In baseball, being part of the Minor Leagues is already a pretty big deal. It is not “minor” at all. Being part of the Minor Leagues is being a professional-level player, is the aspiring promise of greatness, it is having prospects on the dirt.

It is here that a swing gets built, that instinct is drilled into form, it is a complete system with its own logic and rigour.

And now, a very brief history lesson that ought to sit at the center of understanding the minor leagues: before integration, the most gifted Black baseball players in America were barred from the major leagues altogether, and so they built, outside it, an entire baseball world of their own, the Negro Leagues. Nothing about the quality of that baseball was minor, nor diminished. What was withheld was recognition, a place in the official record. This is the distinction worth sitting with: “minor” was never a fact about the game, but a fact about who got to say what counted.

Much of this story can be taken as a metaphor for many a historical event, serving even as a fable of conviction, a rising-above-the-context moral of the story. But in the Caribbean, this ain’t no metaphor: baseball was imported here well before it reached the rest of the world, it was absorbed, localized and creolized, and took root so thoroughly that the region became inseparable from the game itself.

What happened to baseball in the Caribbean happened to everything else that landed there: it was taken in, taken apart, and rebuilt in a local grammar. The region is built out of stories like this one. An archipelago by nature and by thought, made through rupture, transplantation, and constant remixing, colliding and recombining into something that owes no single origin its allegiance.

And if you have been wondering to what extent I am bringing you this seemingly unconnected story of baseball to a dispatch on art, here is the deal:

Las Ligas Menores (the Minor Leagues in Spanish) is a curatorial platform borrowing the minor leagues as structure and the Caribbean as ethos, turning them into a method and a framework for reading culture. LLM places context at the center of its practice, understanding holistically the conditions that produce a body of work (visual art, cinema, literature, music, food, craft, ritual, technology), anchored by three pillars: Artistic Research, Post-colonial Critique, and Poetics of Materials.

And The Art Dispatch, yours truly, is now part of this structure, bringing you monthly a batch of food-for-thought pieces that constitute this effort: to observe and trace the cultural flows, hybridities, and creative negotiations that define contemporary culture. Three dispatches a month: one long read, and two tiny thoughts, broadening our grasp to include opinion pieces on creative practices that permeate culture. These same three pillars now guide the editorial line.

Here is a brief glossary of what we understand as each pillar, a guide you can return to.

1. Artistic Research
Art and exhibition-making as sites of knowledge production, research, and discursive agency, to think about, with, and through art. In essence, this is the practice of locating art objects in relation to place, history, one another, and other fields of knowledge, blurring the line between art and theory. Works that belong to this axis produce another kind of knowledge, one that questions the limits of modern rationality.

2. Postcolonial Critique
Cultural production that interrogates the structures of thought, representation, and values produced by colonialism, structures that continue to shape and organize culture and sociopolitical life in the postcolonial moment. Postcolonial critique, here, also means opening onto a diverse system of thought and practice that discusses art and knowledge production as sociopolitically engaged acts.
LLM’s engagement with postcolonial thought proceeds from the legacies of dependency theory, the decolonial critique of modernity, the literary and cultural traditions of the Global South, and the lived reality of diasporic experience within Western cultural institutions.

3. Poetics of Material
Here, material is understood as an information carrier, a medium with immaterial properties folded into its very attributes. These are works in the spirit of “the medium is the message”: self-referential systems in which material and ideas converge, indissoluble from one another.
Material arrives already saturated with cultural meaning, carrying histories of power and production concealed within it, waiting to be revealed. Objects enter the space of an installation loaded with trajectories, with the residue of what they have been through. This pillar names the platform’s attention to that concealment, and to the conceptual force matter exerts within artistic practice.

So The Art Dispatch becomes a vessel for these commitments. A space to reflect and to share thoughts. The Art Dispatch will continue to reflect on the Parisian contemporary art scene, but will open now to a larger scope of disciplines with no geographic limlits, guided by these three pillars. We will maintain a critical point of view, one always grounded in the contextual analysis of where a cultural production emerges, linking it to wider, universal truths.

See you at the next dispatch.

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But what traveled with the seed was never only the seed; it was the plantation, the monocrop, the rows, the labor recruited and shipped across oceans. Brazil’s rubber economy was extracted and replanted, becoming the template for a system that would exceed rubber altogether; a system that persists today within our socioeconomic and political system, spawned by from the extraction of natural resources from the Global South to the Global North. And don’t let this be read as a critique but as a mere matter-of-fact.

With the passing of years, the changes in politics, in nationhoods, and the different shapes taken by societies, the term “extractivism” expanded its semantics affecting stories, peoples, and cultures feeding up a system that takes and takes without reciprocal benefits to its places of origins.

A system built to take doesn't need one place to take from. It needs an elsewhere; and an elsewhere can be East, South , anywhere.

As Ishita Chakraborty says, the East Is Everywhere.

And by East, she means the plants, the food, and the clothes we wear; in cotton, fruits and rubber. In the notions of space, and memory, and language that circulate innocuously given for granted within “systems that emerge from them and continue to structure contemporary power relations”.

What the artist understands perfectly well, is the network of relations that the Global South and the Global North have created. But I believe that her job as an artist and researcher doesn’t rely merely on relating the people with the ecosystem. But bridge these relations already assembled together, in sublime ways. Objects corrupted with violence reformed with tenderness and poetry; “transforming instruments of constraint into a sign of resistance and vulnerability”.

She distills memory through the poetics of material. In Plantes Tropicales, a mural drawing in charcoal and cotton, explanations are superfluous, the drawings anecdotal (plantation, sugar cane, slavery), because the very marrow of the message is spoken loudly by the material itself.

Ishita Chakraborty is far from making claims or denunciations of matters of histories: histories that belong so much to the South and East as they do to the West and North. In the end, there is one story told from discerning angles; from different distances of responsibility.

Chakraborty extracts the East from a geographical standpoint, towards an ideological force; she loosens the center free for it to stand on the apprehension of the beholder. Your center would depend on what lies beyond, because when you fix a center, everything else becomes “East.”

But when memory circulates framed by narratives of origin and understanding, the map is just a standpoint, and the East begins to move with you. The map only holds still if you refuse to move.

East Is Everywhere is on view at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Paris, until July 25, 2026.

“What you see is what you see.”
— Frank Stella

“Illusion, not flatness, is the essence of painting.”
— Barbara Rose

Color doesn’t exist. It is the quiet trickery of the physical world: light meets matter, matter throws some of it back, and the eye mistakes the residue for reality. What we call seeing is a negotiation between wavelengths and the body that receives them. We move through the world with the certainty of witnesses but in truth, we are only ever borrowing a thin slice of what is there.

This gap between physics and perception is beautifully embodied by the Peacock Mantis. While humans rely on just three types of color-receptive cones to translate the entire spectrum of light into what we call “color,” the Peacock Mantis possesses up to sixteen, seeing deep into ultraviolet and near-infrared wavelengths completely invisible to us. Proof that reality is entirely dictated by the limits of perception.

Yanis Khannoussi’s work stands exactly in this gap between physics (the raw data of light) and metaphysics (how we perceive it and find meaning). His highly polished, iridescent volumes continuously shift and color-grade as one moves around them; engineering objects that stretch the boundaries of human vision, offering a brief, metaphysical glimpse into a vaster, unseen reality just beyond our sight. In his work, color is both a medium and conceptual trap: it seduces the viewer into a flawless, candy-coated beauty. Color is what makes the experience of beauty most seductive. And in this pursuit of beauty and perfection, Yanis paints.

Painting has always adapted its method of illusion to reflect the absolute ideals of its time. In the 17th century, the physical gesture of the painter’s hand was smoothed away to create a flawless window into ‘reality’ (an illusion modernism would soon leave behind). Centuries later, the California minimalists of the Finish Fetish movement (a reaction to the heavy brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism), expanded painting into three-dimensional space, appropriating an industrial repertoire of resins, plexiglass, and vacuum machines, heavily influenced by the mechanized output of post-war factories and aerospace engineering.

Khannoussi works within this lineage, treating his sculptural volumes as paintings: the support becomes the subject, and the surface, however perfect, contains its own depth. Yet he reverses its logic entirely. Historically, an object begins with the human hand (a rough sketch, a prototype) and is finalized by the cold precision of a machine. Khannoussi flips this. His forms originate in the frictionless realm of 3D digital modeling, relying on the human hand as their final vessel: the slow, manual labor needed to pull the weightlessness of the digital into the heavy, material world.

For Khannoussi, the fully mechanized object is “loveless.” Its soul exists entirely within the friction: the pursuit of absolute perfection, and the energy captured in its inevitable failure. Against Walter Benjamin’s fear that mechanical reproduction strips an artwork of its unique presence (an anxiety the present moment has made concrete in today’s automated fabrication) Khannoussi smuggles the aura back into the seemingly perfect object. Hours of manual labor go into erasing every trace of the hand, ensuring the work retains its human soul precisely by hiding it. Luscious, hypnotic color gradients become idiosyncratic elements that collide to form a poetic backbone of premeditated gestures.

This concealed soul reveals the deeply personal core of Khannoussi’s practice. In the Greek myth of Callirhoe, art was born from the impulse to trace a shadow; to give tangible form to a fading presence. This instinct to materialize absence becomes the driving force behind his work, rooted in the grief following the loss of his father. His sculptures function as physical borders for a void: perfectly rendered forms that give weight and structure to what is no longer there. The work, he says, is about “looking for the lack in the star, a star that is always missing; the single drop of an endless world.”

Encountering one of Khannoussi’s volumes is to be seduced by light, to stand before a surface that expresses what language cannot hold. What might appear as a repetition of scale and shape is in fact a rigorous site of variation: a patient pursuit of a wordless transcendence.

The ellipse is the form through which Khannoussi materializes this impossible pursuit. At first glance it appears absolute: defined by seamless curves and shifting color. Yet the ellipse is conceptually rooted in imperfection; it is the alienated iteration of the perfect sphere, a geometry that introduces perspective, torsion, and physical vulnerability. A perfect imperfection. And once you stand before it, the surface begins to move with you, its colors shifting with every step. The object becomes a kind of dialogue between light, surface, and the body that meets it in a slow choreography of perception.

