Art Monthly 490
October 2025

Contents

Naeem Mohaiemen, Through a Mirror, Darkly, 2025

Interview

Looking Back in Anger

Naeem Mohaiemen interviewed by Amna Malik

I asked myself why I never heard about Jackson State where, in that same month of 1970, there had been a shooting of African-American students. The two black students who died at Jackson State are not well remembered, but there is far greater awareness of the fatal event around the deployment of the National Guard around the Kent State protests.

Momoe i manu ae ala atae’e Tasker, Protest banner for West Papua, 2024

Feature

Uneasy About ESEA

Morgan Quaintance argues that the homogenising effect of the ESEA label risks blocking a truly transformative and reciprocal exchange between global regions

The central flaw of binary models, which are used in geographical and community-based distinctions to cast the West as negative other, is that they come bundled with a strange Manichaean moral imperative. That is to say, the body defining itself against the West must be made to stand for almost everything that the West is not.

Aisling Phelan, Goodbye Body, 2025

Feature

Art and Obsolescence

Bob Dickinson points out that artists’ long-term fascination with obsolescence has turned darker with the development of new technologies

Perhaps a deeper understanding of obsolescence can change the experience of art itself, creating glimpses of what appears to be a parallel world in which it is possible for obsolescence to contain possibility.

ZG and Semiotext(e) magazine covers

Feature

On Magazines

Chris Townsend both celebrates and laments magazines, past and present, that made a difference, even if only temporarily

Gary Indiana’s praise for ZG and Wedge would be an epitaph, as neither lasted beyond the mid 1980s. That extinction might be because these publications had done their work in highlighting art’s connections in the transformed historical field of neoliberalism or, maybe, as usual, money, death and power won out.

Karimah Ashadu, Machine Boys, 2024

Profile

Karimah Ashadu

Kathryn Lloyd

Machine Boys captures a group of young men who operate illegal motorcycle taxis in Lagos, known locally as okadas. Many of the riders stare directly out at the viewer before veering off abruptly or creating endless burn-out circles that churn up clouds of dust, as though responding to a shared internal choreography.

Editorial

Flag Waving

England’s self-confidence used to ensure that flag waving was reserved only for state pageantry, but recent insecurities – preyed on by xenophobic nationalists – have caused an outbreak of flags which is spreading across little England like a rash.

In the postwar years, nationalist politicians on the right who wrapped themselves in the Union flag were generally ridiculed, while those on the internationalist left, which cleaved to the red flag, routinely denounced them as fascists.

Note on Magazines

This is Art Monthly’s 490th issue and, as we begin the countdown to our 500th issue and 50th anniversary in October 2026, Chris Townsend’s feature ‘On Magazines’ gives us pause.

Some magazines are intentionally ephemeral, others are like shooting stars that burn out but leave an indelible trace; some founder or peter out and some transform themselves to stay current without losing their identity or try, as we say at Art Monthly, to stay the same while changing utterly.

Letter

Continuing the Conversation

Morgan Quaintance responds to Dave Beech’s feature ‘Talking in Class’

Of the raft of stellar points in Dave Beech’s ‘Talking in Class’, this one stood out: ‘the only way to reformulate class theory for the 21st century is to keep talking’. In that spirit I’d like to elaborate on an important aspect of class consciousness that Beech also cited in the opening of his text: the notion of solidarity.

Artnotes

Ethics in Culture

The Museums Association updates its Code of Ethics to proscribe sponsorship from the fossil fuel industry; Parliament debates banning advertising and sponsorship by the fossil fuel sector; a new scheme launches that encourages artists to support climate initiatives; a pay survey in the arts sector reveals the challenges that working-class artists in particular suffer; the Israeli government defunds its national film awards after the top prize was given to a collaboration between Jewish and Palestinian filmmakers; Christie’s shutters its Digital Art department after disappointing sales; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

Sam Gilliam, Count on Us, 2008, IMMA, Dublin

Exhibitions

Mona Hatoum: Encounters – Giacometti

Barbican, London

Virginia Whiles

Sam Gilliam: Sewing Fields

IMMA, Dublin

Tendai Mutambu

Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time

Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

Chris Townsend

George Henry Longly: Megabreccia

White Chapel Somerset, Langport

Martin Holman

Monica Ross: Unquiet Woman

Phoenix Art Space, Brighton

Gavin Butt

41st EVA International: It Takes a Village

various venues, Limerick

Maria Walsh

steirischer herbst ’25: Never Again Peace

various venues, Graz

Chris Clarke

Rasheed Araeen, Art and Institutional Racism

Books

Rasheed Araeen: Art and Institutional Racism

Eddie Chambers

The book’s essays are in large part Rasheed Araeen’s recollections of interactions and conversations with senior figures in galleries and funding bodies from which he sought support. Sometimes the recollections are as he remembered them; in other instances, though, Araeen’s recollections take the lengthy form of reproduced email exchanges with senior figures such as Tate’s Nicholas Serota and the Courtauld’s Deborah Swallow.

Dan Hicks, Every Monument Will Fall

Books

Dan Hicks: Every Monument Will Fall – A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

Tom Denman

One of this book’s main strengths is its expansive definition of monumentality. Sustained by whataboutism as well as quieter forms of wilful ignorance, victimising memorialisation seeps surreptitiously into the material culture of power and all that surrounds it.

Shadi Habib Allah, In Stock, 2018

Events

Survival Kit: House of See-More

Tosia Leniarska

Palestinian artist Shadi Habib Allah’s ghostly husks of glistening plastic water bottle packaging are taken from food deserts in urban Detroit, sites where the only grocery shops for the local underserved black communities have been opened by Arab immigrants – refreshingly, the only instance of the US being mentioned in the exhibition.

conversation hosted by Tenthaus Art Collective at the Communist Museum of Palestine

Events

Bergen Assembly: across, with, nearby

Rose-Anne Gush

While many cultural and art institutions have capitulated to political pressure and censored staff, students and invited artists – or, at best, forced them to bury their political speech in euphemisms – it is notable that Bergen Assemby, an international art event, has put Palestine front and centre, finding ways to link it to other sites of struggle, including the incarcerated and continuing issues of land rights.

UK AIDS Memorial Quilt at Tate Modern

Report

UK AIDS Memorial Quilt and Beyond

Chris McCormack

For many, the quilts unquestionably gave them the right to grieve what were often ungrievable deaths: lives that often were subsumed into more societally tolerable visions, funerals where the person’s queerness was expunged, or whose death was often redescribed as being from cancer, mollifying the needs of a family’s so-called wishes.

promotional image from ACE’s 2020–30 ‘Let’s Create’ strategy

Reports

Resilient Art Ecologies: No Time Nor Money

Susan Jones

Arts policies have, over time, marginalised the position of artists within the infrastructures and wider ‘ecology’ of the arts. As a result, artists at all development stages now lack social status, putting them at a disadvantage when negotiating with art’s administrators.

Maeve Brennan, Box 29_01, 2022, detail

Reports

Letter from Hong Kong

Ysabelle Cheung

While nostalgia itself isn’t inherently problematic, its tendency toward romanticisation can be, washing over the more complex and ambiguous stories of our past.

promotional image for the BBC’s ‘The Great Art Fraud’ documentary

Artlaw

Lifting the Veil

Henry Lydiate

In the UK, a limited liability company dealership currently faces challenges from artists who allege they are owed payment for sales of their consigned works while some collectors demand repayment for purchases of works they are yet to receive. Lawsuits may be filed against the company and/or, if there are valid grounds for its corporate veil being lifted, the owners personally.