In his 1960 essay L’Œil et l’Esprit (Eye and Mind), the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes about painting as a way of reconciling vision with what escapes it, a fixed material surface with the “halos of Being.”1 The visible, he argues, always has what he calls “a lining of invisibility”2: something that is there without presenting itself directly to the eye. It can be the depth of a space, the movement of a body, the relation between two things, or simply what a particular color does to everything around it. We see the effects without necessarily seeing what produces them. For Merleau-Ponty, this is part of what makes painting so interesting: the painter is looking at the world, but also at what his or her own looking brings out of it.

While Cézanne is, of course, his textbook example, I thought of this while visiting three exhibitions in Paris this August. Victor Man’s paintings at the Bourse de Commerce made me realize how easily color can alter our perception of the visible, his green-lit figures briefly making green seem like the natural color of light itself. Hilma af Klint, at the Grand Palais, was trying to give form to something she believed could not be seen in the first place, using painting to translate spiritual ideas into colors and symbols. Henry Taylor, at the Musée Picasso, starts with things that could hardly be more visible: people, objects, familiar places; yet small details in his pictures carry longer histories and deeper dynamics that are not fully visible in themselves. These three exhibitions are still on view at the end of August, and if you happen to be in Paris, I recommend spending your last days of summer with them.

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1. Clair-obscur, Bourse de Commerce (through August 24)

After Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s pool installation a year ago, the Bourse de Commerce’s Rotunda is currently home to yet another spectacular artwork, whose overcrowdedness proves it to be, once again, a victim of its own success. This time, Fujiko Nakaya’s Cloud #07156, which the artist describes as a fog sculpture, turns the core of the building inside out, bringing a quite unexpected but highly realistically rendered natural phenomenon indoors. Before entering the space, I had never been, in natural conditions, in the middle of such intense fog, except perhaps while on a plane; as such, the only experience it could recall for me was the anxiety of taking off towards an overcast sky. But, having firm ground under my feet in the Rotunda, experiencing only the visual conditions was pretty emotionally moving. Nakaya has been working with fog since the 1960s, when she abandoned painting to experiment with producing clouds on a large scale. In 1969, together with engineer Thomas Mee, she developed a system of high-pressure pumps and rows of nozzles capable of releasing tiny water droplets, recreating the physical conditions of natural fog.

As habit goes, before something is taken away from us, we tend to take it for granted. Same goes for sight. The main merit of this “sculpture” isn’t its incredibly accurate mimesis so much as immersing us in the void for several moments, but a void that we know to be artificial, constructed, limited, temporary, and that, as such, induces not so much fear as wonder and awe; and then giving us right back the gift of vision which, in the meantime, we learn to see under a new light. Which brings me to the main subject of the exhibition: clair-obscur, or chiaroscuro, a term commonly used in art history to designate the contrasted style of artists such as Caravaggio — the classic textbook example of this technique — whose intense highlights and mysterious darks create a particular depth and atmosphere that just draws you in, in search of meaning, pathos, ardor. In this exhibition, though, which brings together around a hundred works from the Pinault Collection, you won’t find a retrospective of the Caravaggists (as you might have guessed from the centrality of Nakaya’s artwork). The term is reclaimed as an umbrella under which a wide range of artistic expressions of light and dark, and most importantly, of everything in between, are assembled.

What I most appreciated in the concept was the non-manichean interpretation of chiaroscuro. I found the intermediary sections, between obscurity (where the exhibition starts, fittingly, in the basement) and incandescence (on which note it ends), particularly well elaborated. In the section devoted to germination, the presence of Yves Tanguy’s paintings made me feel that, in the fog of the rotunda installation, we were just like his enigmatic little figures on their ever-blurry backgrounds. It makes sense that Tanguy’s imaginary was formed partly around seascapes: his landscapes seem to retain something of that experience of looking into a space whose boundaries remain impossible to determine. From this perspective, but also just visually, it made perfect sense to see them paired with Pierre Huyghe’s 2021 sculpture series Mind’s Eye, in which an indefinite assemblage of organic materials points to the image-formation processes accomplished by our brain. A process which we cannot, naturally, see, yet it is the very thing that allows us to see.

Another successful aspect of the exhibition is the way it gives obscurity several different meanings. A video by the Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova, for instance, addresses the Soviet nuclear tests carried out in the Kazakh steppe, bringing into the exhibition a history of environmental and political violence that has itself been partly obscured. The presence of religious paintings and other works dealing with faith opens up another meaning of darkness: not simply the absence of light, but the space of what cannot be fully known or represented. The black paintings elsewhere in the exhibition also made me think of the long history of Black artists, such as David Hammons, reclaiming blackness as a visual and political category, which was the subject of a 2024 Guggenheim exhibition titled Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.

The main revelation for me in Clair-obscur was Victor Man, whose work I do not recall seeing at previous exhibitions at the Bourse de Commerce, or at least never in such quantity. Born in Cluj-Napoca in 1974, Man has developed a highly distinctive painting practice drawing on the history of European art, from Renaissance and Baroque painting to Symbolism and Surrealism, while creating images completely detached from any precise historical period. While his realism and compositions could point to several centuries ago (among others, El Greco’s 1508 painting La fábula), and their unusual colors to the previous century’s avant-gardes, these elements, together with the historically little (or stereotipically) represented identities of several of his models (such as the three Roma women in his 2023 Titiriteros, which adorns the exhibition’s catalog cover), make them beautifully unique. Ten of his paintings are brought together here, and they could, quite frankly, have been the whole raison d’être of the exhibition. His mastery of color is so profound that, after exchanging looks with his green-lit figures for several breath cycles, one starts to feel that this is now the color of universal light, permeating everything. Looking down or away from the canvases, one is almost shocked to see that one’s own skin does not appear in the same shades of green. Rarely do we encounter painters so convincing they make our own skin feel unnatural, and the green luster specific to oxidized public sculptures perfectly normal and expectable.

The exhibition does not, thankfully, conclude with a pure light that would function as the perfect opposite of obscurity. Works in ceramics by Rosemarie Trockel and burnt assemblages by Bruce Conner (showing that, contrary to popular mythology, pure light isn’t inherently good: pure light can burn) maintain some of the ambiguity that has made the preceding rooms interesting. It ends with a quotation from Giorgio Agamben, from the same text on the contemporary that I had already evoked in a previous article: “A contemporary is someone who, in taking a look at his era, surveys the shadows instead of the lights. All times are dark for those who experience their contemporaneity. Thus, a contemporary is someone who knows how to see this darkness, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the darkness of the present.”3

2. Hilma af Klint. Les Peintures du Temple, Grand Palais (through August 30)

There is a slight surprise waiting for anyone who comes to the Grand Palais expecting the Hilma af Klint retrospective that Paris has, in a way, been waiting for. The exhibition is smaller than I expected, mainly focusing on the project that occupied the center of af Klint’s artistic life: the Paintings for the Temple, a monumental cycle of 193 works developed between 1906 and 1915. It is, nevertheless, the first solo exhibition devoted to af Klint in France, eight years after the 2018 Guggenheim exhibition in New York, which was the first major international retrospective to bring the Swedish artist’s work to such a large audience.

Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint was trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and initially worked within the established traditions of landscape and portrait painting. Alongside this conventional artistic career, however, she developed an intense interest in spiritualism and theosophy. In 1906, she began producing the paintings that would eventually form the Temple cycle, which she understood as part of a larger spiritual mission. I’ll have to admit, though, that what fascinated me personally wasn’t the esoteric meanings with which the artist aimed to infuse her work as much as the theories of color that stand behind her choice of how to convey those meanings. Af Klint was interested in both scientific and spiritual accounts of color, and the paintings constantly move between the two. This is one of the things that distinguishes her work from the more familiar narrative of modernism, in which abstraction is often presented simply as a gradual liberation from representation.

Naturally, I spent the most time with The Ten Largest. Within her spiritual circle, in September 1907, af Klint was entrusted with a “sacred mission” to create a series devoted to the different stages of human life, comprising “ten paradisiacally beautiful paintings”… and paradisiacal it truly is. (If only church looked like this…) Painted in egg tempera, their colors are at once remarkably soft and intensely vibrant, and they still look surprisingly fresh today, almost alive. Af Klint treats each stage of life with the same extraordinary beauty, though my favorites are the first two, devoted to childhood. You could just look and look at them and never get tired, your eyes constantly craving more of that pastel world. Their enormous scale only makes the experience stranger: the paintings are full of forms, words, spirals and botanical shapes, yet the overall effect is remarkably harmonious, almost weightless.

Sometimes (for art historians), the historical importance of these works can overshadow the experience of looking at them. We now know the story: af Klint was producing radically abstract paintings before the artists who would later become the canonical pioneers of abstraction. But standing in front of The Ten Largest, I found myself caring very little about who came first. Their art historical importance is undeniable, but it is their extraordinary visual abundance that makes them difficult to leave. The exhibition’s relative concentration may therefore be less of a disadvantage than I initially thought: it allows us to spend time with the project through which she most completely articulated her particular combination of abstraction and spirituality.

3. Henry Taylor. Where Thoughts Provoke, Musée Picasso (through September 6)

Henry Taylor isn’t an easily recognizable name for European audiences, which makes his first major survey in France particularly welcome. Born in California in 1958, Taylor studied at the California Institute of the Arts and has lived and worked in Los Angeles throughout much of his career. His paintings draw extensively on the people and environments around him: friends, family members, strangers, celebrities, political figures and scenes of everyday life. Alongside painting, he has also worked in sculpture and installation, developing a varied practice that is particularly exciting to discover for the first time: from one room in the exhibition to the next, you never fully know what to expect, and are likely to be met with pleasant surprises along the way.

The Musée Picasso brings together nearly one hundred works spanning Taylor’s career, making this both an introduction to his work for a French audience and an opportunity to see how consistent some of his concerns have remained over several decades. The exhibition moves freely between portraiture, reflections on American history, race, class, popular culture and Taylor’s own immediate surroundings. Opening with a monumental untitled triptych from 2019, presented at the 58th Venice Biennale, I knew we were in for a good show, both conceptually deep and visually mesmerizing. The work brings together a portrait of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture, a reference to Glenn Ligon’s text-based 2014 work Remember the Revolution #1, and a depiction of the public attending a funeral after the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama bombing. This first work we encounter in the exhibition is simply astonishing, conveying the hidden reverberations of history (from 1791 Haiti to 1963 Alabama, passing through conceptual art) in ways a textbook never could.

On the other side of the triptych, by way of introduction, stood Taylor’s biography printed on the wall. Considering the mastery of both technique and art history I had just witnessed in that painting, I was surprised to find out that he only began his artistic career in his late thirties: although he had been drawing and painting since his youth, he began his formal training in the 1980s, while working as a psychiatric technician, and received his BFA from CalArts only in 1995, at the age of 37. This was both reassuring (not everything is set in stone by your mid-twenties!) and illuminating as to the maturity of the works on view, ostensible despite their concomitant playfulness. Actually, after this exhibition, I would say that an ultimate sign of maturity in painting is being able to maintain as much visual playfulness as Taylor does, without in the least undermining the seriousness, or sometimes even the tragedy, of the subject. Works from the 1990s such as Happy Meal (1992) and Screaming Head (1990), and from the early 2000s, especially Colonia, Chiquez (2001), most strongly fed this observation. Their almost childlike figuration, rendered in a vivid color palette, conveys the hidden struggles behind ordinary scenes of the Black community in his native California: in Colonia, Chiquez, the lightheartedness of a friend group playing dominoes is underpinned by a police car lurking in the background, as well as subtle signs of financial hardship (in this case, the sign reads “food stamps accepted”).

Besides this semantic ability, I was interested in the way Taylor transmits ideas through the material of the work itself. In Untitled (1999), for instance, a longitudinal painting adopting, in a schematic and incomplete way, the visual language of product packaging (“Enriched Spaghetti,” we can read above a plate of colorless pasta, “distributed by USDA in cooperation with State and tribal government for domestic food assistance programs”), both the canvas and its frame have been burned. The museum does not provide much explanation for the work, which left me thinking about the material consequences of poverty and, more specifically, the poor quality of food available to disadvantaged communities. Whether or not this was Taylor’s precise intention, the physical violence done to the canvas makes the social question impossible to keep entirely outside the painting.

Later works such as My Brother Gene the former “Tunnel Rat” (2010), which deals with his brother’s military experience, could also have been framed more critically. The exhibition presents the work partly through the contrast between military life and ordinary life, whereas I saw something more in it: an attempt to put the sacrifices of individual soldiers in perspective with the question of who actually gets to profit from the conflicts in which they participate. The enormous McDonald’s (evil) clown figure hovering above a group of Black soldiers in the same room of the exhibition points toward the same tension, between the difficult lives of ordinary people and the profits of the corporations that increasingly organize the world around them.

This is one of the strengths of Taylor’s practice: his albeit highly individualized subjects are never entirely separate from the political structures surrounding them. A portrait can remain deeply personal while opening onto questions of race, labor, class or American history. The particularities of the people he paints become the way into a larger history. I was glad, for this reason, that the labels handled The 4th (2012) with more explicitness4, through a simple framing that exhibitions organized around America 250 could have also addressed but most often omitted. Contrary to “official” cutural happenings organized in this occasion, Taylor’s paintings often record people and moments that could otherwise disappear from official narratives, all while making it clear that even the most ordinary image is already shaped by the political and economic world in which it exists. ∎

This has been my case this past March as well; although, in the broader scheme of things, I do not feel alone in having experienced a rather ordinary birthday attached to a supposedly out-of-the-ordinary number. Larger entities, on larger temporal scales, are traversing birthdays of far greater magnitude with perhaps even less ceremony, and arguably in worse health too. Just imagine turning two hundred and fifty.

Writing in November 2025, the historian and journalist Jill Lepore was already noting a relative absence of celebratory preparations for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the United States, which was coming up on July 4, 2026.1 A caption in her article, accompanying an illustration of revolutionary-era figures pointing at one another, seemingly on the verge of battle yet essentially immobile, reads: “Frightened of controversy, some cultural organizations have decided to do nothing.” Lepore, both a specialist of the American Revolution and a keen observer of contemporary politics, goes on to list the range of reasons that have led different institutions to scale down, heavily revise, or even fully renounce any plans they might have had for the occasion. And while I will not reproduce her insightful diagnosis here, I have chosen instead to look further at the symptoms, at some observable manifestations of the underlying condition; more precisely, those running through the art world.

For this medical consultation, fewer candidates than expected lined up; several patients were, ultimately, selected on the East Coast for reasons of accessibility (travel distance from New York). The assessment report that follows tracks a range of clinical manifestations in how museums in the area have marked the occasion of America 250.

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It is interesting how early images depicting the making of America, its physical construction, are also among the ones that best help deconstruct it. This was my main takeaway from the Queens Museum exhibition About Us: The American Imaginary, which needs to be addressed for multiple reasons. First of all, it was curated by four fellows selected through an open call, from the museum’s local community, a collaborative selection process that is rarely seen in museums, but more than appropriate for an exhibition interrogating the meaning of an entire nation. I probably spent the most time in the section curated by the fellow Christina Chan, titled Portals and Possibilities. From unknown photographers to prominent figures such as W. Eugene Smith, the selected pictures, dating mainly from the beginning of the 20th century, show the moments of transition between one American landscape to another: from vast, expansive and seemingly empty2 natural scenery to the industrial environment which we know so well today. Through these photographs, we understand this process to be more than a mere example in the reiterated myth of progress of humanity; it also participates to the making of a certain American symbolism, whose armatures are first and foremost made of steel.

Steel, symbol of strength and resilience, simultaneously mark of progress and instrument of war. When I first moved to New York, perhaps more than the height and imposing stature of buildings in Midtown and Lower Manhattan, I was surprised by how everything was quite ostensively made of steel: buses, ambulances, freight trucks whose front bumpers average at double the height of a human being and look like they could, and would, smash you in seconds. Steel was everywhere. While the case has already been made that dependence on oil resources has shaped recent cultural and political imaginaries, less has been said about steel, despite its colossal ubiquity.3 Unlike the hidden pipelines and remote oilfields that render petroleum a haunting, absent presence, steel demands to be seen in plain view. It is the literal infrastructure upon which the myth of progress was forged, a rigid armature that reconfigured the open American landscape into a strictly enclosed, vertical theater of power. To look at these early 20th-century photographs is to witness the crystallization of this new order.

After my visit to the Queens Museum, I could see it everywhere: the MoMA has a room titled “Architecture in the Age of Industry,” which shows such industrial landscapes but doesn’t address them critically. That room almost seems to be sponsored by Ford: the company’s Detroit plant is the subject of Charles Sheeler’s American Landscape (1930), and credited in the wall text not only for embodying a “boom of industry in the United States,” but even for incidentally inspiring “a rising generation of European architects, sparking a revolution in architecture.” Yet nowhere in this section is the consequent environmental damage on and around the River Rouge addressed.4 What the MoMA missed, but the Queens Museum fellows caught on astutely, is that these architectures are far from being neutral or innocent.

As Carlos David Trujillo, another Queens Museum fellow, highlights through his selection of a video on Venezuelan extractive histories, these histories of extraction also fundamentally dictate geopolitical relations and cross-border behaviors. It was through this kind of critical, rigorous research that About Us proved exceptional within the vast landscape of projects questioning what is "American" in American art. Running alongside this exhibition was Fia Backström’s The Great Society, an installation born from years of immersive field research in West Virginia, where the artist sought to interrogate and document how communities adapt and endure amid overlapping ecological and industrial crises. Moreover, just outside the Queens Museum sits the Unisphere, a towering relic of the 1964 New York World's Fair, and a physical remnant of an era when the economic, cultural, and symbolic power of nations was quite literally condensed into exhibition form; this heritage of imperial display was also critically unpacked on the museum’s upper floor. In other words, About Us: The American Imaginary was in quite good company.

Speaking of MoMA, while they didn’t organize any exhibition explicitly commenting on 250, but instead chose to mark it “with a Dynamic Summer Program and Membership to Celebrate Community and Creativity”5 — which is striking, compared to their ambitious 1976 exhibition The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800–1950, on the occasion of the bicentennial6 — I gave myself the task of going through the collections in search of clues as to what they might think “American” art is. They do have a room, in the 1880–1950 section, titled “American idioms,” where the category of the nation is defined through a constellation of artists brought together by common historical circumstances and by the educational, professional, and institutional structures that shaped artistic production, in this case during the 1930s and 1940s. The iconic Christina’s World (1948) by Andrew Wyeth was there; so was Archibald John Motley Jr.’s 1929 Tongues (Holy Rollers), followed by Alice Neel, José Clemente Orozco, and early works by Philip Guston and Jackson Pollock. But what I found most emblematic of this “idiom” (and this may be a personal preference), was Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925), whose isolated Victorian house, cut off from the viewer by the railway tracks running across the foreground, condenses what is presented as a distinctly American tension between rootedness and mobility, tradition and modernization in the early twentieth century. It also exudes, if I may add, brightness, individualism, a sense of openness, vastness, and immense beauty. And what makes it even more special, is that this was the first painting ever acquired by MoMA, in 1930, just a year after the museum’s founding.

Back in Brooklyn, I made the occasional pit stop at the Brooklyn Museum, where the country’s anniversary was marked by an intriguingly titled exhibition: Common Sense (which I expected to be met with a small dose of irony). Titled after Thomas Paine’s eponymous revolutionary text from 1776, often credited with framing the argument for independence, the exhibition sought to put foundational texts in dialogue with nine contemporary artists.7 The work dominating physically was Paul Ramírez Jonas’s The Commons (2011), an equestrian statue made out of cork, meant to be adorned with pinned notes and messages from the public to subvert the militaristic and authoritative associations commonly attributed to such monuments. Perhaps in a public space, instead of this rather empty exhibition room (at least for the time I was there), the result would have been different, but I felt like the work didn’t achieve the political purpose it was probably aiming for: most of the pinned items were the museum’s own tickets, followed by CVS and iced latte receipts, with no personalized messages added.

Other works were perhaps stronger on their own, but didn't thrive in the environment of the exhibition: all artworks were concentrated on a single wall, except for the text-based ones, which continued around the monumental Beaux-Arts Court — the imposing open space structuring the museum’s third floor. Precisely because the space chosen for this exhibition is so vast, it is unfortunate that the works are concentrated in a way that makes them feel small. As for the texts, their messages varied from relevant (“The highest form of patriotism is the honor of dissent”) to Pinterest-worthy-yet-questionable (“In times of ugly the best protest is beauty”).

During a research trip to Washington, D.C., I was met with similar vastness and desolation. Perhaps I was the only person walking on most streets because this is a city more car-centric than I had become used to, perhaps it was because of the swamp-like humidity and hot weather; but while the museums were filled with every single school in the country at any given moment, I did feel, at times, that they lacked substance. At the National Museum of African American History & Culture, for instance, while the history part was expansive and well developed, the culture section on the second floor was only composed of two rooms: one generally titled “Cultural Expressions,” the variety of which, from food to language, was supposed to be addressed on a single circular structure; and a second, more detailed one, on music genres. And while it was indeed nice to see Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet, Charlie Parker’s saxophone, and Chuck Berry’s magnificent Cadillac Eldorado in person, I did leave with the feeling that there could’ve and should’ve been more. What about the art? Is all responsibility for it left to specifically art-oriented museums? Where do institutions draw the line between art and culture?

The Smithsonian website announces no less than 34 exhibitions related to the anniversary, which the institution frames, gazing forward, as “Our Shared Future,” yet none of them seem to be art related.8 Correct me if I’m wrong, but the American Art Museum is only listed for the “new” installation (on view since 2023) in their Galleries for Modern and Contemporary Art. When I got there, half of the museum was under reconstruction (not their fault, but a lot of downtown monuments were in the same state). It was nice to see Isaac Julien’s five-screen video installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) — centering the activist and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) — have a red velvet-draped room of its own, and to learn that it was jointly acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery back in 2023. This nevertheless meant that it was installed not far from the Presidential Portraits gallery, and the proximity was somewhat eerie.

I had a more pleasant surprise during my trip to Philadelphia. Sure, the Philadelphia Museum of Art brought yet another vague contribution to the list of 250 exhibitions, titled A Nation of Artists (what nation doesn’t have artists?) and, through a generalist selection, simply aimed to “trace the evolution of American identity and visual culture” — the more complex the task a museum gives itself in such contexts, the simpler and more general the result will be. (It nonetheless still gave me the pleasure of seeing one more delightful Hopper, his 1941 The Lee Shore.) The more intriguing institution was across the street, or rather across the Oval and the Parkway: you have now reached the Barnes Foundation. If this is not the place to expand on the charming streets and incredible food we found in Philly, I do have to preface this by mentioning the exquisiteness of this foundation: from the peaceful garden with scarlet Japanese maples watching over a reflective pool filled with river stones, one enters the minimalist on the outside building to find a uniquely maximalist collection display: the defining characteristic of the Barnes Foundation is its dense, salon-style installation, with masterpieces crowded together with period furniture, much unlike the sterile white cube of modern museums.

Their temporary exhibition was curated in a markedly different register from the rest of the collection: first and foremost, instead of modern paintings, it was contemporary video art, featuring works by Arthur Jafa, David Hartt, Garrett Bradley, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Tourmaline. Titled Freedom Dreams and prefaced with a quote by the historian Robin D. G. Kelley — “Without new visions we dont know what to build, only what to knock down” — the exhibition is structured around the idea that liberation begins in the realm of imagination. It was the first and probably the only one9 I saw that, instead of using freedom as a readily-defined, unambiguous notion, recognized that “we continue to grapple with what freedom has historically meant in the United States and what it might yet come to mean.” By acknowledging this ambiguity, and addressing freedom as an unfinished project to which creative expression and new imaginaries can still contribute, the exhibition suggests that continued emancipation must pass through a transformation of the narratives through which history itself is made legible. The five artists assembled engage archives and Black artistic genealogies as dynamic fields of historical consciousness, where cultural memory and unrealized futures coexist within a shared temporal horizon, a temporal assemblage mirrored by that of the moving image as medium. In this sense, the moving image here functions as a technology of historical possibility.

When entering the Museum of the City of New York, visitors are confronted with a wall text asking: “What makes New York New York?” The answer follows, brief and categorical, in four words: Money, Diversity, Density, Creativity. In that order. If the exhibitions organized around the semiquincentennial similarly posed the question “What makes the United States the United States?”, the answers emerging from what I encountered would be: industry (Queens Museum), creativity (Philadelphia Museum of Art), a foundational text (Brooklyn Museum); but also, crucially, dreams of freedom (Barnes Foundation), understood as something distinct from the historical reality of freedom itself. ∎

This experience gave me unexpected insight into a question that art historians and curators are constantly confronted with: how do we make old artworks appear under a new light? The artists you will encounter below have arguably all reached the status of recognized “great artists”: Alexander Calder, Leonora Carrington, Lee Miller, Auguste Renoir, and Henri Rousseau. There have already been numerous exhibitions dedicated to them across decades and continents. How, then, do we continue presenting them to new audiences while finding new angles of approach, rather than relying only on the merely circumstantial reason that a work has not been shown in a particular place or for a certain amount of time? The fact that I had encountered works by all of these artists before, yet still saw them differently — not only because of the new institutions presenting them, but also because of my own recent experiences, reflections, readings, and interests — gave me an idea of the answer.

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• Renoir et l'amour. La modernité heureuse (1865-1885), Musée d’Orsay (through July 19)

I went through this exhibition like one goes through a dream, first of all for a quite material reason that had nothing to do with the art: I arrived at the museum with my phone already dead. Which meant I couldn't take notes of my thoughts during the visit, as I usually do when I plan to write a review, or take pictures to remember exactly which works I saw. (Thank you, Livia, for sharing your own for the scientific quality of these few paragraphs.) The second reason is that, at the time of my visit, I was halfway through the second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, namely À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Published in 1919, the book is set in the early 1890s, during the Belle Époque and the early years of the Third French Republic, which is precisely the period in which Renoir painted many of his most emblematic works.

I couldn’t help but see, in every painting, how Proust and Renoir inhabit the same world: one of bourgeois leisure, dreamy afternoon light, seaside resorts made possible by the railway, and young women whose appearances become the object of prolonged, almost obsessive observation. In both, modernity has arrived, but it announces itself mostly through new forms of seaside leisure and sociability, in a seemingly Edenic world before the tragedies of the early twentieth century. It is a world in which appearances still matter enormously, where a dress, a posture, or the direction of a glance can sustain pages of description or an entire canvas. Walking through the exhibition while immersed in Proust made the paintings feel strangely familiar, as if I were recognizing people and gestures I had already encountered in literature.

Just as the following book in the series, Le Côté de Guermantes, was criticized at the time of its publication for devoting too much attention to bourgeois social life — a perceived sign of the writer’s supposed snobbery rather than the acute social observation it actually contained — Renoir was similarly judged for his joyous, light-hearted portrayal of social relations and, as this exhibition explores, of love. Since critical discourse often privileged artists who expressed melancholy, irony, or disillusionment, the optimism of Renoir’s work was frequently dismissed as superficial, as incompatible with artistic depth.1 As we now understand, and as this exhibition beautifully demonstrates, this was far from the case. Both Proust’s writing and Renoir’s paintings have become exceptional testimonies of their time. Beneath the apparent lightness of Renoir’s scenes lies a remarkably coherent vision of modernity, grounded in the conditions and vitality of everyday social life.

What the exhibition does particularly well is refuse the old opposition between pleasure and seriousness. Renoir’s world is undeniably one of enjoyment, but enjoyment itself is a subject worthy of artistic investigation. The exhibition reveals how much attention is required to construct an image that appears effortless: the arrangement of bodies, the rhythm of gestures, the subtle negotiations between intimacy and performance, and the atmosphere of shared presence that gives these scenes their particular vitality. The curators also address how Renoir’s scenes of leisure emerge from a very specific historical moment, in which social conventions, including gender relations, were being renegotiated. His depictions of companionship and conviviality proposed an alternative to the rigid hierarchies of nineteenth-century life: from the theatrical elegance of Une loge à l’opéra (1880) to the more informal gathering of Le Déjeuner des canotiers (1880–81), while Renoir’s paintings do not erase the inequalities of their time, they do reveal the artist’s investment in the possibility of different forms of coexistence.

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• Leonora Carrington, Musée du Luxembourg (through July 19)

This exhibition delivers the enchantment one expects from a Carrington show, but not quite the depth one might have hoped the institution would bring to her work. Her paintings remain what they have always been: whimsical, metaphoric, mystically charged, and, quite simply, beautiful. I went to see them because it had been a while, and I found that I still liked them very much. The same cannot be entirely said of their presentation at the Musée du Luxembourg.

The exhibition opens with an initial section devoted to Carrington’s early fantasy sketches, shaped both by her upbringing (her parents not only read her stories, but also costumed themselves as figures from those stories) and by her Grand Tour. Carrington’s stop in Florence is mentioned here, though one struggles to see its direct resonance in the drawings on view; there is little in these early sketches that betrays even a faint echo of Renaissance form. Then follows a part-interview, part-documentary film, showing Carrington in her later years in Mexico, alongside a wall of biographical chronology. The sequencing is disorienting; one moves from childhood to old age, from mythic beginnings to reflective ending, before having properly encountered the middle. It is as if the exhibition cannot decide whether biography should illuminate the works or precede them. In practice, it places the paintings within a narrative before allowing them to speak on their own terms.

Only afterwards do we enter the rooms of the paintings themselves, arranged in chronological order: from her encounter with Max Ernst and participation in the Surrealist movement, through her passage across England and France during the war, her exile and traumatic internment in Spain, and finally her departure for Mexico, where she would live most of her life. There, she married the photographer Chiki Weisz and had children, whom she spoke of with striking tenderness in the filmed interview. Even then, her life was not entirely settled: she later moved to the United States during the repression of student movements in late-1960s Mexico, before returning once more to Mexico, where she remained until her death.

This biographical arc is, in itself, fascinating, but the exhibition’s insistence on mapping it too directly onto the work produces a certain flattening effect. Carrington’s visual language is in fact remarkably consistent from early on, already operating within its own internal cosmology: a world of hybrid creatures, alchemical transformations, female figures who seem to inhabit a myth or a dream. If there is a thread, for me, it is less narrative or biographical than atmospheric — a sustained attempt to hold open a space of irreducible elsewhere-ness. Despite the wall texts, I got the feeling her painting does not illustrate life; it proposes a parallel order in which life might be reimagined. A stronger exhibition might have trusted Carrington’s images more, allowing biography to remain a constellation around the work rather than the structure through which it must be understood.

The exhibition becomes even less convincing in its handling of feminist context. A wall text cites Carrington’s refusal to become the muse of anyone, but an artist in her own right; meanwhile, the room with her early paintings includes several by Max Ernst, whose presence is not really interrogated. If Carrington is to be positioned as a feminist icon — which she clearly can be, and has been — it feels inconsistent to frame her emergence primarily through a more established male figure without fully addressing the asymmetry or its implications. Another, smaller disappointment in the display was, for me, that Carrington’s tarot is presented only in projection form. I watched the slideshow while longing to encounter it as an object, to hold it, or at least to find it reissued in the museum boutique (a missed opportunity, if you ask me).

Thankfully, despite these curatorial shortcomings, Carrington’s work is strong as ever. Her paintings remain windows onto a hidden fantastic world that sits just beyond the limits of what can be named, one that she spent a lifetime constructing and allowing us to glimpse.

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• Henri Rousseau, l’ambition de la peinture, Musée de l’Orangerie (through July 20)

I have a personal history with Henri Rousseau’s paintings. Two of them, to be exact: La Charmeuse de serpents (1907) was the subject of an article I wrote in 2020, where I approached it through a phenomenological lens. But it is La Bohémienne endormie (1897) that has accompanied me most closely: I encountered it repeatedly at MoMA and later devoted a paper to it during my time at NYU, examining what the figure of the “bohemian” as an artistic motif could reveal about cultural and political imaginaries in Third Republic France, particularly when embodied by an artist such as Rousseau, the former customs official later affectionately known as the “douanier.” At the Orangerie, it was my first time seeing both works in the same room. They were the ones closing the exhibition: their monumental scale and pictorial mastery reveal a painter who had reached the full realization of his artistic language.

This achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers that Rousseau began not as a formally trained painter, but as an autodidact. Born in Laval in 1844, he came to painting later in life, after a career as a customs official in Paris; he only retired from his position in 1893 to devote himself more fully to art. One of the strengths of the Orangerie exhibition is that it takes us through Rousseau’s trials and tribulations, his experiments during the gradual development of the artistic language for which he is now known. Seeing his earlier works together for the first time here, I was struck by how recognizable that language already was from the beginning: the flattened spaces and peculiar sense of scale, the way people and objects sit in the strange atmosphere that permeates his scenes were already fully present. Initially dismissed as “primitive,” with his disregard for conventional perspective and proportion often interpreted as the result of insufficient training, Rousseau’s style was later reassessed as one of the most original and influential developments of modern painting.

The room before the last, titled “Un style à soi,” was particularly revealing in this sense: the luxuriant vegetation depicted across the paintings, in all its variety, appeared more coherent than nature itself. The curators did a wonderful job of filling the surrounding walls with large-scale works from this series, creating an immersive environment in which the visitor feels transported directly into these fantastic jungles, alongside Henri Rousseau. Except he himself was never there. As he revealed in the final year of his life, in 1910, the douanier-turned-painter had never left France. The immense knowledge of “exotic” nature that seems to animate his paintings was instead constructed from fragments gathered at home: the imagery circulating through colonial World’s Fairs, such as press illustrations, and his visits to the National Museum of Natural History and the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes, where he observed tropical plants and animals removed from their original context.

While the wall text does acknowledge these sources, I felt it stopped short of examining the colonial conditions that made such images available in the first place. The “exoticism” of Rousseau's jungles is treated primarily as a question of imagination, less as one of circulation and power. Having previously written about La Bohémienne endormie — whose dreamlike atmosphere has similarly encouraged readings detached from history, while the painting also draws upon nineteenth-century constructions of alterity — I found myself returning to a similar question: not whether Rousseau believed in the stereotypes he painted, but how thoroughly the visual culture surrounding him had already naturalized them. His paintings did not emerge in isolation from the colonial imagination of his time; they were nourished by it, even when they transformed its codes into something formally unprecedented. It is precisely this tension that makes them so enduringly intriguing, so difficult to exhaust.