Still, something quietly comes undone in this encounter. To learn that color does not exist is to realize that the world we move through with such certainty is, at its foundation, a construction; a consensual hallucination. The Peacock Mantis does not share our agreement. Standing before one of Khannoussi’s iridescent volumes, it witnesses an explosion of color, UV reflection, and spiraling light that the human eye will never access. We stand before the same object and see beauty. The Mantis sees the infinite.

This is where the work quietly exceeds itself. Khannoussi is turning beauty into perceptual thresholds, objects that shift when you shift, that change as light changes, that refuse to resolve into a single fixed truth. Each ellipse is a small argument: that reality is not a given, but a limit we can push. That what we call seeing is only ever a fraction of what is there.

Who knows where the infinite goes. The Mantis does, and it isn’t telling.

The Voyage of the Peacock Mantis
Yanis Khannoussi @yanis_khannoussi
Curated by Valentina Rosas Saad @velrosita08
04.06.2026 → 18.07.2026
DUMONTEIL Paris · 38 rue de l’Université, 75007

For inquiries or exhibition preview write me an email : valentina@clublasligasmenores.com

It starts with a bang! The wholeness of the exhibition stares back at you with the sheer force of its scale, and overwhelmed by awe, you’re lost in the vastness of its proportions. With no focal point, and no master piece of its own, Vivan Suter (1949) exhibits her life work without claiming hierarchies or philosophical weight. The works are just there, hanging like sculptures, tucked away in what could be a storage room where we are welcomed to step in.

Titled Disco after her dog, whose figure and footsteps wander through the canvases, the works fold in paws, leaves, branches, and scraps of cardboard. Extending from ceiling to floor –leaving no room for silence– forms, colors, and figures emerge boundless and meaningless, resisting any fixed conceptual or contextual framing, but shaping one another through their proximity.

It is indeed a an imposing exhibition; but for what ? why?

The paintings live under the natural light of the Parisian summer. The open ceiling of the industrial vastness of the Palais de Tokyo make this exhibition feel lived. The wind brushes the canvases with natural light changing the colors that dress up the whole room. More than 400 naked canvases, spanning from the 1980s to today, inhabit the space. There is nothing to see really, and at the same time there is everything. One has to look freely without the intention of finding anything, for something to struck.

But striking as they are, for me the works are reflexive, subjective to her experience, her environment, her pets, the air that brushes her house, the nature that surrounds her. Tainted with the natural courses that inhabit her home and the effects of whatever touches this membrane, it speaks to her first, and only then, to us. The feeling Suter’s works awakened in me wasn’t new, I had felt it before, standing before Tracey Emin, and while Suter’s practice couldn’t be more distant from Emin’s confessional intensity, it stirred the same recognition: a sense of entering a world filtered entirely through someone else’s experience. A fragment of a lived moment, a story told through gesture and form: this is art that speaks solely of personal experience, and one connects to it only by assimilation, by understanding her life through the lens of our own. Vivian Suter’s work, in its own way, is equally personal, only we connect to it through the aesthetic pleasure of her compositions, when emotional resonance is not immediately shared.

The formal rigor of Suter’s canvases pulled me back to Paris around 2022, to that naïve thrill of encountering something new, still unformed, still testing its boundaries. At that time, a young artist completely blew my mind: fresh, bold, audacious, challenging: Ser Serpas was the talk of the town, in Paris and New York. With carefully assembled pieces of junk, she erected marvelous statues of tomorrow-day. I was mesmerized by her work, its sleaziness, and nonchalantness. Her sculptures were what attracted me to her work. And then I discovered her paintings, out of the easel, rough again, with figures that border abstraction but clearly marked by the path that leads the hand. Her canvases, refusing to be framed, lived in the outside world much like her sculptures did, they hanged like clothes drying in a rack, closed together, signifying the works around them, became sculptural in nature. Much like the works in Disco: frameless, boundless, in the pursuit of form.

Every rupture is a repetition. What shocks us as “new” is often material reshuffled, with the cultural codes of the time. Duchamp’s readymades echoed Symbolist ideas of suggestion over form and the 19th-century taste for objets trouvés. Postmodern artists like Sherrie Levine or Cindy Sherman built careers precisely on this premise, showing that originality is already a copy. Literature tells the same tell: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a collage of other voices, and Joyce’s Ulysses is Homer’s Odyssey lived out in Dublin. Music repeats patterns: Minimalists like Philip Glass, or John Adams draw from Baroque structures and African drumming. What we call invention is often recombination.

“There is nothing new under the sun.” Really. And I say this in the most flattering way. Creation is recycling, cannibalizing, rewriting. It’s taking the hand we were dealt and playing the f*cking game. What matters truly is insistence; the refusal to stop asking, stop reshaping, stop repeating until meaning emerges again.

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Appropriation is the archeology of the present time; At the core, is the way in which new work re contextualizes what it borrows: the new New.

In the contemporary condition, meaning is assembled through repetition across existing signs: it moves in loops of reference, and inherited semiotics where appropriation becomes a symptom of culture under the weight of acceleration and exhaustion. Omar Castillo Alfaro navigates these waters. He brings together the universal language of manga with the ancient featherwork of the Amantecas, engineering and Mayan flowers; memory and imagination folding into each other. He launches new expeditions into unexplored and forgotten forms , ways of thinking, processes; he questions what it means to be contemporary, resisting the demand for constant newness. Instead, he draws on continuity, and hierarchies of knowledge offering a deeper understanding of form and meaning. His practice expands the temporality of the “now” by re-reading history through the lens of ‘culture’, and making some noise while at it.

During his current residency at Casa Velázquez, wandering through palaces and history museums, it became clear to Omar the Spanish had understood this since colonial times. They didn’t invent so much as collect, borrowing Andalusian curves, Gothic heights, Mudejar details. Being contemporary was never about invention, it was about selection. About what you did with what you’ve already seen. Colonialism and globalization worked in much the same way. Two distant systems, both creating collisions that never quite stopped. The result is a kind of blur. Omar has always worked through the wounds left by these forces. But the truth is, they’ve grown larger than us. So large, it’s hard to name what came from where. Cultures mix, symbols drift. We inherit the confusion. And we carry it forward.

So how do we make sense of it all? How do we use it, what is imposed, what is not ours but has grown within us? Is it cultural appropriation? Is it stealing? Is it reinterpretation? How do we make sense of culture when it is so taxonomically divided? The answers to these questions are on what Omar calls dialogues of colonial and imperial processes: not confrontations, but slow infiltrations. Maybe the shape of things is constantly changing, but the structure is just a pattern we keep adapting.

When the Spanish arrived in Mesoamerica, they were captivated by the artistry of the Amantecas – Indigenous feather workers trained in highly specialized systems of aesthetic and spiritual labor. In pre-Hispanic times, feathers held deep ritual, ornamental, and military value. Under Spanish rule, however, they were extracted from their ontological ground and repurposed as tools of evangelization. What followed was a re-inscription: a conversion of embodied knowledges into instruments of colonial representation, placing Indigenous visual epistemes at the service of the Christian imaginary.

Feathers laid the foundation of Amantecas, Omar’s latest series. He learned this almost-forgotten technique; he learned it slowly, by hand, reanimating a language nearly erased. What began as material inquiry turned into something else: a way back and a way in. The feathers, once sacred and ornamental, became tools for return; Omar was suddenly back in his childhood home , weaving and running around with Pedro, the family parrot of 13 years. He picked up his feathers, saved them as relics, and transformed them into epic shapes of memory.

Pedro, is of ultimate importance in the ethos of Omar’s practice. Free in its captivity he became another kind of metaphor opening the door to sculptural stones: representation of beaks pierced by the weight of feathers suspended in balanced metal hooks. An act that becomes a kind of utopia, or a futility: combining heavy stones with the impossibility of flight: wings that move but cannot lift.

Amantecas

Pedro is the first chapter of the series Amantecas: It opens a space, part history– part apparition– to think through image, empire, transmission, and heritage; to consider what survives, and how.

Manga enters the work as a visual language already in motion: global, hyper-circulated, familiar. Much like 18th-century painting, which helped shape collective memory through repeated imagery, manga operates within a memetic logic: symbols and narratives that migrate, mutate, and embed themselves across cultures. Tv series like Sailor Moon, and Saint Seiya, shared across borders and generations, function as global icons, untethered from national identity, yet loaded with affect. By drawing these references in feather mosaics, Omar reclaims a craft devalued through colonization reframing it within a contemporary, hybrid practice. In doing so, he reveals the persistence of cultural memory.

The second chapter, The Theft of Images, shifts focus to the term “mosaic” itself. Omar traces how this word, and the aesthetic it evokes, was shaped by European traditions: from Andalusian tilework to Gaudí, Art Nouveau, and Art Deco. Through this lens, feathers become a sculptural language, reimagined on his own terms. By refusing the logic of classification, Omar opens space for a new kind of taxonomy; one grounded in ancestral craft and the unfinished work of decolonization.

Representation, in Omar’s work, becomes a site of re-mapping. He delinks from Western frameworks by weaving together visual grammars as seemingly distant as Quetzalcóatl and Sailor Moon, a gesture that refuses linear art histories and embraces the pluriversality of image. His feather mosaics enact its complexity, they mark the friction between imperial epistemologies and embodied knowledges, between systems of categorization and ways of sensing the world. What emerges is more a tension than a fusion, an image practice grounded in what Mignolo would call the “colonial difference.”1 In this shared visual imaginary, shaped by global pop and ancestral memory, borders lose their disciplinary hold. By reclaiming a technique once co-opted for religious conquest, Omar asks not just what images represent, but what they resist.

Historiography, visual culture and pre-Columbian mythologies have been the backbone of Omar’s artistic research. Before the Amantecas became a reference, there was a flower: a quiet, persistent image that had already taken hold of his grief. It found shape in the early sculptures that now define his practice, adorned with elements drawn from the earth he and his ancestors have walked: feathers, paraffin, soil, red pigment speak of a beginning, the memory of something first still in motion. To talk about the genesis of Omar and his universe, is to invoke the Naab.

Naab

Naab means “flower” in Maya, specifically the white water lily, Nymphaea alba. This flower was used by Maya painters as a signature symbol. Omar has traced this flower’s presence across history: in Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse’s Le chevalier aux fleurs (1887) at the Musée d’Orsay, in colonial Latin American church decorations, in the tree of life motif, and in Ana Mendieta’s Siluetas series from the 1970s. (A photograph of Mendieta in Oaxaca, holding traditional beeswax candles adorned with flowers for the Day of the Dead, was a key inspiration.)

