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Kulpreet Singh’s Farming Acts

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:52:17 GMT

The Punjabi artist’s work transposes the rural environment of protest to something more ambiguous in the gallery space

A bench covered in hay is arranged to face a black monochrome pentaptych (Painting 7, 2025). Behind it, an insulated screening room, also complete with makeshift hay bales and straw-padded walls, is showing Punjabi artist Kulpreet Singh’s eight-minute film Indelible Black Marks (2022–24). As the UK rolls into its third heatwave of the summer, this small exhibition piles on to the lurking feeling of eco-anxiety.

The five canvases that make up Painting 7 form a neat uninterrupted horizontal black streak across an otherwise empty white wall. Their gritty ash-, smoke- and dirt-stained surfaces offer a variety of textured reliefs: some harsh like sandpaper, some rich and contrasted like patterns brushed into velvet. Despite its earthy medium, the work is strikingly tidy, and it takes the distressing soundtrack – sirens, heartbeats and heavy breathing, the sound of protests, the aggressive crackle of fire – spilling over from the nearby film to suggest an underlying violence.

Indelible Black Marks was originally released in clips on social media to accompany recent farmer revolts in India against the proposed ‘Farm Acts’, in which the artist (who is also a farmer) and some of the performers took part. This context is lost in the gallery, where the film takes centre stage and is accessorised with straw furniture that emanates a faint smell of mulch and comes off, in this pristine air-conditioned room, as Marie Antoinette-style farmer cosplay. Displaced from the environment of protest, the work’s emphasis shifts from a specific struggle against a government to an ambiguous relationship between people and land.

Indelible Black Marks (still), 2022–24, video, 8 min 27 sec. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai

The film captures men dressed in white running across burning fields, carrying long strips of white canvas behind them that collect dirt as they are dragged across the ground, first in straight, parallel lines, then one behind the other in a carefully choreographed circle. At times the men move arduously like cattle ploughing the earth, at others fast like warriors going into battle. In a later scene, the now-dirtied strips of canvas are shown stretched flat across the ground as if to bandage the damaged earth. As the camera pans across them, it reveals drawings of a gun, a wolf, a tree, a bird, then performers lying still as though killed or held hostage by the weapon-bearing illustrated figures that surround them. A reference, perhaps, to the farmers who died and were detained during the revolts. There’s palpable anger but also care and respect in this portrayal of what appears as both a destructive war against an invisible enemy and a celebration of agricultural labour.

Most striking is the opening aerial drone shot of crop rows progressively set ablaze until the whole field fades to black, reduced to dirt, ash and smoke. The exhibition text explains that this is ‘the ritual of stubble burning’, which was ‘adopted commercially during the Green Revolution in India in the 1960s’ (a top-down development strategy that also incentivised monocropping and the use of harmful pesticides to fight famine and generally boost productivity). Unless you’re already familiar with this practice and its history, this isn’t obvious. And it’s difficult, in the London context, to see these burning fields and greying skies and not to think instead about the catastrophic wildfires currently raging through Europe, decimating hectares of land and causing the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people. This slip in interpretation is less a failure of the work than a consequence of its reframing, which sublimates the active power struggle into a (apparently) perpetrator-less atmosphere of despair.

Kulpreet Singh, Indelible Black Marks, HENI Project Space, Hayward Gallery, London, 16 June – 2 August

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

Taiki Sakpisit’s Waking Nightmare

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:14:03 GMT

The Thai artist has a horror filmmaker’s knack of making the familiar seem unfamiliar, sinister and haunted

It is fitting that Thai artist Taiki Sakpisit’s nightmare-themed exhibition launched during the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar, when the gates of hell are believed to be opened for spirits to roam the earth. An eerie, disjointed experience that walks the thin line between reality and dream, the show features seven photographs and a multichannel video installation, whose subject matter draws from familiar horror motifs (a ghostly ship, a spider’s cobweb, an approaching beast) as well as less familiar, harder-to-decipher elements that similarly evoke discomfort.

The photographs were taken between 2024 and 2026, mostly in Thailand – but it is difficult to determine their exact contexts without external help. What they evidently achieve is the evocation of an atmosphere of generalised unease. In The Seer (2026) our eye is drawn to a singular, off-centre hole. The gallerist tells me it is an extreme closeup of a lamp in a Thai temple. The only colour image in the exhibition, Nightwanderers (2024), features a group of dark, irregular splotches against a bright-green background. Brown stains are speckled throughout the photograph, and a single shaft of light cuts through the middle of the image. What I originally thought was mould under a microscope was in fact a photograph of bats, the gallerist explained. More disturbing is Force Majeure (2026), an image of a Buddhist sculpture with its limbs hacked away and the top half of its face cut off. In juxtaposition to the violence enacted upon it, the fact that the figure retains a smile on what’s left of its face, together with a tessellated pattern of yet more tiny Buddhas stamped on its body, only adds to a growing sense of disquiet.

Nightwanderers, 2024, archival inkjet print, 30 x 40 cm. Courtesy ShanghART, Singapore

The multichannel video installation, Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares (2026), takes things up a notch. Disconnected scenes dissolve into each other in harsh, illogical transitions: birds in the sky cut to looming, ominous anthropomorphic sculptures. A human subject contorts on a bed, mouth agape and chest heaving, thrashed about by an invisible yet potent force. Then there are the screams. Screeches, growls, cracklings and skitterings play on loop. The soundtrack permeates the entire gallery.

Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares (stills), 2026 Two-channel video, 4K, colours, B&W, surround sound, 16 min. Courtesy ShanghART, Singapore

While Sakpisit’s larger body of work frequently draws connections to Thailand’s historical and political memory, this exhibition feels relatively personal. The show was inspired, we are told in the wall text, by Sakpisit’s experience of being awoken from a nightmare by a phone call from his brother informing him of a family member’s death. And what the artist, best known as a filmmaker, effectively conveys here is the feeling of terror that accompanies a bad omen proven true.

Ultimately, 13 Nightmares draws our awareness to the thin membrane that separates consensual reality and the supernatural; and the ways in which the latter often bleeds into the former. Indeed Sakpisit has a horror filmmaker’s knack of making the familiar seem unfamiliar, sinister and haunted, such as the phantomlike tree in You Don’t Live Here Anymore (2026). The show captures the fragile boundaries that separate the known from the unknown – and the fact that we all live in a space where the one haunts the other.

13 Nightmares at ShanghART, Singapore, through 4 October

From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

The Bereft Lands of Ladakh

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 10:02:23 GMT

On a visit to an exhibition by Raqs Media Collective, Pramodha Weerasekera finds that art can still play for high stakes at high altitude

Ladakh, despite being located on lands visibly impacted by Indo-Pakistan wars in the politically tenuous union territory in the Himalayas, boasts a tourism industry that stands at odds with its ecosystem. Over 200,000 people visited in June and July 2026 alone. The region’s ecological balance has been further disrupted by power projects funded by public-private partnerships, mining and highway expansions promising access to remote areas in the mountains, strategically embedded with the rhetoric of sustainability and environmental conservation. Now the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO), a public charitable trust housed in two historic buildings, is also home to Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective’s first solo exhibition in India in over ten years.

My flight landed in Leh Ladakh after a glacial outburst along the Himalayan mountain range caused severe flash floods in Nepal; hundreds of people had died, and thousands had disappeared. Thus, I was already thinking about the contentious role – as favourable and attractive yet exploitative and extractive of their landscapes – of contemporary art initiatives in the complex South Asian art scene. Biennales, museums, artist-led projects and public programming spaces have facilitated tourism for decades. For Ladakh, remoteness is only part of the equation. The other is its climate-endangered status.

Inside the exhibition, titled The Time is Never Ripe, a glass fruit fly stares at me with bright, tenacious blue eyes. This hand-blown Drosophila melanogaster, housed in a bell jar, is part of a work by Raqs titled Dew Lover, Drosophil(i)a (2022). In the booklet accompanying the show, the fly is described as an ‘irksome’ creature that exploits others; much like the way we exploit our environment. And indeed, Raqs’s Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta have been wrestling, for over three decades, with the concept of time and the broken bond between humanity and nature.

Raqs Media Collective, The Time is Never Ripe, 2026 (installation view). Photo Qamoos Bukhari. Courtesy Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO)

Raqs’s show begins with Chimera Chorus (2025), a hybrid human-animal figure covered in embroidered organza fabric that stares at visitors. The figure resembled women in the frescoes of the Ajanta Caves in India or Sigiriya in Sri Lanka; she seems to be dreaming up a utopic ‘drosophi(i)a’, whereby humans and nature remain connected. Several steps beyond, four photographs of Ladakh landscapes in the Wayfarers series (2025) act as substrates for glitter drawings of other ancient-yet-futuristic figures. On the lower floor, Raqs engages with time using sculptural and found object artworks about relics, remnants, violence and speed, placed on pedestals of various heights. Cleverly assembled under Ferment (Sear) (2026), an embroidered canopylike shamiana, these smallscale works embody Raqs’s preoccupation with collecting sources, as evident in the ‘sourcebook’ that accompanied their curatorial endeavour Afterglow, the 2020 Yokohama Triennale. An Infra-vocabulary for Capital (2023) paid homage to Bhishma’s deathbed recital of the thousand names of Vishnu in the Mahabharata with a large board listing a thousand unpunctuated nouns and adjectives in vinyl. I wondered if time would pause as I pondered the notion of death. It did not. The work immediately directed my attention to various expressions of power: ‘trenchant ruinous inequitable neutralizer lord industrial sucker…’, it read. Turns out even in a dying declaration, struggles and imbalances persist, among voices that challenge injustice and mythologies and epic narratives that form South Asia’s identity.

