documenta 14 is not owned by anyone in particular. It is shared among its visitors and artists, readers and writers, as well as all those whose work made it happen. We write incarcerated by the myth of individual authorship. Whether poetry or prose (or whatever this is) I blow out hard from these puffed-up lungs. […]
On this day commemorating incomplete emancipation, I offer you this unfinished blogpost in the form of three unanswerable questions: How many Republican sheep does it take to maintain Trump’s regime? How many armed militia statue-protectors does it take to maintain settler colonialism? How many commercial prisons does it take to maintain racist injustice? This blogpost […]
In the museum or the university, the story remains the same. On the one hand, an institution’s strong physique is measured in outsized philanthropy and thick endowments, as administrators make public-facing boasts of rich collections and academic excellence. On the other hand, internal messaging is one of dispossession and precarity, from cuts and layoffs to […]
While in the cradle, every parent, grandparent and god-fearing aunt wants the best for the new baby, hoping to keep the Evil Eye at bay. Over the years, their prayers for safety turn into dreams of success as the child grows and starts on the path through school to college. Now, bursting with pride at […]
A voice comes from somewhere (or within), braying: Well, listen to him! So sanctimonious in his white wokeness and so-called decolonial critique (whatever that is)! We see what you’re doing, writing this out loud for strangers’ ears, but inwardly, under your typing tongue, you murmur, “Oh, let the old guard suffer, so I can profit!”. […]
While waiting at the Dubai International Airport after three whirlwind days at the opening of Sharjah Biennial 14 (hereafter SB14), I found myself idly looking back over my Instagram posts from the exhibition. Even though I had taken hundreds of photographs, videos and audio recordings of my experience at the exhibition, I had only shared […]
Moving past our time-based posts so far this year, we were going to write about names and roles today. We were specifically intent on contrasting Trump’s infantile name-calling of ex-FBI Director James Comey (“Showboat” “Nut job”, “Slime ball”), with the latter’s focus, in his new book A Higher Loyalty and his recent interviews, not on names, […]
The recent issue of the Afterall journal is dedicated to the topic of “Ethno-Aesthetics”, a term coined by the Greenlandic artist Pia Arke in her manifesto of the same name in 1995. Explored across the issue’s “Forward” by contributing editor Candice Hopkins, the manifesto itself and in two essays by Stefan Jonsson (“On Pia Arke”) […]
I have just read Candice Hopkins essay “The Appropriation Debates” in the most recent issue of Mousse magazine. Hopkins, whose work on global indigenous art and culture I first encountered at documenta 14, discusses two controversial artworks of the last year: the inclusion of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Biennial and […]