Omar forges iron by hand with the intuition of drawing, bending and shaping it into structures that hold the logic of engineering. The pieces are often framed by arabesque lines or surrounded by raw earth, grounding their ethereal whims in something heavier: stone, obsidian, and tezontle stones. The melting wax forms stalactites that evoke sacred cenotes (places said to hold the Earth monster’s teeth) while supporting fragile, hand-crafted flowers through an ancestral techniques passed down through generations by the women in his family. What was once whispered in kitchens, stitched and braided behind closed doors, now takes monumental forms in Castillo Alfaros’ hands; traditions once dismissed and slowly eroded by the promise of modernism are reconfigured and re-activated.

Omar’s sculptures navigate the tension between memory and the unfamiliar embodying hybridity as a process of cultural collision. This “third space,” as Homi K. Bhabha2 describes it, is where imposed colonial structures meet local identities, generating something transformed yet new. In this space of negotiation, identities are not fixed essences but dynamic productions continually reshaped through encounters, resistances, and translations. Omar’s practice, with its layering of ancestral craft and contemporary forms, enacts this process, challenging essentialist notions of culture and opening new possibilities for meaning beyond colonial legacies.

For Bhabha, hybridity is both theoretical and creative; a weapon forged in the violence of colonial encounters that redefines cultural production. It unsettles the legitimacy of singular identities and produces new systems of knowledge through cultural conversion. This ongoing negotiation shapes what is preserved, what is displayed, and what is shared from our multiple heritages, while also raising questions about appropriation, both conscious and unconscious. Omar’s work inhabits this space of complexity, where cultural roots and borrowed forms intermingle, making visible the flux at the heart of identity and artistic expression.

The past and present are in constant concession. Their roles are not fixed but inform one another. Hybridity embraces difference: other sounds, other colors, other flavors. Omar’s work is part of an ongoing reversal of colonial erasure bringing silenced knowledge into spaces that once denied them, unsettling the authority they claimed. He reminds us that cultural identity is never still. It’s shaped by where we come from, but also by the histories we rewrite. It evolves through conflict, context, and the power dynamics that frame our understanding.  Ideas and forms that seep into the cracks of even the most rigid structures. 

You have to open the cracks wider. That’s how the light gets in.

In the beginning, there was the verb. And then came the reckoning.

Grada Kilomba’s exhibition Opera to a Black Venus. What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if emptied of water today? at Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, sets in Motion a theatrical experience where history and myth bend reality. She envisions a future where the sea has disappeared, leaving behind an arid landscape strewn with the remnants of human history—the Black Atlantic, migration politics, and the surveillance of water in colonized territories—turning the ocean into an unmarked grave of centuries of loss.

The exhibition unwinds like a post-apocalyptic dream; room after room, where shipwrecks groan, water murmurs, and shadows linger like unfinished sentences.  Rocks, sand, cotton, and the voices of the future-past are drawn from the ocean’s depths to give shape to each room and hallway where fragments of a history resurface into fragile contradictions. One walks through it lightly, with the kind of careful reverence reserved for places of consecration. Suspended in this haunted space, we are caught between repetition and rupture. But can a cycle truly be broken, or does it merely take on a new form? In Kilomba’s own words, the exhibition “explores the intersection between the injustices of the past and the possibilities of the future.” But what are these possibilities? And for whom?

Grada Kilomba is a Berlin-based Portuguese artist whose work engages deeply with memory, trauma, and post-colonialism. Kilomba is best known for her unique approach to storytelling, Her practice gives body, voice, form, and movement to her texts, consistently asking: What stories are told? How are they told? And by whom? These questions serve as the driving force behind her body of work. 

In this story, Kilomba reimagines Venus as an oracle in a future blurred at the edges, defined as much by what is missing as by what remains. Her message invokes a violence so insidious where whispers foreshadow catastrophe, and silence is not an absence of sound but a language of its own. 

Kilomba’s work emerges from a decolonial shift, an active rejection of the Eurocentric paradigms that have dominated our systems of knowledge production. Here, She offers a new way to collect memories, a way to gather what has been forgotten and to reframe the narrative from within. With Black Venus, Kilomba reclaims symbols of beauty, agency, and power, but still meddling through Western frames of reference: Greek mythologies that have long defined the narrative of what is “beautiful” and “divine.” But why this choice? Why take Venus and make her Black, rather than unearth a Black deity like Oshun, goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and water? Would the people of Madrid engage with Oshun in the same way they do with a Black Venus? Is it inescapable to remain tethered to Western structures of knowledge? Has it become an impossible task to exhibit within halls constructed on these very paradigms? would an approach like this risk turning the exhibition from an artistic exploration into an indoctrination on other ways of seeing?

Even when cycles are broken, they remain unhealed. What does it really mean to work within a postcolonial framework?

For an exhibition so powerful and sublime, dismantling a system still

feels out of reach—it can only lay it bare, exposing its lingering hold. Perhaps it means this: the very possibility of a Black Venus; the acknowledgment of a hybrid culture in a postmodern world, the absolute need for real postmodernity, and the reclamation of the public domain of culture. This, perhaps, is what reversing systems is truly about: reappropriation, the creation of new symbols, new representations that can reunite in harmony what was once violently torn apart.

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Perhaps it's less about imposing new ideas and more about disrupting, rewriting. At the end, the exhibition creates a new visual vocabulary, a visual alphabet that supplies the tools to question everything we think we know. It’s a toolbox that spans disciplines—because this is how Kilomba breathes life into complex philosophical inquiries, transforming them into a magnificent opera of ideas. Her work is a work of translation, a constant negotiation between what is remembered, what is silenced, and what is being rewritten.

In the depths of the Black Venus’ ocean, untold stories lie submerged, waiting to be unearthed, waiting for their release. The ocean, now emptied of water, recovers these silences, daring to defy a collective amnesia that has long erased them.

What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if emptied of water today? at Museo Reina Sofía is on view until March 31.

Olga de Amaral is honored with a retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, marking their 40th anniversary, on view until March 16, 2025. As a Colombian, I can't help but feel a deep, irrational pride for this milestone. It feels like reclaiming culture in a quiet act of reconnection. This exhibition is about ancestral knowledge entwined with undeniable artistic mastery. It doesn't deny any historical framework, but incorporates new ones, crafting a counter-narrative that holds space and resists erasure.

Olga de Amaral was born in 1932 in Bogotá, Colombia. After earning a degree in architecture at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca (1951–1952), she pursued her studies at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan (1954–1955), an institution often likened to Germany’s Bauhaus for its integration of art and craft. Amaral embraced innovative materials and techniques, blending Modernist principles with Colombian traditions.

The press release situates Amaral as a pivotal figure in both Colombian contemporary art and the fiber art movement, a movement currently gaining momentum. With major exhibitions like “Unravel – The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art” at the Stedelijk Museum, the itinerant exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” opening at MOMa in 2025, and significant nods at the Venice Biennale, fiber art is, in a sense, in vogue.

Perhaps this retrospective aligns with this zeitgeist, folding Amaral’s work into a broader narrative of global art trends. But what lies beneath this timing and framing?

The influence of Andean textiles on Western modernism—seen in movements like Cubism, Constructivism, Abstraction, Minimalism, and of course Fiber art—manifests in the use of geometric patterns, vivid color palettes, and spatial compositions. To revisit these textiles today is to recognize their rightful place not as peripheral to modernism, but as foundational to its evolution and history.

(New) Modernisms

By the late 19th century, Berlin housed the largest collection of Andean textiles outside Peru. In 1875, German archaeologists excavated the necropolis of Ancón, unearthing remarkably preserved textiles dating back to the 6th century. These artifacts, displayed in the Museum für Völkerkunde, were seen by leading modernist figures like Anni Albers, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and the Blue Rider artists; encounters that somehow must have been instrumental in shaping modernist abstraction, connecting it to a lineage entrenched not only in innovation but in Ancestral traditions.

By then the ideals of unrelenting progress through industrial development faced critique contesting the belief that reality could be objectively understood, particularly after the traumas of two world wars. Western societies, shaken and disoriented, began looking outward, beyond their own paradigms, in search of alternative structures to comprehend a fractured world. In seeking new answers, artists forged paths through lesser-traveled roads.

Modernist institutions such as the Bauhaus, turned their attention to overlooked techniques and traditions, such as handcrafted objects and textiles of non-Western societies. These practices, with their craftsmanship and cultural specificity, resonated with their ideal of integrating art into everyday life, offering a counterpoint to alienation with a vision of a more harmonious, human-centered modernity.

In the 1930s, Bauhaus pioneers Josef and Anni Albers traveled to Mexico, immersing themselves in the cultural heritage of the region, learning about Indigenous traditions and Andean weaving techniques. During these voyages, they saw artisans using the portable backstrap loom. This Andean technique, requiring the weaver to tension the warp with their own body, anchoring it to a tree or post, was later introduced to their students at Black Mountain College, influencing figures like Sheila Hicks.

From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, fiber art had already etched a distinct chapter in art history, championed predominantly by women across Europe and the United States exploring the sculptural and three-dimensional value of thread and fabric. You have Magdalena Abakanowicz’s monumental Abakans; Lenore Tawney’s sculptural cathedrals with thread; and Sheila Hicks, who spent decades learning from artisans from Mexico to Morocco, turning thread and fiber into whatever her mind was capable of imaging. And you have also of course, Cecilia Vicuña and Olga de Amaral, who have carved their place as Latin American artists within this movement—Vicuña with her monumental Quipus, which earned her the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and Amaral as the masterful "rock weaver.”

Even within a movement so profoundly rooted in Amerindian traditions, only a handful of Latin American artists have been recognized in the broader historical narrative. Latin American art tied to non-western legacies has often been sidelined, confined to the periphery, and too frequently relegated to the category of craft. This glaring contradiction prompts a necessary reevaluation, urging us to question the foundations of modernism and its entanglements with histories that have been overshadowed and systematically suppressed.

Fiber art, so often confined to the bounds of modern categorization, is far more than a craft: it is a system of knowledge; an ancestral practice. Long before the advent of written language, Amerindian and Mesoamerican civilizations encoded complex ideas through thread, constructing a language that spoke through material and form. By the early Nazca period, weaving techniques that still inform contemporary practices had already reached extraordinary levels of sophistication. In these societies, weaving was not just a craft but a mode of thought, an accounting system, and an instrument of social order. It transcended functionality, embodying both abstraction and the abstracted; a language unto itself.

