Art Monthly 457: June 2022

Contents

Zineb Sedira, Dreams Have No Titles, 2022

Feature

Conversations with Friends

Zineb Sedira interviewed by Hettie Judah

The conversation with Sonia Boyce and Gilane Tawadros that I filmed for my project was already taking place between many black artists in the 1980s. Unfortunately, we are still having these conversations after 40 years. It was important then and it is still important today, until discrimination vanishes.

Abbas Akhavan, slug, 2020

Feature

A Walk in the Park

Abbas Akhavan interviewed by Tom Denman

You might hear it if you happen to be on the grounds. You experience it as a witness rather than an audience. I’m fond of the idea that the cellist might be performing and no one might hear it except for the donkey that lives at a nearby stable.

poster promoting the Universal Basic Income referendum held 5 June, 2016 in Switzerland, photo Julien Gregorio

Feature

To BI or not to BI: Against Artists’ Basic Income

Chris Hayes argues that we can’t ignore the dark history behind Ireland’s transformative policy

Unlike the labour movements of the 20th century, which pushed for greater democratic control over the economy, basic income does little to address the causes of poverty and precarity, and is often advocated by the same economists and businesses who are allied with existing inequalities.

Suki Chan, Lucida, 2016

Profile

Suki Chan

Maria Walsh

Vision depends on a complex network of neural impulses, but perception is informed by the phenomenological sense of being a body in relation to the surfaces, depths and atmospheres of other bodies in space.

Editorial

Winning Ways

The politics of prize-giving has in recent years left the UK a pariah on the international stage, but the openness of our culture has recently been rewarded despite the isolationism of our government.

In recent years, the participation in the Venice Biennale of the US and its principal ally, the UK, has been largely ignored or awarded the equivalent of ‘nul points’, regardless of the merits or otherwise of the artists selected.

Letter

Withdrawal from BAS9 Manchester

Dozens of artists pull out of the Manchester leg of the British Art Show in protest against the University of Manchester’s handling of legal threats over a Forensic Architecture display.

Artnotes

Looted

The UN confirms the looting of Ukrainian cultural sites; support for Ukrainian cultural workers arrives both from within the country and abroad; Russian artist Oleg Kulik inadvertently finds himself at the centre of Russia’s culture war; Poland’s politicians replace a well-regarded museum director with a nationalist puppet; Documenta faces similar pro-Israel anti-BDS legal threats to those that recently unsettled the Whitworth; Jacob Rees-Mogg has ACE in his sights; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Obituary

Hermann Nitsch 1938–2022

Emii Alrai, ‘A Core of Scar’, installation detail

Exhibitions

59th Venice Biennale: The Milk of Dreams

Arsenale and Central Pavilion, Venice

Chris Clarke

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Ted Targett

Weather Engines

Onassis Foundation, Athens

Sophie J Williamson

Parklife: Biodiversity in Contemporary Irish Art

Glucksman Gallery, Cork

Cherry Smyth

Radical Landscapes

Tate Liverpool

Mike Pinnington

Jane & Louise Wilson: The Toxic Camera

Maureen Paley, London

Adam Heardman

Say Less

Herald St, London

Peter Suchin

Kerry Guinan: The Red Thread

The Complex, Dublin

Michaële Cutaya

Emii Alrai: A Core of Scar

Hepworth Wakefield

Greg Thomas

Lonnie Holley performing at Stone Nest

Performance

Lonnie Holley: The Growth of Communication and The Edge of What

Sara Quattrocchi Febles

Lonnie Holley’s songs and artworks are raw and ephemeral markers – songs that cannot be adjusted or fixed as they are only ever played once, and artworks that use abandoned and discarded objects, no longer needed by their past owners.

Meredith Monk and Bang on a Can performing at Southbank Centre

Performance

Meredith Monk and Bang on a Can: Memory Game

John Douglas Millar

Appropriately enough, given where the performance was taking place, on the site of London’s Elizabethan theatres and bear pits, Meredith Monk’s occasionally comedic elements carried the dark wisdom of the fool.

Cristiano Volk, Laissez-Faire, spread

Artists’ Books

Cristiano Volk: Laissez-Faire

Julian Stallabrass

Laissez-Faire is a book of the urban night – of consumption, clubbing and office work, of the light of capital, seen pure and without the competition of the sun, and the photographic rendering of its colours in acidic clashes across many pages.

Lala Rascic, Gorgo, 2019

Books

Jasmina Tumbas: ‘I am Jugoslovenka!’ Feminist performance politics during and after Yugoslav Socialism

Jon Blackwood

Neither dissident nor an ‘ideal worker’, Jugoslovenkas in this era of collapse and ethnocide used all the tactics learned in navigating existing socialism with the much uglier realities that ultimately replaced it.

Madeline Anderson, Integration Report 1, 1980

Film

2022 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

Adam Pugh

The theme at this year’s festival, ‘Synchronise! Connections, References, Encounters: Pan-African film networks’, surveyed African filmmaking past and present, both rooted and diasporic.

‘Art is Here’, installation views, Moravian Gallery

Reports

Letter from Brno

Pavel Büchler

In Brno today, the decapitated Medusa signals the historical affinity between Brno and Vienna.

Artlaw

Brexit Bites

Henry Lydiate

The UK’s EU art market position derived largely from the benefits of operating within the EU’s stand- ardised framework of laws creating a customs and market union.