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• Lee Miller, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (extended through August 2nd)

There has been a series of exhibitions dedicated to Lee Miller in recent years, and for good reason.2 Before becoming one of the defining photographers of the Second World War — and arguably one of its most important female voices, whether through her images of bombed London, the photographs she so courageously took at Dachau, or the now-iconic images made in Hitler’s bathtub shortly after the fall of the Nazi regime — Miller was already part of the Parisian avant-garde, moving between fashion and Surrealist photographic experimentation. This ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition traces not only these better-known moments in her career, but also everything that came before and after, bringing together some 250 prints. Its greatest achievement lies in revealing the continuity of a gaze that, across several intense decades, constantly adapted to a changing world, and the strength of a photographer who repeatedly found the right distance from which to capture some of the twentieth century’s most defining moments. Lee Miller is only one of the many photographic highlights currently on view in Paris; for more exhibitions worth discovering, see this article, featuring the MAM show alongside Robert Capa at the Musée de la Libération and Daido Moriyama at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson.

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• Calder. Rêver en équilibre, Fondation Louis Vuitton (through August 16)

A couple of summers ago, while working as a gallery attendant at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice as part of an internship, there was one room where all of us were particularly excited, and occasionally terrified, to be stationed. It was the main room of the permanent collection, the one visitors enter through, dominated by a massive Calder mobile suspended in the center of the space. The room had two openings: the main entrance on one side and, on the other, a door leading to the terrace and the water, where visitors also arrived by taxi boat. Naturally, a draft would form in the gallery, and the Calder would move and dance beautifully whenever touched by this breeze. If I said terrified earlier, it is because — as we experience increasingly extreme climatic events each year — we had a couple of thunderstorms that summer, and whenever visitors entered during one of them, the Calder looked as if it were about to take flight.

That said, Calder’s mobiles will always hold a special place in my heart. Needless to say, I was particularly excited when the Fondation Louis Vuitton announced its blockbuster retrospective of the artist, which has been on view since mid-April. And while the exhibition does not shy away from showing mobiles — including monumental ones, as I was delighted to discover on the upper floor — its core lies in another one of Calder’s most endearing projects. This year marks the centenary of his Circus, a new kind of spectacle that the artist created in the late 1920s during his time in Paris (where he had moved from New York in 1926). Fascinated by the circus since childhood, an aspect the exhibition explores in remarkable detail, Calder assembled a variety of miniature acrobats and performers that he made move and interact in a sort of puppet-theater-meets-performance, in front of a live audience. The FLV also includes two later documentary films devoted to the work, which is now part of the collection of the Whitney Museum, where I had the chance to see it several times and from where it is traveling for the first time in fifteen years.

Although Calder returned to the United States in 1933, his artistic life remained deeply connected to France, where he established a studio in Saché, in the Loire Valley, in 1953. This constant circulation is reflected in the way he transformed sculpture itself: he was among the first artists to conceive sculpture as a form that could evolve through movement and through its relationship with the surrounding environment, freeing it from the idea of the fixed object occupying a set space. From small metal constructions activated by the slightest current of air to monumental works integrated into public spaces and landscapes, Calder expanded the possibilities of sculpture by introducing time as one of its essential dimensions. This is also one of the reasons why his work resonates so strongly with my own research on textile artists who have similarly explored new ways of inhabiting and conquering space; he is, for me, one of the greatest artistic inspirations of the twentieth century.

While the exhibition technically runs into August, I still recommend including it in a July itinerary: as is often the case at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the final weeks of a major show tend to be the busiest. Unless, of course, everyone has already left for vacation; in which and in any case, I’ll conclude by wishing you a very pleasant one. ∎

That present was effectively suspended for two years, from March 2024 to 2026, as the New Museum underwent a full renovation. Yet as of this spring, it is back in business, reopening with renewed institutional energy and an intensified claim on contemporaneity. With New Humans: Memories of the Future, whose curatorial team is composed of Massimiliano Gioni (curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, now the Artistic Director of the New Museum), Gary Carrion-Murayari, and Natalie Bell, the institution seems to resume its ambition to act as a barometer of the contemporary condition with a heightened sense of urgency. So, what’s new at the New Museum?

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Regardless of how much we may feel that what we are living through is unprecedented and unique—uniquely hard, uniquely challenging—it is worth remembering that previous generations experienced similar moments of uncertainty and were equally convinced they stood at the threshold of a radically new world. This, to me, was the reassurance underlying much of the exhibition, especially in the second floor, where it starts. The chronological progression specific to most art museums is abandoned by the curators in the favor of dialogue: early twentieth-century paintings converse with twenty-first-century digital works, and it is somehow both unsettling and endearing to realize that, beneath constantly changing technologies, we continue to grapple with many of the same hopes and anxieties. The present, after all, never entirely replaces the past: it absorbs it, reshapes it, often unknowingly repeats it. This will become clearer through specific examples, but I felt that the juxtapositions chosen by the curators were actually thought through and quite profound, unlike some other recent exhibitions which use this tactic of the old vs. new as a superficial curatorial tool (not sure yet if it will get its own review over here, but I’m thinking of the Costume Art exhibition at the Met, where contemporary designer garments were paired with ancient, or older, art on many occasions just because… they kind of looked similar…).

As a preamble, or to better transmit the mood of this part of the exhibition, I should say it deeply reminded me of the 2022 Venice Biennale (Cecilia Alemani’s Milk of Dreams) and its interest in alternative modes of being, in bodies that refuse classical sovereignty, and in Donna Haraway’s insistence that the human is always entangled with technical and biological systems. I felt this from the first room, saturated with images of birth and bodily production, and titled Reproductive Futures—a highly debated aspect of human life and the object of many projections across the political spectrum, although triggering quite radically different reactions. Even when the body is not visible, it is implied, be it in the opening 1967 painting Geburt II by Maina-Miriam Munsky (which, with its determinedly painted black cube over a suggested mass of human bodies, superimposed with a body giving birth in the foreground, I found quite beautifully chosen, reconciling figuration and abstraction) or in the more futuristic, even dystopian 2022 installation HMO Nutrix by Jenna Sutela, which is, in the museum’s words, “a fountain of synthetic human milk powered by breast pumps.”

Amidst more literal suggestions of birth, Constantin Brâncuși’s Nouveau-Né (1920) appeared quite unexpectedly for me, though perhaps not entirely so (judging by, at the very least, its title). I would not have naturally placed his polished bronze forms within a discourse on reproduction, understanding his sculptures more through their artisanal lineage, through an almost archaic sense of form. At MoMA, similar sculptures by Brâncuși are presented within a narrative of material tradition (specifically Romanian woodworking) and modernist reduction. Their wall texts insist on the fact that his repetition of certain motifs is never reproduction.2 It is interesting to me how museum framing alters perception: at the New Museum, the integration of Nouveau-Né emphasizes seriality and the crystallization of form across repetition, even if the artist himself resists the idea of reproduction as sameness.

Birth is not the only concern of this first room; equally present are the infrastructures that surround and regulate it. Lucy Beech’s Out of Body (2025) extends this logic into a biopolitical register through a video exploring “flows of waste materials across species boundaries, in and out of hum/animal bodies through sites of scientific control”. One section, devoted to water containment systems, reminded me of Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound3, and, in a different register, of Joan Didion’s reflections on California’s hydraulic infrastructures in “Holy Water” (1977).4 Where Beech’s twenty-two-minute video goes a step further, and beautifully so, is in showing, without naming anything directly but through poetry, how these systems are inseparable from the cycles of human and animal life. The body emerges as something continuously shaped by invisible infrastructures, hidden forms of labour, exchanges with other species… whose boundaries are revealed to only appear as stable because so much work goes into maintaining them.

The second room, Mechanical Ballets—titled after Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s 1924 experimental dada film Le ballet mécanique—departs from Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), a text that still structures much of contemporary thought and decisions around labor, based on the assumption that the latter can best be optimized by programming humans themselves to value productivity. The exhibition text’s formulation is precise: as technology and capitalism develop together, the distinction between worker and system becomes increasingly difficult to maintain. The dancer is no longer separable from the dance (a metaphor elaborated quite literally by 1920s choreographers presented in the exhibition, who responded to the first implementations of this enduring ideology).

This room moves between early twentieth-century abstraction with its constructivist geometries, and contemporary images of platform capitalism. Amazon warehouses appear alongside Russian avant-garde compositions. I found myself thinking about how, despite the fact that these historical moments mirror each other, we still tend to mock earlier technological imaginaries for their naivety, for their flying cars and impossible cities… yet to notice the similarities, it suffices to simply replace the machine with AI, or crypto, or whatever term currently promises total transformation. These terms age quickly, but the imaginaries and expectations around them have mostly remained unchanged a century later. This is also reflected in how often we now read such earlier works as anticipations.5 While we mustn’t flatten history into prediction, we can, in fact, identify persisting ways of organizing anxiety, productivity, control, and futurity that recur under different technological names.

K. P. Brehmer’s Soul and Feeling of a Worker (1978–80) reclaims the visual codes of this religion of efficiency. Its color-coded emotional systems resemble contemporary productivity dashboards, influencer analytics, or wellness tracking interfaces, but are intended to be applied, as the title informs us, to the soul—one more region of human experience yet to be conquered by the pursuit of data and analytics. The work began as a series based on psychologist Rexford B. Hersey’s 1932 study of railway workers’ emotional states, which organized affect into a graded system, and which Brehmer translated into a color-coded grid echoing both early twentieth-century abstraction and 1960s minimalism. The wall text notes that the work anticipates the transformation of human subjects into data points within a digital economy. This is accurate, and has become a reality since, but once again, this was no prophecy. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests, to be truly contemporary is not to coincide perfectly with one’s own time, but to stand just far enough apart from it to perceive what others cannot, to allow its deepest structures to become visible;6 this is the task of the contemporary artist.

Across the room, we are thrown back into our own time with Matthew Angelo Harrison’s Porsche headlight encased in resin. Born in Detroit in 1989 and influenced by the city’s Fordist history, Harrison has developed a practice based on inserting industrial materials into sculptural form. The resulting shapes sit eerily between technical component and bodily fragment. In the adjacent 2012 work by Henrik Olesen, titled A.T. after Alan Turing, this overlap is extended but turns away from the material, from hardware, as the Danish artist intersects computation and subjectivity through the life story of the English computer scientist. Following another 1920s interlude featuring video works such as Le Ballet mécanique, we are also introduced to Jacqueline Humphries’ painting practice through her series 321HJ (2024–25), where oil on linen mimics digital surfaces, particularly CAPTCHA grids.7 Her works repossess a specific area of the visual language of computation: the visual tests used on websites to check whether a user is human or a bot, expanding the point where human vision is compacted into machine-readable systems, unknowingly producing a form of labor, as CAPTCHAs extract unpaid cognitive work from users to train AI systems.

The following rooms each tackle different elements that have shaped our understanding of the human. The section Prosthetic Gods, for instance, turns towards the inventions that continue to augment the possibilities of the body, or that can protect it, increase its liveliness. As always, the phenomenon has produced different artistic responses, a century ago as today, and we are faced with the evolution of these responses when seeing, in the same frame, photographs from 1918 and Berenice Olmedo’s Olga (2018), a mechanized installation of children’s prosthetics and medical devices assembled in the form of a single body, which repeatedly tries to stand up, falls back down, and repeats. One must imagine Sisyphus happy, was my first thought; it turns out the artist also means to explore “the paradoxes of rehabilitation culture,” “the political dimensions of disability and care.” The photographs mentioned before had a somewhat more humorous tone. Commissioned by the French Ministry of Instructions and Inventions during WWI, they documented recent inventions helping the population endure the war, or recover from it, ranging from the telephone to gas masks. Not that recollections of the war are themselves gleeful, but it can be amusing to see people posing with, perhaps even interacting with these tools for the first time. Naturally, Hannah Höch’s photomontages were also shown, and they feel particularly at home in this room, where the human body is repeatedly broken down and reassembled.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan is turned to the plural to name a section on twentieth-century fascisms and political tyranny. A more recent theoretical framework than the 1651 treatise is provided by Walter Benjamin, particularly his 1935 claim that “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics,” as he observed the intensifying use of visual and audiovisual propaganda. I felt there were multiple levels of interpretation to the subject of this room: not only have the catastrophes of the past century provided us with the visualization of human beings unprecedentedly destroyed, amputated, disfigured—to which state a 1920s Dada sculpture by George Grosz and John Heartfield speaks, sporting an amputated leg and a gun instead of an arm—but the rise to power of the tyrants who commanded them broadened our comprehension of the human to also include what might previously have been termed monsters or evil; in other words, it led to the acknowledgement of what Hannah Arendt has called the banality of evil. This is suggested in the exhibition through the presence of photographs, especially the portraits of Lenin and Stalin.

A downside of this room, however, is the fact that these denunciations are limited to the past century, which now sits on relatively safe ground. The most recent work is Cyprien Gaillard’s 2019 L’Ange du foyer, a holographic LED display based on Max Ernst’s eponymous 1937 painting, which the wall text frames vaguely through “the cyclical nature of past and present as far-right nationalist parties once again ascend to power around the world.” Couldn’t artists who address this more directly have been included here? If this cannot be done in a museum that insists its contemporaneity lies in the absence of a permanent collection, where could it be? Are we only denouncing something once its destructive blaze has already been consumed?

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Another incoherence I noticed from here on was the extrapolation of certain ideologies or identities as “themes” for display; for instance, Marxist thought or feminism—about whose thematization under the dubious title “Automatic Women,” in an attempt to sum up the advent of the “New Woman” through both the technologies that led to the proclamation of the “New Man” and, more specifically, feminist movements throughout the century, I am not entirely sure. I would argue that on the contrary, if a museum wants an exhibition to be feminist, or progressive, or to share the values of these currents of thought, these should permeate and underpin the entire installation, and not become an isolated subject, a fait divers. In the current state, the museum risks stabilizing these critiques into aesthetic objects—and, as Jacques Rancière has suggested, visibility alone does not produce political transformation. That being said, I did enjoy individual artworks throughout these rooms, such as Jamian Juliano-Villani’s paintings, imbued with the mingling of humor and trauma specific to contemporary popular culture, where disparate elements are brought together in what she calls “a poor man’s Photoshop,” or Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s triptych To Imagine Is to Absent Oneself (2025), composed of hand embroidery and oil on canvas, its outer surfaces adorned with rhinestones.

I also found it intriguing how the section titled Dream Machines brings together a wide range of practices and mediums, but, more interestingly, practices that are often opposed in public discourse or even art historical narratives, such as video art and weaving, which tend to be positioned on opposite sides of a divide between technology and craft. On the contrary, the display revealed the intricacies they share, or have shared in recent art. I noted the presence of at least three artists working in tapestry: Hannah Ryggen and her 1951 Atomsen (Mr Atom), which addressed the nuclear arms race in the context of the Cold War; Charlotte Johannesson, who developed an experimental workshop for programming weavings, in the direct lineage of computing history—the Jacquard loom being a key precursor to the computer in the early 1800s; and Marilou Schultz, whose use of Navajo designs in experimental weaving points to the role of Indigenous knowledge in the history of computing. These were interspersed along one long, blue corridor with video works such as Mika Rottenberg’s Dough (2005–06), which stages absurd economies of production through an ironic mise en scène of women endlessly kneading dough; or early experiments in computer-generated poetry, such as Nanni Balestrini’s Tape Mark I (1961) and Alison Knowles’s The House of Dust (1967).

The second floor ended on Hito Steyerl’s Mechanical Kurds (2025), a video installation I had already seen in Paris, at the Jeu de Paume exhibition Le Monde selon l’IA (read more here and here), and which has been shown in numerous other museums since. This only goes to confirm the utter relevance of Steyerl’s work, which continues her investigation into the infrastructures of digital economies, surveillance, militarised technologies, geopolitics and data production. The work draws on the figure of the “Mechanical Turk,” the 18th-century automaton later reactivated by Amazon as a crowdsourcing platform for micro-tasks performed by anonymous workers. Here, Steyerl turns to click-workers based in refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, whose labour consists in training AI systems through the repetitive act of image labelling. Moving between documentary material and speculative sequences, with an unexpectedly emotional effect, the video exposes the distance between the promise of autonomous technologies and the material forms of extraction that sustain them.

On the third floor, the exhibition shifts toward specifically postwar subject formation and (post)colonial histories. The opening section, Animacies, draws on writers such as Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, Gilberto Freyre, and Oswald de Andrade, whose theories of creolization and hybridity structure the conceptual frame. The emphasis is on identity as something formed through contact, displacement, historical violence, and métissage, as opposed to a singular national origin. De Andrade’s notion of “anthropophagy,” for instance, is evoked as a strategy of cultural ingestion and transformation, while Glissant’s relational thinking runs through the section as a whole. Upon entering, the visitor is faced with Julien Creuzet’s video ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO (2023)—the artist who represented France at the 2024 Venice Biennale, though there in more sculptural form—alongside a monumental soft sculpture by Tau Lewis, The Handle of the Axe (2024), and Pol Taburet’s painting Mud field II (2023), a muted interior populated by blurred, spectral figures which was, to me, one of the strongest works in the room.

There were also works by self-taught artists engaging Indigenous sovereignty and cosmologies, such as Jaider Esbell or Santiano Yahuarcani, whose practice reflects on histories of violence in the Amazon. Behind a wall, one encounters Cristopher Kulendran Thomas’s video installation The Finesse (2022), which addresses the Tamil diaspora forced into displacement by state violence in Sri Lanka. Through archival fragments and AI-generated imagery, the work reflects on the construction of individuality under conditions of political erasure, while also questioning the authority of the nation-state and the contemporary production of “truth” through media technologies.

The following room, Becoming Animal, is framed by a tension between two theoretical registers: Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” understood as a condition in which politically devalued subjects are reduced to biological existence, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-animal” in A Thousand Plateaus, where proximity to the nonhuman is conceived as a line of flight from fixed identities and modes of subjectivation.8 The Deleuzian reference is evident, but the distinction between dehumanization through political violence and “becoming-animal” as a philosophical process is not always stable; I found it difficult to settle into this section conceptually. Within this framing, there is a risk that suffering and transformation begin to overlap without sufficient mediation. Does political violence necessarily reduce human life to an animal condition? Are we right to apply that qualification from the outside, or should it only be used when it already belongs to an artist’s vocabulary? And why associate, almost by definition, the tormented with the animal?

The framing was a lot clearer in the subsequent room, New Images of Man, which offers a more coherent historical reflection on postwar, and on a conceptual level specifically post-Holocaust, figuration. The section revisits the 1959 MoMA exhibition of the same name, itself shaped by a world still marked by the aftermath of World War II and the emergence of the Cold War and decolonization. The works respond to this context through forms of figuration hovering between abstraction and distortion, often reducing the body to unstable, precarious forms. Here the question of what it means to represent the human after catastrophe is made highly legible, to the point of offering more canonic names than any other section in the museum. Zoran Mušič’s haunting acrylic on canvas Non siamo gli ultimi (1974) sits alongside Francis Bacon, Maria Lassnig, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow, Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti, among others.

On a similar, WWII-related note, another section titled Maps of Humans gathers postwar and contemporary works shaped by the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the wider nuclear imaginary. Across Akira Kanayama’s machine-driven paintings, Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s biomorphic cartographies, Pierre Huyghe’s dystopian animal figure in Human Mask (2014), and Tatsuo Ikeda’s surreal post-atomic compositions (fifteen of which are shown), the human appears as something repeatedly reconfigured through trauma and survival, destruction and adaptation. I was particularly struck by the material intensity of these works and glad to have the chance to see their surface effects and textures in person. At the same time, it is difficult not to register how much of this formal innovation is tied to histories of catastrophe.

By the time the exhibition reaches the fourth and last floor, the tone shifts noticeably. The section on Future Cities pushes strongly into an exploration of urbanist imaginaries shaped by technological projection. The city appears alternately as prophecy, critique, fantasy: Albert Robida’s nineteenth-century illustrations show floating architectures and early media devices, offering a humorous perspective on the infrastructural saturation of contemporary life, while Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City (1969–75) renders urban space as a closed system of consumption and behavioral regulation; reading it in its entirety, slide by slide across the 154 pages shown in the exhibition, made the experience unusually immersive. Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Ville fantôme (1996) reintroduces, by contrast, a utopian register that is nevertheless haunted by postcolonial instability, as the promise of urban modernity remains inseparable from geopolitical fractures. More broadly, the room resonates with Situationist and post-Situationist critiques of the “urban spectacle,” which conceive the city as an image-system that organizes attention, bodies, behavior, and desire.

The last room is dedicated to robots, and while I am not convinced by the concept, which feels reductive after the theoretical density of the rest of the museum, it is also not helped by the scenographic decisions, which recall theme park design rather than a critical or reflective framing… Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley is somehow invoked alongside Freud’s theorization of anxiety and the return of the repressed. More broadly, the room situates itself within a long genealogy of artificial beings, from mythological automatons to science-fiction robots and contemporary AI imaginaries, all circling the question of how “the human” is reconstructed through its mechanical doubles. Works by Meriem Bennani and Ivana Bašić are nevertheless noteworthy contributions to this final environment: Bennani’s kinetic assemblages introduce a humoristic, almost cartoonish tone, while Bašić’s wax-and-alabaster creature, suggesting a kind of future relic, beautifully materializes the hybridity and instability of bodies suggested throughout the exhibition.

The “new human” becomes in turns a format, an ideology, a hope, a fear, an anxiety, and, at the New Museum, a way of organizing artworks and histories into a structure that can be renewed without end. ∎

Instead, I opted for some of the smaller fairs: NADA (which stands for New Art Dealers Alliance) and Independent (spoiler alert: both were excellent), alongside one larger fair that felt distinctly more quality-oriented: TEFAF. I also made a quick stop at the American Art Fair to visit a friend working there and was surprised by how many non-contemporary works were on view. For that reason, it won’t appear in the highlights below, but it still deserves a mention. What I appreciated there was that, from my short visit at least, their understanding of “American Art” seemed to be large enough: just as I was leaving and searching for the exit, I stumbled upon a series of stunning Peruvian paintings from the Cuzco School. I had encountered similar works throughout churches and museums in Peru, but never really imagined them as objects circulating within the market, since in those contexts they held that aura of religious artefacts, artistic masterpieces, or, in their case, works who are both.

So although I “only” saw three and a half fairs this time, the experience was, of course, completed by gallery openings across the city. What I love about the New York scene is that openings don’t happen in isolation; you don’t have to plan your week around individual events only to somehow miss them all, as can happen in cities where the gallery scene is more dispersed or less coordinated. Here, galleries cluster into concentrated neighborhoods, the top three that come to mind being Chelsea, Tribeca, and the Upper East Side. You go into a gallery, see what they have to show, perhaps grab a glass of champagne, walk right across the street to the next gallery, bump into an artist you know, then into friends you’ve been meaning to see for years, grab another glass, go next door the next gallery, and repeat. Repeat until you’ve crossed off the entire stretch of Chelsea that goes from W 30th St to W 19th. That’s more than 10 blocks of gallery hopping, and just imagine how many artworks, friends, and wine glasses along the way.

Although I saw an incalculable number of openings that week, I will keep it brief here and only mention two. First, I was excited to see Syntax of a Thread at MAMA Projects in Chelsea, organized by the New York-based (Brazilian-printed) magazine Art Dialogues, for its fifth anniversary. Founded by photographer Anita Goes, this beautifully designed bilingual publication dedicates each issue to a specific theme, and this time the focus was textiles. I actually learned about the exhibition through Mia Weiner, who had two pieces in the show. Mia is an artist whose practice (which I’ve written about here) I find among the most rigorous and compelling I’ve encountered in recent years; following her work is a continuous source of inspiration.

Still in Chelsea, I also really enjoyed Kawayan de Guia’s exhibition at Silverlens Gallery, Excavations from the land of the not so plenty. De Guia, who is born and based in Baguio in the northern Philippines, works from within the Cordilleras, a region shaped by the afterlives of American occupation and by indigenous knowledge systems. The artist’s imagery pulls from a wide visual archive (colonial residue, devotional iconography, commercial signage, diagrams, fragments of printed matter) whose elements are made to collide and misalign. In his collages, familiar signs lose their fixed meaning, such as the recurring anatomical body renderings stripped of their use as medical images, encouraging a rhythm of looking along the lines excavation, in an attempt to uncover their shifting meanings through the larger context. I was intrigued by how materially present the works are, from the layered collaged surfaces to the sculpture hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.

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Now, without further ado… on to the fairs!

1. NADA

By the time I made my way to the fairs on Friday and Saturday (May 15–16), the air in the city was already thick with rumors from the preview days about their respective strengths and shortcomings. The competition for best fair seemed to be playing out between NADA and Independent, making it a contest between two of the smaller, more accessible fairs where emerging artists and younger galleries still have room to shine. The larger fairs, Frieze included, were notably absent from the conversation (which, I’ll admit, was a relief). After visiting several fairs over the weekend, I tend to agree with the consensus, although with a slight personal preference for NADA.

From the moment my friend Grace and I stepped onto NADA’s floor in the imposing Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, the fair put a smile on our faces. Which, if you’re not in the art world, you should know is something that never happens—not at the crowded, noisy, exhausting mega-fairs, at least. That was decidedly not the atmosphere here. Our tour of the booths began with ada gallery from Richmond, VA, which was presenting an exciting selection of works by Ryan Browning, an American artist living in Doha, Qatar. Greeted by one of his tapestries at the entrance to the fair, we were delighted to discover the rest of the presentation expanding across a range of mediums. I was particularly drawn to works combining oil on copper, felt, thermoplastic, and wood, a combination that feels entirely original and that somehow works remarkably well. The pieces were playful, yet their figures recalled the strange sharp-against-blurry contrasts of Yves Tanguy’s paintings from a century ago, while the juxtaposition of textures generated an altogether different set of aesthetics and sensations. We were also warmly welcomed by the gallery’s founder, John Pollard, who is himself an artist. The artist-gallerist remains an uncommon enough phenomenon that it produces a noticeably different approach. He not only spoke in depth about Browning’s work but also happily drifted into broader conversations about art and the realities of artistic practice. If you’re reading this, here is your portrait!

Right after this we were immersed in even more playfulness—this time a thoroughly self-aware one. For their joint booth, Saenger (Mexico City) and Cohju (Kyoto) presented a selection of paintings of dogs, most of them working on computers, some doing so from scenic landscapes worthy of the contemporary digital nomad. That’s it. That’s the whole concept. And it was marvelous. I genuinely had fun looking at them and could easily imagine people buying one simply for the pleasure of hanging it in their work-from-home office. It is the kind of millennial humor we love to make fun of, but which, at the end of the day, remains endearing to witness.

This spirit continued (and, I would argue, intensified, pushed toward the grotesque in the best possible sense of the word) at Hidrante (San Juan, Puerto Rico), which presented a series by the Puerto Rican artist Culeybo, humorously titled Imbecilidad orgánica. Taking bread as both subject and metaphor, the works explored the contradictory values we project onto food, from mass production to artisanal labor, from convenience to authenticity. Bread appeared throughout as a surprisingly elastic symbol, capable of carrying economic and cultural meanings. The centerpiece was a large-scale painting populated by a vast cast of figures pointing toward the absurdities and excesses of contemporary capitalism: a horrifying McDonald’s clown, creepy dolls, a rat, the Teletubbies sun baby (a reminder of our tendency to replace even the seemingly untouchable with a human-made replica), and, in the midst of everything, a delicious-looking jambon-beurre with precisely the right amount of cornichons, exactly how I order it from my local boulangerie in Paris. Around this work were miniature three-dimensional paintings depicting giant crackers crushing herds of cows beneath them, and repeated scenes of hands slicing baguettes, all framed by ceramic frames recalling the decorative scoring patterns cut into the surface of homemade bread before baking. It was, in every sense, a bread trip. Beneath the humor, however, the works never lost sight of larger questions surrounding consumption and value, confirming that serious subjects do not require solemn forms, and that satire can sometimes sharpen a critique.

Soho Revue (London) presented a dreamy group show in which the blurry quality shared by several paintings propelled us directly into their inner worlds. That blur also gave the works a strange sense of familiarity, strange because we have never actually seen these images before. My theory (which I’ve developed here) is that such images feel familiar because we have become deeply accustomed to this blurry visual condition through our long-standing online lives. Depending on one's screen time, blur may even feel more immediate than reality itself, more natural than the sharp clarity of Renaissance perspective. This is why I sometimes think of it as a new kind of perspective altogether: one shaped by our post- or simply intra-digital sensibilities.

Another one of my favorite booths was ALA Projects (Miami), which presented a beautifully orchestrated installation of works by the Venezuelan-born, New York–based artist Gabriela Agreda. Agreda’s practice is rooted in an ongoing engagement with Venezuela and its socio-political realities, often through images drawn from everyday life and transformed through unexpected material processes. The main wall of the booth was occupied by a large painting depicting an elderly man walking through a landscape shaped simultaneously by luxuriant vegetation and rusting infrastructure, an image that held both together without forcing either into metaphor. The rest of the booth was rigorously composed from floor to ceiling. On the ground lay blocks of cement interrupted by photographs printed onto ceramic, creating a beautiful dialogue between the fragility of the image and weight of the material. Similar experiments reappeared on the adjacent wall, accompanied by another painting showing a woman driving through the Venezuelan hills. What I appreciated most was the coherence of the installation, this booth being one of the rare ones here that functioned as a complete environment, where photographs, paintings, ceramic surfaces, and cement elements continuously echoed one another.

The rest of the fair did not shy away from figurative painting either, but instead gave this classic medium continuing touches of freshness. Kay Seohyung Lee, represented by Yiwei Gallery (LA and Wuhan), adopts a signature palette of blues and greens to depict whimsical gatherings of women and other female magical creatures, dressed like medieval queens, as trees, or simply not dressed at all. Looking closely at these works felt a bit like immersing myself in the Persian miniatures in the Islamic art galleries at the Met, where I can easily lose hours, the Damascus Room right behind me. They also carried a hint of Leonora Carrington, had she imagined her worlds not only through painting and tarot, but through the visual logic of video games.

While these were, for the most part, large paintings populated by miniature figures, miniature works themselves seemed to be having a moment across the fair. Booth after booth featured them, and I completely understand the appeal, especially in this fair’s context. They are more accessible to beginning collectors, easier to transport, and allow galleries to present a wider range of artists, styles, and subjects within a limited space. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. If I could, I probably would have left the fair myself with a small painting depicting the view of a fire escape from a New York kitchen window; a bite-sized dose of the city’s everyday poetry. And just as we were getting ready to leave, I spotted a painting of a much larger scale featuring my exact subway stop here in Brooklyn: Clinton-Washington Avenues! After spending the morning with imagined worlds and bread-induced capitalist nightmares, it felt unexpectedly delightful to stumble upon the place I pass through every single day.

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2. Independent

Can we start by taking a moment to appreciate just how good this fair’s location was? Installed at Pier 36, although a bit of a walk from the nearest subway stop, its greatest asset was that you could simply step outside from the bar area and find yourself on the East River, gazing directly at the Manhattan Bridge. Mind you, the art was also good.

Compared to NADA, I felt there was much more sculpture to be seen. To start with, I really liked Johan Samboni’s installation Spirits from the (Mud) Block at SGR Galería from Bogotá. The booth consisted of multiple figures carved out of brick that recalled pre-Columbian sculpture and through which Samboni addresses his family’s history of migration. The forms reinterpret actual sculptures from San Agustín, Huila, the land of his ancestors; however, by using brick, a material inseparable from the everyday urban fabric of Cali, where his family settled and built their home, he reflects on the erosion of that ancestral knowledge, asking what remains of indigenous memory after generations of colonial erasure and displacement.

Another noteworthy sculptural presentation was Larisa Sitar at Suprainfinit Gallery from Bucharest. Sitar’s concrete sculptures and reliefs recalled Brutalist architecture and the familiar textures of Eastern European urban landscapes, translating this architectural language into something unexpectedly intimate and humorous. From pairs of crossed legs emancipated from their bodies to reliefs resembling fragments of buildings, the works seemed to ask how built environments shape collective desires, ideals, and memories, even long after the political systems that produced them have disappeared. And although I have called this a sculptural presentation, the works actually occupied a fascinatingly ambiguous territory. Concrete, perhaps the material most associated with weight and permanence, appeared in delicate, almost painterly bas-reliefs, while the seated crossed leg sculptures, despite perfectly mimicking the look of concrete, turned out to be made of… sponge!

On the painting side, several booths and works caught my attention. The first artist that comes to mind is Ian Davis, shown by Galerie Judin from Berlin. The extraordinary sharpness of Davis’s paintings, combined with titles that are sometimes literal (Cavern), sometimes more abstract and suggestive (Propagate, Predicate), produces an almost esoteric experience when entering the worlds he constructs—each populated by small, nearly identical figures, always in large numbers. This sense of repetition and anonymized collectivity immediately brought me back to the Australian photographer Michael Cook, whom I discovered at the Rencontres de la photographie in Arles last year, and whose series Majority Rule (2014) multiplies the figure of its Bidjara protagonist to invert Australia’s demographic reality, imagining Indigenous people as the overwhelming majority. Like Cook’s work, Davis’s paintings rely on crowds that in their orderliness feel slightly off, creating a subtle sense that something is not quite as it appears, not unlike the disquieting logic of Magritte.

Lastly, a piece truly worth mentioning came in the form of media art, a medium that remains relatively rare at commercial fairs for one simple reason: it is difficult to sell. Not difficult to find people who love it—as I’m sure many loved this particular piece, judging by the number of visitors lingering around it—but difficult because of the practical questions it raises. What exactly is being sold: the video work or its physical support? Can the work be reproduced? What happens if the technology becomes obsolete? In any case, I was glad that Sprüth Magers (New York) chose to present part of Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image series (1986–91) on a row of old box televisions installed in the middle of the fair. In this work, Bender takes fragments of television programs and news broadcasts, all recorded from live TV, and overlays them with entirely unrelated words in vinyl lettering. The effect is strikingly similar to David Lamelas’s Analysis of the Elements by which the Massive Consumption of Information Takes Place (1968, pictured below), in which the Argentine artist assembled tape recorders playing news, music, and advertisements, alongside a muted television commercial and decontextualized newspaper clippings, prompting viewers to examine the mechanisms of mass media rather than passively absorb its messages. Similarly, Bender’s TV Text & Image estranges us from the immediate and all-consuming flow of live television, forcing us to reconsider what we are seeing through the lens of phrases such as “No Criticism,” “Human Rights,” or “Money for War.”

would love to hear your thoughts about this piece!

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3. TEFAF

The last fair I’ll get into in this newsletter, as it’s probably getting way too long already (if you’ve kept reading this far, thank you), is TEFAF, which stands for The European Fine Art Foundation and originated in Maastricht, where it has been running for more than three decades. The New York iteration launched in 2016 at the historic Park Avenue Armory, after a long search for a venue large enough to accommodate more than one hundred exhibitors showing art from virtually every historical period. Because if there is one thing you should know about TEFAF, it is this: the fair has an encyclopedic scope comparable to that of the Met. Which is not something one can say lightly. This also meant that the average price point was far above that of the other fairs I’ve mentioned, and naturally so, given that I chose to focus mainly on more emerging-gallery manifestations. Yet I also had the impression that TEFAF wanted this wealth to be unmistakably visible. Its only food area was an oyster bar, and I’m hearing that the fair spent millions on its flower arrangements (which, considering that galleries reportedly paid between $70,000 and $90,000 for a booth according to Hyperallergic, does not even sound particularly shocking).