Olga de Amaral’s work exists within this broader trajectory, where art serves as a lens to renegotiate modernity itself.

Shaped by her architectural training and refined at Cranbrook Academy, Amaral’s work blends the structured modernism of her education with the ancestral language of the Andes and pre-Columbian heritage. The result is a practice that withstands classification, fabricating art and craft into something entirely of its own.

The Fondation Cartier exhibition offers a rare, comprehensive view of her accomplished work, against the reductiveness of chronological curation. It emphasizes her relentless experimentation with materials, scale, and form while tracing the diverse influences that inform her practice.

The exhibition space unfolds in three sections, with one of the main rooms dedicated to works evoking landscapes and cartographies. These towering, large-scale pieces hang from the ceiling like colossal mountains or urban edifices. If you’ve ever walked through Bogotá or Medellín, you’ll recognize echoes of their architecture: brick buildings that blanket the cities in terracotta hues, reminiscent of Muro en Rojo (1982) or Gran Muro (1976). Crafted from cotton, wool, and horsehair, these works exceed the flatness of the textile, embracing a three-dimensionality that pervades the space with a sense of magical realism. Walking through this room feels like wandering an enchanted forest outside time, where nature and architecture collide in a boundless explosion of color and form.

Adjacent to this, the surreal atmosphere continues with works of an entirely different nature. Here, the tapestry unravels—deconstructed into air, into Brumas. Shapes dissolve and reconfigure, morphing into ethereal traces of light and shadow that drift with the viewer’s movement. These are living artworks, ever-changing and hypnotic, designed to be walked through and experienced. Cotton threads suspended in midair form dense, cloud-like geometries, creating a state of suspended disorientation. Like mist, the threads obscure vision and redefine the room’s space, conjuring an atmosphere that is as much about absence as it is about presence; a meditative, shape-shifting interplay of light, color, and movement.

Downstairs, a room brimming with suspended works offers a force of weight and heaviness; almost noise-canceling. The tapestries have abandoned the floor, occupying the air, building a dialogue with space itself organized around thematic currents that have shaped Olga de Amaral’s pursuit of light and language.

The exhibition culminates in Estelas, a spiraled, cocoon-like space centered around 13 gold-leafed works. This room evokes the spiritual, channeling the profound significance gold held for pre-Colombian societies, but also the material’s inherent magnificence: its closeness to the sun, its reflective power, its omnipresence, and its radiant sheen. It is a mystical landscape absorbed with sacred resonance. Amaral captures the essence of megaliths by speaking the hidden language of stones and structuring their silent testimony: “They are the links that connect the earth to the heavens. Captive in the silence of the stone, there is an answer.” This final room is less an end and more an ascension, a transcendence into the cosmos, a glimpse of something bigger than ourselves.

Amaral’s process indulges traditional means and materials: she experiments with plastic, linen, horsehair, gesso, and gold with techniques of weaving, knotting, and braiding. Amaral was steeped in a cultural landscape where weaving is inseparable from the colors and forms of daily life. Her art does not merely continue this tradition; it transforms it.

The importance of this exhibition at the Fondation Cartier lies in its quiet but heartfelt acknowledgment. There is still so much to uncover, and so many voices to amplify; It opens a door to other ways of seeing, honoring perspectives that have long been sidelined. I know people are getting tired of these narratives, but some of us really need them. In parallel, the social sciences and humanities are also increasingly revisiting the past, to dissect it through contemporary lenses. This reverse engineering of time seeks to uncover how present-day phenomena are implanted in specific actions, places, and historical contexts. It is a way of understanding not just how we came to be, but how histories, constructed and contested, continue to shape our identities and futures.

Much of what Olga de Amaral has achieved with her practice circles back to the essence of her being—her landscape, her relentless pursuit of light and color; an exploration of the tactile and the imaginary. While her work undeniably carries modernist influences, it elevates the traditions in her techniques, with unparalleled refinement.

Her art is a testament to heritage, a bridge between the ancestral and the contemporary. It inspires an almost ineffable pride and hope, as this knowledge find its rightful place in the narrative of contemporary art and a broader history of influences. Amaral’s work anchors the past in the present and carries it forward with profound resonance.

This dispatch is part of a series from Las Ligas Menores, Editorial 1: Weaving Voices Untranslated.

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"Coming Soon" at Lafayette Anticipations explores our ongoing fascination with forecasting the future as a reflection on what this reveals about our present-day preoccupations.

But why make an exhibition about this now? Personally, reflecting on our relationship with the unexpected is not enough of an excuse to do this magnitude of a show. (More than 30 artists including loans from the Louvre).  The curatorial text states it is a response to the ongoing crises that seem to define our world, but since I have a living memory the socio-political state of the world has been that of perpetual crisis and wars: economic, political, proxy, religious, you name it.

“Coming Soon” is not quite the title I would have given this show. I, myself think it is not about the future, and what is coming, but rather towards wanting to know “Everything Now”; about an obsession with time and the apparent absence of it. It speaks about immediacy, the yearning for instant gratification and quick fixes. Is everything fleeting and temporary? When we question the future, we inevitably question the present.

My tiny thought on all this, is just tiny because the exhibition is closing soon, (mind the pun – go visit until the 12 of May) and it is quite an opus to unfold. Having visited it twice, it felt like skimming through the pages of a book, where you can't quite grasp why two and two were put together; but then, on a rainy day, you sit and take your time to actually read the book, and say hmm, this all might make sense. This was the exhibition to me.

The first floor, divided into three chapters: The Wisdom of the Oracle, Deciphering the Unknown, and Seeing Ahead is a straightforward text – thorough and literal. The second floor however appeared more enigmatic and abstract compared to the first: Impatience, meditation, boredom, and the act of counting minutes appear as a reflection on time passing and not the future. Works by Benoît Piéron, Clovis Bataille, and Nina Beier speak of it in an ethereal manner – a moment constantly in perpetual arrival.

But the las floor is the icing on the cake; suddenly everything goes quiet inside your head; completely silent. The windowed ceiling of the space lets the light in and suspends everything around it.

“Balance” a daily performance by artist Bridget Polk, is a living installation where the artist, present almost every day during the duration of the exhibition, is balancing rocks. She understood the assignment. She’s just living life. What does the future mean for her, if the rocks keep falling and she just keeps putting them back together? A sadistic joke on Sisyphus who knew nothing about meditation.

Her work creates an ongoing cycle of doing and undoing— a testament to the transient essence of life. Despite its repetitive nature, she remains unfazed by boredom, instead she relinquishes all manipulation of time and its quantification to let it be elastic, flexible, timeless.

After all, I’d say that the future might just be robbing us from appreciating the present and the present is ever pressingly immediate that what lies in between these two is the constant angst of trying to know what is coming next.

I wanna end this thought on two things:

1. I saw no mention of the I-ching, which is the only oracle you should care for, hashtag respect.

2. And second, If you have ever watched 30 Rock, there is an episode where Liz Lemon discovers she can predict the future by examining her diary entries from the previous year. She notices a pattern of repeating events – taxes, seasonal changes, meetings, TV specials, food – indicating a cycle of familiar occurrences. This allows her to anticipate and solve present problems by drawing from past reflections.

So perhaps we do in fact have all the answers already, we just have to carefully examine the past to gain a deeper understanding of the patterns and tendencies that influence our lives.

And if we seek to alter the course of the future, it ultimately comes down to changing our actions and schemes.

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Some people feel it, others just might not, the religious experience of encountering a Rothko. It is highly subjective as it is elusive. Its grandeur, vastness, and repetition in style might induce a deeply meditative state of consciousness. For some, Rothko’s canvases are like encountering deep disturbed waters separated by a thin line of stillness where one can navigate peacefully through a turbulent storm; others might see but colors.

In October of last year, Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris unveiled a comprehensive retrospective honoring the legacy of artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970), featuring an impressive collection of 115 works sourced from international collections including MOMA, TATE, the National Gallery, and numerous other public and private institutions.

The exhibition meticulously arranges Rothko's oeuvre in a strict chronological order, with a continued and often extravagant timely precision. Yet I wonder about the utter necessity of presenting once again the man, the artist, in such a close unbending manner; one we all know, or at least those with a basic art historical knowledge; or one that a graphic timeline in the building’s hall could suffice.

Art history has woven a familiar narrative that often frames modernism and abstract expressionism as a reaction to the postwar era and the so-called suicide of reason. The linear progression from figuration to abstraction, to the fuzzy blocks of bright colors slowly dimming to grays and culminating in the artist’s tragic suicide felt, in a way, awfully mediated and misleading on what the art of Mark Rothko is really about. This severe use of chronology privileged knowledge of art history over the art; over the feeling. And if there was ever an artist who despised superfluous narratives of any sort, was Rothko. Instead, he strived during his lifetime to defy conventional discussions of abstraction and color toward expression. Pure expression.

Sure, there is a sort of correct assumption that Rothko, the man can be dissected through the history of his paintings; indeed, as the years progress some canvases become darker and more inaccessible emotionally. But if presented with each painting in isolation, something different arises, rather than the evidence of the demise in character of the artist; instead, there is a feeling of something opening, something changing in the paintings, in us.

To inadvertently encounter a Rothko in a museum is one of those rare moments, you see, when one actually, without hesitation, stops and sits to immerse oneself in the painting. You do not think about what the artist might have intended, what was the context of its making, or whether it was meant to convey a certain message. It is solely about what it makes you feel. Some people just do, like I said.

This is the key to grasping what a Rothko is about: feeling. This is what it is truly about! Yet somehow, the exhibition feels like a biographical odyssey. Is this wrong? Well no. It is incredibly poignant and surreal. The mere fact of being able to witness the vastness of Rothko’s life work, from beginning to end, is something I, for once, never thought I’d see. Is it a good show? yes, everything in the exhibition is flexibly accurate: the historical understanding is given but any space for emotional deployment is presided over.

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And the thing is, that the Fondation Louis Vuitton has close to infinite resources to make the greatest exhibitions ever produced, and perhaps no one else in probably decades will be able to gather the many paintings from Rothko that this retrospective compiles. So why not strive to make something utterly contemporary with a body of works that knows no historical constraints? Why not honor who the man was by prioritizing his one true achievement: feeling.

Rothko’s found style offered him a path to eliminate all obstacles between the artist and the idea, and “between the idea and the observer”. His shapes and colors got rid of anything that triggered history and memory; narrative and even geometry. He strived to create an overwhelming sensory experience through monumentality, simplicity, and stillness.