Raqs Media Collective, Wayfarers Series (detail), 2025, glitter drawings on Hahnemühle Bright White Paper, four prints, 30×46 cm each. Courtesy the artists

In their essay ‘How to be An Artist by Night’, Raqs writes that industrialisation in the arts demands ‘entrepreneurial acceleration’, but this tightly curated 25-work show does not give in to this demand: it instead sits with the Ladakhi people and acknowledges that their experience of time is vastly different from those of many others. I would argue that the exhibition’s true ‘elevation’ lies in Qamoos Bukhari’s curatorial ambition within LAMO’s architectural and cultural legacy. Bukhari, himself a native of Kashmir (neighbour territory of Ladakh), states in the exhibition materials that the works were ‘placed into direct conversation with the utopic, humanist values that sustain the Himalayan society’s relationship with its air, water, land, and pastoral movement’. The curatorial framework of time forces visitors to deliberate on the concept as fleeting yet stationary, unstable yet embedded in memory: a selection of works about histories of mythical creatures and deities; the infinity symbol’s deceptive nature when painted on dated newspaper pages in the series Seven Billion and One (2015); the ‘clock’ in the video Blood Moon (2025) that measures time in emotions and not chronometry; Waiting (2013), a text-sculpture laser-cut on acrylic, which presents the states of ‘not yet’ and ‘has been’. The curating stated that Ladakhis’ experience of time is unique, and presented the local community with alternative ways to comprehend the passage of time when surrounded by climate catastrophes and political conflict.

Exterior view of LAMO (foreground), 2026. Photo: Pramodha Weerasekera

This curatorial approach was strengthened further when situated in LAMO. Founded by a pair of anthropologists, LAMO the organisation and its programming aim to empathise with and listen to Ladakh’s climate and community. The low-ceilinged seventeenth-century stone building that LAMO occupies comprises two connected houses overlooking the Old Town of Leh: one belonged to the King’s financial adviser, the other to an artisan. The exhibition occupies the artisan’s wing and slightly ventures into the financial adviser’s kitchen. The artworks, some previously shown in climate-controlled white-cube spaces abroad made specially for exhibition purposes, were installed with precision, without a single nail disrupting a wall of this heritage building, with utmost care for their substance within Ladakh. There was also no unnecessary sense of devotion towards Raqs’s international reputation preceding the exhibition.

The city of Leh is deteriorating; tomorrow is foggy, and the day after is bleak. As such, the time is never ripe for an exhibition of this nature, but LAMO does not aim to become the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao or the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong through their initiatives. In keeping with that, the curating of Raqs’s presence here allows local audiences to reflect on the bereft lands of Ladakh with hope.

From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

Éric Baudelaire: Creating in the Dark

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:49:14 GMT

Per the artist, night has begun to fall on all of us, which nevertheless makes it a moment to reach out and connect

In the warren of small rooms that constitutes CCA Berlin’s ground floor, Éric Baudelaire’s When Night Falls begins with 12 horizontal, 15-cm-squared, relieflike sculptures in tactile carved cherrywood set onto metal tables. ‘You may touch the sculptures,’ says the exhibition booklet; since the works’ titles are in Braille, perhaps you touch with eyes closed, running your fingers over landscapelike topographies that occasionally erupt into globular architectural forms. These works were, it turns out, based on sculptures – assembled from plasticine, toys, jewellery, etc – made by students in Paris’s National Institute for Blind Youth, and with whom the French artist has now worked on multiple projects. (Each wooden sculpture is titled Clair de Lune [Moonlight, 2026]) and subtitled for its original maker.) Operating and creating productively in some kind of darkness – both here and in the videowork downstairs that constitutes the rest of the show – turns out to be the show’s guiding metaphor.

Baudelaire was inspired, apparently, by reading something said by Roland Barthes in his 1976–77 lecture series ‘How to Live Together’: ‘To be strangers to one another is inevitable, even necessary and desirable – except when night falls.’ Per the artist, uncontroversially, night has begun to fall on all of us – the world, that is, is visibly going to shit, literally becoming benighted – which nevertheless makes it a moment to reach out and connect; additionally, the act of subjective interpretation, it will transpire, can be surprisingly redemptive. The five-channel, 88-minute video installation Quand le soir tombe (When Night Falls, 2026), shot in six different French locations, makes that clear from multiple angles. In one segment, for example, we see students (‘mostly from working-class and immigrant backgrounds’, says the booklet) in a school in the Paris suburb of La Défense, learning how to trade stocks using computer simulations; trading might be the epitome of cold capitalism, but here the act becomes a connector between disadvantaged strangers and maybe even, for some, a way out of being disadvantaged.

When Night Falls, 2026 (installation view). Courtesy the artist

The next sequence splices a variety of footage shot at the French National Metrology and Testing Laboratory. We see operants seemingly testing – by blowing puffs of powder at them – the efficacy of protective masks and visors wrapped around polystyrene heads; stress-testing condoms; rigorously checking how well attached are the potential choking hazards of plastic eyes and noses on children’s toys. If nobody talks to each other here, the businesslike (and lawsuit-avoiding) tests are surprisingly reframed, under Baudelaire’s broadly humanist aegis, as acts of care and mutuality towards strangers. In a subsequent segment at the UNESCO General Assembly, where Baudelaire’s cinematographer Claire Mathon filmed people from 193 nations convening to ‘discuss social cohesion in a divided world’, we see the Babel of delegates being brought together by a performance from an all-women string quartet, and fraternising across borders afterwards; we see translators bringing disparate people together. In an Ivry-sur-Seine storage facility where art and statuary for municipal museums overspills, the camera observes both attentive restorers plying their skills and plastic-wrapped statuary; Baudelaire – here seemingly summoning echoes of the 1953 French portmanteau essay-film by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, Statues Also Die – focuses on pained, embracing figures.

On occasion, these evocations of collectivity make their point long before they stop: not least the one covering a national election vote – setting Emmanuel Macron against the far-right Marine Le Pen – in a small Normandy town, wherein the camerawork alternates between acts of voting, diligent vote-counting aimed at preserving democracy and a wintry 1886 painting in the voting office by Francis Tattegrain depicting a besieged town whose occupants resort to cannibalism. We probably didn’t need to see all that vote-counting to get a sense of decency at risk of tipping into barbarism. But it’s significant that Baudelaire is finding, as in all these scenarios, an alternative narrative, a different and cautiously hopeful way of seeing things. If night, in his and Barthes’s titular formulation, is falling, it’s not fully dark yet; we might still, in whatever situation, locate the light and the human connections that remain.

Éric Baudelaire: When Night Falls was at CCA Berlin, 12 June – 29 August

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

What Are Artists Like At 25?

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:23:12 GMT

On its own 25th birthday, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong looks to the early worlds of artists for counsel

To commemorate its 25th anniversary, Asia Art Archive (AAA) has returned to source, with a two-part show looking back not on the institution’s history but rather to the times when eight contemporary artists from Asia were twenty-five years old. Conceived by Anthony Yung with curators Christina Bartosch, Hazel Kwok and Rebecca Tso, each part features four artists represented by a cluster of artworks and archival materials positioned across the AAA library that revolve around their 25th year. Painter Zhang Xiaogang’s capsule of frenetic earth-toned paintings, studies, sketches and diary entries hinged to 1983 – a decade before his celebrated Bloodline series, based on family studio-portraits from Cultural Revolution-era China, emerged – express a time in which his mind was, he says in a video interview with AAA, “most chaotic”. Freshly graduated and working as a costume designer, Zhang is represented here by a constellation of photographs, magazines and books that tap into the Opening Up and Reform era that had recently commenced: among them, a photo Zhang took of TV drama Miss Brightness filming in Kunming in 1983, a Journal of Pop Television article from that year titled ‘China Enter[ing] the Television Era’ and a 1984 photo courtesy of Xu Qingyuan, of people watching colour TV in a Kunming department store.

Context is everything in this exhibition, with ephemera mapping the grounds from which artists evolved. For Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, a Bangkok capsule set in 1982 is anchored to the artist’s regular commute across the Thai capital between her home, the College of Fine Arts, where she taught printmaking, and Silpakorn University, where she undertook graduate studies: a route traced on a ‘Bangkok Routes Project 1978–1982’ map reproduced in 2026 courtesy of the National Archives of Thailand. By this time, the artist had gained a reputation for printmaking, and two 1982 works testify to that: the photo etching Power and Loneliness No. 2, of a field strewn in shrouded chairs, and Power and Loneliness No. 3, a relief etching and aquatint of canine carcasses strewn over a landscape save for a live black dog, express a subtle yet thorough interrogation of power as experiential feeling. That uncanny tension likewise charges I Am An Artist (He Said) (2022), among the publications by Rasdjarmrearnsook at AAA: a collection of columns playing with the male and female voice written by Rasdjarmrearnsook during the mid-2000s.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Power and Loneliness No. 3, 1982, relief etching and aquatint, 93 × 80 cm (installation view, At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds: Part 1, 2026). Photo: South Ho. Courtesy the artist

Raqs Media Collective, Black Waters: An Event Shaped Hole, 2026 (installation view, At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds: Part 2, 2026). Photo: South Ho

What is striking across clusters is how differently archives and works have been activated. Objects related to Salima Hashmi – from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, representing the literature with which Hashmi connected to her mother’s English heritage, to a copy of ‘Sochne Do’ (‘Let Me Think’), a poem written in 1968 by Hashmi’s father, Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz – are displayed alongside a QR code that links to audio and video recordings of the artist contextualising each. Coming out of left field, given the cinematic universe he has since built, is Ho Tzu Nyen’s Entropy (2001), a creamy monochromatic accumulation of newspapers, acrylic, emulsion, lacquer and hair on canvas – for which he received the UOB Painting of the Year Award – presented alongside other early abstractions and a playlist of songs defining his twenties. Raqs Media Collective’s stunning Black Waters: An Event Shaped Hole (1993/2026), recomposes the materials for an unmade 16mm film – the collective’s first project – into a sculptural installation that unfolds its original proposal: ‘to reveal the methods and means by which our vision is directed and organised to look at peoples and cultures as adversaries’, through the geohistorical lens of the Andaman Islands. Overlaid on either side of two curved display walls facing one another are printed layers of annotated photos, maps, films, book pages, diagrams, research notes, a partial film script and letters.

