Art Monthly 496
May 2026

Contents

Isaac Julien, Metamorphosis I (All That Changes You. Metamorphosis), 2025

Interview

Close Encounters

Isaac Julien interviewed by Tom Denman

I think one of the problems of today is a tendency to crystallise meaning when it comes to images of power, in how they are constructed and interpreted, whereas I am seeking to trouble such images.

Hassan Khan, Little Castles, 2025

Feature

Beyond Cancel Culture

Sarah E James asks why the onus of taking a political stand continues to fall on artists rather than on cultural institutions

Hassan Khan is unambivalent when he outlines what he sees as art’s critical role in our current times of genocide: ‘To make the taboo visible in a way that is uncensorable is for me at this moment one of the most important political acts art can do.’

From the Back Catalogue Conspiracy Anna Dezeuze asks whether it is possible for art to turn the tide on ‘alt-right’ conspiracy theories. First published in 2023, now free online. Read →

Megan Plunkett, Special Friend 14, 2018

Profile

Megan Plunkett

Gabriella Nugent

Megan Plunkett interrogates our relationship, and that of photography, with objects: she works with props, as well as found objects, consumer detritus and film industry replicas, to circumvent established systems of ownership and desire.

Editorial

So WAD?

The 15th of April was officially, according to UNESCO, World Art Day, though it passed with little fanfare here in the UK – symbolic of a general neglect of the visual arts.

Long before the cost-of-living crisis in the UK morphed into the international permacrisis that we are currently living through, the arts were already in a parlous state.

Letter

Responding to the BAS10 Announcement

Morgan Quaintance is dismayed that the ‘British Art Show’ has become a single curator’s thematic exercise rather than the survey show it was founded as in 1979.

Artnotes

War Crimes

Artist Ali Cherry has filed a war crimes complaint over the Israeli airstrike that killed his parents; the National Audit Office paints a bleak picture of the finances of the UK’s national museums and galleries; a newly revealed survey shows the impact on staff morale of dodgy museum sponsorships; Goldsmiths announces yet more cut backs triggering a campus occupation by students in revolt; plus the latest on galleries, people, prizes and more.

Obituaries

Henrike Naumann 1984–2026
Bob Dickinson

Frederick Wiseman 1930–2026
Arta Barzanji

Glen Baxter 1944–2026
David Barrett

Andrea Fraser, Untitled (Object) IV, 2024, ‘Whitney Biennial’, Whitney Museum, New York

Exhibitions

Senga Nengudi: Performance Works 1972–1982

Whitechapel, London

Henry Broome

Lutz Bacher: Burning the Days

WIELS, Brussels

Camiel van Winkel

Bouchra Khalili: Circles and Storytellers

Mosaic Rooms, London

Elizabeth Fullerton

James Richards: Fevers

Sylvia Kouvali, London

Morgan Quaintance

Harit Srikhao: Cave Stories 0

YDP, London

Deborah Schultz

Seth Price: Redistribution 2026–2007

Sadie Coles HQ, London

Lynton Talbot

Lucía Pizzani: Faunal Succession

Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea

Matthew Bowman

Poppy Jones: Frozen Sun

Towner, Eastbourne

Lillian Wilkie

Let Us Speak Now

Heirloom – center for art and archives, Copenhagen

Frida Sandström

Klima Biennale Wien 2026

various venues, Vienna

Chris Clarke

Whitney Biennial 2026

Whitney Museum, New York

Ravi Ghosh

Peter Hujar, Paul Thek (In Hooded Sweatshirt), 1975

Books

Andrew Durbin: The Wonderful World That Almost Was – A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek

Fiona Anderson

The narrative Andrew Durbin presents here is, instead, one of renewal, of the challenges and pleasures of an artistic life and of these artists’ desire and need for freedom and creative agency.

Lesley Loksi Chan, Lloyd Wong, Unfinished, 2025

Film

Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival

Benjamin Barra

Lesley Loksi Chan brought to life a box of old tapes that record long-lost footage of the artist Lloyd Wong and which explore his experiences of living with HIV, the work paying respect to his deep-felt anger about his impending death.

Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk, We Didn’t Start This War, 2026

Film

Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk: Pedagogies of War

Maria Walsh

Ukrainian artists Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk offer a corrective lens to the spectacle of war. Their film installations create the time and space to contemplate the affects surrounding war in an aesthetic call-to-arms that gets under the skin rather than remaining at the level of information.

Susan Thomson, The Swimming Diaries, 2024

Film

Susan Thomson: The Swimming Diaries

Michaële Cutaya

The film is composed of a series of original dance performances interspersed with extracts from personal archive videos. Each sequence has its own cinematographic identity, reflecting the different emotional states the narrator is going through.

Allan Sekula, Koreatown, Los Angeles, April 1992, 1992

Reports

On Labour

Nicholas Gamso

The themes of the Wattis Institute’s ‘Labour’ exhibition has special significance here in San Francisco, a former countercultural bastion which is now synonymous with tech-world workaholism and with very poor people living in tents in roadside encampments.

ANGA’s flyposting of ‘No To The Genocide Pavilion’ and Palestinian art in the streets of Venice, 2024

Reports

Boycotts Do Work

Tom Jeffreys

Over the past two and a half years, it has been precariously placed cultural workers, not institutions, who have organised together for collective liberation. The less the current system offers you, the less you have to lose from speaking out.

‘Vivono: Art and Feelings, HIV-AIDS in Italy. 1982–1996’, installation view, Centro Pecci, Prato

Reports

European Art and HIV/AIDS

Vassilios Doupas

The moral framing of the AIDS epidemic in southern Europe, which equated it with deviance and something to be marginalised, posed a threat to heteronormative structures. ‘Vivono’, a group exhibition of Italian artists affected by the HIV/AIDS crisis aimed to disrupt a long and pervasive silence.

UK government simplified representation of an AI neural network

Artlaw

Copyright and AI Progress

Henry Lydiate

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act’s computer-generated provisions were enacted four decades ago, when computer technology was rudimentary. Computer-generated works were challenging and costly in the 1980s, but AI has since developed significantly, and can now produce outputs in large quantities without the same challenge or cost.