This is the religious experience I’m telling you about. He layers glazes of colors to achieve hues so deep and powerful that they appear to glow. Something artists from the Renaissance like Tintoretto, Titian, Raphael, and Caravaggio so masterfully achieved. They evoke the unbearable silence of god.  They make you adjust to it, bear it, reach its desired insufferable quality. But this is a different kind of silence, one that can only be achieved in front of greatness. The geometry of its shapes vanishes and disfigures into something else in the presence of this. Because shapes are only shapes until you want them to become a symbol for something else. And this, this has nothing to do with history.

Rothko intended us to feel something instead, to encounter the undefinable, to lean into the void and confront the universal tragedy of man. His paintings have the whole world contained in them. They are as meaningful today as they were 70 years ago.

There is one particular room that really stands out for its openness and immediacy within an otherwise rigid narrative – a room shared with the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti (1901 - 1966) an artist also known for his existential austerity. The pairing in this room is inspired by Rothko’s unrealized desire to exhibit alongside Giacometti at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.

In this room, 18 canvases are divided into horizontal diptychs with a white border—a seemingly simple composition that belies their profound complexity. These paintings are often glossed over as Rothko’s final works preceding his demise, but they're actually about much more. A rupture with his traditional techniques in a medium that presumed him of all honesty; these canvases are less sensual, more halted, and elusive. They create an emotional distance between the viewer, one which opposes his usual forms of faded colors. The white border in the paintings acts like a barrier containing the space within. The interplay of different textures and shades of grey dances energetically yet purposefully within the confines of the canvas. Their bipartite structure suggests inevitable associations with dichotomies—opposing and complementary forces that compel us to confront the depths of human existence, much like Giacometti's haunting figures. And it is Giacometti who complements this enclosure of the canvases in the room. These figures are leaping into the void which the canvases so purposely seclude; a void contained and restricted. The Giacomettis push all restraints of misery and glance at that which is kept hidden, at what is censored, at what we have in front of us but avoid seeing.

Giacometti, like Rothko, grappled with the existential weight of humanity in the aftermath of war—pondering how to depict mankind in the shadow of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb. His skeletal figures evoke a sense of exhaustion, failure, and the guilt of being human—all themes that seem to resonate with the now. The war is ongoing, the holocaust wasn't the last genocide, human indifference and thirst for power insidiously perverts laws and corrupts the need for the greater good. This room is a reminder of our collective amnesia through time and the injurious effects of war on men, and of men on men.

Through the show, we can see this drama unfold like a movie of how Rothko drew from surrealism, intertwining classical myths with symbols of abstraction to explore and understand the depths of the human tragedy. He dedicated his life towards the belief that art could express the most complex thoughts and mysteries of our perishable condition. His transition from figuration to abstraction is not just a change in style and disposition; his life work isn't the downward spiral of demise of character that lead to suicide. His lifework is the achievement of an overwhelming sensory experience of monumental emotion.

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The movement rapidly caught up worldwide, catching its first flames in Bristol, United Kingdom where demonstrators tore down the statue of British slaver Edward Colton. Consequently, in Belgium, monuments of Leopold the II, the 19th-century king whose regime contributed to atrocities in the Central African colony, were also toppled and removed. These incidents add to the growing list of monuments uprooted and destroyed in a widespread reaction against racial injustice around the world. United States, India, Barbados, South Africa, Cambodia, Colombia, Canada, and Ireland are some of the countries in which this movement propagated targeting monuments of the American confederate states, Christopher Columbus, figures involved in the transatlantic slave trade, British colonialism, and eugenics.

As this happens, one questions the legitimacy of such behaviors deemed by many as vandalism. Are these actions impacting the present or are they merely an attempt to erase the past? What is acceptable or unacceptable to commemorate as public memory? Do these monuments reinforce an outdated system of power and representation? What should be done with the remains of these actions? What does an empty plinth represent?

I would argue the main debate shall persist on the questioning of power structures, making the matter in question not about history, but about the present. The symbolism of monuments is embedded in our culture and goes unnoticed as an integrated part of the landscape. Demonstrators around the world are trying to capsize an iconography that protects and perpetuates exploitation, injustice, and brutality. But what happens now?

Colombian artist Ivan Argote has long questioned the relationship between power and iconography. In a parodic performance in 2021, the Parisian-based artist removed the statue of Joseph Gallieni, liberating the women that held him on a pedestal. Galleni was a French military ideologue of colonization implicated in massacres and forced labor in the colonies of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean; he even wrote a manual, “The Politics of Races”, on how to dominate local communities in the colonies, yet he’s legacy seems to be honored with an effigy held by four different racial seminude women supposed to represent the subjugation of the continents under his racial and political domination. The message is crystal clear but nevertheless ignored hidden under the conspicuous beauty of the Parisian city.

Argote’s action responds to a culture’s refusal of accepting its mixed cultural heritage by an inability to assimilate the complex effects of its colonial history. The final video performance shows the idealized reality: the statue is removed and the women (and what they stand for) are liberated; “Au Revoir Mr. Gallieni”.

In a similar fashion earlier this year, Argote paraded around the main streets of Madrid, Spain, a statue of Christopher Columbus erected on the commemoration of the fourth centenary of his arrival to America.

Spain is a particular place to stage such a performance given its history and cultural pride in the events of colonization. The 12 of October has even been established as a national holiday commemorating the day of Colombus's arrival to the West Indies. Its political orientation is also very much inclined to abide by the past without bearing consequences defending its critical influence on the cultural and technological development of the Americas. It has continuously reinforced this position by refusing to take part in any kind of atonement for the atrocities and loitering of the Latin American nations. Though any gesture in this fashion is clearly anything but symbolical, I would argue it to be a decisive starting point on the path of truth, reconciliation, and restitution of memory. The aftermath of the 1492 events, whether negative or positive, is much still disputed. It would be wrong-headed to deny the contributions of this exchange, such as language and its transformations, science, technology, crops, livestock, or gastronomy. What is held in question is not their contributions, but the way they were imposed.

While the parading statue is a replica of the real marble, it raised commotion around the pedestrians who were questioning the action itself, and hopefully, the historical events surrounding this character. Argote seeks to provoke a “moment of speculation” questioning the use of public space with a topic that confronts those who believe there are things or symbols supposed to last forever.

Argote’s performative actions are viable ways to question and (figuratively) destroy controversial public figures that make up our public ecosystem. It certainly does not endeavor to erase history, or rewrite it for that matter, but they do call attention to otherwise seemingly invisible elements of our daily lives. They are synched, without a fail, with the current sentiment of oppression and inequality, but more importantly, to my extent, they advocate towards awareness and questioning. Today's world is permeated by a great deal of information and stimuli that it just becomes easier to tune out. The questioning of what is imposed on us is a real political act that carries important symbolical meaning. “True freedom means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience”.1

Ivan Argote is nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2022.

Tatiana Trouvé weaves an art of memory out of oblivion, endowing transcendence to other aspects of consciousness we often disregard. 

Le Grand Atlas de la Désorientation is a process of recalling, evoking flashbacks, dreams, and déjà vus, where the architectural mind of the artist takes form in a fragmentary arrangement of landscapes, furniture, and drawings that appear as a surrealist vision of a post-apocalyptic world. 

Upon entering the exhibition, a series of drawings on newspapers, From March to May, conjures the sudden feelings of isolation and angst once felt during the pandemic. The series originated on the day before confinement with the cover of the French newspaper La Liberation: a black ominous page headlined ‘Le Jour d’Avant’ intervened with an ironic take on the state of the world before this drastic and sudden turnover. Bound now to this daily practice, Trouvé drew daily on French and international newspapers, attempting to connect with the outside world at a time when contact wasn’t possible. 

However, this exhibition is not about the pandemic or its aftermath. I believe it to be about the intersection of worlds and structures that, though they appear discordant, belong to the same plane of existence (the pandemic is just another example of this).

The framed-cover foyer is guarded by a chair of bronze and stone, on the vein of Trouvés sculptural work, pointing the direction into the landscape of designs that fill the adjacent room. Here, A feeling of disorientation immediately rises, as if the front page news belonged to a world suspended in a distant but rather familiar time.

On entering the main room, a vast open space dimly illuminated by the filtering daylight, sculptures, paths, and drawings converge in a perpetual back-and-forth displacement. Now adrift inside this atlas, the discernible begins to blur, unveiling a surrealist landscape of what I can only describe as memories from the future past: a mirage of a world one recognizes but can't quiet place within a memory in time.

The room has no fixed standpoint but an array of vanishing points and perspectives of free association. Grouped under the titles of Remanence, Intranquillity, and Les Dessouvenus, some designs have a more structured architectural dimension, while others emerge as automatic drawings. For Remanence, black nocturnal views with indistinguishable lines pose as a sculptural black tunnel absorbing the shapes, which are only revealed in the capture of sudden light reflections. They possess a rare transparency of incompleteness, as impressions of images of ungraspable dreams. The other series, Intranquillity and Les Dessouvenus, are much more revealing and structured in composition. These canvases, seduced by the dance of light and hypnotic color tones, are a glance to another dimension: scenarios of death, relics, and fossils from a weirdly recognizable place. 

The elements in space intertwine in a peculiar way with the outside world in a constant game of revealing and concealing. Behind a big extended curtain on the right side of the room, most of the exhibiton's sculptures hide, looking to the street like objects on a storefront display.  

The view from the street proclaims an exhibition of sculptures rather than drawings, but from inside the room the storyline changes as these marbled relics are inaccessible, divided by curtains and barbed wire. These sculptures are the vestiges of our times immortalized on timeless materials: an old chair with books, a necktie, a hanger, a rock, a mattress, a sweater, books; and other more abstract elements like a rootless root, or a faceless bust in black.

And suddenly, one understands there is, in fact, a limit established between us, these images, and the world. On the threshold of liminality Trouvé’s work is within a world we know and an exterior we can only recognize. Reality and fiction are at the heart of the question of disorientation: in the duality of feeling absence in the presence of certain things, places, or even people; in the relationship between memory and material, between a book and an old sweater, or an image of a dog in the newspaper. Dissonant objects that when together elicit a specific emotional response.

To grasp the whole imagery of Trouvé’s work was to be surrounded by visions one sees when falling asleep, when thoughts become surreal around the edges, gradually replaced by images. Images of a world you are part of, but at the same time don’t quite make complete sense; images beyond the cusp of dreaming, images within an atlas of disorientation. 

