Yesterday while looking for two exhibitions at PHotoESPAÑA 17, I stumbled across the exhibition El borde de una herida: Migración, exilio y colonialidad en el Estrecho (“The edge of a wound: Immigration, exile and coloniality in the Strait of Gibraltar) curated by Juan Guardiola at CentroCentro Cibeles. This strait between Spain and Africa was famous […]
“Forty-two” is the response given by Deep Thought, the supercomputer programmed to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This answer, while delivered after centuries of waiting and couched within some serious expectation management (‘You’re really not going to like it’), […]
Yesterday I visited the extensive Lee Lozano exhibition at the Reina Sofia which offered a generous selection of the full range of her work, from the monumental ‘machine’ paintings and the obscene Subway Series to her text Pieces and the Wave series. While walking through the exhibition, I initially thought of posting on Minus Plato about the […]
Yesterday, after a picnic in Parque El Retiro, we visited the Franz Erhard Walther exhibition Un lugar para el cuerpo (“A Place for the Body”) at the Palacio de Velázquez and the Rosa Barba installation Solar Flux Recordings at the Palacio de Cristal. Both of these sites in the park are extensions of the Museo […]
Being back in Madrid brings memories of the year we spent hear during our sabbatical (2014-15). During that time I was lucky enough to meet the photographer Alejandra Franch and discovered her curious ongoing project and photobook Bello Público (“Public Body Hair”). At the time, I offered to annotate these photographs with a series of quotations […]
Greetings from Madrid! On the flight over I was reading the new issue of Afterall magazine which is dedicated to the idea of indigeneity (a term that combines the adjective indigenous and the noun identity). In her essay ‘Floating Between Past and Future: The Indigenisation of Environmental Politics’, Lucy Lippard discusses the artist Cecilia Vicuña […]
Today starts a new phase of this year of daily posts (Minus Plato Today), as between now and early August I will be posting while traveling throughout Europe (including stops in Madrid, Bilbao, Athens, London, Malaga and Kassel). Central to this journey is my experience of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and the question […]
Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955-2014) ends his polemic text ‘The Manifest Toe’ (which I am reading in the brilliant book on the artist Gordon Bennett: Be Polite published by Sternberg Press) by reflecting on the idea of the self as part of the artist’s investigation into his own Aboriginal heritage: The self remains relative, and […]
To be idiomatic in a vacuum is a shining thing – Frank O’Hara What am I actually doing as I move my fingers over these computer keys from which, over the years, the letters have been worn away? And where, exactly, am I doing it? Is all of this transpiring in my head? In […]
The current exhibition Gray Matters at the Wexner Center for the Arts brings together 37 contemporary artists (all women) who across a variety of media and processes have produced vibrant work out of the unassumingly neutral palette of black, white and gray. Curator Michael Goodson, writing in the handsomely produced gallery-guide, designed by Erica Anderson […]