Knowing all of this, it was still an unusual experience to see Egyptian (David Aaron) and Roman (Galerie Chenel) antiquities for sale right in front of me and to be able to casually ask for the price (the Egyptian ones were listed at around $2 million); to encounter numerous large Warhols, Basquiats, and Picassos with nobody else around, no crowds aggressively photographing them as they would in a museum; to find Tiffany lamps installed inside a wood-paneled period room. It’s no wonder that representatives of all major museums in Europe and the U.S. are reportedly visitors of the fair. Some booths felt like an entire art history curriculum condensed into a few square feet: Tornabuoni Art and Matteo Lampertico, for instance, presented nearly all the major names of twentieth-century Italian art—Balla, Boetti, de Chirico, Fontana, Kounellis, Morandi, to mention only a few. And every now and then, these art booths were interspersed with cases of luxury jewelry whose craftsmanship and intricacy were such that, honestly, the exhibitors were doing us a favor by putting them on view.

It would be easy to get lost in such a diversity of exhibits, even as an organiser; which is why I appreciate the attention and effort TEFAF seems to invest in ensuring the authenticity and provenance of everything brought in by exhibitors. This is done through a vetting committee composed of leading experts across the different fields represented at the fair. It is something that truly sets TEFAF apart and, to be honest, I don’t think a fair of this scale and scope would even be possible without such a rigorous commitment to vetting.

This may just be a personal intuition, but it did feel as though sales were going better than at similar fairs I’ve visited in Europe, or at least in Paris. Whatever the actual numbers may be, there was a certain optimism in the air, a liveliness that seemed to animate the city throughout the week. TEFAF itself announced its opening under the headline “TEFAF New York Opens to Sold-Out Booths, Strong Crowds, and Palpable Energy, Underscoring Optimism in the Art Market.” Press releases are designed to sound optimistic, of course; but marketing language aside, the phrase “palpable energy” did not feel entirely misplaced.

If there is one thing I would happily import from this New York gallery week to Paris, it is perhaps the playfulness I encountered at NADA in particular. It can be easy, in art worlds that sometimes take themselves a bit too seriously, to forget that art is also allowed to be funny, strange, weird, ironic, and genuinely enjoyable. Some of the works I remember most vividly from the week were also the ones that made me smile first. Perhaps we underestimate how intellectually productive pleasure can also be. ∎

I did, eventually, make it to the last one still on view: Robert Rauschenberg: Larger than Life at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which closed on May 3. (I went the day before.) It is, in fact, just one room. But somehow, I managed to stay for two hours. I am tempted to attribute this to a kind of sevrage, an abstinence from Rauschenberg or works that operate at a similar frequency, that had built up over my time in Paris.

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The exhibition is anchored by Barge (1962–63), his largest silkscreen painting, which the wall text frames through the oversaturation of the contemporary visual landscape. That is certainly there. Still, it leaves something out—something so present in my experience of the work that its absence in the text feels almost deliberate. What I kept seeing was a specifically Cold War visual landscape. Not just the period in which the work was produced, but the nature of the images themselves: rockets, astronauts, satellites; newspaper clippings; sports; highway junctions and trucks. An entire repertoire of expansion. These are images of a country projecting itself across domains (technological, cultural, infrastructural), where domination comes dressed as progress, in forms that don’t read as war. This vocabulary recurred across the room: in Yellow Body (1969), images of astronauts, planes, a basketball player, and an American credit card are half-obscured by yellow brushstrokes, while in Talisman Freeze (1979), the newspaper-extracted words “America” and “stock exchange” appear in reverse, entangled with sports imagery and a low-resolution globe.

Among the screenprinted images in Barge, a small reproduction of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51) sits in stark contrast, yet might still sustain this line of reading. Venus, reflected in the mirror held by Cupid, offers a blurred face; here, Rauschenberg’s brushwork blurs it further. I found myself wondering whether the figure might be read as an allegory, of America perhaps, unable or unwilling to see itself except through distortion. The mirror is held up for introspection, but the gaze slips outward. Right beneath it, we find a massive highway interchange, whose placement hardly seems accidental. By only looking outward, toward expansion, one misses one’s own flaws.

Culture, of course, played its part in this Cold War imaginary; the most often cited example is precisely the moment when Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964. A recent documentary revisits the scandal generated by the award, while the historian Frances Stonor Saunders goes further, tracing who was involved, and how, in the art world decision-making processes of the time.2 To be clear, I don’t mean to downplay that moment; I am a fan of the silkscreen that was shown (and of this photograph of the works being carried to the Biennale on a boat). My point is not to yet again reduce that recognition to diplomacy, but to consider the kind of world it helped consolidate: one in which the United States was winning on yet another front, this time cultural, extending its reach into the register of artistic innovation.

One of the strongest works in the Guggenheim exhibition was Autobiography (1968), a three-panel lithograph that comes as close as possible to a total description of the multifaceted self. In the first panel, a full-body X-ray of the artist is overlaid with his astrological chart (extra points for whoever can read his birth chart just off the poor quality image reproduced below), revealing the artist’s inner life literally and figuratively. The second panel states key moments of his life in a dense spiral of text, printed over a photograph of him as a child, boating with his family. The third shows him on roller skates, trailing a parachute during his 1963 performance Pelican, framed by images of the New York skyline and its water towers, with a navigational chart of the Gulf of Mexico in the background. As you might be able to tell by now, this is not a chronological autobiography. I found the inclusion of the maps especially interesting, as it gives the sense that the places one has inhabited continue to structure our worldview, the horizon of what we imagine possible.

As I was trying to make out the words in that hypnotizing spiral of personal histories, one phrase stood out: “Moved to Pearl Street off Fulton. Jasper Johns lived in the same building and had just painted his first flag. It would be difficult to imagine my work at that time without his encouragement.” There is a whole line of art-historical scholarship on Rauschenberg and Johns, their relationship and reciprocal influences.3 I have read some, but I might have actually preferred this simple statement, which with so much ease situates the work within a network of proximities—physical, intellectual—without further ado.

Another biographical trace of collaboration appears in a 1963 untitled piece centered (literally) on Merce Cunningham, pointing toward Rauschenberg’s involvement in stage design, and to the European tour they undertook that year. Cunningham’s method—introducing chance operations into choreography, where sequences of movement could be determined by random procedures, and where choreographer, and designer worked independently within a shared “climate”—clearly attracted Rauschenberg.4

The intersection here between visual art and performance foreshadows a practice that would never remain confined to a single medium. Although untitled, this work is part of the combines that made Rauschenberg’s name in the same period. In the combines, objects drawn from everyday life are incorporated, glued or attached onto the pictorial plane (here, two plastic relics recalling a radio, an AC unit, or a toaster… the indeterminacy probably being part of the point), so that the work exceeds its own surface and becomes something between painting and sculpture.

Rauschenberg is an artist who moved across nearly every medium available to him: painting, sculpture, photography, performance, printmaking… and even textiles. The famous Bed (1955), a quilted surface that the artist stretched, splattered, and hung like a painting, is perhaps the most literal example of this. It is not incidental that Mildred Constantine, the MoMA curator (of the 1969 Wall Hangings exhibition, iykyk), later cited Rauschenberg as one of the first contemporary artists to integrate fiber into contemporary art discourse.

The red painting from 1953–54 functioned as a sort of transitional object in the exhibition: although it is “simply” oil on canvas, the material accumulation and chemical processes of drying oil make it resemble damaged metal sheets, recalling both his combines and later metal works. At the Guggenheim, metal appeared in Easter Lake (Galvanic Suite) (1988), where images are transferred not onto canvas but onto a reflective steel surface. The presence of floral patterns, curtains, even chickens on metal produces a particular effect, a slight disorientation in the body. Steel carries its own history—industrial, infrastructural, military—and yet here it is presented differently, as something perhaps more fragile. There is also something in this material itself, in its associations with industry or space equipment, that echoes the Cold War context running through the room. In the combines, where metal is folded, punctured, sometimes damaged, that presumed strength is undone: bent, made unstable, steel is no longer coherent as a sign of technical progress or material certainty.

It is interesting to me that at least one shift in the materials Rauschenberg was exploring was brought about by an environmental concern. In Bilbao Scraps (1997), he moves toward soy- and vegetable-based inks, following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where he became aware of the hazards posed by the chemical solvents he had long used in the studio. He began replacing these with water-based processes, experimenting with vegetable dyes, and transferring images using the pressure of a handheld scraper. I was impressed by how strong a result emerged from this shift away from the methods he had been working with for years. The gesture is close to his earlier transfer drawings, but here it produces a different kind of surface, one holds a certain gravity of image, a material density that feels close to encaustic. Image-making here is inseparable from its material consequences, and from the material supports that carry it.

Had I seen this work before visiting Bilbao last October, I might have experienced the city differently—just as Proust describes in In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator comes to appreciate certain cathedrals through Bergotte’s writing, or the actress Berma’s performance only in retrospect, after hearing it praised by others. Instead of simply experiencing Bilbao, I would have experienced a city Rauschenberg had represented, and immediately become more excited because of that.

It was, again, just one room. But it was dense enough to alter your sense of scale.

P.S. If you made it this far, here is a full reproduction of Autobiography, in case you really wanted to decipher that birth chart:

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Five exhibitions seen across March and April in Paris, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gagosian Gallery, Jeu de Paume, Grand Palais, and the MEP, form the basis of this round-up. From large institutional retrospectives to more focused presentations, they ranged widely in scale and tone, and each set a different frame for how the work could be approached and looked at. Together, they also say something about how exhibitions are made today, and the forms of attention they manage to sustain (or not.)

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• Gerhard Richter, Fondation Louis Vuitton (ended March 2nd)

The retrospective devoted to Gerhard Richter at the Fondation Louis Vuitton had, expectedly, the scale and authority of an institutional summation. It assembled without avarice the many lives and styles of a painter who has spent six decades refusing to settle into one. Richter’s biography is by now canonical: born in Dresden in 1932, trained under socialist realism in East Germany before fleeing to the West in 1961, he developed a practice that moves restlessly between figuration and abstraction. If his career has a signature, it is precisely this insistence that painting remain, at every turn, a problem rather than an established, recognizable style.

In the 2010s, Richter began working from a set of photographs secretly taken by prisoners inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. Transferred onto canvas, these images were then buried, covered over with layers of paint, dragged and scraped until they dissolved into dense, recalcitrant surfaces. The resulting paintings refuse recognition with a stubborn, almost ethical opacity. It is tempting to read these works as a capitulation: the catastrophe cannot be shown. However, as Georges Didi-Huberman has argued against such temptations of renunciation, images can never be “total.” They do not, and cannot, contain the fullness of what they refer to. At best, an image is a fragment; what matters is that it gives us something to work on. Images ask the viewer to return to them, to compare, to imagine, to assemble meaning from pieces that never quite fit together. Where we think we encounter the unimaginable (a subject I also touched on in my recent theater round-up), Didi-Huberman suggests, we may simply be refusing the labor of imagination. Seen this way, Richter’s blurred surfaces reopen the images of disaster, obliging the viewer to reconstruct. Similarly, Jacques Rancière has argued that representation is not reproduction but the organization of a relation between what is visible and what can be understood. Richter’s gesture, then, can be understood as a reconfiguration of that relation.

Besides, to speak of the “unimaginable” today feels historically complicated. We have all seen images of wars, of disasters, of violence circulating endlessly. The shock that accompanied the first revelations of photographs from the Shoah belonged to a different moment, one in which the image itself seemed to produce an event, to divide history in two. The hope that images might change us or transform our humanity has, in many ways, faded. Richter seems to have anticipated this. He never paints the event itself, there is always a filter; the image is always already belated.

But not all of his œuvre is concerned with this. What is rendered evident in the exhibition is how this logic of mediation from reality to the picture plane, through his now-signature blur (so persistent that my phone camera struggled to focus when I tried to photograph them), extends even into works that appear, at first glance, more neutral. Richter’s work engages not only with what has been called the unimaginable, but also with what has become, over time, only imaginable—through loss or distance. This is felt most concretely in paintings such as Aunt Marianne and Uncle Rudi (both 1965), drawn from family photographs he carried with him when he left East Germany, leaving much of his family behind. Underlying all this is a distinction on which both Richter and the exhibition insist: that between the image (Bild) and painting. The former belongs to a world already mediated, already seen; the latter attempts, perhaps futilely, to rework that mediation.

The blur for Richter can also be a strategy to correct what he considers unsatisfactory, something especially visible in his early reproductions after Titian, and later deployed in works like Construction (1976) and, most famously, in the Birkenau cycle. Significantly, he reserves this blur for figurative painting; his abstract works, by contrast, are sharply, almost brutally, defined (none more than his 4096 Colors). This contrast raises a question that the exhibition only partially addresses. Richter has claimed a certain allegiance to ideal, even classical beauty, and a skepticism toward modernist abstraction, yet his output is not missing in abstract paintings. Perhaps these function as a counterweight, a way of tempering the very perfection he seems to distrust. They have, in any case, their own force. Works like Abstraktes Bild (2015) are musical in their intensity, like a symphony saturated with despair.

Besides these considerations that I had mostly known his work for, the exhibition’s broader effect came from something more physical and, in a sense, more banal: its sheer abundance. Moving through the Fondation’s galleries, one encountered not only the expected blurred photo-paintings and glossy abstractions, but also stretches of almost disconcerting conventionality—landscapes, portraits, color charts—each pursued with a methodical seriousness that I would go so far as calling classic. Richter, it turns out, is prolific in a way that feels nearly impersonal.

This is both the strength and the limitation of the show. Its organization adhered closely to the logic of the major retrospective at a major private institution: comprehensive and chronological. It seemed to suggest that more work would yield more understanding, whereas I might have wished for sharper problematizations. But there is also something persuasive, even overwhelming, in the decision to let the work proliferate. The astonishing breadth of Richter’s work becomes a bodily experience. You traverse it. You feel, almost against your will, the duration of a practice that has been rigorous to the point of obstinacy. It is a sensation that stays with you.

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• The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Re-Created by Wes Anderson, Gagosian (ended March 14)

The House on Utopia Parkway could only be seen from the outside. One looked in voyeuristically, through the glass, at a space meticulously staged and forever withheld. The premise—Wes Anderson re-creating the studio of Joseph Cornell—adopts the remake as a format, something I have found myself reflecting on at Les Rencontres d’Arles last year, where two contemporary artists remade an earlier photographer’s road trip down the East Coast of the U.S., and documented it beautifully. At Gagosian, the reconstruction was more direct, less interpretative, in the tradition of historic house museums like the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston; however, through its minuscule size and impenetrability, the exhibition felt entirely constituted as atmosphere, carefully reconstructed and firmly sealed off.

What I have always loved in Cornell’s work is its mystical charge, something I have rarely encountered elsewhere with such intensity, except perhaps in the later assemblages of Lenore Tawney. His boxes and bottles seem to organize the elements themselves: air, suggested through birds (feathers, eggs); water, in seashells of every shape and color; earth, in stones selected according to criteria we cannot know, yet which radiate a kind of primordial inevitability; perhaps even fire, in those works that gesture toward cosmic movement, light, or something like witchcraft. It is a discreet magic, but a total one. Even here, displaced near Place Vendôme, it retains the power to stop you in your tracks.

As an avid collector of ordinary things myself (stones again, seashells, but also coins, pencils, napkins, anything, really), I feel a magnetic pull toward Cornell’s small containers, his little bottles filled with heterogeneous exemplars. I would not go so far as to place a butterfly inside one (this is what artists are for: doing what we would not, yet still producing sensation, conviction), but the format itself feels like an alchemist’s cabinet. And, quite frankly, it does not evoke, for me, the more troubling lineage of the Wunderkammer. Those cabinets of curiosity, however disordered they appeared, were still driven by a desire to possess the world, to gather, classify, and in some sense dominate what had been discovered elsewhere. Cornell’s gesture feels different. There is, in his bottles, a form of courtesy toward the world’s inherent magic. Each element appears in the smallest possible quantity, as if nothing more were needed. The arrangement of symmetrically aligned bottles suggests order, yet nothing within them corresponds to that visual discipline. On the contrary, the heterogeneity is so pronounced that it produces a peculiar sensation of pleasure: your attention pulled in multiple directions at once, toward incompatible yet equally charged worlds, all while your gaze remains fixed on a single object. The contrast does the work.

And the effect is remarkably consistent. Seeing another version of his Pharmacy—I had recently encountered one at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection—produces the same arrest. It keeps you looking for minutes on end (no small feat in today’s time and age), hoping to perhaps get the honor of being permanently transported to that material world of magic and feeling which Cornell was lucky enough to have access to.

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• Martin Parr. Global Warning, Jeu de Paume (through May 25)

Martin Parr was in Paris just at the end of October last year, presenting his new book at The Analog Club. He passed away a little over a month later, in December. The major retrospective of his work at the Jeu de Paume, which I assume had been planned well in advance (as museum schedules tend to be), arrived therefore as a prompt homage to this singular chronicler of contemporary life.

For months now, Parr’s photographs have been adorning the Hôtel de Ville metro station. Part homage, part advertisement for the exhibition, they became one of those intermittent but oddly comforting presences in the Parisian commuter’s routine. Each time I passed through Hôtel de Ville myself, I found myself stopping, looking closely, isolating a detail from a different image each time. By March, I must have known most of them by heart. One might reasonably ask: why bother visiting the exhibition at all? It is a question that returned to me as I stood in the first room of the exhibition at Jeu de Paume, surrounded by the “originals”—whatever that word is meant to mean in photography. Perhaps “artist prints” is more accurate to distinguish them from their enlarged, publicly deployed versions in the metro. In any case, there they were: the same images that I had come to know so well. And yet, rather than feeling redundancy, I found myself drawn back into them, looking again, more slowly, more minutely, perhaps even with sharpened attention.

In trying to account for this, what inevitably comes to mind is Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation of the “aura” of the artwork, which tends to be lost “in the age of mechanical reproduction.” But the metro prints weren’t powerless either; as Georges Didi-Huberman has insisted, too many contemporary readings of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction reduce it to a lament for lost authenticity. In reality, Benjamin’s thinking is far more ambivalent: alongside the hypothesis of decline runs the idea of survival, of aura persisting within reproduction itself. Reproduction also transforms, displaces, and as such, reactivates. As Didi-Huberman argues, what we call aura may be less a property of the original than a relational effect, something that re-emerges in the encounter, even with images endlessly circulated.

This feels particularly pertinent in relation to Parr’s work. Few photographers have been so consistently concerned with the conditions of mass visibility itself. Tourism, leisure, consumption, spectacle: Parr’s images return obsessively to the choreography of crowds and the slightly absurd rituals of collective looking. Yet his gaze is never simply critical. There is no position outside the scene. Parr is always already inside it, part of the same economies of attention, the same pleasures and discomforts he documents. In this sense, his work avoids a moral hierarchy that would have flattened it; it observes without absolution. This feeling runs through his practice from early series such as The Last Resort (1983–85), with its saturated documentation of working-class leisure in New Brighton, to later projects like Small World, where global tourism becomes a kind of looping, self-perpetuating theatre.

The accumulation of his most iconic images—overcrowded beaches, garishly staged tourist attractions, fluorescent buffets, bodies pressed into holiday proximity—as well as lesser-known works, or juxtapositions produced specifically for the exhibition, extends rather than concludes Parr’s project. We are all, in one way or another, in these pictures. It’s the very reason they produce a slight discomfort, mixed with a faint, unconfessed self-recognition. Parr’s photographs will remain relevant precisely because they don’t diagnose society from above, but instead mirror it from within.

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• Nan Goldin. This Will Not End Well, Grand Palais (through June 21)

Nan Goldin’s Ballad is an emotional journey. We are carried through a selection of faces and places from Goldin’s life: her inner circle, or sometimes familiar strangers, some of whom begin to recur, until recognition sets in. It is a passage through the different stages and states of a life: childhood, teenage rebellion, coupledom, violence, despair, happiness, friendship, unfolding non-chronologically, which only intensifies the force of its emotional and associative logic. Music plays no small role in this. The Velvet Underground’s I’ll Be Your Mirror will never, after this, not recall Goldin to me.

This is not a conventional photography exhibition, and as such, it perhaps would have required a different kind of organization on the museum’s part. The experience is durational. If one begins, as one is prompted to, with The Ballad, which runs about forty-five minutes and can only be seen from beginning to end (unlike the other projections, which allow entry at any point), a queue forms and persists until closing time. But at least, once inside, its force makes you forget everything, all the waiting, and the forty-five minutes pass in a blur.

The slideshow format was something Goldin adopted in the 1980s, initially out of pragmatism: it is a way of exhibiting without having to produce prints for each photograph. Working in film, the slides were already there, ready to be projected. Born in 1953 in Washington, D.C., Goldin moved through Boston and New York, documenting, from within, the communities around her: queer, bohemian, precarious, at a time when such lives were rarely seen on their own terms. The slideshow, which began as a solution, soon became her signature language. In fact, in the Grand Palais exhibition, there are no prints: only projections, distributed across five enclosed spaces, preserving the darkness required for projection, each presenting a different work. Beyond The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1981–2022), the exhibition includes The Other Side (1992–2021), devoted to her images of drag performers and transgender communities; Memory Lost (2019–21), a recent work addressing addiction and recovery; Sirens (2019–20), an eerie video collage of sequences from thirty films; and finally, Stendhal Syndrome (2024), one of the results of the artist’s residency at the Louvre.

In Stendhal Syndrome, Goldin turns toward the way images produce sensation, and how that sensation might sustain or even save us. The title refers, of course, to the experience Stendhal has described after a visit to Florence: an overwhelming encounter with art in which perception tips into something almost unbearable, into a sort of excessive dizziness, or even a loss of bearings. In Goldin’s hands, this condition is not pathologized. Well aware that photographs do not resolve anything, that they do not make it all end well, she still manages to produce the same dazzlement in us.

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• Dana Lixenberg — American Images, Maison européenne de la photographie (through May 24)

The MEP, for its part, presents a more conventional photography exhibition in its display, though the work itself is exceptional. Born in Amsterdam in 1964 and working extensively in the United States, Dana Lixenberg has developed a practice grounded in long-term photographic projects, moving between editorial commissions and sustained work with communities outside mainstream visibility. This is, somewhat surprisingly, her first retrospective in France. It is important to mention, from the outset, that Lixenberg works with a 4x5-inch large-format view camera, which requires precise framing and a tripod-based setup, meaning a slow, sequential process in which everything is adjusted manually before each exposure. These technical details already set up an intimate relationship between photographer and sitter. The exhibition also includes a selection of Polaroids, initially used as test shots, which offer a more immediate, almost tactile insight into her working process.

The most impressive aspect of Lixenberg’s work, besides the evident quality of her photographs, is the consistent quality of her attention. Whether photographing globally recognized figures or people far removed from public visibility, she approaches each subject with the same sustained focus. Her undiscriminating attention becomes particularly meaningful in her long-term project at Imperial Courts, a public housing complex in Watts, Los Angeles, which she began photographing in the aftermath of the 1992 uprising. Her work there evolved into an engagement spanning decades, as she returned repeatedly, building relationships with the inhabitants, which are beautifully conveyed in a 2015 documentary. This project, her most longstanding one, is the main focus of the final section of the exhibition, though this same approach is extended in other series shown at the MEP: one realized in southern Indiana, where she photographed residents of a homeless shelter over several years, focusing on individuals rather than the conditions that define them; another in Shishmaref, an Iñupiaq community in Alaska threatened by climate change, where she turned to the daily life of the residents to bring awareness to how their home could be facing disappearance.

Across these series, the work is defined by duration and consistency, and by a refusal of hierarchy. Celebrities and “ordinary” individuals are placed on equal footing, each allowed to appear without emphasis or reduction. In an image culture driven by speed and spectacle, Lixenberg’s work counters that rhythm, and insists to keep on looking.

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Special mentions!

• Couper, coller, imprimer : Le photomontage politique au XXe siècle, La contemporaine Nanterre (ended March 14)

I did not manage to see this exhibition, but the catalogue is a intriguing object in itself. It traces the history of political photomontage across the twentieth century, from the avant-garde experiments of Dada and constructivism to later uses of collage as a tool of both critique and propaganda. The seemingly basic but actually quite well executed idea was to show how cutting, assembling, reprinting photographs became a way of dismantling official narratives and constructing counter-images.

• 1725. Des Alliés Amérindiens À La Cour de Louis XV, Château de Versailles (through May 3)

As you might have noticed from my almost exclusive engagement with contemporary art on here, this is not my usual type of exhibition. Yet I found it one of the most interesting. Through archival documents and a careful selection of objects, produced in close collaboration with members of the Native American communities concerned by the history being told, the exhibition offers a contextualisation of remarkable quality. It recounts the story of a rather unusual diplomatic visit: that of five Native American chiefs to the court of Louis XV, three hundred years ago, and of the three months they spent in Paris. The exhibition traces not only the ceremonial dimension of this encounter, but also the ways in which it was staged, translated, and mediated through objects, images, and written accounts.

• Tracey Emin. A Second Life, Tate Modern (through August 31)

Not in Paris, but one of the more memorable exhibitions I have seen recently. Emin has a singular way of dealing with traumatic experience, be it through painting, drawing, neon, sculpture, installation, video, or textile collage. Structured retrospectively, the exhibition traces the different registers of her practice, from the early confessional works of the 1990s to more recent, larger-scale paintings and installations. Works such as My Bed (1998) that have become almost signatures lead the way to newer, more painterly gestures. The exhibition uniquely brings together intimacy and exposure, through Emin’s own art-shaped confessions, and her characteristic insistence on turning vulnerability into something stubbornly visible. It is not an easy show, but neither is life.

• Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK

A permanent display, but entirely worth the detour. Originally the home of the curator Jim Ede and his wife Helen (although I despise this formulation), the house became a living arrangement of works through Ede’s proximity to artists. Nothing feels overly staged, and yet everything is precisely placed. One of the most memorable details for me is at the entrance: a bright yellow lemon Ede reportedly kept near a blue Joan Miró painting featuring a yellow circle. I also spent a long time browsing his art book library. It all exuded a commitment to art that goes beyond the fixed space of the museum (which many have come to consider a graveyard of art, though I personally think that is debatable), to art as a way of inhabiting space, of moving through life. ∎

Unsurprisingly, it resonated deeply with both me and Livia. Besides contemporary art, we quickly discovered a shared interest in cultural diplomacy and the political lives of exhibitions within our respective research. We quickly bonded over that, but also over many other things. Livia is a person whose academic involvement is matched by a very real, grounded experience of how the art world actually functions, from research and writing to the complex machinery behind major exhibitions and institutions. It felt obvious to me that her perspective was necessary to share.

This conversation stems from that intuition. It moves between Rome and the Vatican Museums, between exhibition-making and long-term research, and into broader questions around museology, censorship, and the role of art within cultural diplomacy. Lastly, it’s a topical conversation today, when museums themselves are being asked to redefine their position in the world at large.

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Monica Seiceanu: Do you remember the moment when you first decided you wanted to study art history? Was there a specific artwork or museum visit that shaped that decision?

Livia Ficoroni: The decision to study art history came relatively late. For most of my life, I had envisioned a future in creative writing. I had always written short stories, participated in competitions, and even won a few prizes. As I approached my final year of high school, I was planning to pursue English literature and creative writing in London. However, halfway through that last year, I suddenly stopped writing—without a clear reason and, quite in-character for me, without any real sense of personal upheaval. Around that time, I began to reconsider my path and found myself drawn toward art history, with the idea of eventually working in museums. It wasn’t purely a passion for art that motivated this shift, although that certainly played a role. Rather, it was a deep fascination with exhibitions and the museum space itself.

If I had to trace this inclination back to a defining moment, I would go further back to a school trip in 2010, when I visited a small retrospective on the Roman artist Mario Schifano held at MACRO in Rome. I was particularly struck by his series of thousands of photographs taken from television screens, which he later reworked pictorially. I remember being completely mesmerized. That experience made me realize, perhaps for the first time, that art extended far beyond the classical and Renaissance masterpieces I had grown up with in Rome. It opened up a new understanding of what art could be, and, in retrospect, it paved the way for my interest specifically in contemporary art.

M S: You were born and trained in Rome, a city saturated with art and history. How did growing up there shape the way you look at museums and artworks?

L F: Rome is an extraordinary city for art lovers: art is everywhere, and yet you never become fully accustomed to it. Even for those who grow up there, the sense of wonder never quite fades: for example, you will still see Romans casually walking past the Colosseum, the Pantheon, or St. Peter’s, stopping to take a picture just like any other tourist. It really is that special. Of course, the city is also home to some of the world’s most remarkable museums, like the Galleria Borghese, the Vatican Museums, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, among many others. But art – great art – is truly everywhere: where else can you walk through the city center, step into a church for free, and find yourself standing in front of one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces?

Growing up in such an environment means that art becomes an intrinsic part of your daily life. I think that kind of constant exposure fosters an instinctive care for art, a sensitivity that you carry with you almost unconsciously.

M S: You have worked with various exhibitions at the Vatican Museums. Can you tell us about some of your most memorable projects there? What does a day actually look like behind the scenes in a place like that?

L F: I began my professional career after completing my Master’s degree at the Vatican Museums, where I undertook a postgraduate internship in the Department of Contemporary Art, then directed by Micol Forti (now Director of MART). I was fortunate to remain there and work from 2022 to 2025, while also assisting Micol Forti on her independent projects.

It is truly a place like no other, because of its history, its unique status within a Pontifical State, and its extraordinary structure as a complex of museums encompassing the entire span of art history.

Among the many projects I was involved in, the most memorable was undoubtedly the museums-wide exhibition celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the Collection of Contemporary Art in 2023. What many people don’t realize is that, within an institution as historic as the Vatican Museums, which are among the earliest examples of the modern museum, the contemporary collection is relatively young. It was established in 1973 under Pope Paul VI, who recognized that the contemporary world still needed art, and that the divide between the Church and the art world needed to be bridged. To that end, he invited leading figures—artists, filmmakers, writers, musicians, designers—to a private audience in the Sistine Chapel, encouraging them to take part in this dialogue. Together with his personal secretary, Monsignor Macchi, he began acquiring works, thus laying the foundations of the collection.

Fifty years later, we celebrated this vision with an exhibition that extended across the entire museum. Recent acquisitions were placed in dialogue with historical collections, creating a series of unexpected encounters: a work by Mimmo Paladino appearing in the ethnological museum Anima Mundi, photographs by Mimmo Jodice along the Gregoriano Profano, or Macedonian artist Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva’s “Haruspex”, originally created for the Vatican Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, displayed in the Gregoriano Etrusco. These juxtapositions were designed to reactivate the viewer’s attention, encouraging new associations across different moments in art history.

Alongside the exhibition, Pope Francis renewed the Church’s dialogue with the contemporary art world by inviting artists once again to a private audience in the Sistine Chapel. Being there, surrounded by extraordinary figures such as Anselm Kiefer, Anish Kapoor, Ludovico Einaudi, Ken Loach, and Jean Nouvel, and listening to the Pope’s address, is a memory I will always cherish.

Of course, daily life at the museum was not always as momentous, but it was consistently dynamic and intellectually stimulating. My main responsibility was contributing to the General Catalogue of Sculpture, which involved extensive research, close visual analysis both in person and through photographic archives, and writing catalogue entries. At the same time, I supported the department’s day-to-day activities: developing ideas for new displays within the permanent collection, assisting with upcoming exhibitions, and contributing to the Vatican Museums’ Instagram content, particularly the Thursday posts dedicated to the Collection of Contemporary Art.

And then there were the quieter moments: a quick lunch in the gardens near the Pinacoteca, or a brief sunbathing pause on a bench overlooking the dome of St. Peter’s before returning to work. Not a bad place for a routine, after all.

M S: What are some of the invisible tasks that go into making an exhibition happen?

L F: I could go on at length about the many technical and logistical tasks involved in bringing an exhibition to life, but I believe the most crucial aspect is the critical thinking that underpins it. This is something I came to fully appreciate during my years at the Vatican Museums, as well as through my work on various exhibitions with CMS.Cultura, a Bologna-based cultural enterprise I have collaborated with since 2021. While the Vatican Museums do not engage in commercial or promotional exhibition-making, they approach temporary exhibitions as essential opportunities to advance research on artists, themes, and periods represented in their collections. In contrast, CMS.Cultura is dedicated to introducing the public to overlooked artists or figures who have never been exhibited in Italy before. This was the case, for example, with Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida and George Hoyningen-Huene: two of the exhibitions I worked on as an assistant curator. Both projects aimed not only to present remarkable bodies of work, but also to fill a gap in the Italian cultural landscape by bringing greater scholarly and public attention to these artists

An exhibition must have a reason to exist. It cannot simply be about transporting a well-known name to a new city, assembling a selection of works, and waiting for audiences to arrive. A meaningful project needs to emerge from, and be grounded in rigorous research and a genuine scholarly necessity. Otherwise, it risks becoming merely a commercial transaction. While there is, of course, a place for that, it is not what defines art history at its core. The exhibitions that truly endure are those that contribute to knowledge, that challenge and educate the public, and that ultimately enrich the discipline itself.

M S: Your career moves between research, writing, and exhibition-making. Do you see yourself primarily as a scholar, a curator, or something in between?

L F: At this stage in my career, I see myself primarily as a trained museum professional. That said, it is impossible to operate at a high level in this field without a strong foundation in research and scholarship. This is precisely why I chose to pause my work in museums to pursue a doctoral degree: to develop the ability to design and sustain long-term research projects, to better understand where the gaps in the discipline lie, and to learn how to address them through rigorous inquiry. Ultimately, this is at the core of what museums do every day—producing knowledge, advancing research, and translating it into forms that can be shared with the public.

M S: Your research often touches on critical museology and even cases of censorship, like your Master’s thesis on David Wojnarowicz. What interests you about the political dimension of museums?

L F: I have long been interested in these questions. My Bachelor’s thesis focused on Okwui Enwezor’s critique of the first display at Tate Modern, at a time—around 2019—when postcolonial perspectives were still not widely integrated into art history teaching in Italian universities, at least in Rome. For my Master’s degree, I examined the censorship faced by artist and activist David Wojnarowicz within the context of the American culture wars of the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis. I then continued along this line of inquiry during my postgraduate specialization, where I studied the transformation of the Royal Palace in Milan into a Kunsthalle after the Second World War—a project deeply embedded in political and institutional dynamics. Now, in my PhD research, I am engaging even more directly with political themes, focusing on cultural diplomacy and exhibitions.