To see more pictures check my Instagram. 🖖

The exhibition, curated by Geneviève Wiels and Thomas Mouzard, two art professionals directly involved with the French Overseas territories and their cultural heritage, pursuits a narrative of defiance from a willingness to live: an exhibition about freedom, love, and reinvention. A refreshing and inspiring story that moves away from trauma and highlights the self-determination for independence and creation.

Preluded by a painting by Haitian artist Herve Tèlémaque, who proposed the exhibition, the canvas, ‘Once More (Do It Again)’, strives to guide the show’s narrative towards themes of freedom, love, and creation. Contrasting its pastel background with vibrant color figures, the painting is composed of dismembered elements remnants of African culture, history, and idyllic landscapes hunted by the specter of racism and colonialism. With floating human figures, African masks, and an almost imperceptible phrase that reads je t’aime, Télmaque guides the gaze towards the persistent need to pursing freedom through love, over and over again.

Following the painting, a map of Suriname and Guyana next to an engraving of the Ville de Paramaribo situate the exhibition’s narrative. Reproductions of these engravings by William Blake after John Stedman (1796), a Dutch army officer who fought against the Maroon communities in Suriname, accompany the first half of the exhibition as a sort of visual aid and reference to the rebellious historical account of the Dutch colonies.

On the other side, the French colonial legacy in Guyana is barely critically surveyed throughout the exhibition but highlighted instead via anthropological voyages, such as those of Paul Seigner, and ethnographic photography, like that of Jean Hurault. Though these accounts have undoubtedly given an insightful report of the sensible issues around these societies, they reinforce the colonial gaze and western social structures of power. Nevertheless, to counter these, more contemporary expressions are exhibited, like the photographs of Nicola Lo Calzo, which elude the ethnographic point of view by portraying more up-close and personal renditions of how societies stemming from the slave trade have continued to live and create.

Having said this, the exhibition's narrative is predominantly guided by the objects of creation of the maroon communities (wood-craft, Tempes , textile production) who transform everyday objects into 1 works of art: an art of emancipation that celebrates encounters and speak of love.

Such work is the canvas of Antoine Dinguiou (1969), one of the first Guyanese Tembe artists who dared paint on canvas. Dinguiou’s painting “Ma Femme n’est pas Belle” is a visual entanglement of geometric forms reproduced and inverted on each side in different complementary colors. The shapes are knotted in harmony by a yellow rhombus that holds them together, sustained by the splashes of black and yellow in the negative spaces; it excels in directing the gaze to a labyrinth of shapes and colors of interlocking curves in anything but random orders. The addition of color to the craft of Tembe has created a visual optical game where the eye gets lost in the perfectly balanced motifs of the pieces.

Parallel to wood-crafting, maroon women would work in cross-stitch embroidery and ornament garments traditionally offered to their beloved men. Some of the shapes and patterns on these textiles have a direct connection to Tembe wood-carved shapes ranging in colors, sizes, and motifs as a testament to a technique that is in constant renewing but paradoxically staying true to a well identifiable aesthetic.

Examples of these garments hang from the ceiling behind a red wall covered by a collection of wooden combs formed in the 1980s in Suriname and Guyana by the association Chercheurs d'art. These Wooden artifacts constitute an essential part of the Maroon artistic production and are said to be the absolute weapon towards conquering a woman’s heart. Little does it matter if it is considered an artistic or skillful production; the matter lies in «what the tradition asks ... to put in the decoration of the humblest object, the best of himself.»

The exhibition continuously manifests how the maroon communities translated their struggle for freedom into creative forces of love. Marronnage - L’art de brisser ses chaînes is a visual story of a community that broke the chains of oppression and found in the forest a place to reinvent themselves with what memory they had left of Africa.

It is of utmost importance to remark how the story of a successful escape from the chains of slavery and colonialism is told in a country participant in the Atlantic Slave trade. Leaps such as this have the force to begin a movement of change in political agendas and education, raise awareness, inspire empathy, and give hope to the silenced. These narratives are often left outside the pale of history but are nevertheless stories that deserve a voice. By sharing them, the gap between our differences begins to shorten in matters as human as is the quest for freedom and the expression of love.

Last week I was in Milano when I saw the news of artist Claes Oldenburg's (1929 - 2022) death. Like an epiphany, I was arriving at Piazzale Cadorna, where his enormous sculpture of a threaded needle welcomed me. A piece that had become to me an integrated part of the scenery, today seemed more present than ever. Suddenly, the Milan where I used to live and had become an acquainted city, was now astounding again, foreign and new. The enormous sculpture, in the vein of Oldenburg’s style, was today his eulogy:  a reminder to relish the ordinary things of life, as they largely compose our day-to-day.

In art appreciation, one constantly seeks transcendental experiences that elevate us from the mundane into the exceptional: the world of noble ideas. With Oldenburg’s art, the exact opposite is suddenly acknowledged. His work is about the banal, everyday objects: the stuff of the days of our lives. Stuff we see when growing up and become part of backdoor memories; stuff we automatically buy at the convenience store, or that we unconsciously desire; stuff we accumulate, cherish, use and then maybe forget about; Stuff that in our apprehension does not belong with high-minded ideals. 

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A spoon with a cherry, a bowling set, a tube of toothpaste, a birthday cake, a knife, or a threaded needle are transformed by the artist from the extremely ordinary to the oddly uncanny. These things, now super-sized in museums and public spaces, alongside a Picasso or a Rothko, or surrounded by neoclassic architecture, swift our perceptions in a sudden move of rapture as the ordinary increasingly becomes more and more disconnected from its form. Form becomes everything, and function is virtually non-existent. 

That urge to transcend with artistic experience is suddenly found in mysteriously familiar shapes. Like staring into the mirror for too long until you no longer recognize your face, or repeating a word incessantly until it loses its given meaning. It becomes an experience based on the context, in a moment to interact with prescribedless seriousness of free association and bewilderment by the purely physical attributes of structure. 

This is the uncanny adventure of encountering an Oldenburg; this is the feeling I had when, after learning of his death, I confronted his sculpture in a city where I don’t live anymore, but had gotten used to its surroundings. A subtle reintroduction to the unremarkably familiar; a lesson that the mundane itself can be extraordinary; the sudden consciousness that we all, indeed, share the same world, the same stuff, the same space, and reality. 

In contemporary art, we are so accustomed to deep ideas and intellectual content, that, more often than not, we forget there is value in the prosaic every day — in the things where most of us can easily recognize ourselves. 

Claes Oldenburg was born in Sweden in 1929, and immigrated to the US as a kid. He grew up in Chicago, studied art history at Yale, and settled in New York City in 1956. Famous for his monumental and colorful works, American pop-art sculptor died at the age of 93 in his New York apartment.

In the middle ages, people believed in a supernatural connection with music. As if these melodic symphonies were the sounds of angels or the voice of God herself. People at the time didn't consume music as we do today, or even 50 years ago. It would only exist when played live, mostly on occasions of celebrations, causing a state of commotion and uncanny sensations.

The visual arts have also elicited such emotional responses throughout history, as did, for example, religious baroque art and their churches in all their almighty magnificence: worshippers would faint at the sight of Bernini's statues. Before the advent of modernity, seeing and appreciating art bared specific indoctrinating implications, often with political tropes. Even in ancient Rome, emperors would have their portraits carved in stone as the ultimate demonstration of political power preserving their image for eternity.

Like music before reproduction, the art of portraiture had a distinguishable effect compared to how it might be appreciated today. Eminent people would have their portraits made as a means of conservation in prosperity employing allegories that would denote power and social status.

But with modernity, appreciation and perception of culture have radically changed, and with it, the process of deciphering art. Through the years, the art of portraiture was increasingly unable to perpetuate the social roles in which it was designed to confirm the people it depicted, mainly a cause of the technological, civic, and artistic changes. Nevertheless, the art of portraiture is constantly in reinvention, synced with the technical and collective alterations over the centuries. Its longevity is evidence of updated vocabulary references that reaffirm its ever-shifting and immortalizing power.

Regarde-Moi, the latest group exhibition in Perrotin Paris confirms how this art form, indeed, continues to be written. Throughout the show, the evolution of the oil on canvas into extensive limits becomes increasingly evident. From paintings in fabrics, canvases of towels, ceramics, surreal statues, and elegies, the exhibition upholds portraiture’s pervasiveness as ill-defined and monumentalizing.

The first gallery room is one of already intriguing conceptions. Nine different portraits by seven artists foreword the contrasting means of the portrait and its subjects. Pop culture dethrones the kings and queens who held the almost exclusive right of this format with portrayals of the soccer player Marco Verrati in the significantly small painting by Charles Hascoët, or Gregor Hildebrandt’s portrait of Italian actress Virna Lisi made out of cassettes. Brazilian artist Zeh Palito also takes part in the subversion of art history with his canvas Josephine & Napoleon (2022) depicting a contemporary black cowboy and his lady in shades of bright pink. The astute personification of the French emperor questions the role of Africans and their descendants in the art cannon by taking the matter into his own hands and rewriting history into a magnificent canvas of modern-day life.

On the opposite wall, one of my personal favorites: Shelin (2021) by Jean-Philippe Delhomme. A reclining female lays on a sofa holding a book with a defiant look, as if bothered by our presence. A painting of subtle colors that aspires to be what it is: a portrait of a girl, resting, reading; nothing more. She reminds me of the La Collectionneuse in Éric Rohmer’s film. It is so refreshing to encounter such a work being exactly what it is supposed to be. The work is there, the subject is there looking at us looking back at her, while she says nothing at all, in a yet so eloquent way. One relates to it without searching for deeper roots or conceptual disguises, so often exploited or abused in contemporary art. At the end of the day it is an artwork where one can freely and without guilt recognize oneself in the lightness of being.

The next room is an homage to homages. The centerpiece, Quartz Eroded Head of Apollo de Belvedere (2022), is a bust by Insta-famous artist Daniel Arsham: a reversed imagery of his well-known archeology of the future. This reproduction isolates in detail a part of another whole: what once was an allegorical figure becomes a portrait; a historical piece reproduced with modern technology, in the hopes that history shapes itself around the view of art.