There’s something revelatory in each material accumulation. Take the moving tribute to late Hong Kong photographer Holly Lee, anchored to the year 1978, when she quit her banking job to focus on her practice. Lee co-ran a photography studio with her partner Lee Ka-sing, with whom, alongside Lau Ching-ping, she cofounded the photography journal NuNaHeDuo (Dislocation). As a testament to their lifelong partnership, Ka-sing is the source of much on view: early woodblock prints by Lee from the 1970s, her tools, contact sheets, articles written by both, press clippings on Lee’s work and promotional materials for their photography studio in Hong Kong. Songs by Joni Mitchell, whose music informed Lee’s semi-autobiographical novel Sushi Grass in Paradise (2019–20), can be heard in this section. Lee’s book is grouped with related publications held by AAA, including Transporting the Emporium, a 1996/1997 issue of West Coast Line journal featuring Ka-sing’s writing and Lee’s arresting Hong Kong Memories series from the 1990s, transposing historical and personal images into layered compositions, such that a hand looms over an aerial view of Hong Kong like a shadow. Then there’s the central arc of Korean artist Bahc Yiso’s archival assemblage: meticulously detailed letters he wrote to his family while a postgraduate student in New York during the early 1980s. These are shown alongside photographs from his time there, including one of Minor Injury, an alternative arts space Bahc founded in Greenpoint in 1985 and ran until 1989, the year the space hosted Homeland: A Palestine Quest, organised by Yong Soon Min and Shirin Neshat in solidarity with Palestine.

At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds: Part 2, 2026 (installation view featuring Holly Lee). Photo: South Ho

Tehching Hsieh, Jump Piece, 1973, photographic reproduction (installation view, At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds: Part 1, 2026). Photo: Stephen Lam. Courtesy the artist

In the case of Tehching Hsieh, a focus starts with Jump Piece: six photos from 1973 showing a twenty-three-year-old Hsieh jumping from a three-storey building in Taiwan and breaking both his ankles. One year later, the artist jumped again. This time into the Delaware River from an oil tanker he boarded in Taiwan, entering the United States undocumented and ending up in New York City: a journey marked out on a world map. He would commence his storied One Year Performance series in 1978, but those documents are not included. Instead, a black-and-white 1978 video, shown for the first time, captures Hsieh cleaning the Chinatown restaurant at which he worked: a sketch of sorts that captures how the years passed between his arrival and when his first One Year Performance commenced. A colour video filmed in 2026 by AAA researcher Tzuman Tseng in Hsieh’s home studio plays below: the artist comes in and out of view, always an enigma. Emphasising that continuity is an Instagram reel introducing the artist by splicing recent footage of Hsieh on a snowy New York street with a black-and-white photo of him decades ago. “He has always been on the move,” says Hazel Kwok. “At twenty-five, he was no different.” The idea that movement is constant is an apt throughline between the artists in this show and the many lives they’ve lived: a motion threading one life, and one era, to the rest.

At 25: Artists’ Early Worlds at Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, through 31 October

From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

Notes from New York: Antisocial Gallery Guide

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:03:20 GMT

The shroud of apparent sincerity over the banal evils of technology is rapidly unraveling. What’s art got to do with it? Jenny Wu goes for a walk

We live in antisocial times. A diagnosis: among encoded longings, apostrophic confessions and smuggled aesthetic surplus, we find acts of banal evil with saccharine centres; the era in which banal evils of technology (eg the attention mining enabled by our twittering devices, the objectification and surveillance of private individuals, and infrastructure-based neocolonialism) are shrouded in apparent sincerity is rapidly unravelling. Maybe that’s just history.

Wading through the morass of openings this month, one catches art and the artworld attempting to mask its alienation in party lights and gemstones. Take, for instance, the oil-on-aluminium paintings by Kelsey Isaacs that went on view at Theta down in Tribeca: works like Cloud Editor 1 and 2 (both 2026) peer vertiginously onto a naked baby sitting alone on a floor made of what seems to be overlapping sheets of plywood painted blue and white – perhaps the abandoned set of a content shoot for which it was meant to pose as a cherub in the sky. A small black projector throws a bevy of twinkling colours at the kid. A spotlight, whose legs are visible on the edges of the paintings, heats the scene from above. The exhibition’s title, Baby Mozart’s Kiss, echoes the phrase ‘Judas kiss’: someone is being sold out.

A similar high-angle perspective dominates Deana Lawson’s Edge Control (2023–), a series of silver halide prints on view in one of Gagosian’s Chelsea galleries, of imagery appropriated from found surveillance stills. In one, a Black woman in a white bodysuit and trainers saunters into a beauty supply store on a rainy day; the door hangs ajar behind her, an open umbrella lies upturned on the sidewalk outside. In another, a subject in a low-cut top and distressed jeans power-walks through an aisle; over her face, Lawson has, in a rather absurd fashion, superimposed the portrait of a hardhat-wearing Donald Trump. Nevertheless, the subject looks exposed, sold out to an unfeeling machine eye.

Kelsey Isaacs, Cloud Editor 1, 2026, oil on aluminum, 119 x 117 cm. Courtesy the artist and Theta, New York

Deana Lawson, Edge Control_edvc, 2023–, silver halide print. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian, New York

Another alienated, screen-mediated dynamic crops up nearby on the same street, in a group show at the Hill Art Foundation. Titled Thucydides Fever Dream, the show proposes that we sublimate the longstanding adversity between the US and China into more complex and chaotic social forms. In Wu Ziyang’s two-channel videowork New Silk Frequencies (2026), we encounter a 3D-animated retro-futuristic universe where TV stands for ‘Totemic Vessel’, and movies are known as ‘Parallel Realities’. Through headphones, we hear audio derived from fragments of a real-life documentary about a satellite project that, beginning in 2015, saw China attempting to close the digital divide in Africa by installing solar-powered television infrastructure across the continent. One interviewee, a villager and widow whose animated avatar (the artist’s interpretation of her) wears gold rings and bracelets, small gold satellite dishes on her head and pastel-coloured wires like goggles around her eyes, reports finding security and comfort in TV: her kids don’t “run around anymore” now that they wear metal viewing devices around their heads. Another villager reports feeling invisible to the world, and yet another, a bespectacled office worker, says, “It’s only StarTimes” – the Chinese media company – “that is seeing us.”

Thucydides Fever Dream, 2026 (installation view featuring Wu Ziyang). Photo: Thomas Barratt. © Hill Art Foundation, New York

Marc Kokopeli, The Hare, 2026, Moissanite, 925 Sterling Silver, LED screen 5 x 5 x 5 cm. Photo: the artist. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Gladstone, New York

The baroque headgear that Wu’s villagers wear to watch – and be watched by – TV look strikingly similar to Marc Kokopeli’s ring sculptures, on display at Gladstone’s Upper East Side gallery. Incidentally, these open and close like lockets and hold miniature LED screens for easy-access entertainment. The Hare (2026), a moissanite-encrusted signet ring with protruding bunny ears, plays lo-fi animations: cartoon eyes, hands, dialogue boxes. Zero (2026), a sterling silver ellipsoid patterned with a swirl of white and black gemstones, plays footage of a walk down a tree-lined suburban sidewalk, the daytime scene saturated with night-vision green. The Holy Ghost of TV (2026), a tulle-covered resin sculpture shaped like the artist’s South Park dummies in Greater New York, wears two rings bearing illuminated imagery of an eagle and a bluejay, respectively. The room is abuzz with sped-up voices and sound effects coming from the rings, a mind-numbing – and decidedly middlebrow – score that visitors can silence only by ejecting themselves from the premises.

Kristian Kragelund, Acurev, 2026, thermal markings on aluminium, 34 x 27 x 1 cm. Courtesy the artist and island, New York

A professor of mine used to say that art does not coerce. But it can, I would argue, aptly describe and enact the gentle coercions that transpire between certain humans – and between humans and certain types of technology. These coercions are epitomised by the computer virus, as seen in Kristian Kragelund’s stripped-down, thermal-marked aluminium plates at Island in Chinatown. To the extent that they attempt to communicate something, the lines of malicious code on these plates – which, per the press release, Kragelund culled from the forums and archives of DIY hackers and, one sees in the gallery, contain elicit messages, diary entries and emotional tributes to deceased friends – are as antisocial as it gets. And yet, the texts entice. On one plate, CABANAS (2026), a eulogy: ‘Gonzalo Cabanas used to be a daydream believer. We shared several thingz in common, heard some R.E.M music style, wore the same ragged blue jeanz, and behaved like kidz everywhere we went together… I know this virus wont return him back to life, nor “will do him justice”.’ On another, Acurev (2026), an existential plea: ‘db’–>” How Can You Think Freely In The Shadow Of A Church?’ The exhibition’s title, Strum und Drang, appears in Strm (2026) as the name for a program. Its purpose, and, in these times, perhaps that of contemporary art: to emit a loud noise before destroying the host computer.

Tyler Mitchell wins 2026 Don Tyson Prize

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:53:40 GMT

Tyler Mitchell (self-portrait). Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Tyler Mitchell has been awarded the 2026 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum has announced. He will receive $250,000 in recognition of his work’s significance.