What draws me to the political dimension of museums is the growing awareness that art is not, was never and cannot ever be neutral. While the idea of l’art pour l’art may still hold in certain contexts, it cannot fully apply to museums, which are fundamental institutions within our societal lives, even more so for the European context, where museums are mostly public bodies. What a museum chooses to display, to exclude, to emphasize, or to silence are all decisions that shape narratives and public understanding. I believe it is essential that art historians acknowledge and study these choices for what they are: not neutral acts, but deliberate and meaningful interventions.

M S: Your PhD looks at Italian art exhibitions abroad as tools of cultural diplomacy after World War II. What made you interested in the relationship between exhibitions and international politics?

L F: As I mentioned, my research has consistently focused on the relationship between art and politics. My interest in exhibition studies, more specifically, developed both through my professional experience—since exhibitions are the aspect of museum work I find most engaging—and through my postgraduate thesis on the Royal Palace in Milan and its early exhibitions in the 1950s. The shift toward international politics came quite naturally afterward, particularly when I learned about the PhD Program of National Interest in Peace Studies, established in 2024. It is a highly interdisciplinary initiative, bringing together over seventy universities across Italy and coordinated by Sapienza University of Rome. Given its strong focus on international relations and diplomacy, applying to the program meant stepping beyond the traditional boundaries of art history and testing myself in a partially unfamiliar field.

I am very glad I made that choice. Rather than pursuing a more conventional PhD in art history, this path has significantly broadened both my skill set and my perspective on the world. It has allowed me to approach exhibitions not only as cultural and scholarly projects, but also as instruments within larger geopolitical dynamics.

More broadly, I believe that research in peace and international cooperation is more necessary than ever in the current global context, and I value the opportunity to contribute—however modestly—to that field through my work.

M S: What are some insights you can share from this line of your research until now? Did postwar Italian art exhibitions abroad share any common denominator? How and by whom were they organized?

L F: From the research conducted so far, a first clear insight is that postwar Italian art exhibitions abroad were far from the expression of a single, coherent national strategy in the immediate aftermath of 1945. On the contrary, they emerged within a fragmented institutional landscape shaped by postwar reconstruction, administrative uncertainty, and ongoing debates over cultural policy. In this context, initiatives were often driven by individual actors, whether art historians, museum directors, diplomats, and private collectors, whose personal networks and professional authority played a decisive role in enabling exhibitions to take place.

Despite this fragmentation, some common denominators can be identified. First, there is a recurring reliance on hybrid forms of organization, where public and private actors collaborated in flexible and often informal ways. Second, many exhibitions shared a strong emphasis on reasserting Italy’s cultural prestige internationally through modern art, positioning Italian production within broader European and transatlantic modernist narratives. Third, even when not centrally coordinated, these initiatives consistently functioned as instruments of cultural diplomacy, anticipating a more structured state-led approach that would emerge in the following decade.

By the 1950s, a gradual process of institutional consolidation becomes visible. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Public Education increasingly assumed a coordinating role, although their action remained heavily dependent on established cultural intermediaries. Among these, the Venice Biennale became a crucial hub, serving as both an organizational platform and a legitimizing authority for exhibitions abroad. In this sense, the Biennale functioned as a bridge between decentralized postwar initiatives and the more systematized cultural diplomacy that Italy developed later in the decade.

Overall, these exhibitions reveal a transition: from dispersed, actor-driven initiatives in the immediate postwar years to a more structured, institutionally mediated system of cultural projection abroad, in which state institutions gradually asserted themselves but still operated through pre-existing cultural networks and organizations.

M S: Many museums today are rethinking their roles socially and politically. What do you think institutions should be focusing on in the coming years?

L F: At a time when, largely driven by younger generations, museums are rethinking both what they exhibit and how they present it, I believe it is essential for institutions to remain grounded and open to critique. This means resisting both extremes: neither hiding controversial material in storage as if it no longer exists, nor proceeding as though nothing is at stake. I am not a supporter of cancel culture, but I do think museum narratives are powerful and therefore carry a responsibility. Museums should act ethically and transparently, in line with the new ICOM definition, which emphasizes their social role. In practical terms, this means to me addressing potential controversies directly in exhibition texts, creating spaces for dialogue through talks, conferences, and public debates, and actively listening to their audiences. It also means engaging with communities and investing in outreach, rather than operating in isolation. In short, museums should simply do their job, but that, of course, is far more complex than it sounds.

M S: What trends or changes in the art world excite you?

L F: I really appreciate how museum visits and cultural outings have become increasingly popular as social activities: what used to be seen as boring, overly intellectual, or even elitist is now often embraced as something enjoyable and shared. More broadly, I think culture—whether it is art, music, cinema, poetry, or literature—should be an integral part of our everyday lives, not something reserved for specific occasions or audiences. This shift toward normalizing cultural experiences in daily routines is, to me, one of the most encouraging developments in recent years.

M S: What advice would you give to someone starting out in the art world?

L F: To someone just starting university, I would say to be aware that this is a long journey, much longer than one might initially expect, if one wants to do it properly. It is not simply a matter of completing a BA and entering the job market straight away.

To someone beginning their first steps in the museum world, I would say that, at least in the early stages, two qualities matter above all: patience and wit. Use this tip as you will.

M S: If you could live inside any artwork, which one would it be?

L F: Maybe it’s because I am currently in Paris, or because the Musée d’Orsay is part of what I jokingly call my personal “Holy Trinity” of museums (the other two being the Museo del Novecento in Milan and the Tate Gallery in London, all places I try to visit whenever I can), but I would choose Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Auguste Renoir. There is something about that painting that feels effortlessly alive. It simply seems like a very good place to be, to be honest. ∎

Representation, Rancière argues in The Future of the Image, is always built on a mismatch. The world and its representation are not of the same nature; they can never coincide. The distance between reality and its depiction is what makes representation possible in the first place. From this perspective, the idea of the “unrepresentable” appears as a sort of misunderstanding: of course no representation can ever be complete, but they were never even supposed to. Every image or narrative exists among others, part of a larger symbolic network that constantly reshapes meaning.

This line of thought can be productively extended to theatre. The stage is a known machine for making crises visible: bodies gather, words are spoken, whispered or shouted, time is compressed, a shared space is temporarily reorganized... but the strategies vary. In this newsletter, I use this framework to look at five recent plays that attempt to grapple with historical and human crises, to extract some form from disaster. Some succeed in creating the kind of imaginative friction that Georges Didi-Huberman sees as the real work or the task of images, while others collapse under the weight of their own strategies, either by drifting into caricature or by explaining too much. What follows are five recent theatrical encounters with crisis, listed chronologically in the order I experienced them. (Spoiler alert: I kept the best for last.)

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1. Boat People, directed by Marine Bachelot Nguyen (La Passerelle, Saint-Brieuc)

On a rainy Thursday evening in Brittany, while visiting friends, we decided that the most sensible way to spend the night was at the theatre. Boat People, then touring the region, happened to be playing in Saint-Brieuc. None of us had even read the synopsis before the lights dimmed, but it turned out to be the best decision we could have made. I can probably speak for the four of us when I say we left the theatre somewhat altered. The title refers to the refugees who fled Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia by sea after 1975, following the end of the Vietnam War. The play begins with a French family in a small provincial village watching a televised appeal asking citizens to host Vietnamese refugees. Believing they are volunteering to receive a single person, they call the number on the screen; only to discover, too late to reconsider, that a family of three will be arriving.

The Vietnamese family enters the household with careful reserve. They are discreet, almost ceremoniously polite. The mother had worked in a library, and the father was a university professor, a profession that ultimately forced him to flee the country. The only thing he managed to bring with him was his diploma, a document that proves frustratingly difficult to have recognized in France. Their daughter Mai quickly forms a bond with Christian, the French couple’s adopted son. The most revealing moments unfold, predictably, around food: the Vietnamese mother occasionally prepares elaborate meals for the family, and these scenes centered around a kitchen table become the rare moments when the formal politeness relaxes. At the same time, the generosity of the French hosts carries a more complicated undertone. Their act of welcome, genuine and admirable as it is, remains threaded with an unconscious sense of cultural authority, a faintly paternalistic posture they themselves never quite perceive. The ambiguity becomes clearer in the way they speak about their adopted son, whom they brought to France during a war somewhere in Africa; though they seem to struggle to remember exactly which one.

As the Vietnamese family gradually finds its footing, the balance changes. They find jobs of their own, not arranged through their hosts as earlier opportunities had been. Eventually they decide to move into public housing in a nearby city, feeling increasingly confined by the small village that first received them. The French mother opposes the decision with visible disappointment and incomprehension, as if their departure were a personal rejection. A similar misunderstanding emerges when the Vietnamese family insists on offering money in gratitude. The French couple refuses, explaining they did not act out of financial interest; the gesture was meant to be purely generous. But for the refugees, refusing to contribute would leave them permanently indebted. The disagreement ends awkwardly, as the French hosts finally announce that the money will simply be donated to the church, a solution that reopens earlier religious tensions between the two families.

The play concludes years later with a meeting between Mai and Christian, now adults, who find themselves on a beach reflecting on childhood memories and on their families from whom they have both grown distant. I’m not entirely convinced this scene was necessary; much of the play’s emotional force had already been achieved earlier, particularly through the use of archival video fragments that situate the story within the visual imagination of the period. One of the most striking moments comes near the end: a kind of performative collage in which the actors manipulate cut-out images over a table covered in water, assembling and dissolving scenes under the camera’s gaze. It is a simple device, but unexpectedly moving.

Boat People is, in the end, a remarkably powerful piece of theatre. Its strength lies in the attention it gives to the contradictions of generosity: the mixture of goodwill, misunderstanding, kindness, and cultural superiority that can inhabit the same gesture. In theatre, it would have been easy to turn such material into accusation or redemption. However, the play’s refusal of easy moral clarity leads to a touching portrayal of the epoch’s political contradictions and also of profoundly human inconsistencies. Nguyen excels at rendering and maintaining these tensions visible, and that ambiguity feels, in the end, closest to the truth.

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2. La Vegetariana, dir. Daria Deflorian (Théâtre Vidy, Lausanne)

At Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne—a venue I love for bringing international theatre to French-speaking Switzerland—I recently saw The Vegetarian, directed by Daria Deflorian and played by her cast of Italian actors. The play adapts the novel by Han Kang, awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. I hadn’t read the book and was glad, in a way, to encounter the story on this particular stage. The previous production I had seen here was Reminiscentia by the Chilean playwright and actor Malicho Vaca Valenzuela, which I adored (and which I’ve written about here.)

The story centers on Yeong-hye, a woman who suddenly decides to stop eating meat after a series of violent dreams filled with images of slaughter. Her husband reacts with confusion and irritation. According to him, their marriage had been perfectly normal until this moment. Yet even in the way he tells the story, we understand that wasn’t at all the case: he begins the play by recounting how he had chosen Yeong-hye because she seemed like an unremarkable woman who would not intimidate an equally ordinary man. One night he wakes to find her in the kitchen throwing away all the meat from the freezer. She describes the dream that led her there (graphic enough that I won’t reproduce it here), and he quite expectedly doesn’t even pretend to listen. From the audience, the situation feels suffocating: Yeong-hye is confined both in an abusive marriage and into a terrible state of mind, where she retreats further and further as the play progresses. She begins to lose weight rapidly, eating almost nothing. The others interpret this as stubbornness, irrationality, illness, madness… but from the public we can feel her distress.

The real eruption comes during a family visit. At the dinner table her father attempts, with startling violence, to force meat into her mouth. The scene escalates quickly and ends with Yeong-hye hospitalized. From that point the story shifts perspective. First her husband narrates events; later the focus turns to her brother-in-law, a struggling video artist whose projects seem to exist mostly thanks to the financial stability of his wife, Yeong-hye’s sister. He becomes increasingly fascinated with Yeong-hye, eventually convincing her, after her husband has filed for divorce, to participate in one of his video pieces. The situation slides almost immediately into another form of abuse. What he frames as an artistic collaboration was all along an affair built on her vulnerability. The final section of the story shifts again, this time toward the sister who remains the only person still trying to understand what has happened.

By the end of the play Yeong-hye has been placed in a psychiatric hospital. Doctors ask her sister for permission to inject nutrients into her body, since she has stopped eating entirely. Yeong-hye pleads with her to refuse. She explains, with a kind of calm certainty, that she is no longer human; she believes she has become a plant. The play forces us to look beyond what the other characters prefer to call madness. Yeong-hye’s refusal appears irrational only if one ignores the violence surrounding her: the marriage that confined her, the brutality of her father, the opportunism of her brother-in-law, the indifference of everyone else. Seen from that angle, her retreat in nature begins to look like the only space she could claim for herself. We left the theatre shaken, with the sense of having witnessed a life gradually torn apart by forces that presented themselves, at every step, as normal.

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3. Willy Protagoras enfermé dans les toilettes, dir. Wajdi Mouawad (La Colline, Paris)

Wajdi Mouawad—whose work I mentioned recently in my overview of what I’ve read in 2025—is one of my favorite theatre directors, and the current head of Théâtre National de la Colline. He will soon be leaving that position, and this season he has chosen to revive his very first play, originally created in Quebec in 1998.

It was also the first time I left one of his productions without feeling completely engulfed by it. The play revolves around a simple premise: Willy Protagoras has locked himself in the bathroom and refuses to come out. Around this act of withdrawal arises a larger question that Mouawad has often returned to in his work: how does one live in a world that has become unbearable? The opening already sets the tone. A series of expressions describing miserable weather, un temps de merde, pile up one after another, prefiguring how the play will soon become saturated with references to literal excrement. (If you are easily disgusted, this may not be the one for you.) Visually, however, the beginning is striking: the scenography resembles the façade of an apartment building, with each character appearing from a small window. The image works beautifully at first, but as this dispositif goes, chaos erupts.

The central conflict concerns the Protagoras family apartment, the only one in the building with a view of the sea. At some point another family, the Philisti-Ralestine, moves in. They had initially been welcomed by the Protagoras, but the cohabitation quickly deteriorates, as the newcomers behave as if the space already belonged to them. The situation echoes larger questions of territory and invasion, compressed here into the scale of two families sharing an apartment. The political metaphor contained in this microcosm only becomes explicit toward the end, in a letter written by Nelly Protagoras, Willy’s sister, who had already left their apartment and what she calls their “country at war,” a place that has become “a broken piano with only one note left.”

Meanwhile Willy remains locked in the bathroom. When people ask why, he gives different answers each time: love; a desire to force the Philisti-Ralestines to leave; a creative crisis in his painting practice. The shifting explanations feel accurate for someone on the verge of adulthood—the play takes place just before his eighteenth birthday. To those who try to engage him, Willy simply replies: “You will never know who I am.” His refusal to get out of the bathroom is also a refusal to be seen by a Sartrian understanding of the gaze of others, the one which fixes us as no longer a subject, but quite tragically as the object of another one’s consciousness. Willy’s isolation is a defense against being reduced to what others expect him to be. Outside the bathroom door, however, the building becomes increasingly chaotic. Someone arrives claiming to mediate the conflict between the two families, but his dishonesty only complicates matters further: eventually the entire building settles into the Protagoras apartment, while the original occupants fall completely silent, immobilized in their own space. The play ends with Willy’s eighteenth birthday, celebrated in this atmosphere of collective absurdity.

Throughout the performance one song keeps returning: There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. It drifts through different scenes, connecting otherwise deliberately unstable moments. Willy himself represents a kind of adolescent revolt: he insists on his independence, claims a fierce attachment to painting, pushes against the authority of parents and inherited structures. All of this is clear enough. Yet unfortunately the experience of the play remained, to me at least, somehow opaque. The exaggeration of the situations, the constant push toward grotesque imagery, created a palpable distance between the story and the public. Leaving the theatre, my friends and I felt less engaged with the questions the play sets out to raise, with what might have prompted young Mouawad to write this play aged 19, than with a certain sense of discomfort. In trying to avoid moralizing or simple political allegory, the piece moves toward a level of caricature and abjection that ultimately obscures its own subject.

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4. Le Cercle de craie caucasien, dir. Emmanuel Demarcy (Théâtre de la Ville, Paris)

Le cercle de craie caucasien was the first Brecht I have seen performed, surprisingly given his towering status as a playwright and theorist. The production by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mahdavi stages the narrative with impeccable clarity: in the aftermath of a revolutionary attack, the governor Georgi Abachvilli is assassinated, and his wife flees, abandoning their infant son Michel. The child is taken in by a palace servant, Groucha Vachnadzé, who becomes a sort of surrogate mother. As she flees across the Caucasus, Michel’s care drags Groucha into a series of impossible decisions: she navigates hunger, violence, social contempt, coerced marriage, and betrayal, all while the revolutionary forces that killed Michel’s father seek to return him to his biological mother. The trial that concludes the story—the eponymous test of the chalk circle—led by the extravagant Judge Azdak, decides that the true mother is the one who will not harm the child to claim him.

For the book club of the research group that I founded, QUILT, we had just read Jacques Rancière’s Le spectateur émancipé, which mentions Brecht multiple times as an example of a theatre that, in its desire to educate the people, ends up underestimating and infantilizing the spectator’s intelligence. Even without thinking of Rancière’s text, I did feel that the play was too didactic. By rendering the morale one was supposed to get so clear, the play maintains a hierarchy of intelligence that Rancière identifies as precisely the kind of preemptive limitation political theatre tends to impose. The spectator’s capacity to negotiate meaning or ethical ambiguity finds itself amputated, as the public is placed within a predetermined map of moral and social logic.

According to Rancière, emancipatory theatre begins when the spectator’s perception itself becomes a site of agency. Here, the clarity of the narrative absorbs that generative tension: the heterogeneity of experience, the ethical dilemmas, the violence and the small acts of care are subordinated to a pedagogical logic. The spectators witness moral correctness rather than navigate the ambiguity of lived experience. Rancière emphasizes that art achieves its political resonance not by demonstrating effects in the real world, but by producing a dissensual reconfiguration of perception—a rupture in the ordinary distribution of who sees, who knows, who acts.

Demarcy’s staging accurately preserves the intensity of the narrative and its moral stakes, yet that dissensual potential is hindered by the play’s didactic logic, leaving the audience with the clarity of the lesson rather than the exercise of judgment. The play enacts Brechtian mechanisms (such as the Verfremdung, the author’s proclaimed strategy of making the familiar strange to provoke critical reflection) but in a contemporary context where spectators no longer require persuasion to see injustice. The result is a performance whose political and perceptual emancipation remains bracketed by the certainty of moral resolution.

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5. Exil, dir. Alexandra Badea (TNB, Bucharest)

Visits to my hometown are so rare nowadays that I cannot afford to miss any artistic or theatrical event while I’m there. For visual arts, I rely on Cristina Stoenescu’s carefully curated lists of Contemporary Art Events; for theater, I browse the programs of various venues until something catches my eye. This time, it didn’t take too long: the title Exil and the name of the the acclaimed Romanian-French playwright Alexandra Badea appeared on the national theater’s homepage, perfectly timed for one of the few days I would be in town.

The narrative of Exil was a delight to witness on stage, but it is difficult to render in just a few sentences. The most useful starting point is that it is a multigenerational story in which we encounter most characters at several moments of their lives. The play unfolds simultaneously along three temporal axes—1970, 1990, and 2026—its structure constantly moving between them. Before the lights in the theater have fully dimmed, a woman dressed in red, equipped with a microphone and camera, wanders through the rows of the audience. She asks spectators whether they have ever considered leaving Romania, or whether they already have and why. The play thus begins as a participatory moment: a series of brief public confessions about migration and (un)belonging. Inevitably, the responses change with each performance. On the evening I attended, a young man explained he had moved to London to pursue music but returned because he preferred to sing in his native language; an older woman mentioned she was a professor at Oxford; another had spent years moving throughout Europe and later Asia and still struggled to find her place. By chance, they were all in Romania for the same few days and found themselves sitting in the same theater, sharing fragments of their personal histories before watching a play about exile.

Once the lights fully dim, we learn that the woman in red is the main character, at least in the 2026 timeline. Her name is Emma. She is working on a documentary about Romania and migration, or exile, as Alexandra Badea terms it. Emma frames her project as a search for her own “manufacturing defect.” We get a sense that it lies somewhere in her family history. Her mother, Agnes, was born and raised in Paris but came to Bucharest in the 1990s, shortly after the revolution, when the country seemed filled with the promise of change. After about a decade, with two young children, she found herself trapped between an alcoholic husband and the realization that the hoped-for transformation of the country had always been illusory. Her own mother, Irène, offered to take Emma back with her to Paris, where the girl would ultimately grow up, while Emma’s brother remained with the father. Whether he chose to stay or was left behind remains deliberately ambiguous, one of the many uncertainties the play’s strength feeds on.

Irène’s own story (Emma’s grandmother) is even more complex. Born in communist Romania, she experienced as violent the gap between her own restless, independent spirit and the surrounding culture of silence, conformity, and constant performance of acceptable identities. Her relationship with her parents wasn’t any easier. Coming from a formerly bourgeois family, they had been forced after the communist takeover to share their large central Bucharest house with a working-class family. Irène (then still named Irina, before she later changed her name in France) fell in love with that family’s son and married him despite her parents’ objections. Around the time she discovered she was pregnant, she managed to obtain a passport to attend a medical conference in Paris. She made the irreversible decision to remain there and request political asylum for her husband so that he could join her. The plan succeeded only partially. After months of hunger strike, she obtained a plane ticket for him, but he never boarded the flight. The next time she sees him is years later, in the 1990s, when she returns to Romania for her mother’s funeral. It is during that visit that Agnes decides to remain in Bucharest and attempt to reconstruct the truth of her family history.

Given this already intricate situation, it is perhaps unsurprising that every generation carries its own trauma. Emma, in 2026, struggles to understand who she is or to feel anchored in any one place, constantly moving between Paris and Bucharest under the pretext of working on her documentary. Her brother has repeated a pattern of abandonment by leaving his own ten-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, echoing how he himself experienced his mother’s departure. On stage, these parallel histories sometimes unfold simultaneously. The focus shifts between them through the video dispositif: the documentary Emma is supposedly making becomes another medium through which the story is told, alongside the actors’ performances. The same mechanism is used during scene changes, when short projected videos appear in which the actors discuss themes related to the play—whether happiness depends primarily on internal disposition or external circumstances, the role of community, the country’s unresolved problems, and what forms of change might still be imaginable. The effect is a literal multiplication of perspectives, which I believe is most appropriate here: the coexistence of conflicting viewpoints is the play’s most forceful structural principle.

At almost every moment, the narrative leads us to demonize one character, to accept one person’s memories and confessions as definitive proof of another’s cruelty. Yet the play repeatedly forces us to reconsider. Each apparent villain reveals another layer of trauma, another chain of reasoning shaped by fear and survival. Only toward the end do we learn, for example, that Agnes returned to Paris while fleeing a situation of domestic violence; that Irène had initially resisted bringing her daughter to Bucharest because she feared she would endure the same disillusionments she had known; that Irène’s husband missed his chance to leave Romania because he had been deceivingly told, the night before the flight, that his mother was terminally ill.

And finally, the most unsettling revelation concerns Irène’s own mother, the character who, until that point, had seemed the most oppressive. On the eve of Irène’s departure for Paris, she confesses that the story she had told for years—that her own parents died in a car accident—was false. In reality, they had been deported to Auschwitz and murdered there. She herself had been taken in by family friends in Bucharest and later married Irène’s father in order to change her surname and avoid the same fate. The rigid silence that had suffocated Irène throughout her childhood, her mother’s insistence on discretion, conformity, and emotional restraint, had been the very condition of her survival. The trauma ran deeper than anyone had imagined: the great-grandmother of the story’s main character had been forced to learn how to live under a false identity in a country that had deported her own parents. Irène still leaves for France, but she later succeeds in having her grandparents’ names inscribed on a Holocaust memorial in Paris, in order to honor the secret she was entrusted with.

What initially appears to be the story of a documentary viscerally reveals itself as the story of generational trauma. First, the specific and particularly complex trauma of this family, written and imagined by Alexandra Badea. But the play’s emotional force mainly comes from how it articulates thoughts and memories that many people carry yet rarely express. Most spectators will recognize at least one of the emotional situations it stages. One of the most pervasive is the sense of shame that seems deeply embedded in Romanian culture, transmitted across generations almost as if inscribed in the body. Children grow up hearing that they should be ashamed; later, many adult actions remain subtly governed by the imagined gaze of others. As Irène remarks at one point, this dynamic is strikingly absent in France. Getting to live this immaterial but powerful cultural difference (which I have experience myself) feels extraordinarily liberating. Part of the reason Irène changes her name after arriving in Paris is that she symbolically erases the part of herself that had lived in Romania, the part shaped by shame and who was denied freedom. In Paris she lives not only in political exile but also in what the play calls an interior exile, one that exceeds the strictly political.

After the extraordinary emotional force of the preceding revelations, the play concludes its incursion into the depths of exilic ambiguity on a cautiously hopeful note. Agnes finally confronts her children and recounts the tangled histories that shaped her decisions, as well as those of her mother and grandmother. She insists that they are not condemned to repeat those destinies. In doing so, she gestures toward what Simone de Beauvoir expresses in Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté: that freedom is inseparable from responsibility, and that acknowledging the complexity of our lives, our fundamental ambiguity, is precisely what allows us to act and to live.1 The statement is a nod to the spectators that they, too, are allowed to claim that same possibility of repair. ∎

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To start with Bregović, I believe his music has long occupied a peculiar place within the international circulation of Balkan cultural imagery. For many listeners outside the region, his compositions are inseparable from cinema (as I’ve heard multiple concert-goers confess in the metro home), particularly from his collaborations with the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica. Films such as Time of the Gypsies (1988) and Underground (1995) contributed decisively to the global dissemination of a sonic vocabulary that to me rings close to home but that is now more widely, might I say internationally, associated with the Balkans: bands accelerating toward ecstatic unison, melodies excelling at both exuberance and lament, rhythmic structures that produce an almost centrifugal energy, perpetually on the verge of excess and, more practically speaking, a mix of trumpets, trombones, tuba, snare drum, violin, guitar, and female voices, executed with such mastery that the musicians carried the entire two-hour performance almost entirely without recourse to written scores.

Over the past three decades, this musical language has become intertwined with a cinematic representation of the Balkans itself. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova demonstrates how Western European narratives have historically produced the Balkans as a symbolic frontier, a conceptual space where Europe projects anxieties about instability, passion, excess, and historical turbulence. Bregović’s music circulates within this representational framework but doesn’t succumb to it: the compositions draw on musical traditions that belong to specific regional histories, yet their remarkable musical virtuosity has propelled them into international success. The concert therefore activated several layers of cultural meaning at once: local, Balkanic musical genealogies and cinematic mythology, but also the expectations of global audiences already familiar with this aesthetic vocabulary.

Inside the concert hall, however, these interpretative frameworks receded behind a more immediate phenomenon: the physical participation of the audience. People danced, and not just with the restrained self-consciousness that often accompanies movement in Western European concert venues, but with reverberating collective ease, following rhythmic patterns that many participants seemed to know instinctively. This intuitive choreography appeared to carry the memory of other contexts, such as festive gatherings or weddings, and of their forms of social dance that rarely migrate intact into Western European concert culture. So it is true, after all, that cultural memory is most often better transmitted through gesture rather than through discourse.

The day after the concert, the conference Perspectives on Art Histories in the Balkans commenced at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. Conceived as an international gathering of researchers and cultural practitioners, the conference aimed to bring into dialogue recent scholarship on the visual arts of the Balkans from the modern era to the present, addressing questions of artistic circulation, identity construction, or the memorial frameworks through which the region’s art histories continue to be written. I had been anticipating this gathering for nearly a year, ever since its announcement, and I wasn’t the only one: scholars and artists alike converged in Paris to trace various genealogies of artistic production in modern and contemporary Eastern Europe. I presented a segment of my ongoing research on Jagoda Buić, an artist who has occupied a central place in my thinking since early 2022, when I began to explore the history of fiber art (a year that coincided, sorrowfully, with her passing.)

Buić’s career was as cosmopolite as it gets. Born in Split in 1930, she initially studied scenography and costume design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Zagreb before continuing her training in Rome, Venice, and Vienna. Early on, she situated her textile work in the lineage of both theater and architecture, by creating suspended, monumental weavings—a format she pioneered at the Lausanne Biennials. By the late 1960s, her installations, vast textile structures that engage with the rhythm of the architectural volume they inhabit, were recognized internationally. She went on to live and work (always remarkably) between Dubrovnik, Paris, the South of France, Venice, and Washington, D.C.

Her work occupies a singular position within postwar European art. Buić translated regional craft traditions into tridimensional forms, insisting that fiber could operate at a scale and conceptual ambition traditionally reserved for sculpture or architecture. Stemming from Yugoslavia, her mobility across international exhibitions and residencies allowed her to produce works that were at once deeply embedded in Balkan material culture and fluent in the broader language of avant-garde abstraction. For me, she remains an icon, whose capacity to transform material, space, and perception continues to shape my thinking. The opening of Casa Buić in Venice this May is very exciting news, as it promises to extend this legacy.

The conference’s opening night was marked by a screening of Notre endroit silencieux by the Sofia-born, Paris-based writer and filmmaker Elitza Gueorguieva. (This mix of birthplace and current residence is typical in conferences gathering people from the region, and Gueorguieva’s film addresses this reality with precision in a line that resonates throughout: on se dit qu’on n’a jamais imaginé vivre “chez nous”, comme tant de gens de cette partie du monde.) In the film, Gueorguieva follows her Belarusian friend Aliona as she writes a novel and struggles to reconstruct the story of her father, a physicist and seafarer who disappeared in 1995 somewhere off the Turkish coast. The film inhabits the porous boundaries of documentary and poetic abstraction, inventing a visual language that amplifies the stumbles of memory, as well as those of the act of writing itself. It was through this screening that I first encountered her work, though she is already established as a writer, having published two French-language novels: Les cosmonautes ne font que passer (2016) and Odyssée des filles de l’Est (2019).

Language emerged as the central theme of the evening. Aliona is presented from the beginning as having arriced in France knowing only two hundred words, each of which she wanted to use to construct her novel about her father’s disappearance. (She has learned infinitely more in the meantime, and eventually published the novel we see her working on, Dans l’eau je suis chez moi, in 2018.) The film resonates with this linguistic liminality, evoking the concept of langue mineure theorized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their study of Kafka: the minor writer, inhabiting a major language, destabilizes its conventions, bending it under the pressure of marginality, and personal narrative. I had applied these ideas myself in my reading of the Romanian-born French-language poet Gherasim Luca, whose work in French I analyzed for Opium Philosophie in 2021. Gueorguieva’s film crystallizes the same transformative mechanisms of language adoption: French becomes, for the foreign writer, a space to inhabit, to stretch, to estrange, a terrain upon which personal and collective memories can finally converge.

The following evening, the conference’s focus shifted to visual art with the opening of Bureau fantôme by the Bosnian artist Bojan Stojčić, an exhibition curated by Melody Robine at the Institut d’Études Slaves. Stojčić’s video work, around which the exhibition is centered, engages the spectral residues of the Dayton Peace Agreement—which resulted, among other things, in the current Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina—negotiated in November 1995 at the Hope Hotel and Richard C. Holbrooke Conference Center, near the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, and formally signed in Paris weeks later. (The Bosnian government reportedly lost its copy of the Constitution in 2008; the only surviving original resides at the Élysée in Paris, where it can be consulted by the public.) The installation situates the viewer in the highly uncanny space and temporality of that negotiation: Stojčić booked a room at the ironically named Hope Hotel, where he was quite seemingly the only guest, and traced its empty corridors, gyms, conference rooms, conversing with employees whose recollections focused less on diplomacy than on the banality of disrupted routines: for them, canceled weddings and excessive laundry were the pinnacle of logistical pressure in accommodating major world leaders.

Through his video, Stojčić transmits the profoundly ironic and deeply spectral atmosphere of the site itself: a remote hotel in the American Midwest somehow became a container for historical energy, haunted by the residue of decisions and anxieties that reverberated across time and space, as far as Bosnia. The artist doesn’t seem interested in providing or even discussing a moral or political interpretation, and prefers to invite a more lasting reflection on the myths we build around such historical events. Hotels in isolated locations often carry an uncanny presence; here, that strangeness acquires an intoxicating historical density, as Stojčić allows us to see and almost feel the Dayton negotiations—an abstract political event for me until seeing Bureau fantôme—as a sensorially apprehended experience. ∎

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• Giorgio Armani. Milano, per amore, Pinacoteca di Brera (through May 3rd)

Milan may be best known for its fashion scene. Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Prada (and MiuMiu), Versace, Valentino… all originate from Italy’s fashion (and economic) capital. With the passing of one of the country’s most famous designers, Giorgio Armani, earlier last September, there had to be some commemorative events still happening in the city. I just wouldn’t have expected them to take place at the Pinacoteca di Brera, arguably Milan’s best gallery for medieval and Renaissance art… but not exactly a fashion hotspot. Not that the Pinacoteca particularly needs extra incentives to draw visitors, but contemporary installations within non-contemporary collections do tend to have that effect. Don’t get me wrong, it was a pleasant surprise. It’s well known that many—if not all—designers have, at some point in their careers, sought inspiration from art or religious artefacts (I could easily dig up a couple of Met Gala themes to support this statement, but I won’t). So, walking into the Pinacoteca armed with curiosity and a splash of energy from the double espresso I had just had, I was excited to see what Armani might have to say about the Italian Renaissance.

The thing is… if he had anything to say, I didn’t hear it. The clothes were beautiful, unsurprisingly, but they were not always coherent with the adjacent artworks (it might not seem like it from the images I’m showing, but I only photographed what I thought worked best). And I’m not referring to the obvious disjointed timelines they belonged to. Together with my friend Grace, we identified several positioning choices we would have made differently had we been handed the same materials to work with. Holding on to a colour, to a jewel, to a pattern… and above all, looking more closely at the paintings themselves would surely have helped. Not everything has to match, but when we’re dealing with such precious garments, and especially such precious paintings, I do think more reflection is needed before placing them together.

This was handled far better in the Louvre Couture exhibition (which I wrote about here), which paired sixty-five haute couture outfits with the royal apartments of the Louvre. Risks were taken, and the bets paid off. Robes, wallpapers, tapestries, and gilded furniture seemed to flow into one another, creating spirals in the fabric of reality that expanded like a fever dream. The mannequins had no faces, but it still felt as though they were looking down at us with a hint of superiority—for getting to wear the outfits they did and spend the night in those royal interiors, while we were condemned to keep our distance and eventually leave. I imagined this must be what it felt like, centuries ago, for a peasant to approach royalty. It was splendid.

