Art Monthly 453: February 2022

Contents

Howardena Pindell, Separate but Equal Genocide: AIDS, 1991–92

Feature

Colour it Black

Howardena Pindell interviewed by Ellen Mara De Wachter

The black community wanted works about the black experience. That was in the 1960s and 1970s. I want the works to be positive experiences. I feel the weight of this beauty. I enjoy using materials that are in a sense taboo in terms of serious art-making. I was criticised for it mainly by white male art critics.

Tam Joseph, The Spirit of the Carnival, 1982

Feature

Centre. Margin. Other.

Morgan Quaintance assesses Tate Britain’s new blockbuster exhibition ‘Life Between Islands’

At best, ‘Life Between Islands’ feels like a missed opportunity. At worst, it is symptomatic of a more serious condition: the systematic defanging and co-option of Caribbean-British culture, and a wider attempt to define and legitimise a narrow, and institutionally unthreatening, conception of black identity.

SERAFINE1369, from darkness into darkness, 2021

Profile

SERAFINE1369

Tom Hastings enters the London-based dancer’s ‘immersive spaces of potential’

SERAFINE1369’s work presents a nuanced critique of the avant-garde, redrawing attention to the racist violence of existing conditions that underlie sumptuous forms of display.

Editorial

The Tipping Point

Analysis of complex systems show that numerous small factors feed into moments of sudden dramatic change, a situation the PM might well be about to experience.

In the UK, all the factors listed in the case of the Baltimore epidemic were in place, in one form or another, especially in terms of unequal access to an overstretched health service, which could be said to have represented the tipping point in the UK’s Covid-19 crisis.

Artnotes

Diversity of Diversity

The culture secretary outlines her personal priorities for arts diversity; Eric Gill’s sculpture at the BBC is attacked; the Colston Four are exonerated; Ireland begins a universal basic income scheme for artists; Slade School of Art students occupy the building; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Obituaries

Lawrence Weiner 1942–2021
Etel Adnan 1925–2021
Anthony Gross 1968–2022

Roger Hiorns, ‘The retrospective view of the pathway’, 2017–, ‘Post-Capital’, Mudam, Luxembourg

Exhibitions

Post-Capital: Art and the Economics of the Digital Age

Mudam, Luxembourg

Louis Hartnoll

Documents from the Edges of Conflict

James Hockey Gallery, Farnham

Julian Stallabrass

Exhibition as Image

80WSE, New York

Tim Steer

With a view to a later date, or never

Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe

Lizzie Homersham

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: She Keeps Me Damn Alive

Arebyte, London

Jack Smurthwaite

Jöelle Tuerlinckx: PLAN B – série b

Large Glass, London

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Nina Chua: Permanent Marker

Workplace Foundation, Newcastle

Pavel Büchler

Terry Atkinson

Josey, Norwich

Peter Suchin

Caroline Bergvall, Nattsong, 2021

Performance

Caroline Bergvall: Nattsong

Lucia Farinati

Nattsong marks the culmination of ‘Sonic Atlas’, a cycle of live works by Bergvall built on research titled Language Stations that centred on landscapes, time zones, trans-locality and writing in context, and the records of voices of migrant poets, transla- tors, academics and activists, to capture the shifting array of languages in the UK and the EU.

Books

Sara Ahmed: Complaint!

Maria Walsh

The idea for the book preceded Ahmed’s resignation as director of the Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) at Goldsmiths in 2016 as a direct result of the obstacles she encountered in her role as an invited supportive academic on a formal complaint mediation process.

Books

Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): on Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices

Maxa Zoller

Picture this: nine adults and 11 children, ranging from newborns to eight-year-olds, at an art residency in north Germany. The communal art – from performance and photography to prop-making – takes place in the middle of all of this, it happens at the threshold between child- care and art production.

Simon Fujiwara, Once Upon a Who?, 2021

Film

Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement: A Goodbye Letter, a Love Call, A Wake-Up Song

João Laia

The exhibition dramatically reconfigured the CAC’s building, partitioning each floor into a succession of rooms that isolated the presentation of each artwork, a gesture which productively highlighted digital culture’s paradoxically fragmented and integrated features.

Renée Akitelek Mboya, A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me, 2021

Film

Renée Akitelek Mboya: A Glossary of Words My Mother Never Taught Me

Tom Denman

Renée Akitelek Mboya interweaves history and autobiography, the political and the psychic, relating her perspective on Kenya’s recent past with diaristic intimacy.

Ruth Ewan, How Many Flowers Make the Spring, 2021

Reports

Learning to Unlearn

Greg Thomas

We are transported across historical and contemporary sites of egalitarian creation, from the Hornsey Sit-In to the Womanifesto series of gatherings in Thailand. As these examples might suggest, the exhibition ‘To Be Potential’ is both geographically and historically far-reaching.

Ragnar Kjartansson, Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture, 2021

Reports

Letter from Moscow

Chris McCormack

The price of being so visible to the Kremlin raises the question of what is culturally permissible in the current political climate, and what protections the institution might feasibly offer the artists it invites.

Zhang Huan, Ash Life No 6, 2008, estimated at £1,000–1,500, sold for £800

Salerooms

Expanding Horizons

Colin Gleadell

After the sale, a PR was hired to write a press release highlighting the few works that had sold above estimate – estimates that were so low it would have been hard not to exceed them.

Artlaw

Get Minted

Henry Lydiate

The past year has seen many artists report via social media that their original copyright works have been minted by others as NFTs without their having obtained prior permission to do so from the artist-copyright owner.