Mitchell is a Brooklyn-based artist, photographer and filmmaker. His work is characterised by a portrayal of Black life that highlights tenderness, play, empowerment and self-determination, often inspired by scenes from his youth in suburban Georgia. In 2018, he became the first Black artist to shoot the cover for the American Vogue.

‘Through photography, film, publishing, fashion, and exhibition-making, Mitchell has created images and experiences that reach audiences well beyond traditional museum spaces,’ said Rod Bigelow, executive director of Crystal Bridges.

The Don Tyson Prize was founded in 2016 as a biennial award with a $200,000 cash prize for living individuals or institutions in the US ‘who have changed the way we look at, think about, or experience American art’. As of this year, the prize has been upped to $250,000 and will be awarded annually.

Read next Tyler Mitchell At The Threshold

Gray Wielebinski: Unboxing Queer Desires

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:52:59 GMT

The artist’s works read as an attempt to package an idea of masculinity through found ephemera

Placed across a table are an assortment of variously sized sculptural objects. The works read as an attempt to package an idea of masculinity through found ephemera: a novel by queer writer Truman Capote; photos of scantily dressed jocks; cigar boxes; a gold chain that can be worn around the neck. All of these items are held in a series of keepsake boxes packed with straw, textiles or pompom ribbons that explode from the centre and cascade down the sides.

Gray Wielebinski draws on a wide range of consumer-culture references, from the pages of pornography magazines to paper Abercrombie & Fitch bags, which are split at the seams and displayed in a cross-shaped frame hanging behind the table. These paper bags are a recurring motif in Wielebinski’s practice, and these works, such as A Man (all works 2026), with their depictions of ideal white American masculinity via the handsome, muscled models printed on their surfaces, accentuate the complex relationship between consumerism and how masculine identities are produced through imagery. Meanwhile, boxes like Little Brother and Menswear, their sides decorated with magazine clippings of nude men, veiny arms and muscular backs, are reminiscent of how fantasies and images of fanciable bodies are stuck to the walls of teenage bedrooms. These boxes present another version of the tender, private spaces where one collects, and perhaps hides, those growing queer desires.

Yet Wielebinski doesn’t shy away from violence, either. Making textual interventions on these collected materials, labels such as ‘LOSER’ and ‘GAY’ appear over the buff jocks on the paper bags and nude men on the boxes. These words carry the look and sentiment of those that might have been scrawled on a locker by a school bully. But a moment of amnesty appears pasted to the side of Now What? Universe Box, on a crudely cut piece of paper: ‘You have a right to be here…’

Legend, 2026, mixed media, 116 × 85 × 9 cm. Courtesy the artist

The boxes all seem to represent a man in a stereotyped form, whether stuffed with rugged textiles or camp pompoms: some show images of guns pasted to the sides, others an intimacy only seen when one peers inside the open lids, such as in A Deskful of Boys, in which appears a small photo of two naked men running along a dimly lit street, their connection palpable. Wielebinski’s use of collage, and references to their own trans identity, are the crux of the show, calling into question what masculinity is and can be, and how such an identity is formed, shaped and reshaped over a lifetime.

It’s in the gallery’s back space that an adolescent energy becomes even more overt. Take Confessions of a Mask, one of three wooden drawers mounted flat on the wall like a frame: its contents, partially obscured by a sheet of frosted Perspex, include a cheerleading poster, some black pompoms, a dartboard and a battered copy of Yukio Mishima’s autobiographical novel, which lends the work its title. The novel explores his growing homosexual urges in postwar Japan, and it’s within this reading of desire and anxiety that these drawer works – and the boxes – become ever more melancholic. Wanting both to hide in adolescence, but still find the courage, through one’s collected paraphernalia and experiences, to become a man of their own making.

Gray Wielebinski: Bring Me Men at Nicoletti, London, 28 May – 4 July

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

‘The Art of Opposition’ by Courttia Newland, Reviewed

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:51:30 GMT

The author offers a vision of art founded not so much on the antagonism suggested by this volume’s title but on a radical generosity and openness

Back in the late 1990s, when a twenty-three-year-old Courttia Newland was on press duty promoting his first novel, The Scholar, about inner-city teenagers at a crossroads of a life progressing by crime or by education, he recalls that‘invariably, publications wanted me to stand by graffiti or stark concrete walls’ for photographs; one photographer requested he climb inside a shopping trolley and pose clutching the bars. Needless to say, Newland declined and instead asked if he could stand by a tree, because, as he told the photographer in question, he liked them. But the rest of Britain didn’t picture young Black, British urban novelists as tree huggers. Starting from there, the essays collected in this timely and extraordinarily powerful volume chart the complex pathway involved in being true to yourself while desiring acknowledgement of your artistic achievements but resisting the easy pathways offered to those who become what mainstream culture demands: a stereotype. Much of this is about who gets to be seen, and how. While Newland begins with his own story, it’s not long before he’s firing out essays on the history of Black British literature, Black science fiction (a genre to which his recent novels belong), the neglected talents of writers Percival Everett and Rudolph Kizerman, African cinema, the genius of Black British rapper Roots Manuva and the complex etymology of certain racist insults. Every one of them delivered with a passion and erudition that means you can’t help but assemble a reading, watching and listening list of everything he’s into. In doing all this, Newman carefully unearths the roots as well as the new shoots of cultures – especially diasporic ones – that have been rendered subaltern in British artistic life, making them feel stable, dynamic and vital. Moreover, his tone makes you feel that you’re chatting with a friend who’s gently guiding you through a culture that might not be your own without dumbing it down or simplifying its complexities. Ultimately, Newman offers a vision of art founded not so much on the antagonism suggested by this volume’s title (though, as he makes clear, that antagonism is necessary), but on a radical generosity and openness: ‘Reality is all to do with seeing, hearing and ultimately feeling those we do not live among,’ he writes. ‘And so, it should follow, is art.’

The Art of Opposition: On Hope, Resilience & Creative Expression Beyond the Mainstream by Courttia Newland. Faber & Faber, £16.99 (hardcover)

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

Theme and artists for inaugural Bienal de Yucatán announced

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:05:12 GMT

Chantal Peñaloza, China Affair, 2023. Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy Proyectos Monclova Gallery, Mexico City

The inaugural edition of the Bienal de Yucatán, led by Abraham Cruzvillegas, will be titled VOCAL. It will take place from 26 November 2026 to 28 February 2027 across 16 venues in Mérida and Maní.

‘This international exhibition will focus primarily on tongue, languages, idioms, the written, the spoken, and what needs to be said,’ said Cruzvillegas in a statement. ‘The works and individuals participating in this renewed version of the Bienal de Yucatán will make it one of inclusion and diversity, of languages and idioms that engage in dialogue and contradict one another.’

76 artists will participate in the Bienal. The list is as follows:

Alias, Abraham González Pacheco, Adolfo Bernal, Ahlam Shibli, Ana Hernández, André Cadere, Andy Medina, Antonio Caro, Augusto de Campos, Bárbara Sánchez Kane, Cachorra, Cecilia Vicuña, Chantal Peñalosa Fong, Citlalli Rodríguez, Coqueta, Dalila Hassanein, David Lamelas, Édgar Calel, Eun Sol Lee, Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Fernando García Correa, Gabriela Aguilar, Giuliana Aguirre, Jazael Olguín Zapata, Jean-Luc Moulène, Jerôme Bel, Jimmie Durham, Jonathas de Andrade, Jorge Pardo, José Ángel Santiago, José Chi, Karen Kantún, Julian Abraham ‘Togar’, Lawrence Weiner, Lenora de Barros, Luis Carlos Hurtado, Marcela Calderón Bony, Marco Castillo, Mariela Scafati, Marilita Quintana, Mario García Torres, Mauro Pech, Max Castañón, Mayra Silva, Melissa, Melquiades Herrera, Milana Gabriel, Miguel Fernández de Castro, Minerva Cuevas, Mitchell Urioste, Mónica Mayer, Mónica Mitre, Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Nicole, Óscar Murillo, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Proyectos Espectra, Rayyane Tabet, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Robert Fillliou, Salomé Marejada, Salvador Xharicata, Sandra Gamarra, Sarah Konté, Susana Solís, Tania Pérez Córdova, Teresa Margolles, Tilsa Otta, Ulises Carrión, Valeria Sánchez, Verónica Gerber, Wael Shawky, Ximena Carrillo, Yael de Gorostegui, Yoko Ono.

Carolina Caycedo’s Raw Materials

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:30:06 GMT

The artist and activist rages against environmental destruction and the efforts to call those responsible to account

Carolina Caycedo is an artist and environmental activist – dual roles that are fully evident in this retrospective. The exhibits flow between the LA-based Colombian’s more formal assemblage sculptures, to documentation of the political causes she is involved in. It is the latter that engages the most.

On opposite walls of the main gallery are two vast photomontages: The Collapsing of a Model (Brumadinho) (2019) could, at first glance, be mistaken for a murky abstract painting in a likeably Per Kirkeby vein. Closer inspection reveals manipulated and repeated aerial photography of a devastated mud-caked landscape, while the title suggests that we are witness to the awful aftermath of the 2019 Brumadinho dam disaster in Brazil. The sweeping brown sludge is a testament to the fatal consequences that befell the residents, the environment and local economy of the Minas Gerais town, when 12 million cubic metres of toxic mining waste broke through its manmade concrete wall. On the opposite side of the gallery, Elwha’s Healing (2022/26) is more hopeful, a mural documenting the blue waterways of the titular river in the US Northwest, which returned to its natural course after dams were (carefully) removed following years of activism.