So perhaps I am just biased by the comparison.

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• Robert Mapplethorpe. Le forme del desiderio, Palazzo Reale (through May 17)

A similar thing happened in the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition installed in one of the wings of the Palazzo Reale, right next to the Duomo. Not that there was much to pair his mostly black-and-white photographs with besides the walls (which they chose to paint baby blue…), but the installation itself wasn’t the best. Call me a perfectionist, but it often felt as though the pictures weren’t mounted perfectly symmetrically on the wall, or maybe they were, and the lighting and the shadows it cast simply weren’t helping. I say this precisely because I love Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, and believe it and its subjects deserve a larger space, to be displayed perhaps more imposingly.

The thematic display (usually one room per theme, with the exception of the final Nudes and Flowers installation, which spanned two rooms) began, somewhat surprisingly, with the photographer’s early collages. As it turns out, this was the medium through which he began his artistic explorations, blending materials far more heterogeneous than the flat images the word collage is often associated with. Mapplethorpe originally enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn to study advertising and design, before switching his major to graphic arts—which didn’t end up mattering much anyway, as he soon dropped out and moved to the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan with Patti Smith, who becomes the sole subject of the exhibition’s second room. Around the same time, the artist Sandy Daley gave Mapplethorpe his first Polaroid; shortly afterwards, he met John McKendry, then head of the Met’s Department of Prints and Photographs. His artistic fate was thus sealed, and in 1973 the photographer opened his first solo exhibition at Light Gallery in New York.

The most important element in his biography seems to be the human relationships he established throughout his life. It is therefore no surprise that he devoted so much of his creative energy to staging portraits. In 1980, Mapplethorpe met Lisa Lyon, the first female world champion bodybuilder, whom he found fascinating and who is the subject of the gallery’s third room. Through his lens, her body becomes more than that of a bodybuilder: it turns into light, shadow, Greek sculpture, landscape. The diversity of Lyon’s poses is interestingly reversed in Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits in the next room. Most of them show him in almost exactly the same pose, facing the camera and fixing the viewer’s gaze, except that the sitter appears completely different each time. I found it a strong curatorial choice to display these self-portraits together and in close proximity: using costume, drag, props, and of course the camera itself, Mapplethorpe turns photography into an instrument for fulfilling the Socratic commandment: know thyself. Thy multifaceted self, he seems to add.

The next room brought together a superb collection of portraits Mapplethorpe took of influential artists and writers. In their mostly identical formats and stark black and white, these homages made the air in the room feel heavy with greatness. The strongest work, to me, was a portrait of Isabella Rossellini against a dark background, whose lipstick, gaze, and luminous skin seemed to scream at you despite the image’s silence. That, I thought, is an immortal image, somewhat like Cleopatra’s in our collective imagination. Coming after such a strong aesthetic and emotional jolt, the Nudes and Flowers section affected me the least in the entire show. The juxtapositions were nice, but the occasional color photograph, instead of standing out positively, somehow disrupted the harmony that had been built by the rest.

I often found myself wishing there were no reflections in the glass. This may be inevitable when exhibiting framed photographs (which works of this importance usually are), but seeing viewers reflected beside the eminent sitters of Mapplethorpe’s portraits somehow felt like a diminishment of their aura. Though perhaps that’s less a comment for the Palazzo Reale than for a psychoanalyst.

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• Anselm Kiefer. Le Alchimiste, Palazzo Reale (through September 27)

“The feeling, like the look, of all Kiefer’s work is chiaroscuro: light and darkness, disembodied spirit and gross material,” wrote the art critic Peter Schjeldahl in 1988, attempting to pin down the peculiar gravity of Anselm Kiefer’s art.1 Few descriptions capture more succinctly the strange alchemy at the heart of the artist’s practice. Nearly four decades later, that reading still feels uncannily precise when walking through Anselm Kiefer. Le Alchimiste at Palazzo Reale, where monumental canvases made of ash, straw, lead, and paint seem to stage an unusual marriage of matter and transcendence.

The first time I saw works by Anselm Kiefer in person was at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, where in 2022 he presented the exhibition Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce, titled after a line of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo. For me, his work has since become somewhat incidentally tied to palatial settings. Le Alchimiste hit exactly in the same spot, and it is the right one. Writing in 1998, Schjeldahl has also prophesied: “a major revival of interest in Kiefer seems likely at some point, but it will be difficult.”2 His recent major exhibitions seem to have overcome that difficulty. The space of the Palazzo Reale where Kiefer’s exhibition is installed is magnificent at first glance, especially when coming from the baby-blue-painted space where Mapplethorpe was shown. But a closer look reveals a different room: the faces of the sculptures that once adorned the walls are missing; parts of the plaster have crumbled; the space is, actually, a ruin. In fact, it was bombed in 1943 and left partially unrestored, possibly as a living reminder of what war and extremes can leave behind. It is, quite simply, the perfect place to show Kiefer.

Le Alchimiste presents over forty large-scale paintings conceived specifically for this scarred space. Kiefer brings together historical and sometimes forgotten women—alchemists, scientists, and thinkers from Caterina Sforza to Mary Anne Atwood—reanimating their presence through his monumental painterly practice. At first, the project might appear to risk the same pitfalls as large-scale rehabilitations of women, artists or not (think of the 2007 WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) which often struggle to move beyond merely making names visible. Such shows can feel generalized, sometimes even arbitrary, bound only by the “female” umbrella, and the sheer number of artists treated together can prevent any deeper engagement with their work. Kiefer’s exhibition could have easily fallen into this trap. And yet, it feels like it doesn’t. Somehow, the works themselves—alchemical in effect, as if the alchemists of the title had conjured their materiality rather than the artist—save the curatorial concept from its own breadth. The presences of these women, or in any case allusions to them, are rendered with an extraordinary mix of materials: shimmering and dazzling, unappealing and gritty substances alike all become witnesses to the same transformative beauty.

Still today, “Kiefer’s command of the big and the little—macrocosmic scale, microscopic beauty-remains unbeatable”.3 Here, the monumental works were installed on wheels. I imagined the alchemists moving through the bombed ballroom at night, dancing, and kissing one another goodnight.

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• Sueño Perro. Instalación Celuloide de Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Fondazione Prada (ended February 25)

I always recommend the Fondazione Prada in Venice when there’s something on view (it’s where I saw one of the best shows in my life: Christoph Büchel's Monte di Pietà in 2024, which featured in my best of the year). The one in Milan doesn’t quite disappoint either. Besides the two permanent installations, Haunted House and Le Studio d'Orphée (Jean-Luc Godard’s reconstructed atelier), I got to see two temporary exhibitions at the foundation. The first was Sueño Perro.

The Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu recently discovered that the original film rolls of his 2000 debut Amores Perros were still being kept at the Universidad Autónoma de México. How one doesn’t know that for 25 years is beyond me; but, for the rest of us, it was a blessing, because it meant we could experience this exhibition decades later. Iñárritu decided to use the rediscovered material to create an immersive video installation built from excerpts of the film (the installation was so immersive that I didn’t even notice the barriers in the dark… thankfully, the floor was forgiving). I first heard about Iñárritu during a classics retrospective at the Cannes Film Festival last year, but I admit I hadn’t fully grasped the historical context—so seeing it at Fondazione Prada was a perfect opportunity. Amores Perros itself is a multilayered, interwoven narrative of lives colliding in Mexico City, structured as a triptych of stories connected by a car crash. Its style is gritty, kinetic, mixing urban realism with more melodramatic moments. The film’s cultural legacy is immense: it launched the modern Mexican cinema renaissance and gave audiences worldwide a visceral, unflinching look at life in Mexico at the turn of the millennium.

Upstairs, the installation Mexico 2000: The Moment that Exploded offered a photographic exploration of Mexico’s sociopolitical history during the same years. While it could easily be experienced as a separate exhibition, I treat them as one because they truly complete each other, and I’m pretty sure they were conceived in tandem. Presented as “a multisensory experience conceived by Mexican writer and journalist Juan Villoro,” it’s worth clarifying: don’t expect any weird smells or rain effects. The “multisensory” aspect comes from an audio dispositif that moves with you through the exhibition. Villoro’s narration follows you through the space, calmly explaining the circumstances behind each image, often violent, but with clarity and empathy. I never, ever take audioguides, yet here it worked just beautifully. By the end of it, I found myself missing his voice. The selection of documentary photographs, curated by Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, was equally remarkable. Each image felt purposeful and resonant, providing a historical lens that deepened the impact of the video installation downstairs.

All in all, this was one of the best homages I’ve ever seen paid to a movie in an exhibition. It not only contextualized Amores Perros for an Italian or European audience, but it genuinely enriched the experience of the video installation itself. Descending the stairs after visiting the photographic exhibition, I felt the film more fully, more intensely, freshly aware of everything that was lurking just behind the cameras.

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• Mona Hatoum. Over, under and in between, Fondazione Prada (through November 9)

I’m sorry to spoil the surprise, but the only three works by Hatoum on display were the ones pictured below. To our disappointment, visitors weren’t allowed to use the upper indoor balconies—which seemed designed exactly for that purpose—to view the monumental artworks from above. “For security reasons…” We weren’t sure whether the world map Hatoum created—crafted from 30,000 red glass beads carefully scattered across the cement floor—was intentionally stretched in the Southern Hemisphere compared to the maps we’re used to from school, or if it was simply the perspective from which we were viewing it. It turns out that Hatoum had deliberately chosen the Gall-Peters projection rather than the more familiar Mercator projection. This approach shows countries of the Global South, like Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, in proportion to their true size, correcting the way traditional maps often shrink them compared to the Global North.

Thankfully, the works were good from all angles. The tripartite site-specific exhibition presents the spider web, the map, and the grid as recurring archetypes in Hatoum’s œuvre, tied to the concepts of instability, danger, and fragility. The first thing visitors encounter in the Cisterna space is a monumental spider web adorned with transparent glass spheres, so exquisitely delicate that it sparked a flicker of anxiety in me over its fragility (isn’t that the way with all beautiful things?). The third and final room shattered the near-sacred silence of the previous spaces. We hurried inside, curious about the source of the sound, and were surprised by its towering height. Upon closer inspection, we were surprised by more: the kinetic installation all of a quiver, composed of nine levels of open cubes, was actually suspended from the ceiling, and moved in an undulating dance that none of us would have suspected of the metal grid structure that it is. The exhibition text beautifully relates this to the words of Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh, who writes that the installation “teaches us that to stand is not to conquer instability, but to inhabit it.”

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• Hito Steyerl. The Island, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio (through October 30)

Did I just say there were two temporary exhibitions at the Fondazione Prada? Well, if you also count Hito Steyerl’s installation at the Osservatorio—their off-space situated, or rather hidden, in the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele—there were three. I became interested in Steyerl’s work after reading the research of Alexandra Gilliams, who I interviewed for Studio Hangouts last fall. In her research, Alexandra reveals the illusions that circulate around technology and the narratives that shape what we take for granted in our understanding of artificial intelligence. Some artists do the same in their work; one of them is Hito Steyerl. Born in 1966 in Munich, Steyerl has spent the past two decades interrogating the circulation of images and the influence of technology on society, producing videos and installations that are as playful as they are conceptual.

The Island begins with a story told to Steyerl by Darko Suvin, the Zagreb-born, McGill-based critic and theorist of science fiction. During a 1941 bombing in Zagreb, Suvin imagined himself inside Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars, watching the comic-serial hero save the world. For Steyerl, this anecdote became the starting point for her own reflection on parallel worlds. She translates it into video art using concepts drawn from quantum physics: sudden jumps, multiple coexisting states, the idea that alternative possibilities can exist simultaneously. The installation becomes a space where anticipated catastrophe and media theory meet, shaped by the logic of science fiction.

Framing this space of contradictions are two conventionally opposed registers. On one side is the kitsch of cosplay and AI-generated imagery: a blonde-wigged Flash Gordon attempting to rescue a world overrun with digital nonsense. The result is half grotesque, half so campy it eventually becomes endearing. On the other side, sculptural installations composed of spherical screens anchor the work in its high-cultural register (sustained, of course, by its presentation at Fondazione Prada.) The contrast between these two aesthetics is the point. The work lures the viewer with spectacle, but it also encourages critical reflection.

Steyerl’s work is playful and intellectually rigorous at once. The video overflow, the mess of images, the Italian brainrot (extra points for showing it in Italy), all resonate with Suvin’s conception of multiple worlds in science fiction. Steyerl opens our eyes to the chaos of technology, the kitsch of costume, and the conceptual discipline of installation all at once, and through this, the possibility of other worlds feels real.

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P S: Nan Goldin. This Will Not End Well, Pirelli HangarBicocca (ended February 15)

This one was recommended to me by a friend, but unfortunately I didn’t make it in time… luckily, the same exhibition is coming to Paris at the Grand Palais towards the end of March, saving me from that little failure. Let the cultural Olympics commence go on. ∎

Since then, her trajectory has evolved across several art-world ecosystems. Alongside being awarded a Prix du jeune écrivain in 2024, she interned at the Bourse de Commerce - Fondation Pinault, then at Galerie Poggi, completed a master’s in exhibition studies, and co-produced La terre retombe au soleil with her curatorial collective clome. Today, she works at Galerie Poggi as an artist liaison, accompanying artists through the different stages of exhibition-making.

This conversation traces how writing, research, and exhibition-making intersect in her practice, and how these modes of working inform one another across different art-world contexts.

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Monica Seiceanu: How did you first become interested in art?

Marie Lucas Scarpa: As far as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in art in many forms. As a child, I was fascinated by churches, by the way paintings and sculptures told stories through images. My father also played an important role: he moved within artistic and alternative circles in Geneva and often took me to contemporary art openings. So art was simply part of my environment from an early age.

M S: Back when we met, you were writing your Master’s thesis on Annegret Soltau. Can you tell us more about her practice? What drew you to her work at that moment?

M L S: I had already been interested for some time in women artists involved in body art and performance practices of the 1970s when I encountered Annegret Soltau’s work at Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles. She was the only artist in the Verbund Collection exhibition I didn’t know, which immediately sparked my curiosity. When I started researching her, I discovered that she was still active and widely recognized in German-speaking and Anglo-Saxon contexts, yet almost unknown in France.

Soltau belongs to a generation born just after WWII. Her work uses her own body to question feminine identity as well as the historical and psychological legacy of post-war Germany. She began with performances, wrapping herself or members of the audience with black thread, creating drawings directly on the skin through tension and constraint. She later turned to photography, especially self-portraiture, developing techniques such as photo-engraving, stitched photomontage, and photographic embroidery. Since the 1990s, she has also integrated digital processes.

Thread is central to her practice, both a motif and a material, allowing her to merge body and image, surface and wound. What interested me most was how she simultaneously deconstructs representations of femininity and questions the structures that produce them. My thesis examined how fragmentation, stitching, and injury operate formally and symbolically in her work, linking it to broader post-war German aesthetics and to performance traditions such as Viennese Actionism. More broadly, I was interested in how the body becomes a site where identity can be dismantled and rebuilt.

M S: In parallel to academic writing, you were also writing a novel titled Vola, vola which brought you the Prix du jeune écrivain in 2024 (congratulations again!) How does literary writing coexist with art writing for you? Do they nourish each other, or do you experience them as distinct mental spaces?

M L S: Thank you! <3 It’s a very good question.

I consciously try to keep the two practices separate. When I write about art or artists, for example for Le Trou, an off-space in Geneva founded by artists and friends Agathe de Limoges and Montserrat Mayor, the writing is not about me; it serves other people’s practices and a public context. Even if I bring a literary touch, the text remains in service of something external.

Literary writing (short stories, poetry, or novels) is much more personal. It is my own space, my own practice, with a very different intention. That said, even if I try to keep them distinct, they inevitably nourish one another in ways I don’t fully control.

buy Vola, vola here!

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M S: You’ve moved through very different institutional contexts, from the Bourse de Commerce to a commercial gallery. How did those shifts affect the way you think about exhibitions and artworks? What stayed with you from each experience?

M L S: Moving through different contexts has made me much more aware of the economic dimension of art. Art has always been linked to money, as part of a market, as a symbol of power… but also because artists—as everyone—need material conditions to survive and create.

Experiencing non-profit spaces, a private collection with significant resources, and then a commercial gallery allowed me to move away from the romantic myth of the suffering, bohemian artist. Instead, I became interested in very concrete questions, for exemple: how do people actually sustain a life in art? Is precarity almost a structural condition when entering the field?

This reflection led me to a second thesis on the phenomenon of exhaustion in the contemporary art world, not only as individual burnout but as a systemic issue shaped by production rhythms, project-based competition, unstable incomes, and shrinking resources. For me, exhaustion is therefore a deeply political question, because it concerns the conditions under which art is produced and exhibited.

I guess that what stayed with me from these experiences is a more material and pragmatic way of looking at art. One that doesn’t diminish its poetic or critical power, but places it within the real conditions that make it possible.

M S: With the exhibition La terre retombe au soleil, curated through clome, you stepped into a more collective and experimental mode of working. Any highlights (artists, artworks…) from that experience?

M L S: Yes! I had the chance to work with ten other curators from the collective clome, alongside brilliant young artists just graduating from the École des Arts Décoratifs and the Beaux-Arts. I’m thinking in particular of Paola Bazelaire-Ferré and Ilaria Andreotti, with whom I had the chance to work closely, both artists of great intelligence and sensitivity!

What I loved most was the collective energy. It brought a sense of playfulness to the process, even though it was intense : we curated three exhibitions in two weeks and published a catalogue, which was a first for all of us! Working collectively allows ideas to emerge that no one could have imagined or realized alone. In the end, what remains are the intellectual and emotional connections built during the process.

M S: You currently work as an artist liaison at Galerie Poggi, with whom you have recently exhibited at Paris Photo. Working at art fairs exposes a very specific tempo and economy of the art world. How does that intensity affect your relationship to artworks and artists themselves?

M L S: Fairs are indeed intense but also exciting moments. The artwork remains central, it’s the focus of every conversation, yet there is a strong pressure tied to sales and results, since galleries invest heavily in these events.

During a fair, the emphasis shifts slightly: you’re sharing works with a large audience rather than working with artists on a day-to-day basis, as I do in my role as artist liaison. It’s a moment of exposure, where you can present and almost amplify works you’ve been engaging with closely. It can also be an opportunity to make a statement, as when Galerie Poggi presented Sophie Ristelhueber’s 40m long installation No Comment at the entrance of the Grand Palais.

M S: Writer, researcher, curator, gallery professional: you’ve never followed a singular career path. How do you experience this multiplicity?

M L S: I would say I’m still quite young, so there’s still time for me to singularize my carrer path!

But jokes aside, multiplicity feels very natural to me. It reflects how I experience the world and my different interests.

Everything remains distinct, yet connected at a deeper level. What I learn and experience in one field inevitably informs the others. I don’t think it could be otherwise, we are porous beings. The challenge is mostly practical: balancing time and energy between different commitments. It requires awareness, like knowing when to focus intensely on one practice and when to let another breathe.

M S: At this stage, what are you most curious about? A type of writing, a format of exhibition, a way of working that you haven’t yet explored?

M L S: More than a specific format, I’m currently trying to embrace a different approach to working, one that allows more room for joy. Art and literature are often approached with a great sense of seriousness, and rightfully so, but I also want to remember that they can be playful and light.

I’m interested in creating spaces where experimentation feels like a playground rather than a burden. Taking away some of that gravitas doesn’t make the work we do less meaningful; on the contrary, it can make it more sustainable. I think many of us working in art need to hold on to that sense of joy; it may be a key to survive trough these times. ∎

In retrospect, I doubt that in our jest any of us were indeed referring to the actual terms that were being discussed (the possibility of an innate human nature, and how that may influence the construction of a just society), or the reasoning behind the two philosophers’ disparate views (to keep it short: Chomsky replied affirmative, relating the concept of human nature to that of a universal grammar, which he was theorizing; Foucault disagreed, insisting on the socially constructed essence of past definitions of human nature, and of human experience in general). But we were all engrossed in the debate’s cultural signification, still present almost five decades after it had taken place. An analytic and a continental, we might’ve thought (although the two philosophers’ stances don’t really reflect this divide); a representative of the Old World and one of the New World (though the latter’s standpoint seemed more anchored in an already ancient—in the 1970s—kind of idealism); the alternation of Chomsky’s perfectly articulated American English and Foucault’s representative halting French; the unbreakable focus of the public. It all had us in a chokehold.

As of October 2025, I’ve officially lived long enough to see it in a museum. And only on that occasion did it become clear to me that what mattered was not the spectacle of two “great minds” in opposition, but the broader circulation of philosophical and political ideas their exchange exemplified, and possibly even accelerated. An excerpt from the debate was shown on one of the many small screens in the exhibition Echo Delay Reverb. Art Américain, Pensées Francophones at Palais de Tokyo.

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• ECHO DELAY REVERB : Art américain, pensées francophones, Palais de Tokyo (ended February 15)

In an exhibition roundup earlier this winter, I suggested that a stretch of the Avenue du Président Wilson might well deserve the name Museum Avenue. After Palais Galliera in January, we’re back there for the present roundup, this time with the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Palais de Tokyo. The latter is arguably the city’s official home for contemporary art—especially now that the Centre Pompidou is closed for the next five years (which, for me at least, always leaned more toward modern art anyway). For the past five months, the institution has presented a characteristically expansive exhibition of US artists inspired by what is known in English as “French theory.” Among the figures cited are “from Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Monique Wittig, Pierre Bourdieu and Édouard Glissant…” Before turning to the art itself, it is worth noting that this constellation of French philosophers—like many things whose value is so tremendous that, like the sun, it blinds those who look from up close—achieved much of the recognition they enjoy today through the export of their ideas to the United States, where they were avidly studied and celebrated before receiving comparable attention in France.

Semiotext(e) played no small part in that trajectory. For those who may be unfamiliar with this name made up of semiotics, text, and the final (e) pointing to a French origin, Semiotext(e) began in the early 1970s when French philosopher Sylvère Lotringer founded it at Columbia University as a journal devoted to avant-garde theory. Initially centered on figures such as Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, it later moved toward the New York art and punk scenes. In the 1980s it became a publishing house, notably with its “Foreign Agents” series introducing French theory to the American art world, and in the 1990s expanded with Chris Kraus’s “Native Agents” series highlighting younger women writers. Now based in Los Angeles, it continues to publish and translate experimental literary and theoretical works; its history had a dedicated section within the exhibition. The curators’ attention to different cultural forms also came through in their integration of audio recordings, and I spent a long time listening to Jayne Cortez’s poems in a section devoted to Melvin Edwards, which highlighted their decades-long collaboration between New York and Dakar: Edwards designed her album covers, while she dedicated poems to him.

Pairs of red walls covered with texts and philosophical quotes, alongside original editions and small screens showing interviews and influential videos—such as the Chomsky–Foucault debate—introduced the exhibition’s different thematic sections with enough clarity to make the underlying thought apparent. I personally loved this approach, not only as a philosophy graduate myself, but because it placed theory and art on something like equal footing. It also skillfully avoided the pitfall of overloading the show with theory (a looming risk, since theory was half of the show’s raison d’être): these elements were concentrated in the introductory sections, while in the subsequent rooms the art was given clear predominance. The different sections were titled Dispersion / Dissémination (dedicated to diasporic identities, building on Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant to Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida), La critique des institutions (shaped by Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault), Géométries du non-humain (decentering the human and tracing regimes of control, with figures such as Frantz Fanon and Foucault), Machines désirantes (gender and sexuality, from Simone de Beauvoir and Monique Wittig to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), and De l’abjection en Amérique (formlessness, the grotesque, drawing on Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille, and echoed in artists like Cindy Sherman and David Hammons).

I probably spent the longest time in La critique des institutions, as nearly every work on view struck me as one I would want to include the next time I teach the history of contemporary art institutions; each, in its own way, also unsettled what such an institution might even be. An emblematic example is Hans Haacke’s Condensation Cube (1963-67). The work may not announce its critical charge at first glance: a sealed plexiglas cube, partially filled with water, in which condensation forms and recedes according to the surrounding temperature. Yet for me the work functions as a kind of museum in microcosm. By staging a self-contained climate that nonetheless depends on its external environment, Haacke exposes the fiction of institutional neutrality and absolute control; the cube’s subtle internal shifts register the limits of the museum’s promise of stability. A more immediately legible message appears in Andrea Geyer’s Manifest (2025), a series of embroidered banners that overtly articulate political demands addressed to museums, though beyond their declarative tone, I also read in them a more intimate outline of a desire, a projection of how the artist imagines artistic institutions might become.

Speaking of banners, Renée Green’s more colorful and poetic Space Poem #2 (Laura’s Words) was presented earlier in the exhibition. The 2009 work reproduces lines from Laura Riding Jackson’s poem “There Is No Land Yet” in a deliberately fragmented layout, formally restaging the thought and language dispersal described in the text and transferring it into the very act of reading. This mode is what the cultural theorist and literary scholar Homi K. Bhabha would describe as an “interstitial” space of enunciation: meaning emerges in transit, in the back-and-forth movement of the reader, in the absence of “fixed identifications [opening] up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”1 In this sense, the work enacts Green’s own insistence on fluidity, on not “making a claim to any specific or essential way of being.”2 The poem’s declaration that “there is no land yet” itself suggests that community and identity constantly being formed in the very act of their articulation. The same could be said about French theory: without a single home or proper terrain, it exists only in its displacement and reiteration.

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• Otobong Nkanga. I dreamt of you in colours, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (ended February 22)

Some spend their whole lives searching for their purpose; for others, it is revealed in a dream; and for even fewer, it comes through their mother’s dream. Otobong Nkanga’s mother told her as a child, “I dreamt of you in colors,” and from that moment she knew she had to become an artist. Her practice is so varied, so prolific, so wonderful, it feels as if it, too, has emerged from that same dream world. Nkanga, born in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria, and currently living and working in Antwerp, Belgium, explores through her art a breadth of ecological issues spanning “mining extraction, the utilization of mineral resources, but also the body’s relationship to space and the earth.” These issues are addressed in tapestries, photography, installations, acrylic painting, sculpture, soap… the diversity of mediums never diminishing the virtuosity of her work in any one of them.

Let’s begin with her tapestries. A monumental series of four welcomed visitors from the first room, setting the slow rhythm that would be needed to fully observe every artwork in the exhibition. The four woven works Abyss, Midnight, Twilight and Sunlight, forming the series Unearthed (2021), could be said through their narrative, sequential structure to continue the lineage of grand Renaissance tapestry ensembles. Going through them in order, one is supposed to start an almost spiritual journey in the depths of the ocean, then ascend to light, shallow waters, and finally the shore. But formally and aesthetically, they are something else entirely. What first distinguishes them in the viewer’s eye is the shimmer: a colossal quantity of differently shimmering threads are arranged in a complex manner, producing depth and relief effects uncharacteristic to the plane tapestry medium. On a technical level, the works are woven using a rapier loom, a new kind developed by the TextielLab in Tilburg.

Another monumental textile that struck me later in the exhibition was The Weight of Scars (2015). Composed of four woven panels in varied fibers—once again producing unexpected visual effects—and ten collaged inkjet photographic prints, this work from the Centre Pompidou collection reimagines the map of the world. Maps are never neutral; Nkanga conveys this with such poetry and radiance that the tension between the work’s dazzling surface and the irreducible histories of cruelty and exploitation it evokes is enough to make your heart sink. Two headless figures, their multiple puppet-like arms faintly reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico, hold a web of strings that stretches across the shimmering, almost abstract woven map of the world, suspending circular black-and-white photographs of “abandoned mine sites in Namibia—cracked ground, abandoned concrete, pipelines, and fenced-off emptiness.” Through all the shimmer and the beautiful blues and their soothing contrast with the black-and-white circle photographs, Nkanga maps out a history of colonial extraction and mining operations.

Across this tapestry was the 2014 installation In Pursuit of Bling, composed of an impressive quantity (and quality) of elements.3 The title may be playful, but once again the underlying concerns are extraction and exploitation. The concept of extractivism was theorized in the early 2000s by thinkers such as Eduardo Gudynas and Alberto Acosta in the context of Latin American debates on resource-dependent economies, describing a model based on the large-scale removal of raw materials for export, often at considerable social and environmental cost.4 In this magnificent installation, Nkanga turns to a perhaps less examined dimension of that logic: the pursuit of shine itself. The glittering surfaces we encounter daily (in makeup, construction materials, and other ordinary commodities) are made possible by minerals extracted, often violently and exploitatively, from specific sites, particularly in Namibia, a landscape to which her work repeatedly returns. I was teleported back ten years when I spotted the BH Cosmetics Galaxy eyeshadow palette; others may have been struck by different elements (there were enough for everyone) but that detail, for me, violently revealed how deeply this issue touches us all, and especially testified to Nkanga’s remarkable capacity to universalize the subject of her art.

In Le Spectateur émancipé, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière offers a powerful critique of art that seeks to be overtly “political”—that is, too explicitly denunciatory. His position differs from more conservative objections you might have already heard to political art: Rancière simply questions works that express their message so didactically that they risk underestimating the intelligence of their viewers. Even when the intention is emancipation, he argues, such art can place the spectator in a subordinate position. For Rancière, the emancipated spectator is simply one whose own intelligence is taken seriously. Before seeing this exhibition at the MAM, I resonated with his argument, though it did remain theoretical. But Otobong Nkanga showed me the power of an art that articulates critique while still allowing space for ambiguity, and, crucially, for beauty.

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• Meriem Bennani. Sole crushing ⟡ Steffani Jemison. ciel clair / eaux troubles, Lafayette Anticipations (ended February 8)

This past season brought two quite different yet equally compelling exhibitions to Lafayette Anticipations. Meriem Bennani’s Sole crushing was among the most joyful, playful shows I’ve seen in recent memory. Nearly two hundred flip-flops and slides, installed throughout the full height of the building, struck wood and metal with their soles, generating a percussive rhythm impossible not to answer with the tapping of one’s own feet. The generated music was no random sound: it was actually a piece composed by Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner) specifically for this iteration of Bennani’s installation, with the flip-flops programmed as meticulously as an orchestra. I enjoyed this more than I expected; the sound installation, combined with the sight of the differently colored slides—no two alike—was so enchanting it was almost impossible to leave. One kept waiting to see where the next sound would emerge, where the following rhythm would begin. Together, the flip-flops were meant to resemble bodies in motion (a crowd at a protest, a stadium, or a dakka marrakchia—a traditional Moroccan musical ceremony). Their simple slaps synchronized into a shared pulse that exceeded any single element; and in that play between sole and soul crushing, the work moved beyond surface sound to suggest a collective force, nearly cosmic in scale.

On the second floor, Steffani Jemison’s exhibition ciel clair / eaux troubles introduced a more explicitly historical and theoretical dimension: the artist examines the role that constellations, eclipses, and other celestial phenomena have played in moments of revolution or uprising, as forces that have inspired and shaped collective action more often than we might assume. Drawing on specific examples from the 19th century, Jemison does not seek to recreate the historical moments that inspired the show; instead, her works take on a life of their own, becoming potential celestial landmarks in their own right. A larger-than-life golden wind vane rotated gently, its movements programmed from the summer winds of 1967, tracing invisible currents and choreographies while anchored to a jagged base of Paris Meteorite fragments.

In a dimly lit, narrow couloir, Jemison’s 2025 Untitled (Same Time) transformed a five-minute process into a condensed history of celestial power. Through an almost alchemical silvering process, she turns transparent glass into a reflective surface, which she engraves with drawings that trace eclipses and other astronomical events historically reimagined as metaphors for power and uprising—from Columbus predicting a blood-red moon in 1504 to Nat Turner reading the eclipse as a sign of revolt in 1831. The whole show produces a poetic archive of the sky, merging symbolic and historical threads into a contemplative surface that reinterprets, or perhaps best reflects, the presaging movements of the heavens.

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• Les gens de Paris, 1926-1936, Musée Carnavalet (ended February 8)

While this may not fall under contemporary art, I always visit the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris for a smile. The subjects aren’t always uplifting—it’s a history museum, and history isn’t all light and laughter—but this Marais institution perfectly presents its chosen themes accessibly for the general public, without ever sacrificing scholarly rigor. I still remember what I’ve learned in the 2022 Parisiennes citoyennes exhibition (whose poster hangs in my living room), or the 2024 one about the post-revolutionary year of 1793 in Paris, or more recently Agnes Varda last summer, better than I remember any of the history I had nevertheless thoroughly studied for my school exams. This time, it was the 20s that took center stage; not the current 20s, but the last ones, specifically how Paris’s population censuses evolved in the decade between 1926 and 1936. Now, a census might not sound like anyone’s idea of fun, and it certainly isn’t mine. But at the Carnavalet, the numbers came alive interspersed with architectural maquettes, plans, photographs of all neighborhoods, lifestyles, and jobs that a Parisian could have around 1930—along with two audio recordings that carried the accents of the era straight to us.

It was in this exhibition that I discovered my new favorite game: a sort of spot-the-difference, going through the earliest photographs I can find of my neighborhood and hunting for the streets around my own home. (We ended up buying a book specifically about our arrondissement, so some of this information comes partly from there; it’s by no means representative of the whole city, but it was what resonated with me the most.) The 10th arrondissement was surprisingly much more densely populated a century ago than it is today. At the time, it was notoriously unsanitary, with buildings and living conditions that ignored any kind of standard. Historically, it wasn’t a neighborhood of wealth, and poverty dictated the often unlivable circumstances residents had to endure. As a result, multiple complexes had to be demolished and rebuilt, which explains the occasional newer buildings scattered among the older streets. Somehow, amid the harsher realities of a time scarred by war, poverty, disease, and social inequality—issues the exhibition addressed thoughtfully—I found it strangely reassuring to glimpse the human side: photographs of people walking, working, and perhaps even smiling despite it all; seeing how they strove to find happiness, build families and communities, and how, ultimately, they survived. ∎

The recent Monday strikes at the Louvre, now almost routine, are only the most visible symptom of deeper structural problems within the museum. During my eventual visit, I overheard a museum worker explaining the situation, patiently and without drama, to a curious visitor. Behind the closed doors are questions of budgets and priorities: security staff stretched thin and underpaid, acquisitions made at great cost only to disappear almost immediately into storage or in tours de France, buildings whose foundational fragilities are becoming increasingly difficult to conceal (as attested by the Egyptian manuscripts damaged because of a water infiltration, not to mention the theft.) Who would’ve thought, even institutions built to preserve time are themselves subject to it. Even the most prestigious museums need to acknowledge their imperfections more openly: to accept that scale does not guarantee stability, and that authority does not exempt one from learning, adjusting, or repairing. The Louvre is not, and has never been, a finished object.

