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I'm trying to follow my instinct: to have confidence and not get into my head too much about what other people are expecting.'
Conversation: Ahead of a solo show at London’s Cubitt Gallery, Marlene Smith speaks to Lubaina Himid about her time in the BLK Art Group, friendship and collaboration
Tell It Slant
Built Environment: Giovanna Silva on photographing history through unexpected architectural interventions
Dean Sameshima
What does it mean to be alone? In Dean Sameshima’s recent body of work – 25 monochrome photographs of queer men in Berlin porn theatres with sumptuous black negative spaces and blinding white cinema screens – ‘alone’ is a complicated term.
Nicole Wermers
Nicole Wermers’s Reclining Female #6 (2024) looks out over Glasgow.
Greater Toronto Art 2024
Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada
Echoes of the Brother Countries
In recent years, the former German Democratic Republic (DDR) has been the subject of a reappraisal that, while not seeking to redeem the stiflingly authoritarian state, has attempted to present a more nuanced overview of its social and cultural realities.
Pierre Huyghe
A pale tetra fish swims around a vast obsidian tank, while another bobs on its side at the top of the water, perhaps ailing from debilitating swim bladder disease (Circadian Dilemma [El Día del Ojo], 2017).
Inward Yearnings
Essay: Rianna Jade Parker retraces the history of the Jamaican intuitives, a group of self-taught artists who ushered in a national form of artmaking mythologizing African traditions through religious divination and esteem-raising cultural work
The Promise of the Past
Built Environment: On the occasion of the ‘Tropical Modernism’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Derin Fadina examines the architectural movement’s exclusionary narratives
Where Is Everyone?
Built Environment: Minoru Nomata’s paintings ask why we obsess over unpeopled architecture
After the Miracle State
Built Environment: Reimagining a postcolonial Ivorian cityscape with less concrete and more natural materials
Sleepers Awake
Built Environment: By slowing sound, John Cage created a rousing music of shifting relations to space
Primary Information
Profile: How a storied artists' book publisher brought 1970s conceptual art into the hands of a new generation
The Second Self
On the tenth anniversary of Chris Marker’s pioneering experiment in machine intelligence
4 Galleries to Watch in Tokyo
Dossier: A new generation of galleries, non-profits and artist-run spaces has emerged in Tokyo, embracing the city’s famous pop sensibility – and revitalizing one of Asia’s oldest and most storied contemporary art sceneswith commissioned
Open Invitation
HOSTING PERFORMANCE in institutions, particularly those that have historically presented more traditional formats, is both tempting and tricky.
Winner Takes It All
IN THE EARLY 1990S, Donald Rodney assembled a collection of more than 100 cheap sporting and academic trophies, such as those typically available in local shops, and displayed them on shelves that ran the length of the gallery wall, and in purpose-made glazed and mirrored cabinets.
Graham Little
There is no formula for beauty, no reliable unit of measure.
Marcel Dzama
Canoe Lake, in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is where the great Canadian landscape painter Tom Thomson occasionally lived and worked – and where, at the age of 39, he drowned.
Shuvinai Ashoona
Crawling with tentacled creatures, flipper-footed beasts and beaked hybrids, Shuvinai Ashoona’s colourful pencil drawings are playful and fantastical depictions of Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic.
Regina José Galindo and Iva Lulashi
The female figure predominates in the works of Guatemalan visual and performance artist Regina José Galindo and Albanian artist Iva Lulashi.
Bettina Pousttchi
‘Progressions’, Bettina Pousttchi’s survey at Zurich’s Haus Konstruktiv, is a striking illustration of the idea that urban space is not only the physical environment of a city – from pedestrian and surveillance structures to actual buildings – but also a projection, subject to both time-bound ideologies driving urban policy and to city dwellers’ subjective memories. Spread across three floors, the exhibition highlights the fluidity with which Pousttchi moves between industrial-scale readymades, urban architecture and photography.
Nidhal Chamekh
Taking its title from philosopher Édouard Glissant’s question, ‘What If Carthage Hadn’t Been Destroyed?’ – posed in his book of collected poems Le Sel Noir (The Black Salt, 1957) – Nidhal Chamekh’s latest exhibition, ‘Et si Carthage’, is inspired by the ancient city whose ruins are a ten-minute drive from Selma Feriani’s new gallery space in downtown Tunis.
Green Snake: Women-Centred Ecologies
When I was younger, my mother told me a story about a man who travelled to a faraway lake in China, where he met a beautiful young woman dressed in white and spent the night on her boat.
Whitney Biennial 2024
With this year’s Whitney Biennial already having been dismissed by many critics (The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vulture) as riskless, I felt hard-pressed to agree.
A Man Entering America With a Camera
Robert Frank at 100: in the last years of his life, it seemed a plausible enough prospect.
Cool Connection
ON A STREET IN HARLEM, New York, in 1963, a Black child runs back and forth.
Hidden Passages
OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES, curatorial discourse has reached a crescendo, to the point where it can sometimes feel as though the contextualization of art is so extensive that it risks overwhelming the very work it is intended to substantiate.
The Curious Cosmopolitanism of Ali Sultan Issa
How research into historic Afro-Asian solidarities drew a filmmaker into the path of a Zanzibari political revolutionary
Ghislaine Leung
How to identify Ghislaine Leung amid the lunching crowd at a south London cafe? In this image-greedy world, Leung is that rare creature: a public figure of whose physical person no trace seems to exist online.