Between these are paintings, drawings, photographs and sculpture that document both environmental destruction and the efforts to call those responsible to account. Confluências (2026), a new work that gives the exhibition its title, is a delight: a textile collage of sloganeering T-shirts, flags and banners from environmental activist groups, hung on a curving architectural frame to form a spiralling corridor. LOS AFECTADOS DE TODO EL MUNDO, ÚNIVOS! proclaims one; ÁGUA E ENERGIA NÃO SÃO MERCADORIA!; TEVGERA EKOLOJI UA KIRDISTAN A EWRUPAYE! No need to speak Spanish, Portuguese or Kurdish for these to ignite a fire in your belly; particularly when these calls to action run alongside pumping fists and similar insignia of militancy. Nearby a whole wall of framed and captioned line drawings pay homage to Caycedo’s heroines: women who have fought, and many who have died, for environmental and intersectional rights. My Feminine Lineage of Environmental Struggle (2018–19) includes portraits of Adelinda Gómez Gaviria, part of the Women of the Colombian Massif movement, who battled gold mining in her country. Assassinated in 2013, she is shown stern and determined. Dora Alicia Recinos Sorto, the El Salvadorean activist, likewise killed, smiles, her hair tied back; towards an unseen crowd Marielle Franco, the slain gay, Black favelada councillor from Rio, rallies into a microphone.

Manganese Intensive, 2025. Photo: Paul Salveson. Courtesy the artist

Protest will only ever be one facet in the fight against environmental degradation; the issues are tangled, but Caycedo questions whether or not capitalism has the answers. For the Mineral Intensive series (2023–) she draws anonymous mining facilities that are extracting the various minerals that the World Bank has identified as necessary – ironically – to the clean energy transition away from fossil fuels. (The gallery’s interpretive texts do a lot of necessary contextual heavy-lifting in this show: without the explanation one wouldn’t be able to assume the artist’s critical stance in this series, for example.) Manganese Intensive (2025) and Titanium Intensive (2024) show in crisp detail (exploiting the pseudo-innocence of a child’s colouring-set-like palette) the billowing chimneys and scarred land that one would not normally associate with a ‘green’ revolution. In a series of nine wall sculptures, precious stones and pendants on chains (all presumably found), which Caycedo describes as Amulets for Fair Energy Transition (2022), are made from the same raw materials.

Amid these documentary-inflected works hang more formal sculptures – art that looks like art – a series of ceiling-hung fishing nets, each filled with objects found on Caycedo’s travels. They feel slight in contrast to the more pedagogic projects: formally they are a little kitsch; conceptually they carry none of the political heft of the works aforementioned. This mixed success is carried into a video room that closes the exhibition. The longest of three films, playing sequentially, A Gente Rio (2016) is beautifully shot and gives voice to the people affected by an earlier Brazilian dam disaster. It is powerful, gut wrenching stuff (it was first shown at the Bienal de São Paulo, though its warnings didn’t stop Bienal organisers from last year accepting Vale, the dam’s operator, as a sponsor). In contrast, the shorter videos in the showreel, Apariciones (2018) and Fuel to Fire (2023), both invoking ancestral rites and contemporary dance, are opaque at best, dubiously mystical at worst, dropping a bum note at the end of an otherwise powerful portrait of an artist, and her comrades, fighting the good fight.

Confluences at Museu de Arte de São Paulo, through 4 October

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

Maria Arusoo appointed director of Tallinn Art Hall

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:38:08 GMT

Photo: Silver Mikiver

Maria Arusoo has been appointed as director and member of the management board of Tallinn Art Hall for a five year term.

Arusoo is a curator, dramaturg and cultural manager. Since 2013, she has been director of the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tallinn, and commissioner of the Estonian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Prior to this, she has worked as a curator at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art and as a project manager for the artist Martin Creed’s studio.

‘My aim is to expand the organisation’s scope and open up new ways of thinking about and engaging with art and culture’, Arusoo said in a statement. ‘I want to build the Art Hall’s programme around meaningful collaboration and participation, while also strengthening its interdisciplinary dimension.’

Arusoo will begin her new role on 1 January 2027, following the reopening of the museum in December after five years of renovations.

The George Lucas Museum: It’s a Trap!

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 13:02:45 GMT

Lucas’s billion-dollar Los Angeles ‘Museum of Narrative Art’ promises to showcase ‘the people’s art’, writes Desirae Embree, so long as ‘the people’ share the director’s own tastes

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a striking apparition. Its sleek, flexuous architecture seems to hover, inviting us to regard it with the wonder that crowds in Hollywood movies bestow upon extraterrestrials, and its verdant 4.5-hectare campus is an oasis in a part of town otherwise choked with concrete infrastructure. After spending 16 years in development limbo, seeking and failing to find a home in two other cities, the museum finally arrived in South LA, an otherworldly benefactor claiming to offer – as its married cofounders, filmmaker George Lucas and businesswoman Mellody Hobson, put it during previews – a place dedicated to “the people’s art”.

With holdings derived in large part from the couple’s private collection, the Lucas Museum seeks both to reimagine curating in a populist way and to celebrate the role that images have played in constructing society. Works in the opening hang range from a digital reproduction of the Cave of Altamira to contemporary manga, though there is a strong bias towards twentieth-century illustrators, whose work is particularly important to Lucas. The idiosyncratic mix is meant both to thwart the taste hierarchies that have historically determined which art is worthy of attention and to trace visual storytelling across cultures and over time. However, the project is so riddled with philosophical inconsistencies and basic curatorial oversights that it’s hard to believe its founders ever asked how their philanthropic aspirations would best meet the people’s needs.

For one, the museum has no consistent definition of the phrase ‘narrative art’ by which it operates; the visitor’s brochure merely describes narrative art as that which ‘illustrates stories’. The semantic ambiguity is exacerbated in the 30-plus galleries in which objects are accompanied by no context besides basic tombstone information. This curatorial choice is a disingenuous abdication of the museum’s responsibility to provide public education as it had promised when seeking community approval for its private use of public lands. Instead, a 14 percent reduction in staff in 2025 gutted the museum’s education and public programming team. Today, neither the brochure nor the press materials mention educational programming at all.

N.C. Wyeth, Slag was a figure for sculptors, 1918, oil on canvas, 106 × 81 × 4 cm. Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

Education and knowledge production are what distinguish public museums from private galleries. But providing historical context and critical framing should be particularly important for the Lucas Museum because it is dedicated to the power of the image to, in Lucas’s words, “create a society”. Around half of the galleries explore cultural narratives that, Hobson told the press, “unite us as families, communities, countries, nations”, but that have been shown from only one side – that of a dominant American ideology reflected in the country’s most commercialised artforms.

Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Photo: Hufton+Crow. Courtesy Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

The ‘Western Stories’ gallery consists entirely of ‘Wild West’ imagery from a beloved genre that has enabled an insidious historical revision of the forced displacement of Indigenous people. The ‘Work’ gallery largely focuses on white men engaged in the dignified labour of industrialisation, as in N.C. Wyeth’s oil painting of a steelworker, Slag was a figure for sculptors (1918); slavery goes undepicted. Female artists such as American illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith are afforded only token representation; fewer than 7 percent of the films shown in the museum’s theatres are directed by women. Yet, gendered stereotypes and sexist visual conventions abound. In Norman Saunders’s pulp covers, femmes fatales menace and imperilled ladies swoon. Frank Frazetta’s heroines cling to a male saviour’s leg, their preternatural proportions barely contained by bikinis.

“Narrative art”, Lucas told the press, “creates a group of people with common belief systems, which allow them to work together [and] not kill each other.” If this is the conceptual framework behind these galleries, then to which group of people do these narrative artworks belong? And what, exactly, is the belief system that unites them?

It seems clear that the museum is unequipped to grapple with these issues as long as Lucas has total oversight of the ‘content direction’, as he has called it following the departure of the museum’s chief curator in late 2025. According to CEO Tracey Bates, the opening hang was “hand curated” by Lucas himself. Whatever his other creative accomplishments may be, Lucas is not a curator, and in dispensing with the guidance of one, he has essentially erected, on public land, a $1 billion monument to his own tastes.

Lin Htet Aung: Art After the Myanmar Coup d’Etat

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 11:02:43 GMT

Lin Htet Aung’s poetic, nonlinear films defy categorisation, confound international audience expectations and won’t be shown in his native Myanmar anytime soon. So what are they about, and who are they for?

While the true victims of military dictatorship and deadly civil war in Myanmar are made of flesh and blood, some in the country argue that its film scene has also been gravely wounded – ‘restrained’, as filmmaker Moe Myat May Zarchi puts it, ‘from its freedom to explore, experiment and truly grow wildly’. Prior to the 2021 military coup – a period when the country, led by a civilian government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, found itself at the cusp of an exciting yet shortlived democratic flourishing – several independent film festivals ‘elevated cinema culture in our country’, she writes, by giving young aspiring filmmakers an opportunity to experiment with low-budget shorts and screen their efforts in the city of Yangon. And yet, she believes, there remains a lack of inventive image-making. The structural reasons put forward for this lack include the strict rote learning of the education system and limited access to new technology, but she also floats a deep seated psychological reason: ‘our witnessing and enduring of decades of painful hardship, which leads to a great focus on powerful stories and less focus on the exploration of cinema form itself’.

Published in 2023, Moe’s provocative article is borne out anecdotally by the recent evidence of the eyes: powerful stories do reign supreme. When a feature film from Myanmar is lauded these days – Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering (2026), for example, which won top prize at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary film festival in July – this acclaim tends to centre around the weight and perspicuity of the message bound up within the drama, not formal experimentation. And documentaries about the depredations of the civil war and humanitarian situation are regularly screened at international film festivals. In short, films from Myanmar often fall under the banner of art activism or creative resistance, while foreign audiences anticipate direct, tragic realism from a crisis zone.