This feels like an appropriate (if not too dramatic) starting point for a new chapter of exhibition reviews that move across a wide temporal and aesthetic span, looking at artists and exhibitions ranging from the Baroque to Neoclassicism, from modern art to the ultra-contemporary. Different moments, different conditions of visibility, but often the same underlying questions: how works are shown, preserved, framed, and received. And, maybe, what we can learn from them.

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• Georges de la Tour. From shadow to light, Musée Jacquemart André (extended through February 22)

Back in 2022, a painting by Georges de la Tour titled La Madeleine à la veilleuse was one of the opening works of a great (by which I mean both big and impressive) exhibition at the Louvre, Les Choses, which explored the history of still life. One might wonder, first of all, why a picture depicting Magdalene would count as a still life. It technically doesn’t, but the scene is stripped of action, Magdalene appears as a mere meditative presence, and the work is structured around objects reinforcing this atmosphere—particularly the skull in the center of the composition. In still-life terms, the skull functions as a vanitas motif, a memento mori signaling mortality and the transience of worldly existence, and meant to communicate the futility of worldly pursuits. The composition is meditative par excellence. The main character here is the flame; it is the flame that organizes the space, fixes the rhythm of looking, and determines what is allowed to appear and what remains in shadow.

Georges de La Tour is the painter of candlelight, of clair-obscur, of night lights and smoking flames. In a room filled with his paintings, one might feel tempted to whisper, as if not to disturb the order of the night; to tiptoe, as if not to scare the figures whose field of vision extends only as far as the reach of their candle’s glow. Despite the crowds, this hushed attentiveness persists at the Musée Jacquemart-André, which is currently devoting an exhibition to the French painter. The Musée Jacquemart André is where I usually go to taste a piece of Rome in Paris, with its recent exhibitions such as Masterpieces from Galleria Borghese, or Artemisia Gentileschi. Heroine of Art (which I wrote about last summer.) An exhibition dedicated to a French painter changes little about the museum’s overall ambience, it is still in the museum’s preferred, unmistakeable Baroque style.

My favorite Georges de la Tour painting is, like many, in the collection of the Louvre. Titled Le Tricheur à l’as de carreau, it is one of the few that actually don’t include the artist’s signature depictions of candlelit scenes. It has often been praised for the eye contact of the cheater with the spectators, to whom he reveals his secret—the ace of diamonds tucked under his belt, and with whom he aims to fool the younger, richer, better-dressed boy on the right. I am, however, much more fascinated by the exchange of knowing, suspicious glances between the two women in the middle of the composition, their subtle side eyes, not to mention the glamorous garments, the feather headpiece, the pearls, and how the barmaid holds that appetizing glass of wine, just between her thumb and her index.

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• Jacques-Louis David, Musée du Louvre (through January 26)

The museum presented Jacques-Louis David as a particularly relevant artist for today, suggesting that his work raises a question many of us still ask: what can artists do in moments of historical crisis or political upheaval? Yet read less optimistically or heroically, David’s biography prompts me to add a perhaps darker question: what can artists do when their political commitments fail, when they have aligned themselves with what turns out to be the wrong side of history?

David’s career is inseparable from the political turbulence of his time. Under the Ancien Régime, David excelled within the established system, earning early recognition and being admitted at the Académie royale at a remarkably young age. During the French Revolution, he became a fervent supporter of the Republic and an ally of Robespierre, producing iconic revolutionary works such as The Death of Marat (1793) and unfinished The Tennis Court Oath (1789), meant to exemplify the moral rigor and civic idealism he championed. As a member of the revolutionary government, he was complicit in the machinery of the Terror, yet he survived the fall of Robespierre when many collaborators were executed—he is actually one of the few whose lives have later been spared. Later, David aligned himself with Napoleon Bonaparte, even as the former consul declared himself Emperor. Works such as Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1801) and The Coronation of Napoleon (1805-1807) reveal inner contradictions between David’s earlier republican ideals and his work for those actually in power.

Reading David in this light, his oeuvre becomes a reflection not only of artistic mastery but also of the compromises, risks, and moral ambiguities faced by artists navigating political upheaval. Each major phase of his work, the revolutionary as much as the imperial, poses the problem of reconciling vision and reality. Instead of an answer (which I don’t think David himself found in his lifetime), I will mention another work I was more excited to see in person: the 1787 Death of Socrates. The philosophical reference may seem less political, but in the end, it is the story of a public man sentenced to death because of his insistence on speaking the truth.

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• Berthe Weill. Art dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde, Musée de l’Orangerie (through January 26)

The exhibition devoted to Berthe Weill reveals a simple yet often overlooked reality of art history: artists do not become “great” on their own. Their survival, visibility, and eventual recognition depend on the networks of support that surround them, on decades of labor, risk, advocacy, and persistence.

Opening her first gallery in Pigalle in 1901 with modest means, at a moment when the Parisian art scene was still dominated by the Salon system and a handful of powerful dealers, Berthe Weill committed herself to artists who were largely unknown at the time. Her support took many forms: organizing exhibitions, selling works before markets were established, defending artists publicly, and maintaining relationships over decades—she described the artist Émilie Charmy as a “friend of a lifetime”—even in the face of financial precarity and political persecution (her gallery closed in 1940, amid the escalating persecution of Jews in France during the war; Weill herself went on to live until 1950.) In 1933, she published a memoir of her gallery titled “Pan! Dans l’œil…” which, according to the Orangerie, was “a pioneering work in this literary genre.” Active during a period marked by the emergence of now-canonical avant-gardes such as fauvism, cubism, and the School of Paris, Weill played a crucial yet long-undervalued role in the early circulation of modern art, often preceding the recognition later secured by more powerful dealers.

In his 1982 seminal study Art Worlds, the sociologist Howard S. Becker proposes an interactionist model through which to consider art, insisting that the latter is not the product of isolated genius but of collective action—of dealers, critics, framers, installers, printers, and countless others whose work enables artworks to exist. The great merit of this exhibition, besides the beautiful paintings exhibited, is making that collective dimension visible. Focusing on Berthe Weill shifts the narrative of modern art away from heroic individualism and toward the fragile ecosystems that sustained the artistic production of that time.

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• Beatrice Bonino. In the Main in the More, Fondation Pernod Ricard (through January 31)

Catherine David’s curatorial text for In the Main in the More opens with a notion that seems to be on everyone’s minds recently: our attention span. From articles such as Rebecca Jennings’s “How I’m Fixing My Broken Attention Span” for Vulture, who questions the claims of an ongoing “attention crisis” while also investigating different ways to deal with it—ranging between watching Chantal Akerman’s three-hour-long film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles to joining a book club, which Jennings herself recommends—to YouTube investigative journalism from Howtown, debunking the myth of “brain rot,” debates around the contemporary attention span seem to be everywhere. Art has not been spared; but perhaps it can help provide an alternative. In an era of hyper-mediatic, hyper-mediatized art—from the likes of Jeff Koons, or the broader pressure placed on artists to align with the fast rhythm of social media rather than the slower temporality of creation—the reminder stated by Beatrice Bonino and Catherine David feels more than welcome: art asks for close looking. It’s a reminder already present in Renaissance studies, for instance in Daniel Arasse’s (highly accessible!) books such as On n’y voit rien, where attention becomes a method, as the art historian insists on details that would otherwise escape us and on their meanings. Contemporary art deserves to be treated in the same way.

Neon (sentence) for instance becomes, under closer inspection, a stack of carefully folded silk ribbon encased in plastic, despite first impressions and the mirage of the title. Catherine David’s text situates Bonino’s work within her long-standing research into Sanskrit and Indian philosophy (in which the artist holds a PhD), particularly on the idea of existence as action.1 Attention, here, could also be understood as a form of action, as something one does, rather than something one passively possesses or loses.

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The artist was invited by the Fondation Pernod Ricard to also include work by other artists who have inspired her, and Bonino selected eight. Among them, one presence that makes itself felt is that of Dieter Roth, the German-Swiss artist known for her use of organic materials often already in the process of decomposition.2 Her 1988 work Two shirts recalls the quite recent (if not still ongoing) controversies surrounding Prada Men’s FW26 collection, which sported dirty and wrinkled shirts designed by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons. Some read it as luxury garments cosplaying as poor, some as “collapse economy core;” but these shirts might also be an albeit conceived critique of the dominating white-collar aesthetics and axiology. In Bonino’s work, the commentary is made more explicit through gestures such as the display of two deformed chocolates encased in plexiglas “as jewels” for the 2024 Funny and Fun, in which the commercial value of the object is replaced by its emotional value. How many of us haven’t found melted candies at the bottom of our pockets, and kept them long past their edible life for reasons that have nothing to do with taste?

David adds an important distinction here: this is not an umpteenth artistic repurposing of objects symbolizing “consumer society,” but rather a collection of materials and the affects attached to them. As an avid collector of completely useless things, I get it. I’m fairly sure I’ve kept small paper cups like Dieter Roth’s though, unlike Roth, not long enough for them to grow mold. There were also small silver cubes—Matt Browning’s 2024 Plastic Freedom—looking as if still wrapped in its protective plastic film, the kind you delay removing, either to preserve the freshness of something you paid too much for, or perhaps out of a form of respect for the object itself. The affect becomes even clearer in the presence of Lutz Bacher’s video Snow. I found myself watching what initially seemed like a static shot of the Twin Towers, seen from a window as snow falls. The black-and-white atmosphere was so absorbing that when the hands holding the camera moved ever so slightly, it felt like a major plot twist. I followed the subsequent, still very subtle, camera movements with even greater attention. I noticed everything. I felt everything. I fixed my attention span.

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• Felicità 2025, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (through February 1st)

About a year ago, I wrote a piece about a tendency I noticed in a lot of contemporary art, which I interpreted as a change of perspective. It’s not as much about the abandonment of classic art historical perspective, a move which has been accomplished long ago, but about the adoption of a new one, one which is specific to screens, memes and social media. I noticed this again last week when I saw the exhibition at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. James Dosa is the winner of the acquisition award, meaning his work was selected to be included in the Beaux-Arts collection. 1/2 générique, Viva, Mom’s Mark… his three exhibited paintings stage a collision between visual regimes: on the one hand, flattened, screen-based imagery borrowed from advertising, packaging, or digital communication; on the other, a slower, more physical painterly language, classical techniques such as oil on canvas through which these codes are reinterpreted. Dosa creates spaces that allow the logic of mass-produced images to rub up against the material resistance of painting itself.

The annual Felicità exhibitions don’t show the the entire graduating class, but those who have received honors from the jury. Among the other artworks I liked was Caroline Rambaud’s multi-screen installation Fille Ultime. In my recent overview of 2025 cinema, I read the spreading cinematic representations of violence, or of vulgarity, as something which for many filmmakers appears as the primary way to depict the contemporary world, with all its violence and vulgarity. Rambaud’s work transforms the viewer’s experience of this very phenomenon into a space for reflection on “the representation of violence, the permanence of trauma, and how it is possible to inhabit it creatively.”

The Ukrainian painter Viktoriia Oreshko renders the traces of war in domestic spaces, often through large-scale works such as Dans un coin and Vingt-sept jours, which were present in the exhibition alongside a small canvas titled Fleurs que mon père m’a offert. Her sparse, intimate, interiors do not show the conflict directly; they situate us within its horizon, balancing the fragility of human existence against the material hints such as a broken vase or decaying enclosures. But in the midst of it all, she also suggests that life can persist even under the shadow of destruction.

In Apolline Regent’s work, the familiar and the absurd collide, questioning how meaning is produced and destabilized. Canvases and objects—ranging from a painting of a toaster next to handwriting « il n’y a pas de grille-pain, appelé toaster par les Anglo-Saxons, car il a pris feu. C’était pas là mais c’était dangereux », to a caricature of the Mona Lisa whose postcard whistled as one exited the exhibition, to a painting of flowers inscribed « sans racine », or a toothbrush tied to a canvas—constantly reverse the hierarchy between signifier (the object or text) and the signified (its meaning or concept). Echoes of Magritte’s wit and conceptual displacement, that of his famous La Trahison des images (1928-29), are brought back to life in the way Regent isolates and recontextualizes objects, making their representation and function explicit while highlighting the arbitrariness of their signification.

Winca Mendy’s installations of prints (lumen, bichromated gum, platinum-palladium) explore the circulation of invisible forces, both luminous and conceptual; as such, in the exhibition they are presented as analogous to spirit photography. As explained by the curatorial text, Mendy conceptually draws on Yannis Varoufakis’ idea of the “capital cloud,” which highlights that contemporary economies are structured by opaque, algorithmic systems governing labor, consumption, and social relations. His photographic processes act as interfaces for making these forces perceptible: they here become the characters in a contemporary vision, or rereading, of the Apocalypse according to Saint John.

After all, the exhibition asks how we can inhabit a world where disaster seems imminent. “How can we build community, repair, slow down, represent and re-enchant the world, and perhaps manage to extricate ourselves from the continuous flow of images and representations that reduce reality?” ∎

However, I am here with a proposal for a different Parisian Museum Avenue, and that is Avenue du Président Wilson. Just a small portion of it, actually: the stretch wedged between Avenue d’Iéna and Avenue Marceau. You’ve probably guessed it by now, I’m talking about the strip lined with four major museums: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Palais de Tokyo, Palais Galliera, and Musée Guimet. A trip to one of them means a trip to a second. (Not to all, since they are too big to all fit in the same day.) There’s always so much to see in this particular portion of the 16ème arrondissement—which is, to me at least, noteworthy given the particularly uneventful nature of this posh neighborhood. This January closing exhibition tour starts with one stop on that Museum Avenue, at Palais Galliera, then spreads throughout the city according to the different exhibitions’ end dates.

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• Rick Owens, Temple of Love, Palais Galliera (through January 4) & Tisser, broder, sublimer. Les savoir-faire de la mode (through October 18)

Entering this exhibition felt like entering what you think is a shack and instead discovering a cathedral. Not that the Neo-Renaissance palace housing it would ever resemble anything like a shack. But the freezing never-ending wait in line for the security control and then the ticket control and then the hordes of visitors sluggishly figuring out security and ticket control in the miniature lobby—these things can make you forget the noble origins of the place you’re getting into. As soon as I stepped into the Rick Owens retrospective, all that trouble went away. It became part of a distant if even existent past, all overshadowed by the twelve holy figures throning before my eyes. And I don’t use the word lightly; dressed in white tunics, one more mesmerizing than the other, and against a backdrop of brown felt and Rick Owens’s voice reading and rereading a book passage like a mantra, the twelve (surely a carefully chosen number) silhouettes truly emanated holiness.

Owens was reading a passage of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s A Rebours (Against the Grain), in English and then in French. The book is only one in a constellation of inspiration sources that have shaped the designer’s youth, mindset, and later his approach of fashion, and that were recreated in this first room of the show. The space was guarded by imposing grey-toned mannequins dressed in some of his finest creations, across seasons and collections, interspersed with film clips ranging from the 1934 Cleopatra to Owens’s 1998 collection Monsters; while its center was dominated by two long tables adorned with other such cultural muses: Huysmans’s book, vinyl covers by the likes of Iggy Pop and David Bowie, diapositives and cutlery from Les Deux Cafés on Las Palmas Avenue—a Hollywood institution created in 1996 by Owens’s partner, Michèle Lamy, who was also the one to discover his artistry in 1987, when he was hired at her design studio as a pattern maker. The integration of these sources as proper exhibits must have appeared as a necessity, since throughout his career Owens himself never hesitated to pay homage to them, be it on the invitation cards for his shows, or on a 2016 tripartite label representing a model, Joseph Beuys and Iggy Pop, which immediately caught my attention.

The inspirational source I was most sensitive to was, in fact, Beuys. The walls of this same space were lined with brown felt, an unpopular exhibitional choice for the current white cube-dominated era. One group of mannequins was also dressed in the material, its earth-toned roughness contrasting with the pure white adorning the central figures, as well as some of the silhouettes on the right. Felt is a fetish material throughout the œuvre of Joseph Beuys. It is foundational to the artist’s self-mythology, according to which, when the plane he was flying during the war crashed somewhere in Eastern Europe, he was saved and cared for by a group of locals who covered him in a felt blanket and fed him honey. (As it has been written, the point isn’t to establish whether this story is true, but to see what its enunciation means for the artist’s body of work.) In the 1990s, when Rick Owens collected secondhand felt that had belonged to the military and then used it for his creations, he stated: “THE RELICS OF WAR ARE A REMINDER OF THE FRAGILITY OF PEACE AND PROTECTION AND REMIND US TO VALUE OUR SAFETY AND SECURITY.”

The following room was yet another blow in the face. After being confined within the felted walls and in the immemorial time of cross-cultural, cross-temporal references, one was plunged into an unexpected burst of sun and color. Sure, the black or dark-colored outfits were still very much present, but the sumptuous light that was bathing them rebirthed the show anew. Here, the mannequins stood in line one behind the other on silver pedestals, symbolically reproducing the walking etiquette of fashion shows. Contrary to the latter, there wasn’t just one coherent collection being presented, but a myriad of materials, pairings, visions. I was struck by the elevated simplicity of some pieces, such as a plain black dress adorned with a massive golden horn-shaped neckpiece; as well as by how well pairings which I would’ve thought superfluous actually worked. A pleated satin white top with oversize sleeves, assembled with a pair of white leather pants covered by a cutout long skirt recalling both fish scales and flower petals, turned a model (whose face was also covered in silver leaf) into a monumental swan. I spent the rest of my time in the exhibition sat on an armchair also designed by Owens, who recently incorporated furniture into his creative approach, in front of four screens reproducing his fashion shows in Paris (in cultural locations such as Palais de Tokyo—AW 2015, SS 2016, SS 2024, SS 2025—or the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, for his first ever Parisian show, AW 2003-2004), and the Lido in Venice (where most of the brand’s production is based, which is why a discreet video show was organised there during the pandemic). Speaking of video, the documentary Rick, Michèle, and Scarlett, which is available on YouTube, was also shown in the exhibition, just before a final reconstruction of the couple’s carefully designed and decorated room.

The retrospective is now over; but you can still queue in the numbing, penetrating January cold outside of Palais Galliera to see their new exhibition Tisser, broder, sublimer. Les savoir-faire de la mode (through October 18). The basement show (which is actually the museum’s bigger exhibition space) begins with a flowery Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld to the left; a flowery Balenciaga dress to the right. While I’m not a big fan of florals in fashion (not in spring, not anytime), these dresses, followed by the many others presented near them, are among these objects which when observed closely, in person, with the naked eye, take on a whole new appearance, a whole new existence, birthing details that one may not have even suspected. As it happens, I had forgotten my eyeglasses at home on the morning of my visit (in an overly optimistic decision to leave home with my sunglasses on, in late December), and was forced by the circumstances (by my actually naked, shortsighted eye) to kneel just to be able to read the labels, and to stick my face to the protective glass shielding the luxury garments from our unconsciously desiring hands, just in order to see them. This accidental fact gave me a way in to all the points of sewing, of stitching, to the impressive craftsmanship with which every single detail was assembled, to the hours, days, weeks, if not months of work which must have been spent in over to achieve such masterpieces. This applies equally to the contemporary haute couture outfits that we usually only see in fashion week reports (but never in person), and to the older garments, whether royal or simply aristocratic, already astonishing for their state of conservation, which has allowed them to reach us to this day.

The subtitle, “Crafts and Trades of Fashion,” suggests that the show is conceived as an encyclopedia of fashion expertise; no one designer or style is highlighted (although this edition of what will become a series of exhibitions—in classic Palais Galliera style—is dominated by floral motifs), but the idea is to show what kinds of craftsmanship made it possible to even create these garments. As such, the dazzling show of dresses was followed by a corridor lined with the names, stories, and creations of highly specialized, and many highly recognized, artisans of the fashion world. Not the designers which we all know (or at least whom we have heard of), but those who create the luxury buttons, the feather headpieces, the color pairings, the jewel appliqués, the dentelle—I suppose we all agree lace is a laborious material to produce, but actually seeing the process and the people behind it makes that labor impossible to overlook. This couture craft anthology can be followed by a visit to one of the following, on the same street: Palais de Tokyo, MAM (both have great shows on view, and both will be in the February iteration of this closing exhibitions guide), or Musée Guimet (whose permanent collection I can’t recommend enough; it’s the only place in Paris that reminds me of the mesmerizing Asian art galleries at the Met).

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• Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten, Grand Palais (through January 4)

A recent ArtReview article by Joanna Walsh, titled “The Inequalities of Scale,” began with a mention of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Hon (1966) : “a massive hollow sculpture commissioned by Hulten and originally populated by her partner Tinguely’s kinetic works, as well as work by Per Olof Ultvedt.” Anthropomorphic, one entered this woman-shaped space through the opening between her legs: the same place through which we all came into the world. The monumental, colorful, daring piece was created as a site-specific installation for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (an institution which had been created by Hulten himself in 1958, before he went on to become the first director of the newly opened Centre Pompidou in 1977; but that is another story). What matters here is that de Saint Phalle was given carte blanche in terms of everything, including in terms of scale. The sculpture, part of her Nanas series, measured 13 × 14 × 23 m in length and weighed 6 tons. After being exhibited for three whole months, it was destructed over just three days. “This didn’t happen because of some disaster. This literally major piece of feminist art was deliberately destroyed. The reasons are unclear but the publication Hon – a history (1967) states, ‘Her destruction was not undertaken because it was the only way to let her out, but simply because it was part of her destiny’ – neatly circumventing the problem of the practicality of keeping ‘her’.” Walsh goes on to use this example as a symptom of a larger issue of scale in contemporary art—that of the artist pulled between the desire to create big on one hand, and the dread and anxiety and sometimes just impossibility of transportation (or conservation, or general logistics) costs on the other.

Scale is an important aspect when considering the work of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, as well as Pontus Hulten’s career. If not the most important one. Unlike the ephemeral destiny of Hon, many of de Saint Phalle and Tinguely’s grand public sculptures can still be viewed in different places across the world to this day: I discovered this many years ago when, arriving at the Zurich Hauptbahnhof, I was enraptured by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Guardian Angel sculpture hanging from the ceiling, protecting travelers since 1997, its imposing colorful irregularities, blue skin, and golden wings nothing like the immemorial constance of the Swiss architecture surrounding the train station. Other, perhaps even more striking examples were presented in the exhibition, such as the couple’s Cyclop, a monumental mirror-covered head 22.50 meters high, made out of 350 tons of steel in a forest (Milly-la-Forêt) not far from Paris. Monumental was also the exhibition’s closing piece, titled Hell, a Small Beginning (1984), consisting of metal, found objects, and electric motors assembled by Jean Tinguely and reconfigured for each presentation. Here, it was “activated”—like most of Tinguely’s kinetic artworks—every nine minutes for a duration of two, during which the metal pieces spun, swirled, twirled, danced to the sound of their own nuts and bolts, pure mechanics. For those two minutes, everyone in the room was utmostly captivated, enchanted, to a degree of joyful attention one may imagine reserved for children discovering the circus for the first time. (Or adults discovering Calder’s.)

What I found relevant in the approach of the Grand Palais exhibition was the choice of not focusing on one of these three artistic figures, but instead showing how their interlaced trajectories benefited every single one of them. De Saint Phalle and Tinguely first met in Paris in 1956, and soon became a couple; although they ultimately separated, they decided to get married in 1971, convinced that “they were the best placed to defend the artistic legacy of the other if ever one of them should disappear.” This was ultimately the task left to Niki de Saint Phalle when Tinguely died in 1991, a decade before her; a museum dedicated to the Swiss artist was ultimately opened in Basel in 1996, of which Pontus Hulten was, once again, the first director. (He must have had a thing for first times.) To be completely honest, I do feel that de Saint Phalle was disadvantaged by this turn of events: although her work is present in Museum Tinguely and a great number of world-class collections, no one was responsible of opening an institution dedicated to her work…

Hulten, for his part, first met Tinguely in 1954, then de Saint Phalle in 1960. Not only did they form a friendship that lasted for the rest of their lives (as shown in a beautiful photograph taken decades later, of Hulten visiting de Saint Phalle in California, where the artist had moved in 1993 for health reasons), but the two also formed the core of the Swedish curator’s extensive network of art world contacts, particularly in Paris, where Hulten became a central figure in the life of major contemporary art institutions, including the birth of the Centre Pompidou. It was through this network that he also earned the recognition (and legitimacy) necessary to open the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, as well as for the many other projects later entrusted to him, which were to consolidate the legend of this great museum administrator.

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• Forever young, MAC VAL (through January 4)

To my shame, having lived in Paris for about seven years now, I only recently came to visit the neighboring Vitry-sur-Seine. Prompted by a young painters’s prize exhibition known as Novembre à Vitry, I decided to follow that visit with the Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC VAL), which has been on my list for ages. The MAC VAL is a relatively recent museum, inaugurated in 2005. Last year, it celebrated its 20th birthday: it’s even younger than I am. (“You can’t be serious when you’re 20,” as the museum’s press release declares.) As such, I felt that it was significantly better organized than most other French cultural institutions, when it comes to both visitor experience and collection display. The latter is exclusively dedicated to post-1950s art in France, and the museum also engages in punctual, thematic reorganizations of the permanent holdings. I found the current display not only compelling and relevant, but also particularly original: based on the 1667 hierarchy of painting genres established by the art historian André Félibien, which has regulated artistic production (and its interpretation) for centuries, the curator Nicolas Surlapierre and his team propose a rereading of the five established categories: still life, landscape, genre painting, portrait, and the throning history painting, here respectively become goods, horizons, gestures, people, and hours. Without any pecking order this time, of course.

Youthfulness and the unbearable lightness of being were pursued in the temporary exhibition which ended on January 4, titled Forever young after the unmistakable 1984 Alphaville song. One big space, no barriers, at most a few movable temporary walls to prop up some of the photographs, paintings, installations. This, I feel, already says something about the museum’s approach: not one practice is privileged, the presented artists aren’t chosen according to some preexisting criteria. Instead, the curator Frank Lamy (assisted by Julien Blanpied) surveyed cultural professionals to craft a selection of 20 young artists (born between 1973 and 1997) sharing a connection with the MAC VAL (having seen, for example, works that marked their youth or their careers), and whose practices are rooted in “a reflection of and on reality, echoing the world.”

Having a restricted group of only 20 artists allowed us, visitors, to engage much more intimately with the presented works. I remember entering the show and stopping to observe the little screens on fragile wooden constructions by Sarah-Anaïs Desbenoit, which struck me for both personal and aesthetic reasons—they reminded me of little maquettes I would build for school as a child, but they also reveal a conceptual intertwining between the visual media which currently occupy most of our lives, and architecture, constructing a subtle commentary on the ways in which we inhabit the world today. The overly specific place-related titles such as RER C or 55 Av. Anatole France also have something Erauxesque to them; I probably would have included the series in the Extérieurs. Anni Ernaux et la photographie exhibition, shown in 2024 at the MEP and last summer in Aix-en-Provence, which is where I saw it.

I also vividly remember Coco De RinneZ’s autoportrait series POUR QUI SE PREND COCO DE RINNEZ? [Who does she think she is?], a humoristic take on the issue of artistic inspiration/appropriation, in which the artist photographs herself disguised as various cultural figures, from Warhol’s Monroe to Angela Davis, via Tupac, Frida Kahlo, and Queen Elisabeth II. I remember Jordan Roger’s hand embroidery Hell Soon, made of beads, cotton wool, rhinestones, plexiglass, photographs; and his dystopian Barbieland set of fired and glazed earthenware Burn Them All. I remember Maïlys Lamotte-Paulet’s immersive installation Le terrain c’est 11h, composed of more materials than I could count, including concrete, a carpet, a soccer jersey, and a video playing on an iPhone, all in shades of red, all as if waiting for something (perhaps the artist’s September performance, which I missed), suspended in a temporal limbo. I remember being amused, but also taken aback by Raphaël Maman’s Ce que pèse le réel [The weight of reality], in which concrete blocks are laid on top of mechanical scales to embody “the relationship between building standards and body weight,” and I remember deeply resonating with Yann Esteve’s Là où dansent les lucioles, where memories in the shape of photographic prints form an environment with objects from the places where they occurred: wood, shells, aluminum, stone, marble. I of course remember Rebecca Topakian’s photographic series on film, printed on matte baryta paper as well as on obsidian and kunzite from a lake, in which the artist deals with her diasporic Armenian identity and tries to recover phantasmatic stories of her ancestors. Would it be redundant to say this was a memorable exhibition?

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• My Name is Orson Welles, Cinémathèque française (through January 11)

Which self-declared cinephile hasn’t watched Citizen Kane one evening as a teenager, and thought about it ever since? Yet how many of us actually have a deep knowledge of Welles’s career not only in cinema, but also in theater, radio, and advertising? The exhibition at the Cinémathèque française aimed to correct this lacuna, and to shed new light on a somewhat controversial figure in film history.

The life of Orson Welles is the classic story of a child prodigy who peaked at 26, and never again came close to equaling his greatest masterpiece. It is hard to imagine the director and protagonist of Citizen Kane as the young adult that he was in 1941, when this “greatest debut of film history” came out; this should of course in part be credited to the incredible make-up artist who worked on set, Maurice Seiderman, “The Best Make-up Man in The World” according to Welles himself. Seiderman’s mastery combined to that of the young actor-director made us all believe in the aging protagonist and in his fading power. But Welles’s already extensive experience also played a big role in that. Born in 1915 in Wisconsin and losing both of his parents quite young, his acting adventure began on an escapade to Ireland, where he was on sabbatical “to escape a Harvard scholarship”; aged 16, he lied to the Dublin’s Gate Theatre’s managers about his age and his fame, pretending to be famous in America; his unpaired energy, and not his cover story, is what got him in.

Returning to the US with a pit stop in New York, Welles soon became a director at the Mercury Theatre in Harlem, where he staged the first Macbeth in which all roles were played by Black actors. His name was, nonetheless, more famously (and infamously) publicly associated with radio. While producing the show Mercury Theatre on the Air for CBS, where Welles would recite radio adaptations of famous novels, the actor made the headlines by adapting The War of the Worlds by British writer and homonym H. G. Wells, a science-fiction novel announcing the arrival of Martians on Earth. As it happens, the specificity of radio as a medium and the power of evocation made thousands believe that aliens had, in fact, landed in New Jersey; a literary, theatrical radio show turned into nationwide panic, as emergency services were flooded with terrified calls asking for updates on the alien situation. This, of course, created a name for Welles, although not the best one necessarily.

I wrote about the power of radio, though in a completely different context—that of Cold War jazz broadcasts—here:

But Hollywood wanted him. According to his own testimony, he managed to make his overly ambitious first film because when approached by the industry, he asked for unrealistic contract terms, thinking he would be left alone; instead, they conformed to his wishes, and that is how Citizen Kane came to be. The film is obviously considered a masterpiece today, both for its narrative technique, a Proustian approach based on a sequence of flashbacks and time leaps, and for its technical achievements, such as a depth of field that was still unparalleled at the time. But faced with various enemies—such as American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, on whom the character of Kane is based, and who did the most to ban the film from theaters—Citizen Kane did not enjoy the same acclaim upon its release as it does today. This also meant that the director’s subsequent film attempts were not as successful as hoped; although many of them were great, none of them were triumphant.

He married Rita Hayworth, they divorced, he reinvested himself in his acting career, he moved to Europe, he rediscovered his first love, that of theater and of Shakespeare in particular: none of this was enough to restore him to the glory of his younger years, and so it was that in the latter part of his life he ended up earning his living by acting in commercials. This could seem like a really sad story, if it weren’t for the carefully edited closing video of exhibition. Composed of multiple monologue fragments pronounced throughout Welles’s career, as well as his acceptance speech upon receiving the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1975, this final touch makes it all the more clear that Welles never attempted and failed to become a successful director; he loved movies, of any kind, and did his best to make them on his own. “As a director… I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my own work, in other words I’m crazy… [audience laughs] But it’s a fact that many of the films you’ve seen tonight would never have been made otherwise. Or if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn’t have been mine. The truth is I don’t believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it weren’t for this: my own particular contrarity. Let us raise our cups, then… and drink together to what really matters to us all: to our crazy and beloved profession, to the movies, the good movies, the every possible kind.”

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• Sibylle Bergemann – Le Monument & François-Xavier Gbré – Radio Ballast, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson (through January 11)

I visited the two most recent exhibitions at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson during Paris Photo Week—aka that time of the year, sometime in November, when the Paris Photo fair agitation spreads into a myriad of photography-related events all throughout the city. A selection of works from Sibylle Bergemann’s Monument series (1975-86) was also exceptionally presented at the fair, pointing to the then ongoing exhibition; which is why I have already mentioned this series in my previous article.

The series documents the prolonged and ultimately fraught construction of the Marx-Engels Monument in East Berlin, tracing its transformation from a site of ideological ambition into one permeated by uncertainty and latent absurdity, which today reads as a prefiguration of the ideological collapse to come. Rather than presenting the monument as a finished symbol of socialist triumph, Bergemann photographs it in fragments and states of incompletion—scaffolding, isolated figures, displaced heads—using repetition over time to reveal the gap between political rhetoric and material reality.

Sonia Voss is a great curator who has worked with multiple artists across Eastern Europe; I believe her knowledge in this regard allowed for the best possible contextualization of what Bergemann’s photographic series meant in its time and political regime. It was, of course, originally presented as a project documenting the working process for a Great sculpture of two Great thinkers; but the subtle flaws in its various stages of incompleteness allow us to see the photographs more as a situated, albeit camouflaged, commentary than as simple reproductions. In the very possibility of that tension lay the subversive nature of the photographic medium.

In François-Xavier Gbré’s exhibition, the scars of ideology are documented less as outdated cultural artifacts, and more as the material remnants of colonialism. In 2023, the photographer undertook a journey along the railway running the length of Côte d’Ivoire. Constructed during the colonial period, this line was designed to organize the movement of raw materials from the interior of the country to Abidjan and onward to France. According to the curatorial text, Gbré’s photographs engage with this infrastructure as a historical framework to bring together different temporal moments: the colonial era, the period following independence, and contemporary realities, revealing how these layered histories continue to shape the landscape.

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• Minimal, Bourse du commerce (through January 19)

This is the only exhibition that hasn’t already ended at the time of this publication; you can still run to see it until Monday, January 19. It is a known fact that as of recently in the Parisian art world, private foundations have a kind of monopoly on large, ambitious retrospectives, especially when it comes to high-profile works and artists. This one is no exception. After the Arte Povera retrospective exactly one year ago curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (whose Rotunda display was quite similar to the current one) and the successful Body and Soul exhibition curated by Emma Lavigne, the Bourse de commerce—which is the Parisian outpost of the Fondation Pinault, with two other locations in Venice, Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana—appointed Jessica Morgan, director of the Dia Art Foundation, to curate the current retrospective dedicated to the minimalist movement, in all its iterations. It is a somewhat lesser known fact, although still noteworthy, that Parisian institutions are hosting an ever larger number of American artists, curators, directors, more than was the case before. Besides Morgan, I can think of Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, now artistic director of the Echo Delay Reverb exhibition at Palais de Tokyo; Philip Guston on view at Musée Picasso; or Jeffrey Gibson at Hauser&Wirth. I made the same observation earlier last fall; let me know in the comments if I should elaborate on it.