Surrounding this piece are three different portraits of Bauhaus designer Marianne Brandt by artist Chen Ke. Oddly placed in contrast to the modern-day Apollo of Belvedere, these paintings too are reinterpretations of historical portraits as colorful reproductions of the German designer's photographs. The acclaimed masculinity of Apollo is contested by this powerful androgynous icon whose relevance has been overshadowed by her male counterparts. Today, in a gesture to reposition women’s place in the art world, not one, but three portraits of a woman stand surrounding a fragmented representation of a once powerful Deity.

Curiously enough, this is not the only Apollo demanding our regard. Hanging in the next room, a colorful and tender oil on canvas by artist Jiang Chen portrays the God of Archery with aroused pink cheeks, a vacant stare, and an almost feminine pensive gesture contradicting the overpowering strength and assertiveness often associated with masculinity. Art might not change history or the world, but as proven here, it does shape the way we think, and the way will remember.

The exhibition extends to the gallery space across the street, where three more rooms complement and complete this portraiture survey. Les modèles au Repos (2022) by painter, architect, and writer Romeo Mivekannin draws one in as the main event of a room filled with star-shaped canvases, ceramics hanging from the wall, and an eerie all-black statue vaguely resembling the ghost of a woman.

This monumental canvas, like those from Zeh Palito, comes from a desire to vindicate black people's place in western iconography. Mivekannin evokes different famous paintings, depicting himself as a black woman by constructing his body in relation to otherness. The figure prompts a dignified position with extraordinary treatment of the figure in all black color, while the other woman, inspired by Manet’s famous Olympia, seems like an unfinished sketch.

The artist brings his own religious practice into art by using traditional cloths soaked in mixtures and spices before assembling them together in a voodoo ritual. His work is a compositional study of the representation of blacks according to the Westerner biased regard of colonization and enslavement: a body submissive, terrorized, stereotyped, mercantile, and dominated. Mivekannin negates this image that doesn't correspond with his view of himself or his ancestors. He gives, in return, another image conforming to what he truly represents. The artist turns the portrait into a political space.

The next room is one filled with odd and playful, almost infantile, figures that mock the bourgeoisie views on art by perverting traditional formats of representation. The artist Klara Kristalova presents what seems like an enchanted forest of nordic myths inspired ceramic figures: A face masked and pierced by a tree, a face masked by a mask of a face, a girl who grew roots to the floor, and a horse-headed girl with a blue dress standing in a shy position, are some of the magical portraits that populate the world delivered by the artist. These set of ceramic characters remind us once again how a realistic image can also be outlandish; how this century-old form keeps reinventing itself proving its non-exhaustiveness with a ludic approach.

The in-depth exhibition culminates in the third chamber of the second gallery, with a homage to the deceased Claude Renault, a long-time artist represented by Perrotin. In the small dim-lighted room, 12 crude canvases lie horizontally on the floor. The piece could be said to be a premeditated post-mortem self-portrait by the artist, who conceived it in 2001 stipulating the stack of canvases shall be displayed this way after his death. While he was alive, it was presented vertically with the back of the last canvas facing the viewer; now they appear as a metaphorical casket for the artist's long life work, with the unpainted canvases lying in homage on the floor.

In 1840, the French painter Paul Delaroche declared the death of painting upon seeing the first daguerreotype. But oh was he wrong. Photography didn't replace painting, and it sure didn’t become the only mean for portraiture. With this exhibition, Perrotin has not only proven the livelihood of the oil on canvas but has taken its most predominant art form and established its longevity and lack of exhaustiveness. If one shall seize anything from this group show, is how the limits of art and representation are yet to be expanded and explored. More than just a record, portraits are immortalizations of our stories, the transcendence of myths in time, the reclamation of forgotten histories, the vicissitude and the leisure of daily life, of the living culture, and the dead. The list is endless and yet contained, because they all convey a form of regard, a subjectivity, in an infinite exploration of form.

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Stepping into this ambitious exhibition at Centre Pompidou is to step the actual Weimar Republic. With an overly long and self-explanatory title, Germany/ 1920s/ Nouvelle Objectivité/ August Sander, this collection presents an extensive account of the overlapping narratives which framed the evolution of German modernity until its end during the rise of Nazism to power.

A period of change, the 1920s was subject to aesthetic debates in Germany that noted the gradual disappearance of fashionable expressionism in favor of a painting that returned to a form of realism out of a new detached and objective attitude after the First World War.

The New Objectivity, a term forged by art historian Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub after his famous Mannheim Kunsthalle exhibition, became a cultural slogan referring to new artistic trends in Germany. With a critical and bitter look at a society torn by war, different disciplines at the time shifted to rationality and pragmatism. The present exhibit, directs our gaze towards this multidisciplinary movement, thus depicting artworks, personalities, and utility objects of German history, linked by the Magnus opus of photographer August Sander, The Man of the 20th Century.

The staged exhibition design is one of such complexity and thoroughness that I confess to having gone twice for a better comprehension of the curatorial purpose. The show consists of a prologue, 12 chapters, and an epilogue: the thematic display goes through the lateral space, and a sort of central gallery with Sander’s photography portfolios complements and intersects the parkour. Though complicated, one may profit from one's desires and expectations: for those who have the time and dedication, getting lost and finding your way through the consecutive chapters is a fulfilling experience that leads to an exhaustive analysis of a society in flux defeated by war.

The antechamber of the exhibition situates us in Germany before the war. Three works embody the time: a famous photo by August Sander in 1914 (a few months before the outbreak of the war) of three nonchalant young farmers, unaware their life was about to change forever; an expressionist self-portrait by Ludwig Meidner, one of the greatest painters of the 1910s in Berlin; and the Dada head of Raoul Hausmann composed of found objects where one finds a total negation of individual expression. These works announce the New Objectivity, the recourse to models, and an abandonment of the individual expression.

Standardization and typology are at the center of the exhibition erasing singularities towards reproducible forms. At the beginning of the show, works such as paintings by George Grosz with faceless schematic human figures in empty urban settings, and Gernd Arntz's development of the Isotype announce the tendency for classification of social classes through standard codes.

This constant social assortment juxtaposes August Sander’s photographic archetype portfolio: farmers, paisans, and artisans. This first encounter with the real confronts us with the actual people who shaped the Weimar Republic, a contrasted representation to paintings and objects.

All through the exhibition, the loss of individuality and the need for typological classification indicate the era to come. From 1918-1930 disciplines like ethnography and anthropology developed, echoed in the encyclopedic photographic project of Sander. People with no name or history are classified according to their status in society and their profession: urban workers, farmers, religious priests, students, politicians, and the elite. Sander's project differs from other similar artistic endeavors, like that of Walker Evans, as it holds a complete annihilation of subjectivity in favor of topologic allocation. This project has a definitive purpose, as well as all the art displayed through the show; utility is a denominator among the disciplines of the time, from art and design to photography, all aspiring for practicality. One may even construe these classifications as immoral, complicit with nazism and antisemitism; although it might come as an overreaching interpretation, one ponders on its lack of innocence all through the show.

Probably the most remarkable section is The Cold Persona: the four deadly years of the war ended in defeat, engendering a general disillusionment. Humiliation breeds a culture of shame. The paintings and photography in this section portray a detached person devoid of all feelings. External representation replaced expression as an almost visual sociological analysis of the subject. Instead of depicting their interiority, they show their position in the social order; the New Objectivity boxes people according to their profession and workplace.  

One of the most prominent examples is the famous painting of journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix. He depicts her without complacency as an emancipated intellectual typical of the Weimar republic: short hair, make-up face, monocle typical of the dandies of the time, and her body hidden under a heavy checkered dress. The artist's gaze focuses on the strange, revealing the mystery of the character. All that was expected of a woman at that time: delicacy, beauty, and charity, is denied in the image of this modern woman smoking alone at a bar table.

The cold person is also revealed in Sanders's photographs comparing the fiction of painting with the document, only to see the same individual; the same woman: masculine, short hair, men's clothing, smoking.

After the war's massacre, women began to take the positions left vacant by men who died in the front. A normative transgression of gender norms and heterosexuality began to take hold in Berlin in the 1920s, with an important homosexual subculture. Seeing women who not only entered the labor market and also won the right to vote in 1918, beginning to dress in pants, shirts, ties, and short hair, developed ideas of revenge by some men.

Otto Dix reveals this discontent in paintings such as that of Dancer Anita Berber, an overtly bisexual star with multiple quirks, caricatured as a personification of sin. All in red, she is presented as a figure out of hell—an incarnation of Babylon, a sinner.

A whole section of the exhibition is dedicated to men's shame and anger for the transgression of normativity through representations of graphic and perturbing violence towards women. A complicit discontent and moral decline towards liberation begin to shape, in disturbingly poignant captures of the time that manifest the cultural malaise of a society.

War, political instability, economic crisis, far-right policies, and social discontent are all evidenced marks of the exhibition, denoting the prognosis of a society that, later on, will go to democratically elect Adolf Hitler. It is almost impossible not to wander through the hundreds of portraits, how many of these individuals will come to be the future nazis.

From a historical perspective, art becomes the symptom of time and provides a better understanding of our existence and how we interpret and interact with reality. Art is such a wonderful token that grants each person what they need. Probably that is the magic of it; but I must believe in its cultural relevance. Not only at its moment of inception but, as we said in our last newsletter, by its plural or disjunctive relationship to temporality. Much of the sentiment expressed by the German society of the 1920s is present in our contemporary world. This show might come as a warning, a diagnosis, or a prediction. An appeal to stop and learn from our past to prevent it from repeating itself. 

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In a small and intimate exhibition, Galerie Chantal Crousel presents rare archive material from early performances by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum: a rare gem amongst the artist’s most common object-based work. Her now-famous minimalist and conceptual installations have earned her a prominent status as one of the leading artists of the last decades. She masterfully translates insightful subjective narratives of displacement through lenses such as gender and identity. Her installation pieces manifest into a manner of unsettling instability that, I believe now, have always been present in herself and her artistic desire, regardless of the medium of expression.

Mona Hatoum, Performance Documents, 1980-1987/2013  is a critical revision of the artist’s ontology, bringing together sketches, drawings, notes, descriptions, and videos from a strategic point of her career when her work focused on performances. With the body, Hatoum explores the state of oppression and surveillance with political and emotional engagement. Her use of the bodily language comes from the Western European way of separating the body and the mind, contrasted to her Middle Eastern conceptions where they have no undiscerning split. The performances documented in this exhibition appeal to a sensibility that prioritizes the physical for a subsequent appeal to the intellect.

