer is an excavator of our technological landscape. Through a meticulous process of creation, manipulation, and repetition, he explores themes of belonging, identity, spectacle, and pop culture. His first-ever retrospective, “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom,” was a 25-year survey of his video, photographic, and sculptural works—such as Vitruvian Figure (2008)—that probed the psychological resonance of mass-media imagery. For Pfeiffer, they are akin to Rorschach tests. Take his Caryatid series (2003–21), archival footage of boxing matches with one fighter digitally removed, the other’s body convulsing under invisible punches; or his ongoing Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse series (2000–18), photographs of lone, isolated basketball players,…