Whichever way we may read its workings, Minimal is, as expected, a blockbuster show made possible by heavy money. Which is not to criticize it. Contrary to what it may seem, I am actually a big fan of minimalism. I love getting lost in Agnes Martins’s grids, and I would make the trip to Marfa, Texas just to see Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation. What I loved in this exhibition besides the usual artists associated with the movement, and besides how close we can get to the mesmerizing artworks in the Rotunda, was the inclusion of more diverse pieces which contradict the standardizing (both aesthetically and socially) appearance the movement may have. I loved seeing Maren Hassinger’s floor-based sculpture River (1972), made of galvanized steel chains and rope to point to the transatlantic slave trade. It was shown as part of a section—one of seven: Lumière, Mono-ha, Équilibre, Surface, Grille, Monochrome, Matérialisme—on “Materialism,” focusing on the use of natural materials by “artists exploring the associative qualities of these media while transforming them into geometric and sterilized forms.” Another example is Jackie Winsor’s Bound Grid (1971-72) made of wood branches and hemp, which uses nature to form an unnatural motif: the grid, this famous defining element for 20th century art.

In her 1979 essay entitled “Grids,” Rosalind Krauss posits the grid as a central formal element of pictorial modernity: she identifies the grid with an operation that “drives out” the dimensions of reality and replaces them with a single surface, amounting to a reduction of depth in favor of a flat, autonomous frontality.1 Krauss reads this frontality as a declaration of independence for the modern artistic field: the grid produces a geometry, regularity, and standardization that remove the work from imitation of the natural world and assign it its own existence, internal to its own perceptual and formal rules. Art historians such as Elissa Auther shift this Kraussian reading by re-examining the grid in the context of a consolidation of the hierarchy between “arts” and “crafts,” facilitated by Clement Greenberg’s criticism.2 According to Auther, who questions the modernist rejection of the decorative, the grid also becomes a place where the naturalization of this hierarchy is played out. In works such as Bound Grid, relying precisely on materiality, this quarrel appears surpassed.

Another discovery in the exhibition that helps to deepen our understanding of the history of minimalism is the Japanese movement Mono-ha, translated as the “School of Things.” Initiated by a group of philosophy-students-turned-artists, Mono-ha promotes an artistic practice based on the rearrangement of existing materials rather than the fabrication of new sculptural forms. This may sound a lot like ready-mades, but it’s more about assemblages: “a stone balanced on glass, a wooden beam leaning against a wall, or a sheet of paper placed on raw earth. These gestures shift attention away from the artist’s hand and toward the interaction between object, space, and viewer.” This was the second similarity I found to last year’s Arte Povera exhibition. The more you see, the more this glossary of references and parallels grows, until one day it may swallow this whole city and its museums and galleries and private foundations and then spit it all out, different, except it’s all the same. As Deleuze has written, “The more our daily life appears standardised, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely, the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death.”3 ∎

In this post: 3 art history books for reviews I was commissioned; 3 books about the art market; 4 books about contemporary art biennials; 3 history books; 3 artist monographs; one foundational art historical theory book; one theater play; my Olga Tokarczuk summer; more novels; and Joan Didion’s early journalism, a genre in itself.

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1) 3 art history books for reviews I was commissioned:

Rachel Rajalu (dir.), Les Flâneries en paysages (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024)

Ida Soulard, Anni Albers. Abstractions concrètes (Les presses du réel, 2024)

Freya Gowrley, Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage (Princeton University Press, 2024)

This first category brings together three art history books I read in the context of commissioned reviews for the French journal Critique d’art. Although they address different objects—walking, textile, and collage—they share a common concern with the ways art history constructs or expands its own categories. Les Flâneries en paysages examines flânerie (one of those not fully translatable words) as an aesthetic, pedagogical, and political practice, focusing on its role in artistic education. The book combines phenomenological reflections on embodied attention with experimental contributions that range from concrete pedagogical dispositifs to theoretical discussions of walking, listening, and sound recording, as well as artists’ first-person accounts. The publication deliberately adopts a collective and fragmentary form that reflects the dispersed, situational nature of flânerie itself.

Ida Soulard’s Anni Albers. Abstractions concrètes : une histoire textile de la modernité is the first French monograph devoted to the full scope of Anni Albers’s career. Soulard proposes a reconfiguration of modern art history through textile materiality, structure, and technique. Anchored in a biographical framework that follows Albers from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain and from weaving to works on paper, the book mobilizes a wide range of theoretical references and technical analyses to articulate what the author identifies as a “textile way of thinking.” Particular attention is paid, again, to pedagogy; to the concept of materialgerecht; and to Albers’s engagement with pre-Columbian textiles, showing how textile practice operated for the artist as a method of knowledge.

In Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage, Freya Gowrley offers an ambitious re-reading of collage that challenges its canonical modernist and European framing. By integrating non-Western assemblage practices and emphasizing the material and technological conditions of fragmented forms, the book seeks to broaden the historiography of collage while questioning established distinctions between art and craft. Gowrley’s methodology alternates between broad definitions and focused case studies ranging from anonymous photographic albums to quilts, memory jugs, and the work of Hannah Höch, foregrounding the material logic of assemblage as a means of reassessing inclusion and exclusion within art historical narratives. The full versions of my reviews will be published in Critique d’art in June 2026.

2) 3 books for a university course I taught in the Spring about the art market:

Nathalie Moureau, Le marché de l’art contemporain (La Découverte, 2016)

Raymonde Moulin, L’artiste, l’institution et le marché (Flammarion, 1992)

Alain Quemin, Le monde des galeries. Art contemporain, structure du marché et internationalisation (CNRS Éditions, 2021)

For anyone aiming to understand the economic, institutional, and symbolic mechanisms that shape contemporary art, these three publications offer complementary analytical frameworks. Nathalie Moureau’s Le marché de l’art contemporain offers a great introduction to the economic dynamics of the contemporary art market, using economic tools to demystify what is often perceived as an irrational sphere of high prices and celebrity artists. It was particularly useful for introducing students to key notions such as primary and secondary markets, uncertainty, reputation, and speculation, while also properly historicizing the contemporary art market, which did not emerge in a vacuum: value and prices are formed through interactions among actors and constructed through established conventions as much as the physical characteristics of works (if not even more).

Raymonde Moulin’s L’artiste, l’institution et le marché approaches similar questions from a sociological standpoint. Rather than isolating the market as an autonomous sphere, Moulin analyzes the relations of interdependence between artists, cultural institutions, public authorities, critics, and commercial actors. Her work shows how artistic recognition is produced through the convergence between institutional validation and market success, and how these processes affect artistic careers over time. Finally, Alain Quemin’s Le monde des galeries focuses more specifically on galleries as professional and structural actors within the contemporary art market. Based on extensive fieldwork, the book examines how galleries operate, how they position themselves nationally and internationally, and how inequalities are produced within the gallery system itself. Quemin pays particular attention to the effects of internationalization, the growing concentration of visibility and resources, and the unequal access of artists to the most powerful segments of the market.

3) 4 books about contemporary art biennials, both for the class I taught in the Fall and for my own research:

Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø (eds.), The Biennial Reader (Bergen Kunsthall, Hatje Cantz, 2010)

Caroline A. Jones, The Global Work of Art: World's Fairs, Biennials, and the Aesthetics of Experience (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)

Charles Green, Anthony Gardner, Biennials, Triennials and documenta: the exhibitions that created contemporary art (Wiley/Blackwell, 2016)

Panos Kompatsiaris, The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials. Spectacles of Critique, Theory and Art (Routledge, 2017)

The Biennial Reader, edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø, is a foundational anthology for anyone interested in art biennials of any kind, from their emergence to the global proliferation of their model. Rather than proposing a single definition, the volume assembles competing genealogies and analytical frameworks, emphasizing the heterogeneity of biennial formats and contexts. One of its central contributions is to situate contemporary biennials within longer exhibition histories, particularly those of nineteenth-century world’s fairs. In her essay “Biennial Culture: A Longer History,” Caroline A. Jones demonstrates that biennials inherit structural features from these earlier exhibitionary forms: claims to universality, pedagogical ambitions, close ties to tourism and urban development, and a recurring rhythm that promises renewal while relying on repetition. Jones argues that biennials function less as neutral containers for artworks than as “world pictures,” in which the placement of art within a broader spatial, political, and urban framework actively shapes meaning. This historical perspective challenges the tendency of biennials to present themselves as purely contemporary or future-oriented phenomena.

Caroline A. Jones expands these arguments in The Global Work of Art, where she develops a broader theory of how contemporary art operates under conditions of globalization. Biennials play a central role in this account as event-based structures that codify art as experience rather than as isolated object. Jones links the rise of installation art to the proliferation of biennials, arguing that both respond to shared geopolitical and aesthetic conditions. Her analysis insists on the importance of spatial, urban, and institutional framing: artworks acquire significance through their insertion into global exhibitionary circuits that connect cities, audiences, infrastructures, and cultural ambitions. Jones introduces a distinction between commerce-driven globalization and mondialisation, emphasizing epistemic shifts in how art itself is contextualized and understood.

Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s Biennials, Triennials, and documenta offers a different perspective, grounded in detailed case studies form exhibition history. The book traces the development of biennials from the late nineteenth century through successive “waves,” paying particular attention to post-war and post-Cold War contexts. Green and Gardner examine how biennials have served as sites of dialogue, contestation, and experimentation, especially outside the traditional centers of Euro-American art. They analyze exhibitions such as São Paulo, Havana, and various triennials as attempts to reconfigure international cultural exchange, sometimes explicitly challenging Cold War binaries or dominant geopolitical alignments. A great merit of the text is showing how many such manifestations operate within contradictory conditions where critical ambitions and institutional constraints coexist: we cannot redue biennials to either neoliberal spectacle or critical counter-space, and Green and Gardner choose the right case studies to exemplify this point. To be read in continuation of the previous works, Panos Kompatsiaris’s The Politics of Contemporary Art Biennials focuses more explicitly on the political logic of large-scale exhibitions since the 1990s. Drawing on political theory and institutional critique, Kompatsiaris argues that ambiguity is not a failure of biennials but a structural condition of their durability. Biennials must continually negotiate tensions between avant-garde claims, public accessibility, critical discourse, and institutional legitimacy. Kompatsiaris emphasizes that these political dimensions such as activism and social engagement are inseparable from the spectacle and scale of biennials themselves, which simultaneously enable critique and absorb it.

4) 3 history books:

Christine Stansell, American Moderns. Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000)

Sandra Bott, Jussi Hanhimäki, Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, Marco Wyss (eds.), Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War (Routledge, 2017)

Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000)

I began reading two of these books—the ones traversed by questions of neutrality, and Cold War politics—in the context of my PhD research and a Cold War history course I took at the EHESS. American Moderns, by contrast, entered this reading list more organically: I came across an original edition at the Strand in New York, and its exploration of the city (by which I mean New York) and the village (by which I mean Greenwich) in the bohemian 1900s immediately caught my attention. To proceed in the chronological order of their subjects, Christine Stansell’s American Moderns. Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century examines the cultural and social milieu of New York at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on writers, artists, activists, and intellectuals associated with bohemian circles. The book figures such as Emma Goldman, John Reed, and Margaret Sanger within the urban transformations of New York and the political upheavals of the period, showing how modernism developed through networks of sociability, radical thought, and cultural production rather than through isolated artistic breakthroughs.

The following two books shift the focus to the geopolitical landscape of the mid-twentieth century. Neutrality and Neutralism in the Global Cold War explores how different states or movements sought to position themselves outside the binary logic of the Cold War. Through a series of case studies, the contributors examine neutrality not as passive disengagement but as an active and often contested political stance, offering a more complex picture of Cold War alignments beyond the opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union. In turn, Mary Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights analyzes the relationship between domestic politics in the United States and the country’s international position during the Cold War. Drawing on legal, political, and diplomatic sources, Dudziak demonstrates how concerns about global image and foreign policy pressures influenced civil rights reforms.

5) 3 artist monographs I enjoyed:

Liesbeth Decan, Maria Wierusz-Kowalski, Agnieszka Sosnowska, Tapta: Flexible Forms (Muzeum Susch, Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, 2024)

José Luis Barrios Treviño et al., Marta Palau: naualli (Turner; Conaculta; Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán; Difusión Cultural UNAM; Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM; Centro Cultural Tijuana; Fundación BBVA-Bancomer, 2006).

Agata Jakubowska (ed.), Alina Szapocznikow: Awkward Objects (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2011)

My PhD research in contemporary fiber art led me to explore a wide array of publications this year, but among them a few monographs stood out for the depth and intimacy with which they document their subjects’ practices. Two of these focus directly on textile and fiber-based approaches, while the third is devoted to a sculptor whose work, though not textile-based, has profoundly influenced the way I think about materiality and the body. I should note that an exhibition catalog to which I contributed, Musée Bourdelle’s Magdalena Abakanowicz: La trame de l’existence was also published this year, although it will not be addressed here.

Published in 2024 on the occasion of the Tapta’s retrospective at Muzeum Susch in Switzerland, Tapta: Flexible Forms offers a comprehensive overview of the Polish-Belgian artist’s career. Her work, spanning traditional textile techniques, knotting, and flexible structures in its beginnings, evolved toward large-scale installations and sculptural commissions for public spaces (one of which is installed in a Brussels metro station.) The book foregrounds both her sculptural sensibilities and her life story—although the artist herself never emphasized elements of her own biography, such as her time in Poland during the war, becoming a refugee and studying in Belgium, or living in pre-independence Congo with her husband for about a decade. The critical essays of this catalog map her practice across several decades, highlighting the way she transformed fiber into dynamic, environmental forms.

Marta Palau: naualli presents the work of Marta Palau (1934–2016), a Spanish-born artist who lived in exile in Mexico, whose practice engages with fiber, installation, and the ritual potential of materials. Palau began her studies in textile arts in Barcelona with Josep Grau Garriga before relocating to Mexico, where she became one of the best-known textile artists in the country by the mid-1970s. She approached textiles not merely as a medium but as a “textile-action,” an activity that materialized into objects without a predetermined model or predictable end. I read this monograph concurrently to the artist’s recent solo show in Barcelona, which I got the chance to visit during its last days back in August; seeing her marvelous works in person immensely complemented what I had learned. Palau uses natural and materials such as fibers, earth, and found objects (amate bark, corn husks, coconut fibers, reeds…) to create forms that are uniquely symbolic and ritualistic, and this engagement with local materials exemplifies her resourcefulness: when fibers for weaving were scarce, she would simply tear palm leaves and grasses from the surroundings. Works such as Cascada, in which repurposed nylon stockings became a flowing mass that explore the anti-formal, anti-structural potential of fiber, also demonstrate the artist’s interest in bodily analogy and immersive installation. Palau’s work can, much like this iconic work, be described as profoundly materially and conceptually “overflowing.”

Finally, Awkward Objects, edited by Agata Jakubowska, focuses on Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973), a postwar Polish sculptor whose fragmented, corporeal forms oscillate between figuration and abstraction. I was invited to speak at a conference on Szapocznikow’s life and work, which led me to compulsively read everything published about her. This anthology, published for a 2011 retrospective in Warsaw, adopts a thematic rather than chronological approach, reflecting the instability and corporeality of her sculptures. Essays consider her use of casts, synthetic materials, and disjointed bodily motifs, addressing questions of trauma, embodiment, and representation, without reducing the work to biography. More about her is coming in a review of the exhibition.

6) one foundational art historical theory book:

Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: : archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l’empreinte (Les Éd. de Minuit, 2008)

My friend Sara lent me La ressemblance par contact by Georges Didi-Huberman while I was preparing the aforementioned Alina Szapocznikow conference. As with anything by Didi-Huberman, the book offers answers, references, and conceptual tools that extend far beyond a single artist or period, and that become a scaffolding for the discipline itself. Concretely, this one offers a theoretical and historical inquiry into the role of the “imprint,” understood as the direct contact between body, gesture, and material, in the making and interpretation of forms in modern and contemporary art. The book retraces a synoptic history of the empreinte as a technique and idea, asking why and how simple gestures of contact (like pressing, molding, or casting) lead to complex artistic procedures and what kinds of memory, presence, and anachronism this way of working introduces into the history of art.

7) one theater play:

Wajdi Mouawad, Ciels (Actes sud, Leméac, 2010)

Wajdi Mouawad is the director of Théâtre de la Colline—my absolute favorite theater in Paris—best known for his seven-hour play Racine carrée du verbe d’être, which I still haven’t managed to see because it’s always sold out (I really hope they produce it again soon.) I did see another play he directed, Journée de noces chez les Cromagnons, but until Ciels, I hadn’t read any plays he had written. Ciels (2009) is actually part of a series, but when I came across the books in a café-library during my vacation in Marseille earlier this summer, I couldn’t bring the whole collection back with me; so I settled for the one which spoke to me the most, which happened to be this one. Ciels is the fourth and final installment of Wajdi Mouawad’s tetralogy Le Sang des promesses, following Littoral, Incendies, and Forêts. In this play, six members of a secretive operations unit, known as Operation Socrates, are isolated from the outside world as they work to decipher urgent and mysterious signals. The narrative intertwines technological monitoring, philosophical reflection, and emotional unraveling: as the group races against time, the intensity of the mission becomes inseparable from deeply personal questions of identity and loss. May I say, my intuition was right: I finished it in one sitting, never putting the book down. It is intelligently written, mature, tragically suspenseful, and incredibly original.

8) my Olga Tokarczuk summer:

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019); Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018); House of Day, House of Night (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025)

“I see lines, planes, and bodies, and their transformations in time.” The East-bound massive planes pass over my apartment exactly 4 minutes after their departure from Charles de Gaulle. First, I hear the strong sound of the engine in the night, then by the time I go on Flight Radar and check their destination, they’re not directly over my head anymore, but more so over the Parisian periphery. Beijing. Hong Kong. Tokyo. All these hundreds and thousands of people above me, and I wondered if anyone else was thinking about them this way. Or if they felt someone was thinking about them at all. Maybe the narrator of Flights could have been:

“I take a different view of time. Every traveller’s time is a lot of times in one, quite a wide array. It is island time, archipelagos of order in an ocean of chaos; it is the time produced by the clocks in train stations, everywhere varying; conventional time, mean time, which no one ought to take too seriously. Hours disappear on an aeroplane aloft, dawn issues fast with afternoon and evening already on its heels. The hectic time of big cities you’re in for just a bit, wanting to fall into the clutches of its evening, and the lazy time of uninhabited prairies seen from the air.

I also think that the world will fit within, into a groove of the brain, into the pineal gland - it could well be just a lump in the throat, this globe. In fact, you could cough it right up and spit it out.”

As James Wood beautifully wrote in The New Yorker, Flights “is a cabinet of curiosities that must include itself in the cabinet.” I found out from The Guardian writer Kapka Kassabova that the book’s original Polish title, Bieguni, refers to “an obscure and possibly fictional Slavic sect who have rejected settled life for an existence of constant movement, in the tradition of the travelling yogi”. In a similar vein, I happened to come across the French title, Les Pérégrins, or the pilgrims. Both titles seem to insist on centering the multiple characters of the work, who are all some sort of pilgrims in their own way—the narrator most of all, who uses this precise word multiple times to describe her aimless journey. But despite the differences in translation, I am a fan of Jennifer Croft’s choice in the English translation. I am a fan of Flights and of the passages referring to them and airplanes.

Hot girl summer 2022, Barbieheimer summer 2023, brat summer 2024… in 2025, I had an Olga Tokarczuk summer. (And, arguably, a Fitzcarraldo Editions one.) I started Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead on my twelve-and-a-half-hour flight to Peru in June, although my destination bore little resemblance to the snowy, desolate hills of the Czech-Polish border where the story takes place. The novel follows an eccentric, aging woman astrologer living in a remote Polish village (as Tokarczuk’s chacaters often do) who notices a series of mysterious deaths among the local hunters. Part murder mystery, part philosophical meditation, it examines the (not always peaceful) entanglement of humans with the natural world.

“If I weren’t a person, I’d be a mushroom,” the narrator of House of Day, House of Night informs us. I feel like I could’ve guessed that, I felt like I already knew. Olga Tokarczuk is the writer of isolated country houses where one cooks potato soup and makes tea or blackberry wine to forget remoteness and haunting recurring nightmares; of infinite forests where the sun doesn’t rise and harsh winters on the Czech-Polish border, but always in Poland; the writer of “constellation novels,” meaning both that her storylines and characters are uniquely rhizomic and entangled, and that one of her narrators is a practicing astrologer; of dogs; of seasons and years passing by flying sailing running after anatomic specimens in world museums; but still and always the writer of mushrooms. “What is death, I would think - the only thing they can do to you is tear you from the ground, slice you up, fry you and eat you.”

9) more novels:

Clarice Lispector, Hour of the Star (Penguin Classics, 2014) & The Passion According to G.H. (Penguin Classics, 2014)

Paul Auster, Baumgartner (Faber & Faber, 2023)

Christian Kracht, Eurotrash (Serpent’s Tail, 2024)

I also read Clarice Lispector in Peru, and the setting was arguably way more appropriate for her than for Tokarczuk. Macabea, G.H… her female protagonists are incarnations of South American women, all Brazilian, but the commonalities stop here: Lispector can conjure with the same ease and depth the innermost mind and still-forming desires of a girl of humble origins from the Nordeste, as the spiritual revelations of an affluent sculptor in her metropolitan apartment. In Hour of the Star, Macabea’s existence is marked by poverty, invisibility, and alienation in Rio de Janeiro, while in The Passion According to G.H., the protagonist experiences a violent existential awakening in her own apartment, confronting mortality, desire, and the self. Lispector herself, born in Ukraine and raised in Brazil, often explored the interiority of women and the existential dilemmas of modern life, blending sharp social observation with profound psychological insight.

I got two of Auster’s books as a birthday present from my friend Victor, who was my neighbor when we both lived in New York, randomly at the same time, to go to NYU (him at the Philosophy Department, me at the Institute of Fine Arts). Both the philosophy department and New York show up in Baumgartner. Emotional intensity is conveyed so strongly in this novel it cannot leave you unimpacted. Auster, born in 1947 in New Jersey, is known for exploring identity, coincidence, and existential crisis in urban settings; in Baumgartner, he returns to those preoccupations with a quietly devastating meditation on mortality.

At first view, I also had the most fitting setting when I read Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash: a hotel room in the French Alps. I was, however, only in Grenoble for a conference, and not at one of the luxurious inherited chalets the protagonist endlessly goes on about. Eurotrash is at once a comic take on the superficialities and dark sides of the Swiss billionaire class, and an account of turbulent mother-son relationships shaped by generational conflict, illness, and the still underlying tenderness. Kracht, born in 1966 in Switzerland, excels at ironic prose and dark humor, often examining social hierarchies, decadence, and cultural absurdities in contemporary Europe.

10) last but not least, Joan Didion’s early journalism, a genre in itself:

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008; first published 1961) & The White Album (Harper Collins, 2017; first published 1979)

Joan Didion’s writing is like a mall. And I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner. In the early 1970, in an article now reprinted in The White Album, she wrote a piece about shopping malls, the history of malls, the theory of malls (which she was studying on an Extension Course from the University of California while living in New York), the lived experience of malls. She wrote that malls are, without having intended so, the most egalitarian type of place. Nobody lives there, yet anyone can go there and feel the same desire. Nobody lives in Didion’s writing either. Nobody can or will ever own her mind, her style, her prose. Yet we can all go there and feel the same desire. In the same piece, she described having gone to the mall in Honolulu to buy an issue of the New Yorker, but since the magazine hadn’t arrived, she impulse-purchased nail polish and a toaster on sale. On her return flight, she regretted the latter. I recently got two Didion books to last me through the one week of Christmas vacation; I finished the first one before the trip and the second one the plane. On my return trip, I was reading a third.

Where I come from, the term “Honolulu” is used to designate something inconceivably far away. To say hyperbolically that you’re leaving for the furthest place possible, or even to refer to an imaginary distant place, one would speak of Honolulu. But after a whole childhood (and young adulthood) of fantasizing about that imaginary, remote, secluded, always and necessarily paradisiac place, I ended up learning a great deal about Hawaii generally, Honolulu specifically, from Joan Didion’s 1966 article “Letter from Paradise, 21º 19’ N., 157º 52’ W,” republished in Slouching Towards Bethlehem which is where I got to read it. I’ll spare you the details, since they are best related by Didion’s own hand, but she begins the piece by recounting three Hawaiis, which of course amount to three visions of Hawaii, that she has gained and failed to connect to each other at different moments of her life: the one found as a child on the map, on December 7, 1941; the one, rich and vulgar, later presented in vacation advertisements, impossible to conciliate with the first; and the long-lost vision of pre-war Hawaii in all its glory, which you just had to be there to know. One gets the same feeling about most of the places she has written about. No one knows how to conjure a place—the spirit of a place—quite like Joan Didion. She did this with all of California throughout Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, leaving behind an account of a California that no longer exists and that no one will ever reproduce. She did this by recording its fractures, its moods, its moments of incoherence and dread; a California as lived, felt, and slipping away even as it was being written. For this, and for so much else, Didion remains my biggest role model and inspiration in writing. ∎

I have been obsessing over the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which recently ended, for about a year now, ever since a friend informed me it would be curated by Diana Campbell. I first met the curator on a warm summer night in Bucharest, of all places, where she was invited to give a talk in the garden of a contemporary art gallery. For the nearly five years which have passed since that event, I have been following her work with the Samdani Foundation in Bangladesh, where she has served as Founding Artistic Director since 2013. The Foundation is best known internationally for the Dhaka Art Summit which, under Campbell’s direction, seems to have been conceived as distinct from a conventional biennial. With no national pavilions (not even a country of origin present on labels, in order to foreground the artists’ work rather than nationalist categories, as Campbell stated in a 2020 interview) and no market-oriented programming (including no sales, no VIP programmes, and no cost for public attendance), it operates more as a research platform through research-based commissions and long-term collaborations with local artists.1

This committed experience of developing an international art exhibition without merely reproducing the established Western biennial system was sure to have an impact and to be an appropriate exhibition model for Central Asia as well, specifically in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. As evidenced again and again in all the press releases around the new Biennial, the city’s roots stretch back over two millennia—as a recent review in ArtAsiaPacific highlights, it “was established around 500 BC, almost a thousand years before Venice”—as a trade crossroads on the Silk Road that connected Persia, India, China, and beyond, and whose historic centre remains one of the most intact examples of a medieval Islamic city in the world. Bukhara was the capital of powerful empires like the Samanids and the 16th‑century Shaybanid Khanate, and today carries the layered legacy of Persianate culture, Mongol conquest, Uzbek rule, Russian imperial protectorate status, Soviet republic integration, and independent Uzbekistan’s cultural revitalisation. All these elements were invested to the point of saturation by the Uzbekistan Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF), the official commissioner of the Biennial through its Chairperson, Gayane Umerova. (The same institution was behind the Sur les routes de Samarcande. Merveilles de soie et d’or exhibition held at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris three years ago.) The Foundation is, in many ways, the private equivalent of a Ministry of Culture, although factually distinct from it. One can wonder how or why exactly distinct, when confronted to the Foundation’s list of selected activities:

“Since its establishment in 2017, the ACDF has been dedicated to amplifying Uzbekistan’s cultural voice on the global stage – from Venice and Paris to London, Milan, Beijing, and beyond. Now with Bukhara Biennial, this is just one step in a national cultural renaissance led by President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and supported by Saida Mirziyoyeva – from Tashkent’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, Aral Culture Summit to the upcoming National Museum of Uzbekistan...”

The historical elements reproduced time and again by the press originate in the Biennial’s curatorial concept and raison d’être, which appears to be that of, to reuse the aforementioned terms, “a national cultural renaissance.” Bukhara was not an obvious destination for the contemporary art circuit, but it was strongly and surely turned into one, from a newly delimited “Cultural District” in the heart of the city to the rich programming of the Biennial. The latter reportedly welcomed approximately 1.8  million visitors during its run, of whom roughly half were foreign tourists. If, like me, you are unable to comprehend or visualize such large numbers, 1.8 million is more than double the visitors of the 2024 Venice Biennale (reported at 700000), which nevertheless ran for twice the duration of the one in Bukhara.

Thinking this through the lens of cultural diplomacy helps clarify how and why such a transformation could take place so quickly outside the established networks of contemporary art.2 As the historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht argues, cultural diplomacy should not be reduced to overt propaganda or state messaging but understood as a field of action in which culture functions as “a way of interacting with the outside world,” and it can be especially significant as “a means to establish ties with countries that were politically unpalatable.”3 In this sense, the Bukhara Biennial can be understood as an interactive structure in which artists, curators, institutions—and in this case, culinary chefs (more on that later)—collectively mediate Uzbekistan’s repositioning on the global cultural map. Gienow-Hecht emphasizes that cultural diplomacy tends to be most effective when “there is distance between the agent of a cultural diplomacy program and a political or economic agenda” (hence, the ACDF as distinct from a Ministry) and when its structure is participatory rather than directive. The Bukhara Biennial exemplifies this logic: while clearly supported and enabled by state-adjacent actors, it mobilizes contemporary art as a long-term relational practice embedded in site-specific commissions, international collaborations, and prolonged engagement with local heritage. Seen from this perspective, the Biennial functions as a diplomatic tool that leverages cultural production to generate legitimacy and maybe even affective attachment (which I, at least, definitely felt), while deliberately avoiding the often extractive dynamics of Western biennials.

Now, I’m not saying the whole exhibition was simply the result of some diplomatic operation; but its impeccable promotion is, definitely, part of it. Not a week has passed for me this fall without seeing an ad (including very carefully concealed ones) inciting me to travel to Uzbekistan NOW. Posters in the métro hallways, the back covers of art magazines distributed across fairs and galleries, one of which was in everyone’s hands at Art Basel… Even UNESCO held its 43rd General Conference in the country this fall, Samarkand being its first venue outside of Paris since 1985. And it worked. I was opening SkyScanner at least fifteen times a day, hoping for a miracle to take the shape of an affordable flight from Paris to Tashkent (or even directly to Bukhara, if the heavens allowed) on the limited vacation days I had from teaching at the university this semester. Spoiler alert, I did not end up buying the plane ticket. Not out of “biennial fatigue,” a wording that resurfaces with the same frequency as its object of reference. Life (read: work) just intervened, as it does. But the engineered desire to go there lasted until the very last day of the exhibition—which was eventually extended through November 20—and the eventual irresolution of this longing gave birth to the present impulse to write. This is the story of how I didn’t go.

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How does one write about an event they didn’t witness? About an exhibition they didn’t get the chance to visit? This question would have felt less pressing had there been a catalog, but that, to my knowledge, is not the case (although I would be more than happy to be corrected on this fact.) The best resource available to me, besides the biennial’s gorgeously designed but elusive website and the numerous identical press releases it entailed, are the reels that were regularly posted on Instagram to show artworks and artist statements. One thing I quickly understood is that most installations were produced in collaboration by a local artist (or artisan, or group) and an international one—contrary to the Dhaka Art Summit, national origins seem to have been of interest here, if only to keep this principle of joint work in check. Among the most breathtaking pieces I discovered in this visual documentation were:

• Maria Perez Simão and Bakhtiyar Babamuradov’s Untitled installation (pictured above) in the heart of the Cultural District, a “celestial map of an imagined universe” which made headlines in all arts newspapers;

• Abdulvahid Bukhoriy and Jurabek Siddikov’s Blue Room, which adopted mosaic tiles in shades of blue specific to Islamic architecture and frequently employed in the impressive Bukhara or Samarkand medieval monuments, a reference here carried to its highest level to encompass an entire room, and which must’ve felt like being immersed in the warmest ocean;

• Nomin Zezegmaa and the Margilan Crafts Development Centre’s ᠣᠩᠭᠤᠳ (Ongod), which consisted of braided blue textile forms embedded in the arched brick walls, paired with two surprising flower sculptures by the Lithuanian duo Pakui Hardware and the Uzbek ceramicists Alisher & Shokhrukh Rakhimov, combining matte black ceramic bulbous bodies with reflective, curving stems;

• the installation Longing by Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), a monumental ikat tapestry installed along the canal—the importance of this water network for the city being another commonality with Venice. The woven panels seemed to move which the light reflections from the water, and which commented on the slow disappearance of the Aral Sea as both an environmental catastrophe and a collective emotional wound;

• speaking of textiles, Aziza Kadyri’s (who also represented Uzbekistan at the 2024 Venice Biennale, with a sublime blue environment) installation Cut from the Same Cloth, in collaboration with Yulduz Mukhiddinova and Mathieu Bissonnette, combining embroidered textiles with metal cotton-gin forms to turn her grandfather’s archive into an interactive, sensory experience;

• Erika Verzutti and Shonazar Jumaev’s playful but simultaneously impeccably crafted Tower of Pomegranates, a whimsical Brancusi column allusion and one of my favorite sculptures here for personal reasons (I just love pomegranates.)

Another thing I learned from the reels was that the kinds of works that were presented I could not begin to imagine experiencing, since they were most if not all site-specific, and they would never again be in the same position in these historical sites, under the same sun or light reflections from the Naryn Canal. Even more than the artworks themselves, the part of the Bukhara Biennial that could never be captured or repeated in text or press releases—and, how fitting, my favorite part of the whole lineup—was its chef’s programme. As a gastronomy enthusiast (with a 103-week streak on beli as of December 2025), it would’ve been a dream to visit the Café Oshqozon, a temporary venue activated specifically for the biennial and even conceived as its central hub—the whole curatorial concept being, quite tellingly, “Recipes for Broken Hearts.” Named after the Uzbek word for “stomach,” also used to describe a “vessel for cooking,” the café was inspired by this idea of food as a form of healing through communal exchange, and so it was designed as a living space where culinary practice and contemporary art converged in weekend-long chef takeovers.

Over the course of the biennial, Café Oshqozon hosted menus by a diverse roster of international and Uzbek chefs, such as Saidakmal Vahobov and the Qand Team, Lilian Cordell, Elena Reygadas, Pavel Georganov, Fatmata Binta, Bahriddin Chustiy, the trio Ekaterina Enileyeva, Aleksandr Tolkachev and Vladimir Kogay, Zuri Camille de Souza, and in the closing days Jeong Kwan alongside Subodh Gupta. Numerous ingredients carry transnational histories and genealogies, and this programming allowed the biennial to reveal subtle commonalities in taste, technique, and ritual that traverse geographical and cultural boundaries.4 To give one example of the thoughtfully composed menus, Marseille-based Zuri Camille de Souza’s flower-focused dinner wove together local ingredients and diasporic heritage into dishes such as Herb Bouquet aromatiques with smoked cheese, radishes, and preserved Uzbek lemons; Olive Oil Brioche with pollen butter and black garlic; Kothimbirwadi with chickpea flour and coriander chutney; an Autumn Broth of pumpkin, white miso, and roses; Biryani to share with saffron, rosewater, apricot seeds, and pine nuts; and a Lemon Tart adorned with caraway seeds, fresh thyme, and pistachios… which definitely would’ve healed every last corner of my broken heart.