But, what it's truly being surveyed in this gallery exhibition? Why is it important to stage Hatoum’s early work documentation from more than 20 years ago? Are these documents new works of art separated from the performances? Now a days, most Contemporary Art exhibitions are staged at the level of the image: the cool, the new, the Instagram-able, well designed, successful, and valuable in the market. But what does Contemporary Art means today, and why is Galerie Chantal Crousel orchestrating this simulacrum of an exhibition?

Let’s start by briefly and partially try and comprehend the principal notions of what it means to be contemporary with three quotes from three art philosophers and professionals who have attempted to define the scope of Contemporary art:

• “A state of being founded on temporal rupture: that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism”.
  - Georgio Agamben

• “A Simultaneous and incompatible co-existence of different modernities and ongoing social inequities”.  
  - Terry Smith

• “In each historical object, all times encounter one another, collide, or base themselves plastically on one another, bifurcate, or even become entangled with each other.”
  - Georges Didi-Huberman

Rooted on these interpretations, one may assume that the Contemporary exists in plural or disjunctive relationship to temporality. The Contemporary in art is no longer a signifier for its literal meaning, but furthermore as art that sets the past and the present in dialogue to form plural relationships with impermanence. This exhibition demands thinking both in past and present tenses by relating the art to the state of the world today: How or why are they relevant now?

Documented performances on display, such as Don’t smile you’re on camera (1980) or Video Performance (1980), transcend normative social constructions of the body with aggressive and invasive tones to alert people of a constant state of surveillance and control. For both performances, Hatoum plays with the audience’s perception using prerecorded scenes of naked and intimate images that she then passes as live footage. For example, During Don’t smile you’re on camera (1980) the artist plays with the public by pointing a live camera directly at them, panning up and down the rows, and focusing on parts of a random person’s body. Meanwhile, on the monitor facing the audience, close-up images of faces, torsos, and intimate body parts would appear creating the illusion that the camera could see through the person’s clothes. (This performance was made possible with the help of hidden assistants who used a second live camera to scan their naked bodies mixing the images fed in by the two live cameras).

She uses the body to explore our conceptions regarding sex, identity, technology, and control. During these encounters, she intrudes on intimate spaces to create a feeling of discomfort, embarrassment, and violation. All these actions might well associate with state mandate controls regulating bodies, sexuality, and notions of privacy violation. It reverberates with the recent decision to overturn the constitutional right of abortion in the United States; or Saudi officials seizing rainbow-colored elements to tackle homosexuality during Pride month.

In Roadworks (1985), one of her most memorable performances, Hatoum walks barefoot through Brixton, South London, while dragging a pair of Dr. Marten boots attached by laces to her ankles. The artist's parkour highlighted the violent race riots and police brutality prominent in the area of Brixton at the time. The menacing and continuing presence of racism and right-wing politics personalized by Hatoum with the boots is one not unknown to our present times: from the death of African American George Floyd at the hands of the police through antisemitic and fascists political discourses gaining force in countries like the UK, France, and the USA. 

One of the works, The Negotiating Table (1983), has an uncanny relevance to the current war in Ukraine. In a dark room, the artist lies bloodstained and motionless on a table surrounded by empty chairs; on the soundtrack, news reports about the civil war play in dissonance with speeches of Western leaders talking about peace. Many other nations in conflict have played the role of the dead person on Hatoum's negotiation table; speeches of peace and humanitarian help are empty promises by global leaders whose intentions lie in protecting their own political and economic interests.

Much of Hatoum's incarnations of her experienced world three decades ago are still a scary reflection of today. While it proves my point of looking for the contemporary on the disjunctive forces of the present-past, it makes one reflect on the state of society: are things ever going to change, or are we enclosed in a constant cycle of war, instability, revolution, peace, conflict, war, etc., etc. 

Mona Hatoum (1952) was born in Beirut after her parents fled from the war in Palestine with Israel. In 1975 she went to London to continue her studies when, back home in Lebanon, war broke off, making her return impossible. Her history is one branded by exile, loss, and the making of new memories by situating her own existence in a world informed by western and middle eastern perceptions.

Hatoum’s work has a familiar and moving character that is not difficult to identify with, her vocabulary is about the living and what was lived. Her work, seen today or back in the 80s, is intended for all uninitiated audiences as she addresses issues we have all experienced in one way or another: intimacy and its violation, control, impotence, and social injustices.

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Next Week on L’Art Dispatch:
‘Allemagne / Années 1920 / Nouvelle Objectivité / August Sander’ at Centre Pompidou

Is it a betrayal of original thought to state how good news are hard to come by, especially these days (?) Perhaps each era has its own perpetual bad news momentum, but nowadays, with an algorithm-driven feed, all we keep seeing is what we (unconsciously) seek to see. Good news are always conceivably side to side with the bad news; an optimistic individual would say your perspective in life would depend on the prism you look at it with. 

Pascale Marthine Tayou (1967) brings a full-on color prism to his new solo show in Galleria Continua Paris, in an infinite exploration of material, color, beauty, and history. The exhibition, entitled 'Bonnes Nouvelles' (Good News in French), joins the present and past into one plane of existence to weigh in dialogue the different perspectives and narratives inscribed in history.

Born in Yaounde, Cameroon, Tayou began his artistic career in the 1990s with exhibitions around Cameroon, Germany, France, and Belgium. His installation pieces depict postcolonial African lifestyles and contemporary social, political, and cultural realities across countries. Tayou’s work is admirably not a denunciation nor an exposé of the past on the present; on the contrary, he has managed to artistically redefine the postcolonial experience and raise new questions about modernity.

‘Bonnes Nouvelles’ is an exhaustive survey on the artist's ability to turn adversity into freedom and hope. From the floor up to the ceiling, the gallery is fully covered with artworks that combine everyday objects, waste material, scraps of fabric, and found objects, assembling a colorful joyful but haunted forest. His work is composed of collectible ephemera and recycling material connecting everyday things to significant matters of contemporary life: economy, migration, politics, and social justice.

As one strolls through the three-floor exhibition, Tayou reveals before our eyes a colorful protean accumulation in an endless attempt to reverse antagonism into beauty. Starting from the first floor down, an array of wooden and crystal African masks in constant mutation create a direct link with history and identity. Tayou reappropriates his own cultural artifacts and re-signifies them by subverting the exotic and fetichist connotations often associated with African art in western cultures.

The more than 15 masks are each carefully crafted with sunglasses, beads, sacks, metal scraps, chains, papier mâché, toys, fabrics, and other recycled materials. Each and one of them is granted a unique form and personality that harmoniously come together into a precious piece of art. These type of Masks, without the artist's intervention, are usually bought by tourists and collectors in Africa, making them objects prone to forgery and putting into question notions of authenticity. The artist overturns this proclivity by creating completely different pieces elevating them to art objects without questioning their provenance.

The cultural aesthetic appreciation of African ritualistic objects and ‘primitive art’ is one that dates primarily from the early 20th century and has a direct connection with colonization and looting of artifacts brought to the West. Granting religious artifacts the ‘art’ status is a western practice inscribed in our ideologies and institutional frameworks. These historical limits can be evidenced, for example, in the way we see art from the renaissance as grand masterpieces. However, at the time, they were not intended to perform as works of art as we know them today: Michelangelo’s magnificent transformation of the Sistine chapel into a visual spectacle served as a metaphor for God’s creative power. The art of the renaissance was a visual manifestation of the power of God embodied in the catholic church; it had a political intention.

Be that as it may, the question of what is art or not is out of the reach of what I'm trying to say here; instead, I want to emphasize how western cultural institutions have translated religious and ritualistic objects into works of art: It happened with catholicism and the Renaissance, as well as with the Venus of Willendorf, the paintings of the Lascaux Caves, and the Benin Bronzes, to name a few. It is unattainable to deny these objects as essential elements to understanding our cultural heritage and centuries of human evolution, whereas to grant them the status of art is a notion of modern art history.

Today, our reality and ideologies are constantly in flux and mediated by cultural institutions, but historical distance allows us to see their work in context. Modern and contemporary artists have often created critiques of ideological conventions and is within their exhibitions that we can begin to understand how representations and their relation to the real acquire meaning.

Pascale  Marthine Tayou has taken historicism into his own hands by mediating his own cultural reality. With his interventions and remaking of ritualistic objects like masks and totems, he becomes the authority and intermediary of his heritage. He releases them not only from their original ceremonial purpose but also from the burden of questioning authenticity. They have been endowed with a unique personality and form from the hybrid collage of materials that compose their identity.

All through the gallery’s first floor one encounters found objects, written messages, contemporary totems, crystal mask figures on pedestals, and colon statues in various configurations. With playful colors and even childish drawings, Tayou subtly brings awareness to matters which are otherwise hard to talk about.

Continuing on the ground floor, one of the main pieces unfolds, enticing the viewer like a firefly lured by a dangerous light. Colonial Spines covers a complete gallery wall with protuberant wooden thorns as color pencils and colon figures. The wooden pencils are a clear metaphor for the power and the danger of education, and the system’s injunction to knowledge, while the colon figures, plus the artwork’s title speak of a colonial past. The overall piece brings together a threatening tension with a double message.

When creating this piece, the artist has spoken about seeking the means to talk about the history of a village in Namibia (which used to be a German town) by creating a link between Germany and Africa:  a shared history that is hard to talk about. How to speak of something which was probably pleasant for a group of people and not practical for another? This installation brings shadow into the light by sharing two versions of a story on one same page. Colonial Spines invite us to reflect on ways one can overcome these walls and rethink the role of empathy in colonial legacies. To tell a story from the side of each participant is a way to find consensus, encounter peace, and meet each other halfway. We may not be responsible for the past, but the past is always present, and it is up to us to find ways of making amends.

Having a posture on the meaning of the past is not only about maintaining a political opinion but about understanding the present. Sometimes one lives within ideological structures without being aware of them a cause of, perhaps, education, society, heritage, or just silence. Tayou makes us question whether it is possible to talk about horrible human violence without politicizing, theorizing, or complexing the matter. Bonnes Nouvelles opens the pages of history for people to read, watch, interpret and see. By using neon, glitter, and color to refer to a very dark story, light illuminates the darkness luring the spectator gently into awareness. Tayou achieves a conversation on intricate and challenging issues with simple and beautiful forms breaking the cycle of negativity and bringing us the good news.

Next week on L’art Dispatch: Mona Hatoum at Galerie Chantal Crousel