Lin Htet Aung, then, is something of an outlier. Since attending a film festival in Yangon in 2017, this self-taught filmmaker has produced a suite of experimental films within which any political, historical or sociological message that the viewer may sense rests upon the pursuit of a slippery, shifting poetic quality, not reality.

Once Upon a Time, There was a Mom (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2023. Courtesy the artist

The acclaimed Once Upon a Time There was a Mom (2023) is a silent black-and-white short comprising episodes of mystifying family drama. In its opening scene, a simple midcentury dining room quickly comes to seem ominously charged: a morose man sitting at a dinner table across from his son holds an upturned bowl, near a pile of rice that appears to have just fallen on the floor. A wind then enters the house by brute force. This uninvited presence is Death, we can surmise: the son spots his mother, dressed in traditional attire, lying supine on the floor. In the instant that a sheer floral fabric is laid over her lifeless body, she vanishes.

What follows is a succession of equally curious vignettes, set to a plaintive soundtrack of piano, folk songs and traditional Burmese instrumentation, in which a cycle repeats: the father, transformed back into his teenage self, falls in love again. Or tries to: the woman he is pursuing has also secured the affections of his son, who tells her, “You look so much like my mom”, as they canoodle in a derelict building. Flecked throughout this slow-burning story are incidental moments heavy with cryptic symbolism, from a duck hopping up a staircase to a rock falling on a vanity mirror and a three-way ritual in which flower petals are eaten in slow motion. Intensifying its spell are a radio broadcast announcing an earthquake and intertitles recounting episodes from the Vessantara Jātaka (the tumultuous story of Buddha’s past life as a virtuous prince who gives away his family).

This 29-minute film’s archaic syntax, handsome nostalgia and retooling of a Theravada Buddhist tale are offshoots of a protean, magpielike methodology. “I see film styles as found objects,” Lin tells me in Bangkok in August, between completing an art residency in northeast Thailand and returning to Frankfurt, where he is studying at the Städelschule art school. “Like other artists who use found objects, you can see a signature in my works, but the shapes and forms are always changing.”

A Gentle Breeze (stills), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2026. Courtesy the artist

This shapeshifting has given rise to a semiautobiographical story called A Gentle Breeze (2026): a micro-bildungsroman about a boy milling around at home in rural Myanmar. Inspired by the TV dramas Lin grew up watching, it’s a pared-down and quietly confident film in which mundane incidents – his mother’s cooking, broken tree branches hitting the roof, the wind that brings them down – slowly take on a supernatural gravity. The last film he shot in Myanmar, its layers of political subtext are subtle by necessity – a way of protecting both himself and those who collaborated with him. Another striking about-turn, A Metamorphosis (2025), is a gnomic foray into the mise-en-scène of TV studios in Myanmar. With their strong lines, bold colours and harsh lighting, the sets are oppressive, to the extent that they resemble human cages. Accompanying the jerky and grainy images of them are too-cute lo-fi melodies, Burmese lullabies and a ticker relaying bizarre breaking news.

To the sceptical viewer, Lin’s mercurial approach might suggest a flightiness, a sophomoric lack of focus, but there is always a rationale behind the chopping and changing. Once Upon a Time… was spurred by the fact that only one silent black-and-white movie from Myanmar is known to survive: Tin Maung’s Mya Ga Naing (The Emerald Jungle) (1934). “I tend to see my work as a form of archiving, even if does not use archival materials or documentation,” Lin says. “The idea was to make a second silent black-and-white movie for my country.” In a 2024 interview he described it as ‘a kind of delicate horror story that reflects the complex political power play’ in Myanmar. Similarly, A Metamorphosis arose from a desire to détourne the style of government TV propaganda in pursuit of what the synopsis terms a ‘counter-nightmare’ that ‘resembles the parts that they dare not show’.

A Metamorphosis (stills), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2025. Courtesy the artist

Clearly a fervent political consciousness born of personal experience is at work, yet in conversation Lin baulks at the suggestion that concrete meaning could or should be ascribed. “My films are not about explaining in a straightforward way,” he stresses. “I see them more as doorhandles.”

Lin’s path into filmmaking presented itself in Yangon, where he arrived from Taungdwingyi, a town in central Myanmar, to study civil engineering at Yangon Technological University. There he attended literature workshops and began writing underground poetry under the pen name Thway Ha. The switch to film came in 2017, after an afternoon at Yangon’s historic Waziya Cinema, where Tsai Ming-Liang films were being showcased as part of the MEMORY! International Film Heritage Festival. By the time the screening finished, Lin had decided to drop poetry and pursue filmmaking that composes time as well as image.

His first effort, Silence! (2018) – a lo-fi, handheld affair set in a barbershop – looks like it was made by him and his friends for the sole enjoyment of him and his friends. But Lin soon began metabolising the dysfunctional goings-on around him, fashioning shorts that seem, through their polysemic nature and probing of form, to channel the ‘witnessing and enduring of decades of painful hardship’ that Moe wrote about. Yet they do so without, as he says, “using other people’s suffering” and “being obvious”.

Estate (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2020. Courtesy the artist

Made at the start of the pandemic, Estate (2020) seems to emulate, through its metallic found sounds, snippets of secondhand conversation and blurred digital graphics, the monotony and confinement of being stuck at home with nothing more than thin walls, noisy neighbours and a phone screen for company. Then came the still-expanding cluster of films archly reacting to another convulsion: the end of democratic rule in 2021. Appropriating an obsolete film genre, the silent actuality film Me and My Country Pornography (2022) is a video diptych in which Lin, dressed in polkadot pyjamas, walks left to right through a home repeatedly. Breaking up the footage are suggestive intertitles: ‘Part 1: Quickie’, ‘Part 2: Foreplay’, ‘Part 4: Edging’, etc.

As a low-budget experiment in the power of innuendo, it is not entirely successful, but it stands as an attempt to allegorise the cyclicity of sociopolitical trauma in Myanmar – ‘the repetitive act of being screwed’, as one reviewer puts it. And it is also a response, Lin says, to the period after the coup when “international audience and film festival programmers expected to see violent images and political films from our country” (a statement that somewhat colours the synopsis’s talk of ‘people who want to watch a different kind of porn’ and ‘immediately pull down their zipper’).

The films he has churned out since, including Once Upon a Time… and A Metamorphosis, can be read in a similar fashion, although his own position within Myanmar’s political stalemate – and its historical resonances – have also had an impact on the tenor and direction of his work. Shortly after the coup, students at Yangon Technological University staged a boycott. Four years into a five-year degree, Lin never went back. “Our school has a history of many students not finishing their studies,” he says, alluding to the 1988 protests, or 8888 Uprising, which were triggered after riot police shot a student there. Lin left Myanmar in December 2023 after winning a place at Städelschule, and he has not been home since – for fear of being conscripted into the army (reintroduced in February 2024, Myanmar’s military service law enforces mandatory conscription for men aged eighteen to thirty-five). “It’s not like military service in other countries,” he says. “You have to really kill other people: your people, your friends on the side of the revolution.”

One outcome of his situation is a cruel irony: once dismissive of the older generation’s fixation on the politics and struggles of their era, Lin now finds himself in a similar boat. Another outcome is a freedom, privilege and opportunity – a chance to ‘truly grow wildly’ – not enjoyed by his friends back home.

Buried a Dog Called it Love (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2026. © Nowness Asia. Courtesy the artist

Currently, he is eagerly expanding into art installations and developing the screenplay for his first feature film, although there are downsides to his being abroad. The physical distance from his homeland and the likelihood of not going back for many years has, he says, left him contemplating the sorts of moral and ethical considerations that many diasporic artists eventually confront: “Can I still say something? Am I still in a position to tell Burmese people about Myanmar?” Since the coup, he has not shown any of his films in Myanmar, and such are the risks and burdens faced by those living there that he is not inclined to. “These films are not for them, not for the present day; they are for people looking back in the future,” he says. Were he to make one for Myanmar audiences today it would, he adds, be an entertaining or beautiful film full of comedy or flowers – something peaceful they can enjoy.

As things stand, the fleeting peace and beauty of Lin’s films help him conjure a miasma of discomfort. Made in Thailand with Thai actors, Buried a Dog Called it Love (2026) is a sumptuous film groaning with delectable imagery: coconuts falling, women powdering their faces, crockery, ice cream, fresh flowers. But its luscious backdrops and decadent things are merely props in a small-town drama, set in socialist 1970s Myanmar, wherein preparations for a politician’s visit quickly take on an uncanny, nightmarish quality: the shot of coconuts is held long enough to unsettle, the women are gossiping about a child who was mauled to death by a dog, the crockery being carried is wobbling, the bowls of ice cream melting and someone just sprayed the fresh flowers with perfume. Taking place against heavy curtains and sagging national flags, the events the actors (and pretty props) animate, like players in a flowing tableau vivant, become increasingly dizzying and inexplicable. Lin, perhaps, is trying to relate the everyday havoc and absurdism of life under the late General Ne Win, a superstitious leader who relied on soothsayers, astrologers, numerology and yadaya (traditional ritual magic) to make state decisions. But as with all his films, coming to this – or any – conclusion, finding a powerful story hidden within the adopted form, requires a closure: a filling in of blanks.

From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

Rodrigo Cass, artist whose minimal work was rooted in faith, 1983–2026

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:01:26 GMT

Rodrigo Cass. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel Gallery, São Paulo

Rodrigo Cass, the Brazilian artist known for his minimal monochrome works, in which he applied liquid concrete to canvas, has died.