The Recipes for Broken Hearts curatorial statement presents the heart simultaneously as a biological, emotional, and epistemic entity, framing it as an archive of human experience. In her text, Campbell carefully situates Bukhara historically and geographically, drawing on figures such as Ibn Sina, whose medical and philosophical practice encompassed both physical and lovesick ailments, alongside references to Sufi thought and shahrashub poems that celebrate young artisans’ skill, creating a multilayered genealogy of care and craft. These histories inform a curatorial emphasis on process, duration, and relationality: carpets are woven over months, palov is cooked in communal settings, and in Bukhara, performances come to life in restored courtyards and workshops, activated by the presence of community and guests.

The inaugural Bukhara Biennial encouraged visitors and long-distance admirers alike to “imagine a joyful world where everyone’s heart can feel lighter and everyone’s stomach can be full.” For that and much more, I can confidently and unreservedly call it art event of the year. ∎

Christmas music was, naturally and perhaps inevitably, another output of the American cultural export machine as it entered post-1989 Eastern Europe (one region among many, though I will limit myself here to what I know best from both theory and experience.) But first, let’s historicize this a bit. During the Cold War, music already functioned as a key front in the confrontation between East and West, and it is a ground on which the West, from my observations at least, ultimately won. In Paweł Pawlikowski’s iconic 2018 film Zimna Wojna (translating precisely as Cold War, one of my all time favorite movies, to the point of being one of the few I’ve actually watched more than once), we watch a Polish folk choir circulate through Europe, perhaps even beyond it, but such tours only reached a few people. Their impact appears even more limited when set against the diffuse, persistent power of radio. Radio Free Europe is the most obvious example, but because the concern here is music—especially music that requires no shared language to be effective—a more telling case is the transmission of jazz, broadcast across borders ever since the late 1940s.

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Jazz was unscripted, spontaneous, difficult to contain. Jazz was freedom. After World War II, radio broadcasting emerged as the most effective vector for the circulation of jazz across the Eastern Bloc, precisely because it bypassed the institutional controls placed on live performance, print media, and recorded sound. As the historian and musicologist Rüdiger Ritter notes, while the Cold War is often remembered as a battle fought through “word and text programs,” and instrumental music was originally thought of as rather apolitical, it was soon recognized that jazz had an “enormous mobilizing potential,” sufficient to open “a battlefield… where jazz became a weapon used by both sides.”1 Central to this process were Western radio broadcasts, most notably Willis Conover’s Music USA program on the Voice of America, which from 1955 onward provided “the main source of knowledge for this music” for listeners throughout the Eastern Bloc.2 Conover’s program was carefully calibrated for transnational reception: his slow, deliberate English and emphasis on instrumental music ensured that listeners could grasp the affective and formal qualities of jazz even without linguistic comprehension.

While Soviet and satellite-state authorities soon decided to repress jazz as a symbol of Western “cosmopolitanism,” sometimes even prohibiting instruments producing “imperialist scores,” such as the saxophone, these measures proved largely ineffective against transnational radio transmission.3 As Keith Hatschek documents in his study of jazz in postwar Poland, American music continued to enter the country through powerful shortwave broadcasts transmitted by stations whose signals could be received despite jamming efforts.4 Jazz functioned as a “window to the West,” but not in a narrowly political sense; rather, its reception “both reflected and added impetus to a modernization process in the Eastern Bloc” that was “responsive to, and at the same time independent of, jazz’s associations with the United States.”5

For American cultural strategists, jazz symbolized liberal values—individuality, spontaneity, and freedom—and the radio transmission of this “weapon of choice” functioned as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, particularly through the promotion of African American musicians. This was premised on the belief, often articulated by Willis Conover, that audiences deprived of political freedom could nonetheless “detect a sense of freedom in jazz,” precisely because its extemporaneous structure modeled a form of autonomy unavailable in everyday political life.6 Yet for Eastern European listeners, its appeal also lay elsewhere. Jazz, Ritter argues, was received “not in an explicitly political sense, but rather as the potential to eschew politics altogether, a space without control, a space devoted only to self-expression.”7 In her 2014 book Antipolitics in Central European Art, the art historian Klara Kemp-Welch emphasizes that under late socialism, the refusal to participate in officially sanctioned political discourse—what she terms “reticence”—constituted a deliberate strategy that sought to preserve zones of autonomy beyond the reach of ideological coercion.8 Jazz listening and jazz practice operated within precisely such zones.

Fun, you might say, but what does any of this have to do with Christmas music? Well, another front of the same cultural Cold War can be found in a popular character known under the name of Santa; precisely in relation to the phenomenon often described as “Coca-colonization,” namely the process by which American consumer culture embedded itself in foreign soil through seemingly innocent symbols. The term is thought to have been introduced by the French in the 1950s, when Le Monde would write sardonically about accepting “chewing gum and Cecil B. DeMille, Reader’s Digest, and be-bop” but drawing the line at soft drinks. “After Coca-Cola, holà.”9 The media studies researcher George McKay has written about Santa Claus as a visual instrument of this process. Christmas music was its audible counterpart. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” for instance, was a character created in 1939 as a marketing tool for the Chicago department store Montgomery Ward, then turned into a song a decade later to sell Gene Autry records. It became known worldwide as the latter.10 The 1953 song “Santa Baby” performed by Eartha Kitt provides another example: it takes the form of a sensual Christmas list from a woman requesting lavish gifts such as sables, yachts, and Tiffany decorations—items that were largely inaccessible to much of the world at the time and that epitomized the peak of American consumer culture. Like many Christmas songs of its era, “Santa Baby” has passed the test of time: it has been covered by artists including Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Michael Bublé, Ariana Grande, and the object of last year’s biggest Kim Kardashian controversy. In fact, most Christmas songs from the 1950s have been repeatedly reinterpreted, which means that the repertoire we hear worldwide today largely mirrors that of the mid‑20th century, albeit sung by different voices.

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As with jazz, Christmas songs operate as a form of interiorized soft power: they are emotionally embodied long before they are cognitively understood. Now, consider what happened in Eastern Europe after 1989: the political systems collapsed, yes, but so did the cultural reference points; the songs that had been taught under socialism suddenly seemed equally dated and tainted, and Christmas could be celebrated openly and religiously once again. There was a cultural vacuum, including in regard to the freshly rediscovered holiday, and into that vacuum flowed American Christmas music with the efficiency of water seeking the lowest ground. The reaction was nothing like France’s resistance to Coca-Cola in the 1950s. The French had cultural institutions capable of mounting resistance, they had economic power and established traditions to defend; we had new, exciting, international TV channels. So we learned “Jingle Bells,” though none of us had ever seen a one-horse open sleigh. We learned “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” and imagined the kind of snow that makes you grateful for a cup of Jacobs coffee near a fire that is so delightful, though those of us born and raised in high-rise communist blocks had never seen a real-life fireplace. We also learned a new vocabulary, such as the word “stocking” or “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” though chestnuts were not part of our cuisine and open fires belonged to a rural past we were being encouraged to forget. We were learning to want a Christmas that had been manufactured in Hollywood and Madison Avenue, one that promised entry into what Charles Acland has called “one worldness”—the magical feeling that commodity consumption could make us citizens of the modern world.11

We wanted to belong to the world we saw on television and heard on the radio, the kind of Christmas that seemed normal in the movies. The Christmas songs promised all of this, and they delivered it through the most powerful mechanism available: memory itself. Even now, knowing what I know about the commercial origins of these songs, about the deliberate export of such cultural forms, about the vulnerability of post-socialist societies to exactly this kind of cultural infiltration, I cannot hear the opening notes of “Let it Snow!” without feeling something that I have in the meantime learned to call nostalgia. These songs have also always been my own. ∎

This setting is, without a doubt, better than the one I first encountered: the spectacular architecture of the palace stretching out before us, best seen from the upper floor; the glass ceiling letting in generous natural light; the more breathable corners where one can pause for an overpriced coffee. The crowds are still there, if not multiplied, but simply entering this space produces a different sensation altogether. With preparations for the 2026 bicentenary of photography well underway in Paris—the birthplace of the medium—I can say that the very existence of this fair, as well as the quality of the works presented within it, already pay a fitting homage to this incredible practice discredited as an art form in its beginnings, confirming not only its place within the arts of the 21st century (surviving the risk of banalization raised by the mass democratization of image-making), but also on the art market.

In this post: Sophie Ristelhueber, Mia Weiner, Sarah Sense, Tarrah Krajnak, VALIE EXPORT, Ana Mendieta, Sibylle Bergemann, Martha Rosler, Sunil Gupta, Sophie Calle, Lee Schulman, Jeff Mermelstein, Mohammad Ghazzali, Yunya Yin, Mo Yi, Claudia Andujar, Agnès Geoffray, Daido Moriyama, Marie-Laure de Decker, Nhu Xuan Hua, Emilio Azevedo, Alexandra Dautel, Mihai Șovăială, Pooya Abbasian, Flore Prebay, Frédéric Froument, Ming Pang, Ivan Murit…

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Upon entering the fair this year, one was faced with an impressive 40-meter long rail bearing around 60 photographs from the four decade-long career of the French photographer Sophie Ristelhueber, shown by Galerie Poggi. Winner of the 2025 Hasselbad Prize—the most important in the industry, conceived in 1980s Sweden as a Nobel prize for photography—Ristelhueber has developed and established a poetic practice of documentary photography. I could’ve written “war photography,” but her photographs never show battle as it happens; they record the traces of events and place the viewer in the residue of the aftermath, often without commentary or narrative structure. The installation at the entrance to the Grand Palais brought together landscapes and walls marked by conflict (such as her Fait series), remnants of structures long gone (the Palmyrene Roman columns of Dead Set), unexpected juxtapositions that work unexpectedly well (the Dead Sea and Parisian asphalt, in Sunset Years), artist quotes in red over black-and-white photographs (Grand Paysage), and a couple of rare, striking human figures (Every One series)

This monumental installation gave way to diverse smaller booths throughout the fair, each pleading for a yet different mode of image-making. Some, like Fred Herzog shown by Equinox Gallery, are there and the same for every single edition; others, especially the new participations, introduced less conventional kinds of photography. My favorite booth could be found among the ones upstairs: Amsterdam-based Homecoming Gallery’s presentation of tapestries by Mia Weiner.

Tapestries?, you might ask, at a photography fair? In which case I am here to answer your doubts: the photographic medium is inextricably present in the artist’s textile practice. Mia Weiner is actually one of the first artists I’ve written about on this newsletter, back in January, and I got to have a long, lovely conversation with her at the fair, made to pass too quickly by our shared intersecting passion for the two aforementioned mediums (hers in making, mine in writing). Her first experiences with analog photography date from a workshop during her high school years; after which she went on to pursue a BFA and MFA in textiles. By way of this trajectory, Mia is most professionally trained and skilled in weaving and other forms of textile-making. However, the photographic vision never seems to have left: it adapted instead to the new fiber materials it is being transposed onto, instead of being developed in a lab and printed on paper. Because if the photographic medium seems one of the more immaterial, especially in its most recent developments, let this be your reminder that this is not the case; and in digitally planning where each pixel of the image will end up on her warp, what colors it will be invested by through the weft, Mia Weiner works precisely at deepening the original materiality of photography itself. In her booth at Paris Photo, this admirable interplay of skill and vision was shown through a selection of four recent tapestries, of which one is a diptych: Electric Rose, Dusk/Dawn, You Taste Like the Sun, and Together, in One Breath. Their monochrome depiction of anonymous, naked bodies, never a face in sight but rich instead in oscillating tones and free-falling threads, either on the sides or at the bottom, recall the visual universe of thermographic images. As such, they inevitably bring to mind, to eye (and to the lucky collector, perhaps to touch), the primordial heat of another human being, and the possibility of connection we are all secretly longing for.

Weaving was actually present more than once in this year’s Paris Photo fair. The other noteworthy occurence I stumbled upon were Sarah Sense’s woven archival inkjet prints shown by Bruce Silverstein. Titled Land, Lines, Blood, Memory, her series brings our attention first to a collection of vast natural landscapes, and then to the inaccuracy of the presumed neutrality of their representation. Sense cuts and weaves together photographic fragments—images of land interlaced with collective portraits of Native Americans—disrupting the viewer’s passive consumption of landscape imagery and insisting instead on a reading in which territory is inseparable from history, memory, and power. Executed on Hahnemühle bamboo and rice paper, and interwoven with wax, cotton thread, and Chitimacha rivercane, the works materialize this entanglement. As such, Sense’s landscapes can be read against the ideological function of nineteenth-century American romantic painting—most notably the Hudson River School—whose monumental, romantic depictions of untouched wilderness helped naturalize the idea of an empty continent, as W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, rendering conquest invisible by presenting the historically produced emptiness of the depicted sceneries as natural fact.1 This reading is further grounded in Sense’s biography and long-standing practice. A Chitimacha and Choctaw artist from Sacramento, California, she has developed her photo-weaving method since 2004, drawing on traditional Chitimacha basket-weaving techniques passed down through her family, as the artist herself has stated.

Much like this series, multiple works presented in the fair this year involved a practice of or a reflection on seriality. One of the first I encountered upon entering the fair was Tarrah Krajnak, Body Configurations (Venice), 2023-24, shown by Zander Galerie, a series in which the artist measures or models elements of Venetian architecture against her own body. This gesture situates Krajnak’s work within a lineage of practices that replace abstract or monumental scale with embodied experience. The work directly references VALIE EXPORT’s Body Configurations (1972-76), in which the artist photographed herself contorting and aligning her body within urban and architectural structures, exposing how public space disciplines and regulates bodies—particularly gendered ones—through proportion and constraint. Krajnak’s practice also recalls Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series (1973-80), in which the body’s imprint inscribed the land to suggest that place is inseparable from lived and political histories. These artistic precedents align with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of space in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), where the body is understood not as an object within space but as the very condition through which space is perceived and produced. I loved Body Configurations (Venice) for all these reasons, and for involving Venice specifically, a city (and island) I have a particular fondness for.2

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Seriality was also present in Sibylle Bergemann’s Das Denkmal (The Monument), a body of work developed between 1975 and 1986, and exceptionally shown by the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in conjunction with its concurrent solo exhibition of the artist, curated by Sonia Voss.3 The series documents the prolonged and ultimately fraught construction of the Marx-Engels Monument in East Berlin, tracing its transformation from a site of ideological ambition into one permeated by uncertainty and latent absurdity, which today reads as a prefiguration of the ideological collapse to come. Rather than presenting the monument as a finished symbol of socialist triumph, Bergemann photographs it in fragments and states of incompletion—scaffolding, isolated figures, displaced heads—using repetition over time to reveal the gap between political rhetoric and material reality. A more recent series-based approach appeared in Martha Rosler’s Greenpoint, New Fronts (2015-ongoing), a photographic project that follows the rapid transformation of the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn amid accelerating processes of real-estate speculation and gentrification. Best known for her feminist works of the 1970s, including Semiotics of the Kitchen, Rosler here turns to a sustained documentary mode, returning repeatedly to the same streets, construction sites, and temporary façades. The serial structure allows change to emerge gradually rather than spectacularly, through newly arisen buildings and gradual but prominent signage shifts.

Another recurring formal strategy I appreciated, present across many works at the fair, was juxtaposition. Sunil Gupta’s Exiles series (1986-87), shown by Matèria, places text beneath the photographs, recalling cinematic subtitles while also evoking the photographic strategies of Sophie Calle, whose series Douleur exquise (1984-2003) and Les Autobiographies (1995) use captions to construct narratives that remain latent in the images themselves, confronting the viewer with traces of the unrepresented. Lee Schulman’s Golden Memories (2025), presented by Clémentine de la Féronnière, experiments with material juxtaposition: photographs from The Anonymous Project are printed on gold leaf, producing an interplay of transparency and opacity while reflecting the viewer in a surface that is simultaneously precious, and fragile. In Jeff Mermelstein’s NYC (2015-17), an archival pigment print series presented by Galerie Bene Taschen, diptychs of heterogeneous images recall the aesthetics of Juergen Teller, whose work similarly embraces immediacy, uneven composition, and the visual tension produced when seemingly unrelated images are paired, foregrounding the affective and narrative possibilities of unexpected adjacency. Mohammad Ghazzali’s black-and-white diptychs, in which one half of each composition is a monochrome rectangle (black or white), invest the language of abstraction while simultaneously revealing the constructed nature of photographic representation, asking the viewer to consider what is included, excluded, or made visible through the photographic frame.

Yunya Yin’s The Meditations: Strangers series (2022-24), shown by Three Shadows +3 Gallery (Three Shadows is China’s first contemporary art space devoted exclusively to photography), was definitely one of the most impressive, or at least memorable, from this year’s fair: the artist transfers Polaroid portraits onto Pinctada maxima shells, to create a poetic contrast between the ephemeral human subject and the enduring protective shell. As the gallery notes, “the soft photographic paper and the hard shell suggest opposing qualities of eternity and the present, lightness and heaviness, fragility and stubbornness,” a material and conceptual duality that is central to the work. According to the artist, the shells themselves carry layered histories: beyond serving as a natural “shelter of hardened calcium carbonate” for mollusks, they were historically extracted and circulated through early global trade networks, including as currency, linking them to colonial exploitation and the displacement of both people and resources (as shown in the 2021 publication Conchophilia: Shells, Art, and Curiosity in Early Modern Europe). In this context, the shell functions simultaneously as a protective vessel and a symbol of structural violence, mirroring the precarious conditions of the individuals depicted. By situating the ephemeral human image on this historically and materially charged surface, Yin asks viewers to reflect on the hidden emotional and social dimensions of migration and labor, drawing attention to how global systems render both humans and objects as “strangers” in unfamiliar territories. The series beautifully merges material experimentation, historical awareness, and intimate portraiture to probe questions of fragility and displacement.

A number of artists in the fair I recognized from previous exhibitions, especially since most displays from Les Rencontres d’Arles could be found again at the Grand Palais: Mo Yi, whose street-photography-meets-self-portraits I had first encountered at the 2024 Rencontres; Sophie Calle (whom I got a signed book from!) with her distinctive and recognizable approach merging documentary and conceptual practice; Claudia Andujar’s 1970s series Rua Direita showing street passers-by in São Paulo from a below vantage point, highlighting their gestures and presence against the cityscape; Agnès Geoffray’s tout geste est renversement (2024), a black-and-white clin d’œil to emancipation efforts of marginalized young girls; the entire Brazilian modernism exhibition, Construction déconstruction reconstruction… But also several artists whose work I had seen in other contexts: Daido Moriyama and his grainy, high-contrast explorations of urban life in Japan, whom I had seen at Photo Élysée in Lausanne, shown twice now at the fair by Taka Ishii Gallery and Akio Nagasawa; Marie-Laure de Decker, presented conjointly by Galerie Anne-Laure Buffard and in camera galerie, whose incredible photographic reportages were recently the object of a major retrospective at the MEP; and Nhu Xuan Hua, whose signature approach to portraiture (precisely her iconic work Chen) could be seen previously on the cover of a HONNE album titled Love Me / Love Me Not, which I listened a lot to around 2018.

A curated selection of photographs from the Estrellita B. Brodsky collection was also shown, although it feels like it generated less enthusiasm than the fair itself. Estrellita B. Brodsky is a renowned collector of Latin American art and photography, and this was the first time her collection was shown in Europe. The presentation included works spanning multiple generations and photographic approaches; their more aerated installation allowed the photographs to be experienced in isolation rather than in the crowded, commercial energy of the surrounding booths, which gave the section a quieter, museum-like atmosphere amidst the bustle of the fair. The works were great, but I believe that in this space the rush of adrenaline, dopamine—and for some, anxiety—from the fair’s ongoing sales simply dropped, and naturally so.

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If I titled this publication Paris Photo Week rather than simply Paris Photo Fair, it is because photography-related events have multiplied like mushrooms during the same week, not unlike the proliferation of satellite fairs around Art Basel. Another noteworthy event was Photo Saint-Germain, which functions more as a festival than a commercial fair. Founded in 2007, it has consistently emphasized accessibility, dialogue, and the promotion of emerging as well as mid-career artists, combining photography exhibitions and talks on the rive gauche: as it name suggests, the festival takes place in spaces across the 6th arrondissement, from galleries to off-site venues, creating a sense of discovery and conviviality rather than a purely market-driven encounter. One such unlikely setting was the Maison d’Auguste Comte, the philosopher’s final residence and a remarkably preserved historical apartment tucked away on the first floor of an equally historic building. Within this charged domestic space, Emilio Azevedo’s exhibition Rondônia (comment je suis tombé amoureux d’une ligne) focused on the transformation of the Amazonian territory, drawing on documentary photography while weaving in elements of (auto)fiction. The Photo Saint-Germain program also extended to La Galerie du Crous, a space dedicated to showcasing emerging artistic practices, particularly those of student artists. The venue hosted several small-scale exhibitions, beginning downstairs with Ailleurs est imminent, bringing together works by Philippe Calia, Alexandra Dautel, Victoire Thierrée, and Elliott Verdier. The practice that struck me most was Alexandra Dautel’s, shown on the first floor. Her project centered on the unresolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, approaching the event through its lingering presence in collective imagination. Ten years after the flight vanished, Dautel connects the tarmacs of its scheduled departure and arrival—two concrete sites between which the aircraft remains suspended.

My favorite exhibition in the Saint Germain neighborhood was undoubtedly Mihai Șovăială’s at delpire & co, organized in partnership with the festival Un Week-end à l’Est, which this year focused on the culture(s) of Bucharest. Titled Bucharest/Palimpsest, the exhibition offered a photographic vision of the Romanian capital as a city shaped by accumulation, erasure, and unfinished transformation. Șovăială approaches Bucharest as a surface repeatedly rewritten: its historic center and early twentieth-century architectural fragments, many of them destroyed under Ceaușescu’s regime, give way to socialist housing blocks, now further altered in equal measure by contemporary gestures of repair on one hand, and by neglect on the other. Crumbling façades insulated with polystyrene become visual markers of a city defined by architectural improvisation, mirroring a broader political indeterminacy. This attention to processes of covering and uncovering extends beyond Bucharest to Zurich, where the artist is currently based, a city that appears under his lens as a vast, perpetual construction site. Conceptually, the notion of the palimpsest is reinforced through the artist’s material strategies: photographs are printed on unconventional supports such as tarpaulin or lithographic stones. Among these, I was particularly struck by the series Uranus Imprint, which brings together images of secretly preserved architectural elements from the former Uranus neighborhood, demolished by Ceaușescu to make way for the current Parliament building—an outsized display of power enacted at the expense of entire communities, one that continues to resonate as a site of generational trauma, even for those not yet born at the time of its destruction. Printed on stone, these images operate as an insistently physical support for memory, transforming the photograph into a form of conservation of vernacular architecture and, implicitly, an act of resistance against its political erasure.

Additionally, the Biennale de l’Image Tangible, held in and around the 20th arrondissement, highlighted more emerging practices and experimental approaches, or, in their words, “works that tend to break free from a classical use of the photographic medium.” This fourth edition presented a constellation of projects in multiple venues, from an exhibition at Espace Niemeyer to shows at Galerie Plateforme, Fisheye Gallery, Julio Artist-Run Space, Le 100 ECS, and Atelier Néerlandais. Among the artists on view were Pooya Abbasian—who also had an incredible exhibition titled in dubio pro reo at Carré de Baudouin, curated by Noélie Bernard—and others at Espace Niemeyer; Flore Prebay’s Deuil Blanc and Frédéric Froument’s Camera Calda : Débâcle installation (and happenings) at Fisheye Gallery nearby; Ming Pang, whose series What burns never returns stems from visits to First World War battlefields prompted by a 1925 Michelin guide documenting the war’s marks on the landscape, at Galerie Plateforme; Ivan Murit’s Global Receipt installation, printing real-time climate data from a NASA satellite onto receipt paper—linking scientific observation to everyday consumption and ecological accountability—at Le 100 ECS… I truly loved everything I saw, and think the great diversity of the selected artists’ origins contributed a great deal to the originality of the practices presented at this Biennale.

Together, these overlapping events creating an almost overwhelming amalgam of photographic manifestations, offer a genuinely exciting glimpse of the medium’s vitality and foreshadow what the bicentenary of photography next year might bring. What more can I say than: Vive la photographie! ∎

Chang very rightly draws a parallel between these two films, whose protagonists are both distant fathers and successful film professionals (a director and an actor, respectively). Each has two daughters and tries—somewhat too late—to repair a broken relationship with them, especially with the elder daughter, by offering her a piece of his fame (a role in his next movie for Gustav Borg; a speech at his tribute in Tuscany for Jay Kelly). In both cases, she inevitably and definitively refuses. The similarities are undeniable, and if I did not notice them myself, it is surely because I hadn’t seen Sentimental Value in Cannes. Even from its synopsis, it did not seem likely to offer anything of real cinematic, visual, narrative, or even sentimental value—an impression confirmed by Chang’s review, which suggests that the actors are the film’s only “saving grace.” I did see Jay Kelly, on the other hand, and in my review of the Mostra I interpreted the protagonist and his storyline through the broader situation of Hollywood itself, and through the industry’s looming influence on Venice:

The film was enjoyable in the way a good Hollywood production usually is, but its lack of resolution—its refusal to deliver a true grand finale—felt timely. Kelly ends by asking, “Can I do it again? I’d like another one.” But of course, there is no second take in life, and the film suggests that Hollywood itself may not get another chance, at least not if it continues with its current lack of axiological grounding. While the story frames this in terms of “family values” and their infringement within the industry, we know the malaise runs deeper. Jay Kelly only brushed the surface of Hollywood’s deeper problems, but this was less a failure than a deliberate choice: the film offered what audiences expected—a not-so-tragic ending, if not exactly a happy one.

Beyond the parallels highlighted by Chang, I myself have noticed two broader themes running through the films selected in both festivals this year, and even beyond them. First, a strong cinematic engagement with conspiracy theories and the social effects they have had, particularly since 2020; second, multiple takes on the working conditions of late capitalism and their impact on both laborers and wider society . These two observations form the basis for this article.

Films mentioned in this post: Jay Kelly (Noah Baumbach), Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier), Eddington (Ari Aster), Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos), Made in EU (Stephan Komandarev), On Falling (Laura Carreira), Don’t expect too much from the end of the world and Kontinental ‘25 (Radu Jude). Special mention: the exhibition Bullshit Job at Centre Wallonie Bruxelles in Paris (Nov 13 - Dec 4, 2025).

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To begin with conspiracy: a genuinely contemporary cinematic development, it is shaped by and inseparable from current events. I don’t think, before this decade, that such themes would have taken hold of characters and narratives with this level of intensity; and if they had, they would have seemed far more fictional. We have all noticed the rise of conspiratorial thinking in the media, in the news, and perhaps in our personal lives. Cinema, as always, seized the moment and absorbed these anxieties into its own language, to such an extent that recently, they seem to have become a central framework through which contemporary cinema processes reality.

My first real encounter with this theme on screen dates from 2025 (unless my memory fails me), at Cannes, with Ari Aster’s Eddington. The description released ahead of its premiere was particularly cryptic, certainly more so because of how little it revealed. I admit I was drawn above all to the promotional image: a face-off between Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix, the latter dressed in cowboy attire. Aster himself, of course, has also built quite a reputation for himself with Midsommar. In my earlier review, I described Eddington as a topical, satirical, and grotesque portrait of the early pandemic years, in which the internet, particularly social media, functions almost as a character. Louise, played by Emma Stone, embodies the ordinary person caught in the crossfire of online radicalization and collapsing trust, while the story unfolds through Facebook posts and the chaotic performativity of small-town politics. The film is undeniably messy, but its messiness mirrors the disorientation it seeks to depict.

Coincidentally or not, the same Emma Stone leads the second major conspiracy-centered film of the year: Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. This film also felt overtly contemporary, not only in its references but in the way it stages paranoia as a social ecosystem. One of the main characters, Teddy, is a packaging operator (and a beekeeper in his free time) who spends much of his life online, assembling a worldview in which Michelle Fuller, a pharmaceutical executive played by Stone, is secretly an alien orchestrating a large-scale takeover of humanity. Convinced he has uncovered the truth, he enlists his cousin to abduct her. Rather than simply mocking conspiracy logic, the film adds conceptual depth by placing it alongside genuine institutional harm. Teddy’s mother was injured during one of the company’s medical trials, and this trauma intimately coexists with his more fantastical beliefs. Michelle’s own calm, intelligently constructed response never fully erases the possibility that Teddy is simply reacting to a system that has already failed him. Lanthimos repeatedly asks what counts as “proof,” who gets to define reality, and what desperation looks like under late capitalism. It also confronts the viewer with a familiar dilemma: when violence erupts in the name of “uncovering the truth,” is it simply madness, or is it a distorted response to real structural injustice?

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Structural injustice lies at the core of the second major theme I observed in this year’s cinema: structural labor insecurity and exploitation.1 In Venice, this was powerfully articulated in Made in EU, a film I initially underestimated (out of Eastern European self-depreciation, most certainly), but which ultimately became one of the most notable works of the festival, if not my actual favorite. Stephan Komandarev’s film exposes the human cost hidden behind the reassuring label of European production, following a Bulgarian seamstress whose life quickly deteriorates after she is falsely blamed for bringing COVID into her workplace. The tragedy that unfolds is equal measure personal and systemic: surveillance replaces care, rumor replaces truth, and illness becomes grounds for exclusion. The film situates Iva, its protagonist, within the network of economic dependencies that latently structure contemporary Europe. Factory ownership is transnational and mobile, labor is disposable, and families are stretched across borders in search of survival. While production can be relocated at will, workers are left to absorb the shock of every crisis—sanitary, economic, social—without protection. Made in EU was so powerful because it never tries to soften this reality; it doesn’t frame injustice as an exception but as a feature of the system itself, one that turns the migration of workers and families, in this case from Eastern to Western Europe, into a necessity rather than a choice.

A similar logic is at work in On Falling, Laura Carreira’s portrait of contemporary labor precarity. Where Made in EU exposes exploitation through collective structures (factories, supply chains…), On Falling turns inward, focusing on the solitude produced by the same economic system. The film follows a young Portuguese woman named Aurora working in a logistics warehouse in Edinburgh, whose days are reduced to repetitive gestures, algorithmic targets, and an exhausting struggle to remain employed. There is no single dramatic rupture here, no public scapegoating; instead, injustice operates through attrition. The body gives way gradually, relationships thin out, and the threat of unemployment hovers constantly, rendering solidarity nearly impossible; colleagues have forgotten what it means to communicate. Carreira shows the normalization of exploitation, which of course is the core of the generalization of capitalism: the way instability becomes routine, and how exhaustion is internalized as personal failure rather than recognized as a structural condition.

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Radu Jude’s Don’t Expect Too Much from the End of the World extends this critique. Although the film did not come out this year (two other Jude films did, Kontinental ’25 and Dracula), the filmmaker had a major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, another on MUBI, so circumstances made sure I saw his entire filmography again and again. While the film is not most commonly discussed as a depiction of late capitalism (public attention largely fixated on its verbal excesses and on the vulgar online persona adopted by its female protagonist in the form of an Andrew Tate-lookalike alter ego), I was personally most struck instead by its relentless portrayal of exhaustion as a structural condition. Angela, the film’s central figure, spends her days driving endlessly from one work assignment to another, repeatedly warning her employer that she is dangerously tired, that she has already fallen asleep at the wheel and risks causing a fatal accident. Her concerns remain completely unacknowledged and her work continues uninterrupted.

The violence of the film lies not only in this exhaustion but in the nature of Angela’s labor. She is tasked with recording testimonies from Romanian workers who have suffered serious workplace accidents, knowing that only one of them will be selected and “rewarded” with visibility and (hopefully) compensation by the German company responsible. The process culminates in a grotesque performance of accountability designed to satisfy the firm’s CEO, Doris Goethe—yes, the writer’s grand-grand-granddaughter—whose concern for the workers is purely cosmetic. The chosen worker is made to speak in front of the unchanged accident site, carefully framed so that corporate negligence remains invisible, and is pressured to rewrite his testimony to shift blame onto himself. When he refuses, aware of the consequences this could have for his ongoing legal case, he is filmed anyway, standing in the rain with a blank sheet of paper. The company’s PR department will later fill it in, scripting a story in postproduction. Whose story, we do not know.

These issues resurface as well, though perhaps more latently, in Jude’s recent Kontinental ’25, where a bailiff is tasked with handling the case of a formerly elite athlete now living clandestinely in the basement of an apartment building slated for conversion into a luxury hotel. In a visual mode which I love, so characteristic of Jude, the protagonist’s moral unease is punctuated, especially toward the end, by alternating cityscapes of late-capitalist Cluj, saturated with billboards and vulgar real-estate fantasies whose ostentatious luxury feels violently out of scale with both their surroundings and the lives unfolding within them.

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The omnipresence of these concerns in contemporary cinema says a great deal about the state of the world we are living in. Contemporary art has hardly remained on the sidelines of this reckoning; the recent exhibition Bullshit Job at the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris offers a notable parallel to the films discussed here, translating questions of exhaustion, meaningless labor, and structural violence into spatial and visual terms. Staged as a simulated corporate environment riddled with glitches and disruptions (such as Marcos Uriondo’s surrealist office white coffee mugs, Damn Fine Coffee 2, or the multiple ironic video installations shown on desktop computer screens), the exhibition exposed how capitalist and particularly corporate regimes of work infiltrate bodies, affects, and systems of belief, well beyond the office itself, turning human experience into the next resource to be extracted. What the show created, beyond stakes of sole denunciation, is a landscape of resistance: through irony, sabotage, care, and fiction, the artists unsettle the bureaucratic logic of productivity and efficiency. A 2024 installation by Elie Bolard titled WER4 echoes the work shared by many protagonists mentioned above, such as On Falling’s Aurora or Bugonia’s Teddy: the handling of packages, here Amazon boxes, which the artist arranges on several shelves in a separate room and makes open mechanically, accompanied by a hauntingly monotonous soundtrack. Seen alongside recent cinema, Bullshit Job confirms that these are not isolated artistic preoccupations, but shared attempts to grapple with a world in which work increasingly structures not only how we live, but how we think, feel, and relate to one another. ∎