English
LAIA ABRIL: ON ABORTION
The Museum of Sex in New York presents «On Abortion: And the Repercussions of Lack of Access», Laia Abril’s first-ever solo show in the US, displaying her career-long research exploring the debate over abortion restriction worldwide. In Abril’s words, abortion has become “a political matter, rather than a question of rights.”
ECOFEMINISM(S)
Ecofeminism is grounded in spiritual feminism, which insists that everything is connected –that nature does not discriminate between soul and matter. This exhibition presents some of the strategies of ecofeminist art, by its pioneers as well as the youngest generation of artists. It also provokes the question: if the ecofeminist art of the 1970s and 1980s was largely defined by Goddess art, ritual performances, anti-nuclear work, and feminist land art, what makes female environmental artists working today ecofeminists?
MAKE ART A FORM OF UNIVERSAL LITERACY. A LETTER FROM LUIS CAMNITZER
For Luis Camnitzer, the current global health crisis reveals how fragile the definition of museum has always been, how it helped create an art bubble by now held together by a flimsy web of financial threads. And worse, how the exhibition industry doesn’t help but is actually an obstacle to good education. New York’s MoMA letter firing its freelance educators illustrates a prevailing belief: if no people come to a show, there is no consumption and therefore, no education
LOIE HOLLOWELL: GOING SOFT
Loie Hollowell’s pastel drawings for «Going Soft» explore the physical and psychological experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. Serving as abstracted self-portraits, each drawing reveals the artist’s interior psyche at the time of the work’s creation. Her online exhibition is at Pace Gallery (New York).
BEAUTIFUL DISTRESS: ART AND MENTAL HEALTH. MARTÍN LA ROCHE IN CONVERSATION WITH CAROL STAKENAS
Carol Stakenas, curator at-large for the Social Practices Art Network (SPAN), talks to Chilean Amsterdam-based artist Martín La Roche (1988) about his three-month residency experience at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, as part of the Beautiful Distress Foundation (Amsterdam) program, whose mission is to raise awareness of mental distress under the belief that art is pre-eminently capable of articulating and representing the human condition.
MINIA BIABIANY & ÁLVARO BARRIOS APPROACH COLONIAL ISSUES FROM THEIR CARIBBEAN ANCESTRY
Minia Biabiany’s exhibition approaches the issue of ecology from a non-Western, and more specifically Caribbean, perspective. Thanks to its poetic, ephemeral form, the artist’s work forces us to take a closer look at previously ignored aspects of French colonial history, which is perpetuated through pernicious acts of covert violence. Featured concurrently, an exhibition of Álvaro Barrios’s work brings the discussion to focus on the history of bloodshed in the Caribbean region.
THE ROLE OF ART IN TIMES OF PANDEMIC
To expose these ruptures, to create objects worth contemplating, artists will need time, light, water, and stability. They will need to get involved in long, thoughtful, experimental processes; being able to assemble and disassemble, to dream and lose hope, in order to achieve the perfect formula. Requiring immediate answers (beyond an opinion or a personal intuition) to a highly informal sector is grossly unfair and totally blinded. Crisis are not, at least as long as they spark off, educational opportunities. They are events that occur and hurt us. They indicate everything about us, included our learning and reflective abilities.
JOSÉ LUIS VARGAS: MYTH-MAKING
The faces and figures in the work of José Luis Vargas (Puerto Rico, 1965) become surrogates of very deep thoughts related to a sharper gaze. The duality in the works were created by many years working with people from different backgrounds, and his studio practice interestingly submerged the people that inhabit the paintings. People on the edge of the sublime and the mythical without forgetting their human nature.
AGNES PELTON: DESERT TRANSCENDENTALIST
«Desert Transcendentalist» is the first solo exhibition devoted to Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), a pioneer of American abstraction, in twenty-five years. This is a rare opportunity to experience Pelton’s profoundly spiritual body of work and to confirm her place in art history. Pelton received little critical encouragement for her abstract paintings during her lifetime as a result of living away from the mainstream art world for most of her career.
THE OVERLAPPING IDENTITIES IN ALIA FARID’S RECENT FILMS
Alia Farid’s work explores contemporary urban life against the backdrop of colonial histories in Kuwait and Puerto Rico, where the artist lives and works. Her exhibition at Witte de With presents a newly commissioned film installation, along with her earlier film At the Time of the Ebb (2019). In both films, Farid delves into how group rituals, social ruptures, and individual acts of resistance may admit, escape, alter or reject definition.