Art Monthly 489
September 2025

Contents

Hilary Lloyd, Very High Frequency, 2025

Interview

Woman with a Camera

Hilary Lloyd interviewed by Chris McCormack

One of the things about filming people is that if somebody is doing something that they are consumed by then they will become glorious, otherwise they’re feeling under threat from the camera or what’s being demanded.

Jo Spence, in collaboration with Terry Dennett, The Highest Product of Capitalism, 1979

Feature

Talking in Class

Dave Beech argues that we are still lacking the political will or the theoretical tools to talk about class

Downplaying the political narrative has the mysterious effect of pushing the working class as an empirical category into the history of capitalism while denying it a place in contemporary capitalism.

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, 1999

Feature

Dance Class

Chris Townsend celebrates the transgressive power of dance, from the bacchanale to the rave, and laments its repression under late capitalism

Consider the dance marathons of the US’s 1930s depression era, dramatised in Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? If there’s a finer allegory of industrial capitalism’s ruthless demands upon the human, I’m struggling to find it.

Maryam Tafakory, Razah-del, 2024

Profile

Maryam Tafakory

Luisa Lorenza Corna

The brilliance of Maryam Tafakory’s approach lies in reversing the usual way prohibitions are signposted: she turns the gaze towards the film industry’s efforts to keep desire within the frame, and the shifts in image-reading this prompted across Iranian spectatorship.

Editorial

Forgive Us Our Trespasses

The government’s heavy-handed response to Palestine Action protesters spraypainting military jets only highlights the draconian nature of new anti-protest laws and their devastating impact, particularly on the lives of young campaigners.

It is instructive to compare the present government’s overreaction regarding Palestine Action with that of the government of the day to the activists from the anti-nuclear Women’s Peace Camp who, on 24 July 1983, committed a similar act of trespass on the RAF base at Greenham Common.

Artnotes

CCA Action

CCA Glasgow issues an apology after it called in police in response to peaceful protests; Anish Kapoor works with Greenpeace to campaign against fossil fuels; Amy Sherald cancels her solo show at Washington DC’s National Portrait Gallery after the institution capitulated in advance to President Donald Trump’s discriminatory agenda; IMMA dispels press reports of censorship over a Derek Jarman screening; the government publishes its underwhelming plans for the arts; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.

nabbterri, a suitable host, 2025, Helsinki Biennial

Exhibitions

Rebecca Horn: Cutting Through the Past

Castello di Rivoli, Turin

Maria Walsh

Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams

Courtauld Gallery, London

Matthew Bowman

Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II

South London Gallery

Andrew Chesher

Permindar Kaur: Mirror, Mirror

Prem Sahib: Doubles

Pitzhanger Manor, London

Paul Carey-Kent

Sophie Podolski: Wisdom Should be Sung

Milly Thompson: My Body Temperature is Feeling Good

Goldsmiths CCA, London

Daniel Culpan

Kaari Upson: Dollhouse

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

Elizabeth Fullerton

Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order

WIELS and argos, Brussels

Ellen Mara De Wachter

Helsinki Biennial: Shelter – Below and Beyond, Becoming and Belonging

various venues

Lucia Farinati

36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts: The Oracle

various venues

Toby Üpson

Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell, Direct Action, 2024

Film

Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell: Direct Action

Nicholas Gamso

Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau’s new documentary is a sort of love letter to the famed ZAD commune and the rugged beauty of its human and more-than-human denizens, though ultimately it is a languishing, unrequited love, which aggravates its subjects and raises questions about how best to represent activist movements, if at all.

Jenkin van Zyl, Lost Property, 2025

Film

Jenkin van Zyl: Lost Property

Michael Kurtz

Much has been made of the maximalist intensity of Jenkin van Zyl’s art, but his intelligence as a filmmaker is often overlooked. Central to Lost Property, for instance, is the interaction between linear content and cyclical format.

Yasmina Reggad, we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming. all before… all after…, 2025

Sound

Yasmina Reggad: we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming. all before… all after…

Stephanie Bailey

Initiated in 2016 and composed of live radio broadcasts, performances and installations, this latest iteration continues Yasmina Reggad’s polyglot investigation into the role of radio in previous revolutions and its resonances today.

‘Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen’

Sound

Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen

Irene Revell

Rather than reconstruct the ‘problem’ of the colonial (sound) archive, here we are plunged into just a dozen or so of the numerous ways that work interrogates these histories on its own terms and in resistance.

How to Set Up an Art School

Books

How to Set Up an Art School

Natalie Bradbury

The book owes as much to punk and DIY traditions as bureaucratic institutions: an irreverently styled sausage on a stick designed by the artist Bruce McLean, which is presented to students in place of a traditional graduation certificate, gives a particularly good sense of TOMA’s ethos.

Sweeney’s Bothy, one of the Bothy Project residences

Reports

On Residencies

Maria Fusco

Residencies are an unstructured time away from everyday life, an opportunity to reflect, not to renounce the everyday but to understand it.

Sean O’Connell, Sam Batley, 2025

Reports

Letter from Barnsley

Lillian Wilkie

This ambivalence, around class, tradition and masculinity, and around Barnsley’s industrial heritage, gives Sam Batley and Sean O’Connell’s work a contemporary relevance and compelling energy.

view over Malta International Contemporary Arts Space (MICAS)

Reports

Letter from Malta

Laura Robertson

‘These stones are yours,’ prize-winning Maltese poet Immanuel Mifsud writes, ‘they arose from your land / from your body, your soul, your mouth.’

John Chamberlain, Etruscan Romance, 1984, estimate £300,000–500,000, sold for £463,550

Salerooms

London Summer Sales

Colin Gleadell

London’s summer auctions continued their precipitous slide downwards in June when Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips amassed just £101m between them for their modern and contemporary art sales, though one silver lining came in the form of further evidence that women artists are finally starting to be valued in line with men.

an artwork by Pete Doige not Peter Doig

Artlaw

Fake or Fortune?

Henry Lydiate

Had the claimants chosen not to pursue Peter Doig, but instead to publicly exhibit and market the fake painting with their attribution of his authorship, would the artist have had any legal right to prevent them? That's where moral rights come in.