While his work referenced Brazilian Neo-Concretism, it was in the forms of classical Catholic iconography that Cass took his greatest inspiration, informed by his own faith and early training as a Seminarian.

On to the concrete surface Cass might carve gestural, curving, lines, or partial geometric and diagrammatic patterns.

Between 2000 and 2008, Cass was a member of the Carmelite Order, and in 2006 he completed a degree Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo. Between 2007 and 2008 he studied Philosophy and Theology at the Jesuit Faculty of Philosophy and Theology in Belo Horizonte.

Cass exhibited at Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo; Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo; Galeria de Arte Copasa, Belo Horizonte; Galerie MDM, Paris, France; Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe, Germany; and MALG – Museu de Arte Leopoldo Gotuzzo, Pelotas.

The artist died while swimming off Copacabana beach in his home city of Rio de Janeiro.

Talk: Ha Chong-Hyun at Lisson Gallery

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:02:28 GMT

On 13 October, join Prof Sook-Kyung Lee and Wenny Teo in conversation with ArtReview editor-in-chief Mark Rappolt about the work of Ha Chong-Hyun, on view at Lisson Gallery

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Venue Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell Street, London, NW1 5DA
Date Tuesday 13 October
Time 11am–1pm
Featuring Prof Sook-Kyung Lee, Director, The Whitworth, The University of Manchester; Wenny Teo, Senior Lecturer, Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld Insitute; Mark Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief of ArtReview

Organised by Lisson Gallery in partnership with ArtReview, this panel discussion will engage in conversation with Lisson’s new exhibition of Ha Chong-Hyun, surveying the abstract painter’s experimentation and mastery across six decades of pioneering work.

Based in Seoul, Ha has gained international recognition for combining elements of monochromatic, minimalist and gestural abstraction with the conceptual, performative and material aspects and possibilities of painting.

Ha’s early Naissance series featured geometric compositions of woven, painted strips and colourful folded and rippled canvases, dating to the late 1960s. These works positioned the artist firmly within the realm of objecthood, exploring the limits of the painted surface. This exhibition follows Ha into the 1970s, where his burnt impasto surfaces, strewn with coiled springs or barbed wire directly onto the works, reflected South Korea’s protracted periods of martial law and military dictatorship. Here, Ha alighted upon his signature method of pushing paint through the reverse of coarse hemp canvas – literally turning the painting process inside out. Rather than applying paint onto an image plane, Ha forces pigment through the woven structure of the canvas, allowing pressure and material resistance to shape the final form. These works, known collectively as the Conjunction series, continue to occupy a central place in Ha’s practice to this day. Over time, the artist has expanded and refined this inquiry, demonstrating a life-long commitment to experimentation that has significantly shaped broader discussions of postwar abstraction. In the 2000s, his practice evolved into what has been described as the Post Conjunction series, extending his exploration of colour, scale, and spatial rhythm.

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Ha Chong-Hyun is on view at Lisson Gallery, London, through 7 November

‘Saffron Crossings’: Rajinder Singh’s Still, Complicated Seas

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:53:29 GMT

Is there risk in transforming migration into mythology, Sharmilla Ganesan wonders – turning memory into something to be preserved indefinitely?

A two-metre-long bamboo model of a twin-masted steamship (SS Rajula, 2026) rests on a wooden stand in front of two screens looping black-and-white videos of the ocean. The sound of movement through water fills the space. Paintings in shades of ochre, clay and black hang on walls to either side of the model, aligned in a manner reminiscent of the way that portholes puncture a ship’s hull.

Despite the videos, for an exhibition centred on the theme of journeys, it is all remarkably still. It feels, in fact, like facing an altar.

Which is apt given the history of the actual ship that inspired these works: the S.S. Rajula, which transported tens of thousands of Indian migrants between India and Malaysia from 1926 to 1973. Running fortnightly between Madras, Nagapattinam, Penang, Port Klang and Singapore, the ship played a pivotal role in the lives of these migrants, allowing not just their migration to new shores, but also journeys back and forth.

Rajinder Singh has voyaged on it, his father did the same in 1957, as did his grandfather in 1927. But the Rajula is a shared refrain within the family histories of many Malaysian Indians, taking on almost a totemic quality – a symbol of a past home and the means by which they left. It is this reverence that seems to linger in Singh’s Saffron Crossings. The Malaysian-born, London-based artist has long been excavating his family’s migration history from Punjab to Malaysia in his works. With this exhibition, he seems not just to be exploring memories of that journey, but also crafting them into both a personal and a collective mythology.

For his richly patterned paintings, Singh draws on the centuries-old Phulkari textile tradition from Punjab. Traditionally these were made by women, embroidered slowly over time in anticipation of major celebrations like weddings, and often treasured as heirlooms. By employing this style of geometric, repetitive motifs, Singh’s paintings take on a further ceremonial quality.

The imagery they contain, however, is so varied as to defy easy categorisation. Some paintings seem like festival scenes, with gods, sacred animals and umbrellas in procession. Others resemble cave paintings, with forms that suggest mysterious plants and fauna, or mythological figures. And in others, there are trains and Ferris wheels, all of it densely packed together as if multiple different stories were unfolding at once. In this they recall passengers packed tightly onboard a vessel: chaotic but arranged in neat rows. A hodge-podge of memories, which have now, like the patterns, become heirlooms.

Lee Mok Yee and Rajinder Singh, SS Rajula, 2026, bamboo, Rice paper, acrylic paint and cotton twine, 250 x 240 x 45 cm. Photo: Dinndiran Studio. Courtesy Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and Ding Feng Paper Effigies Trading

Amid those busy Phulkari canvases, Singh places textured, monochromatic paintings of deep red or black, evoking the feel of both soil and sea through their opaque, tactile surfaces. Between two paintings (and one floor up from the model ship) is in an evolving work titled Passenger Manifest (2026): 63 wooden beads (the total comes from the arithmetic of a 7 × 9 grid for embroidery and the fact that the artist is in his 63rd year) occupy a grid on the wall, notionally representing positions within a vessel. Each Tuesday during the run of the exhibition, one bead is removed. The wall label declares: ‘The position remains. The passenger has departed.’

There is a risk in transforming migration into mythology, of turning memory into something to be preserved indefinitely. The very qualities that make these works resonate so deeply – the sense of ritual, the evocation of heirlooms – also seem to keep the exhibition removed from the present. The Rajula becomes a relic.

This is where the stillness begins to feel complicated. The ship that once carried people between countries is here permanently fixed in place. The paintings are full of movement, but all fixed into a pattern. Lived experiences have become objects of contemplation.

This is particularly striking in comparison to Singh’s previous solo show, Saffron Surrender (2024), which examined migration through the lens of violences inflicted on the Sikh body by colonialism. The paintings were roiling and restless, and insisted on confronting the present with the uncomfortable past. In contrast, Saffron Crossings presents migration as something to be contemplated, preserved and passed down.

Perhaps this is the tension at the heart of Saffron Crossings. There is something genuinely powerful about seeing a community’s fragile histories carefully gathered and made tangible. But migration is not simply an inheritance; it is a lived reality that continues to be shaped by changing borders, economic conditions and the desire – or necessity – to make a life elsewhere. Here the present remains largely beyond the frame.

Rajinder Singh: Saffron Crossings at Wei-Ling Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, through 26 September

From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

Cinema in the Age of Consent

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:38:27 GMT

Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea is the latest in a series of films to tackle the subjects of ageing, dementia and the right to control your own life

With whom does the responsibility lie for determining a person’s capacity to make critical decisions – with a partner, child or institution? – and what do the complex emotional experiences of those involved look like? These are the questions that have become increasingly present in films of the past decade, and that perhaps might become even more pressing in a world increasingly governed not by people, or emotions, but by the more dispassionate protocols of artificial intelligence. Not only relating to the inner workings of an individual’s mind, these considerations furthermore apply also to the general issues concerning the responsibility of care (and where it lies), questions of what makes a house a home and how the environment surrounding an individual expresses or shapes their selves.

In Gaspar Noé’s Vortex (2021), an exasperated husband, played by the renowned Italian director Dario Argento, resents the ways ageing and ill health have reshaped his relationship with his immediate surroundings, angrily determining that his home has become ‘a real nightmare’. The character’s wife has dementia; he, issues with his heart. Together they navigate, largely alone, this sharp trajectory of decline in a Paris apartment overrun with books, papers and various other possessions a couple might acquire during a lifetime. Martin and Leslie, the elderly couple at the centre of American filmmaker Lance Hammer’s tender, oftentimes painful new drama, Queen at Sea, face a similarly arduous daily task with the staircases of their London home. Steep, noisy and numerous, the stairs are wholly at odds with the couple’s physical capabilities, yet it takes nearly an hour for someone onscreen to acknowledge this glaring obstacle. “The labour of those stairs says so much about the labour of the characters, and how the house that used to suit them now doesn’t,” says Hammer when we meet in London. “The house is their place of comfort, but it’s going to kill them.”

Vortex, dir. Gaspar Noé, 2021. Courtesy Wild Bunch

Played by Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall (joint Silver Bear winners for their roles in the film at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, where Hammer also took the Jury Prize), Martin and Leslie have been married for 18 years, having met at a classical concert after both were widowed. In the film’s opening, we find the couple in bed on a grey weekday morning, as Leslie’s daughter Amanda (an affecting performance by Juliette Binoche) and Amanda’s teenage daughter Sarah (Florence Hunt) walk in on them having sex. Leslie’s advanced dementia is already a contentious issue for the family and we learn that Martin has previously been advised by their doctor against having intercourse with her. Amanda, frustrated by his continued insistence that it’s beneficial (according to additional research he’s sought online), phones the police and he is arrested. Her mother, meanwhile, undergoes an intrusive rape exam she cannot comprehend, and subsequently spends time in a care facility (cut short following an incident with another patient).

