Art Monthly 491
November 2025

Contents

Suzanne Treister, Q. Would You Recognise a Virtual Paradise?, from the series ‘Fictional Video Game Stills’, 1991–92

Interview

Time Travel

Suzanne Treister interviewed by Jamie Sutcliffe

Let’s take a wider perspective and assert that all art by default creates a crack in consensus reality, that on one level or another all art is visionary, all art is political, all art is mystical, all art is about identity, all art is holographic and so on.

Nnena Kalu, installation view, Arcadia Missa, London, 2024

Feature

Curating Difference

Lisa Slominski asks whether it is possible to contextualise difference with care and without instrumentalising it

Nnena Kalu’s nomination for this year’s Turner Prize raises important questions about ethics, interpretation and responsibility, and invites broader reflection on how representation is negotiated.

Abbas and Yasiin Zahedi, Magnetic Sun, 2022, installed at Springfield University Hospital

Feature

Art Treatment

Tom Denman assesses what it takes to make art in and for hospitals, concluding that the best approach encourages an ‘interdependent therapeutic gaze’

The question is, how can the therapeutic gaze be harnessed to upset the top-down, objectifying dynamic we might associate with medical practice, including the wider neoliberalist framework of arts in health advocacy?

Luc Delahaye, L’Autre, 1995–97

Feature

Re-de-photography

Mark Prince argues that in our social media saturated culture, to photograph or film something is becoming a substitute for that same experience

The paradox reflects photography’s conflicted role in a mediated world – rife with image manipulation – as both the medium that most effectively dissembles its form in order to simply attest, and the one most likely to deceive with its evidential appearance.

Grant Mooney, Deisal c. i, ii, 2024

Profile

Grant Mooney

Francis Whorrall-Campbell

The removal of the Chisenhale’s windows is enough to enact changes, not only to bodies that pass through the building, but also to the objects the artist has placed in the gallery. Over the course of the exhibition, the volatile currents of air and moisture slowly cause the works’ surfaces to oxidise.

Editorial

Raising Ghosts

Keir Starmer’s Labour government is haunted by the ghosts of triple election-winner Tony Blair and his New Labour agenda that, contrary to myth, not only ended in failure but also paved the way for many of the problems we’re facing today – resurrection is not the answer.

Imagine refusing to show your future digital ID to the police, armed as they are not just with tear gas and tasers but with SOCPA (the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005), whose powers allow police to search and arrest you without charge. Daniel Ward’s documentary, Lonesome Ghosts, serves as a reminder of the ease with which police powers – of surveillance and undercover work in this case – can be abused.

Artnotes

Ire at Fireworks

Cai Guo-Qiang’s White Cube exhibition draws protests; the NEA’s interpretation of Donald Trump’s orders have been ruled unlawful; M HKA’s future is cast into doubt; the Met is the unwitting host of a guerrilla AR exhibition; the British Museum gala ball is disrupted by protesters; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

William E Jones, The Fall of Communism as Seen in …, 1998, ‘On the Origins of the 21st Century or …’, Kunstverein in Hamburg

Exhibitions

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories

Royal Academy, London

Larne Abse Gogarty

Tanoa Sasraku: Morale Patch

ICA, London

Michael Archer

Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love – Until the Sun of Freedom

Nottingham Contemporary

Cherry Smyth

Joyce Joumaa: Prologue

Brunette Coleman, London

Amrita Dhallu

Christopher Williams: Hand Painted Signs, Photographs, Long Play Vinyl, Audiophile Bar, Printed Matter

The Perimeter, London

Duncan Wooldridge

Ketty La Rocca: you you

Estorick, London

Martin Holman

On the Origins of the 21st Century or …

Kunstverein in Hamburg

Chris McCormack

Sixties Surreal

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Ravi Ghosh

Hito Steyerl, Medium Hot

Books

Hito Steyerl: Medium Hot – Images in the Age of Heat

George Vasey

The book convenes a series of essays exploring generative AI at a brittle moment of global politics and climate emergency. It is a typically dense yet readable book that chronicles Hito Steyerl’s grappling with almost-weekly technological advancements.

Daniel Ward, Lonesome Ghosts, 2025

Film

Daniel Ward: Lonesome Ghosts

Peter Suchin

Part of Daniel Ward’s vigilance with respect to film’s manufactured form is his direct examination of the use of photography by specially trained police officers carrying out detailed surveillance operations on left-wing protest groups in the 1970s and 1980s.

Margaret Salmon, ‘Assembly’

Film

Margaret Salmon: Assembly

Maria Walsh

Rather than being a critique of documentary or observational film, these self-reflexive moments give the viewer the time and the room to feel their way into the unfolding of an encounter.

‘Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity As Practice’

Reports

Letter from São Paulo

Juan José Santos

The surge of Indigenous art has gained momentum over the past year, and while its visibility within institutional calendars remains significant, a rift is emerging between spaces that exoticise or commodify this art and those that entrust Indigenous communities themselves to curate, emphasising not the ancestral or tribal but the contemporary and hybrid.

Liliana Porter, Red Sand, 2018

Reports

Letter from Buenos Aires

Bob Dickinson

Signs put up by workers operating the rest of the site of remembrance still proudly announce: ‘IN A BROKEN STATE, WE ARE HOLDING IT TOGETHER.’

Chris Ofili, Blossom, 1997, estimate £1–1.5m, sold for £2.1m

Salerooms

London Revival

Colin Gleadell

Best performer in relation to estimate was Gary Hume’s portrait Funny Girl, 1995, bought like much else in the collection from White Cube, which soared over a timid £15,000 estimate to sell for £82,500 – nowhere near a record, but one of the better prices for Hume in recent years.

Fall of Freedom at the No Kings march in New York, October 2025, photo Daniel Bejar

Artlaw

Fall of Freedom

Henry Lydiate

Dread Scott had previously aroused controversy with his exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, 1988. The work, which consists of a US flag laid on the floor before a wall-mounted silver gelatin print and a shelf with books and pens, invites audience members to participate by standing on the flag to reach the shelf and read/use the books and pens.