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ArtReview’s February issue presents its annual focus on the next cohort of Future Greats, for which artists, writers and curators are asked to spotlight someone they think is doing work that deserves more attention: artists to look out for in the years to come. It might be an artist who’s been foundational to a town’s scene for years but is unknown on the other side of the world; it might be someone who’s only just left art school and has had a few smaller-scale exhibitions. Artists who we should begin to observe more closely, and return to in time. (Though, ArtReview knows, of course, that the ‘future’ promised is very much an expression of the art that we are seeing now, not the art that is to come.) For the first time, ArtReview wanted to focus its Future Greats a bit more closely, to consider artists working more in and around one medium, if that’s even possible: what used to be called photography, or even lens-based media, and what we might now just call image-making, in whatever way this is mediated.
This year’s ten ‘image-makers’ work in photography, painting, video and collage, proving that there is no one medium that can define how artists create images today. Yan Jiacheng (whose work features on the cover), selected by Lai Fei, reframes digital images to create layered narratives. Kathryn Garcia, selected by Dean Sameshima, creates sun-inflected ritual performance videos. Lindokuhle Sobekwa writes about the way in which Tshepiso Mazibuko messes with expired analogue film to create ghostly portraits of her hometown. The other featured artists are Léonard Pongo, selected by Roger Ballen; Aineki Traverso, selected by Karen Lamassonne; Alexey Shlyk, selected by David Claerbout; Rachelle Anayansi Mozman Solano, selected by Justine Kurland; Tiyan Baker, selected by Adeline Chia; Marina Woisky, selected by Oliver Basciano; and Samuel Hindolo, selected by Martin Herbert.
While this issue looks for the future in the present, it also looks for the future in the past. Lawrence Alloway’s 1956 essay ‘The Robot & the Arts’ is the second installation in a new series in ArtReview, titled ‘Eternal Returns’. These are texts of significant art historical interest, from E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Norm and Form’ to Okakura Tenshin’s ‘The Range of Ideals’, republished with annotations by ArtReview’s editors. Mining its own archives, ArtReview remembered that Alloway had written about the Whitechapel Gallery’s group exhibition This is Tomorrow, which is widely credited as paving the way for the British Pop art movement – and which also garnered media attention because it was inaugurated by a robot named Robby. Alloway, who often deployed popular culture references in order to better engage audiences with the otherwise distant fields of theory and sociology, argues that ‘perhaps, with gestures like Robby [from the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet] opening an exhibition of art and architecture, the needed shake-up of the old categories of the arts is advanced a little’.
Back in the present, Stephanie Bailey reflects on the entangled art, life and activism of headline-making Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, whose ‘lifework is an ongoing confrontation with those who would deny his homeland’s existence’. From Jarrar’s State of Palestine passport stamp, inked on the passports of visitors to the West Bank in 2011 to his 2023 Unknown project of oil made from olives harvested in the West Bank and titled after the way his birthplace was erased on the green card he obtained in 2023, the artist’s work highlights ‘the bureaucratic and infrastructural matrix that Palestinians navigate in occupied Palestine’.
Elsewhere in the magazine, Martin Herbert speaks with Berlin-based Vietnamese painter Anh Trần about her tumultuous canvases. Rooted in Abstract Expressionism, Trần’s works evade fixity and act for her, a Vietnamese woman, as a kind of performance. The pair discuss the points where abstraction meets the real world; painting as empathy and a space for “unknowing”; the importance or otherwise of identity; and the artist’s shamanic ancestors.
Also in this issue, exhibition reviews from around the world: J.J. Charlesworth reviews Electric Dreams at Tate Modern, London; Cat Kron considers the digital aesthetic at LACMA’s Digital Witness; Greta Rainbow visits Raven Chacon’s Aviary at The American Academy of Arts and Letter’s, New York; Allison K. Young reviews New Orleans’s triennial Prospect 6; Hammad Nasar reports on the ‘eccentric’ art history presented in MANZAR at the National Museum of Qatar; and Max Crosbie-Jones notes that ‘the only things being nurtured’ at the Bangkok Art Biennale ‘are corporate art collections, consumerist appetites and bottom lines’.
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