Hammer says he arrived at the story via accounts, gleaned from his father’s circle of friends, of living with Alzheimer’s, and news items he read, like the 2015 case of Henry Rayhons, the former Iowa state representative who was charged with, and ultimately acquitted of, third degree felony sexual abuse after he had sex with his wife within days of staff at her care home asserting she was not mentally able to consent. “I was affected by the emotional toll it took on everybody, but I didn’t have a clear understanding of my moral position, and felt very unsettled about that,” recalls Hammer. (He has since adopted a position, he shares, but chose to withhold it from the project, instead approaching the film from a place of neutrality.) Separated from his debut, and only previous feature, by 18 years – the sobering 2008 Sundance winner Ballast, about the aftermath of a suicide in the Mississippi Delta – the writer-director was initially hostile to the idea of a new film. “But this thing was presenting itself and I couldn’t shake it,” offers Hammer, whose approach to both films is chiefly informed by compassion, which in turn feeds the care he takes establishing his protagonists. “I decided to write a screenplay, for my own sake, and the outline just came out of me.”

Ballast, dir. Lance Hammer, 2008. Courtesy Alluvial Film Company

Amour, dir. Michael Haneke, 2012. Courtesy Canal+

A trained architect, the filmmaker notes that as an outsider to London (he’s based in Los Angeles), the city’s distinctive landscape initially helped him find his way to the characters. His attention to London’s architecture additionally shaped the film’s visual language, particularly in domestic scenes where Hammer and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso employed architectural features as physical framing devices. “I engaged in the creative process in the same way I would for design – seeing three-dimensional space, and humans moving through it,” reflects Hammer. “Architecture is where meaning happens, and here it’s a very important conveyor of the emotional tone of the film.” While this sensitivity to design creates a rich texture onscreen, it also tethers Queen at Sea to other cinematic representations of dementia, and the significance of the home within the subgenre, where conversations about nursing homes are typically woven into the narrative, if not a key feature of the storytelling. In The Father (2020), for which Anthony Hopkins won his second Academy Award, his character furiously reiterates multiple times his intention not to leave his flat (despite the space becoming less and less familiar to him as his dementia progresses), while the female protagonist of Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012), played by the late Emmanuelle Riva, upon returning from hospital makes her husband promise she won’t have to go back (a vow he stringently upholds, locking the doors to their apartment when she later dies, and surrounding her body with flowers). In these instances, as for Martin and Leslie, the home is both a comforting space and tangible evidence of a former self, even when the physical, and potentially marital, components are cause for concern.

“There are really great films that deal with ageing, but there are some really terrible ones that are sentimental and attempting redemptive acrobatics,” continues Hammer. “This film had to be truthful, and the truth is ageing is really, really hard.” Collaborating with social and healthcare professionals, who he later cast, provided some legitimacy – bringing an authentic lexicon to scenes around safeguarding in particular – while the filmmaker’s decision to concentrate on the moral minefield of intimacy in the last chapter of life feels especially notable, and is further amplified by the introduction of Martin and Leslie in bed. “It’s that act that’s the problem, right? So, starting the film that way, everybody’s awake to the issue,” he asserts. “Part of that is the shock of seeing elderly people having sex – we glorify youthful bodies, but with an older body we see death. I’m not trying to provoke. It’s just two people in love having sex in a super banal way.” In a concurrent storyline that underscores this perspective, Sarah starts dating a boy from school. The pair make TikToks to Lola Young songs, sneak over to each other’s homes and, eventually, have sex for the first time. Their glaring youth provides a reminder of the harsh agony of Martin and Leslie’s situation.

Queen at Sea, dir. Lance Hammer, 2026. Courtesy Curzon

Of course, the couple’s circumstances are not theirs alone to negotiate – as per the film’s core line of inquiry – and during a tearful phone call with her ex-husband, Amanda relays her knotty position and protests the unfairness of it all from the front seat of her parked car. “I’m not the police, I don’t want to be this person,” she says, her visibly wet face filmed reflected in the rearview mirror. The line speaks to the collective emotional and psychological labour of Leslie’s illness, coupled with the question of Martin’s behaviour, and highlights Hammer’s intentional neutrality: without his inserting right and wrong, we’re invited to interrogate our own beliefs and feelings of discomfort, confronting what is to become an increasingly relatable situation (indeed, during press for the film Binoche has shared her own experiences of having a parent with dementia). “If you don’t make a choice, that’s damaging, so you’re forced to do something, but in doing that, you’re also harming,” observes Hammer. “Amanda’s position [like Martin’s] comes with a lot of heartache.” In the film’s third act a relative compromise is reached between Amanda and her stepfather, with Leslie at home and a care worker visiting regularly. However nothing is truly resolved, and by the film’s devastating final moments the full extent of the couple’s vulnerabilities are revealed when the house that brought them so much joy exposes a further, fatal obstacle.

Has Black Musical Culture Always Been a Visual Culture?

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 11:35:41 GMT

The rich history of black graphic scores, writes Zoë Hopkins, represents a visual culture creating space for improvisation, imagination and unknowability in much the way black musical culture does

A cadre of recent and contemporary black thinkers – among them Amiri Baraka, Arthur Jafa and Fred Moten – have argued that black visual culture necessarily finds itself playing catchup to the aesthetic and social power of black musical culture. The latter, nearly metonymous with black culture itself, is not only more accessible in terms of its production and circulation but also understood as a more organic expression of the psychic and affective richness of black life, and of its origins: it is, indubitably, a rare and sacred metaphysical DNA-strand tethering us to that which survived and preceded the wreckage of the Middle Passage, as well as to the intransigence and insurgency required for such survival. But how might black visual and aural culture cocreate each other’s stakes and beauty? Where does black vision prelude and produce black sound? What if black musical culture has always also been a visual culture?

Black graphic scores – from Julius Eastman’s to Renee Gladman’s – open the heart of these questions. A graphic score involves either braided musical notation and visual elements – such as abstract signs, figures, pulsations of chroma and hue – or the complete metamorphosis of musical notation into a schema of signs that are, in essence, visual rather than legible. Instead of notes, staffs and clefs, musical meaning dwells in and speaks through a pictorial voice. The resulting translation between score and sound is moved by the indeterminate wind of aleatoric and improvisational playing: interpreters enter into an open field of meaning where they have license to imagine and decide what a sight might sound like. Sight – aerated by improvisation – displaces script, leading sound towards what Moten himself might call ‘music against the law of reading’. So too is sight released from the sclerotic calculus of empiricism – which falsely renders seeing equivalent with knowing – entering with sound into an ambiguous liquidity of meaning and interpretation. Thus, the improvisatory poiesis that stirs the life of black music is enriched and redoubled by a visual spontaneity, notation that wanders beyond signification.

The black avant-garde past and present is rich with composers and visual artists alike who have adopted the graphic score. Julius Eastman was among the first to experiment with the form. In the score for Buddha (1984), musical notation floats inside womblike layers of concentric circles evoking the shape of the Zen Buddhist ensō and the halo of ambient intensities that enshroud the song itself. In Thruway (1970) musical symbols are themselves transformed into abstract images: notes, rests and crescendos are enlarged and isolated, morphing into minimalist geometric abstractions.

Anthony Braxton, born in 1945, five years after Eastman, works devotedly from the synaesthetic pressures and play between colour, sound and shape. His score for Composition 76 (1977) is annotated with colour arranged into geometric shapes, encoding an affective index wherein hue corresponds to the mood of the playing (green is ‘calm, restrained’, red is ‘explosive or intense’). The composition is what Braxton might call a ‘three-dimensional painting’ made of the embodied emotional resonance of a colour, and the relocation of this resonance from the body into the sound. Later works are entirely graphic in comportment: Composition 108B (1984) consists of oscillatory patterns resembling sound waves or the eidetic analogue of a glissando. Nothing in the score indicates what musicians should read in these shapes; they are given freedom to move in the blur between sound and form, to let their playing wander along the curve and flexion of the line.

Renee Gladman, Slowly We Have the Feeling: Scores (details), 2019–22, pastel and pigment on paper (grid of nine), dimensions variable. Courtesy Artists Space, New York

In Renee Gladman’s Slowly We Have the Feeling: Score (2019–22), fragments of musical notation nestle against mathematical notation and pastel abstractions. The putatively objective art of calculation is inflected with the questioning voice of improvisation, with the unsolvable variables of pitch, tempo and sonic feeling. Elongated and inverted musical staffs populate several works on paper by Jennie C. Jones: in Score for a Sustained Blackness (2014–16) she incorporates the elements of scoring into a minimalist grammar of form and line that ‘search[es] for the time signature of blackness’.

In a modernity where vision has been wielded to surveil, subjugate and render blackness immanently knowable, graphic scores offer black visuality a chance at the mysticism of black sonic improvisation: they offer up sight as a device of occultation and encryption rather than of revelation and description. Sound and sight dance together towards those semiotic loopholes where blackness can improvise its infinite unknowabilities.

From the September 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.

Islamic Arts Biennale 2027 names lead curators

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:42:42 GMT

King Abdulaziz International Airport. Courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation

The third edition of the Islamic Arts Biennale will be lead by a team of four curators, the Diriyah Biennale Foundation announced today.

Taking the helm will be Nada Raza, Director of the Alserkal Arts Foundation; William Robinson, formerly head of the Islamic Art department at Christie’s; Alain Fouad George, I. M. Pei Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the University of Oxford and Director of the Lusail Institute in Doha; and Idries Trevathan, former Chief Curator of the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran.

Held at the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Arts Biennale aims to trace the ‘tangible and intangible influences of the Muslim world’.

The third edition will open on 1 November 2027.