Art Monthly 488
Jul-Aug 2025

Contents

Ima-Abasi Okon, ‘Incorporeal hereditaments like Love [can] Set(s) You Free, according to Kelly, Case, Dru Hill, Kandice, LovHer, Montel and Playa with 50 - 60g of –_D,)e,l,a,y,e,d¹;—_O,)n,s,e,t²;— ;[heart];_M,)u,s,c,l,e³;[heart];—_S,)o,r,e,n,e,s,s⁴;’, 2025

Interview

Horizon Lines

Ima-Abasi Okon interviewed by Polly Staple

I was interested in the idea of a finish line or a starting line not being linear and someone having many starts and many finishes, an alternative sense of growth and moving at one’s own pace. Competition stifles relationships and how we engage with each other.

Sammy Baloji, Shinkolobwe’s Abstraction, 2022

Feature

Atomic Legacies

As the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki looms, Tom Denman wonders why there is deafening silence in the art world.

Although there are a number of artists engaging with the legacies of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the UK’s curatorial and institutional interest in the topic is slight, which is alarming to say the least.

Urs Fischer, You, 2007

Feature

Art in Decline

When both conservatives and liberals bemoan the state of culture in general, is it time, wonders Morgan Falconer, to ask whether contemporary art is in decline – and, if so, why?

If we were to look for a single market mechanism in the art world that has had an outsize impact over the past 20 years – something we might provisionally put alongside the advent of Spotify or Netflix or Amazon in different spheres – it is surely the proliferation of art fairs.

Victor Burgin, Parzival, 2013

Feature

Victor Burgin in Conversation

Chris Townsend talks to Victor Burgin

It was writing that led me to photography as a form of representation that was democratic, that was not intimidating to an audience in the way that a painting can be. Also, my working-class origins played a part here. I was feeling increasingly alienated from this bourgeois art world in which I had landed.

Diamond Stingily, May 29, 2025

Profile

Diamond Stingily

Amrita Dhallu

The descent from the reception desk towards the installation feels closer to a choreographed executionary march as we are seemingly ushered towards the guillotine. We become more attuned to the physicality of our own bodies, as if this is a rehearsal for our own fate.

Editorial

MOAH, MOSH, MOP

It is beyond satire that Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed ‘president for peace’, should be the first Commander in Chief to order the combat use of the massive GBU-57 bomb, dropping 14 of them on Iran’s nuclear facilities just as Japan prepared to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the devastation it suffered when the US dropped atomic bombs in anger for the first and, so far, only time. But in an era when Hershey sweets have been branded ‘unsafe to eat’ because of carcinogenic additives and children in Gaza are forcibly starved, the terrifying truth is stranger than any dark parody.

The relentless pursuit of the bottom line in business is as American as apple pie, so it should come as no surprise that even children are not protected from the all-out drive for profit.

Artnotes

Negative Review

The government’s Spending Review is bad news for the arts; arts organisations bemoan negativity around corporate sponsorship; the British Museum hosts Israel’s ‘Independence Day’ celebrations; the Science Museum is the subject of a school boycott; the Whitney Museum censors work at its Independent Study Program, sacks the director and cancels the whole initiative; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Emma Critchley, Soundings, 2024, Tate St Ives

Exhibitions

Liverpool Biennial: Bedrock

various venues

Sarah E James

Ed Atkins

Tate Britain, London

George MacBeth

The Gatherers

MoMA PS1, New York

Ravi Ghosh

Kasra Jalilipour: Gut Feelings 2.0

Grand Union, Birmingham

Cherry Smyth

Myths of the new future

Common Guild, Glasgow

Akshi Singh

Donald Locke: Resistant Forms

Spike Island, Bristol

Amna Malik

Wolfgang Tillmans: Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us

Pompidou Centre, Paris

Daniel Ward

Emma Critchley: Soundings

Tate St Ives

Paul Carey-Kent

London Round-up

Sadie Coles HQ • The Approach • Phillida Reid

Tendai Mutambu

Hope Strickland, A River Holds a Perfect Memory, 2024

Film

15th Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival

Vaishna Surjid

The directors of this year’s festival situate it within our ever-worsening global crises – ‘the world burns’, they conclude. I concur. Each programme contained themes of climate crisis, labour and late capitalism, the loss of land and culture, and the afterlives of empire.

Jaki Irvine, SHWO EM THE WAY OT GO HMOE, 2025

Performance

Jaki Irvine: SHWO EM TEH WAY OT GO HMOE

Maria Walsh

Inspired by the 1925 sea shanty ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’, this sampling and layering of her films provided a live score improvised by five jazz musicians engaged by the artist. Foregrounding the nonlinearity of improvisation, the audience was only allowed into the dimly lit auditorium just after the performance had already begun. The overall tenor was dark.

Gaza Solidarity Encampment, Columbia University, New York, 2024

Report

Why are universities so easy to break?

Amelia Jones

In US universities, presidents and provosts – who used to be active academics deeply connected to faculties – are now yes men and women, whose interests are aligned with those of wealthy businesspeople on boards of trustees.

Joe Namy, Until this Elegy Ends, 2024

Report

Letter from Amman

Mark Sheerin

Working with the materials they have to hand, they document the many overcrowded camps in the territory. While all stylistically different, the four artists conveyed fragility and resilience, made powerfully affecting by their proximity to mortal danger.

Meleanna Aluli Meyer, Umeke La’au, 2025

Report

Letter from Honolulu

Elisa Adami

An audio-piece recites the names of 38,000 Hawaiians – including Meleanna Aluli Meyer’s then 17-year-old grandfather – who signed the 1897 Ku‘e petitions against the illegitimate annexation of Hawai‘i by the US. Again, resurgence and refusal go hand in hand.

an artwork by the Belgian painter Christian Silvain in 1990, and a work made by the Chinese painter Ye Yongqing in 1994

Artlaw

Lost in Translation

Henry Lydiate

Plagiarism and copyright infringement are often misunderstood as being the same, but they are not: they may overlap, but they are separate wrongs. Plagiarism is a violation of ethical norms and policies through the appropriation of another’s original work as one’s own without acknowledging the work of the original author. Copyright infringement is an unlawful violation of an author’s exclusive intellectual property rights to control use of their original work.