Cloths, soap dishes, prayer rugs with ornate lace adornments. They were
collected and preserved by her mother over the course of many years, some had
already been part of her own dowry. Now they are destined for her daughter and
her own family, her own home. To be passed on the day her daughter leaves the
family.
The fabrics embody a specific perspective on the life of Nurgül Dursun’s mother
and the transformation of work from farm labor to craftsmanship to factory work.
Through her personal dowry, Nurgül Dursun endeavors to explore this history
and, to some extent, reflect on the accompanying heritage.
The dowry becomes artistic material that Nurgül Dursun transforms into an
installation for the exhibition “Off you go” in the showcases of the Kunstverein
Harburger Bahnhof.
As part of the exhibition, the Kunstverein is showing Nurgül Dursun’s newly
created film work “Somut Olmayan Miras, Açıklaması / Intangible Heritage,
Explained,” in which she embarks on a biographical search for clues and travels
to places where her family manufactured and sold textiles.

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HAUNCH

These days

I repulse me,

emptied

of purpose.

 

FLANK

To put something in

to take something out,

to perform the motions

in a cycle for all time:

to be needed, loved.

 

BREAST

Only the wretched

found themselves

at my door,

so wet and various.

All who entered me

left changed, renewed.

 

CHUCK

What believers know

as transubstantiation,

in the industry we call

processing. The way I moved

spirit into matter, faster

than wafer dissolves

on the tongue.

 

RIB

We learnt to place a kindly hand

for the sake of flavour, knowing

adrenaline toughens

the product, brought to tears

by our own humaneness.

 

MINCED

My best years were spent

labouring in the shadows,

wrenching sustenance

from spirit, prying animal

sounds that would pierce

your sleep, mock

your pristine shirt sleeves.

 

SHANK

My bosses turned their backs

on their own doing, able to

side-step their appetite.

I kept their hands clean, gave

my best years, my jaws.

 

OFFCUTS

So much moved

through me… Now find myself

slipping into the surprise trapdoor

of my own heartache. All my toil,

for what?

 

LOIN

These days, the ones

who enter me marvel,

I overhear them saying things

like: art is so reparative.

Instead of a meat locker

there’s an installation,

a vibe.

 

PLATE

Let it be known

I am still here, I flake

my arsenic paint into human hair,

as the beautiful throw their heads back,

laughing at the vernissage.

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I had a music teacher who insisted we exercise breathing in such a way that we could hear our lungs touching our ribcage. He held his hands in the air, signaling that we should keep opening and opening our chests to gain a sense of all the organs implicated in singing. “Two tubes are connecting your insides now with the windows to the exterior world!” — he meant the esophagus and the trachea, while the windows were the nose and the mouth. Singing, he thought, was meant both for our inner organs and the outer world.

I never thought much about it until one day — during the pandemic — I saw an interview given by a Buddhist nun talking about the importance of getting to know our inner organs. She said, rightfully, that Western culture talks non-stop about the body and yet has no interest in gaining proper knowledge about what is inside us. She implied that because we can’t see our inner organs, they remain abstract — and this is very misleading. Our organs are far from abstract, and they determine so much in our lives that it seems foolish, if not entirely unreasonable, not to know “who” they are. She said that to look inside is not a matter of looking into an empty vessel or a simplified idea of a head, but to precisely look into each and every organ that composes who we are — like bricks compose a building.

I came to realize that in ancient Chinese and other Eastern medicines, there are very precise indications on how certain spots on our skin and external body parts connect to the inner organs. Clearly, where we see “in” and “out,” other, more knowledgeable cultures established — already very early — a non-binary system of communication and visualization between the visible and the more difficult-to-see dimensions of the body.

Lately, I have also realized that not a single day passes without the word “inflammation” crossing my path. Inflammation seems to be the state to avoid and, paradoxically, is a condition that particularly affects our inner organs. It is as if, all of a sudden, Western culture has become aware of centuries — more, millennia — of oblivion toward the organs, and now is the time to find a way to secure their well-being. Violent as we are, as a culture, we assume that our organs are revolting — that inflammation is the name of a silent revolution happening inside all of us and putting all of us at risk.

The words and wisdom of my music teacher were perhaps a way to anticipate the solution before the problem appeared. Since, if you conceive singing and the history of singing as a method to appraise the stomach, the intestines, the lungs, the liver, and the heart — not to mention the brain and the skin — then you shouldn’t fear any organic insurrection.

When I first came across the works of Eva Fàbregas — more than a decade ago — her major preoccupation was to make the pieces breathe and their skins sense. This preoccupation never left her work, but her knowledge of the question of the “organs” has grown. The works always emerge from deep research into how primordial elements of life do not possess a particularly easy-to-compose form. Life, in certain circumstances, embraces forms that are difficult to describe and even more difficult to stabilize.

By now, technology has allowed us to see, for example, tiny channels that connect the kidneys with the bladder or small twists that form in our intestines at times. Many of us love those medical series where a super-intelligent doctor is capable of visualizing a problem happening inside the body and immediately sends the machines in that direction to confirm what he already saw in his mind. It is also almost “sweet” how these almost divine powers are always given to male doctors — but to dismantle the politics of the writers’ rooms is not my mission here.

But — you see? — there has been a growing interest in seeing the organs in ways that surpass modern medicine.

Art, however, has shown little interest in both the organs and the organic. Organic matter has gained importance in the development of an entanglement between art and nature, but the organs remain a non-subject in contemporary art, with a few beautiful exceptions.

The materials used by Eva Fàbregas are mostly non-organic. But the reason is purely pragmatic: it is very difficult to achieve the level of dynamic relationships between all the elements at play using living materials. And yet, over time, her techniques and knowledge of flexible and elastic matter have almost invented a substance that allows her to create tension and volume in unprecedented ways.

The idea of tension is intensified by the texture of the sculptures: the skin of the works appears cracked, almost eroded, resembling a dense network of blood vessels, forming a surface akin to visceral tissue. For a moment, we wonder if they belong to the space they are in with us — or if they escaped a body and landed in the space after numerous adventures. Looking at them, we know we do not belong to the same realm. They belong “inside,” while the gallery space — and we — are in a dimension we can call “outside,” or public. If you look at them carefully, you can sense that they are forming groups — and that they seem to be protecting each other. At times, the pieces resemble spheroids or organoids, clusters of neural cells mimicking brain tissue. At times, they look like germinal centers, like the lymph nodes containing spherical clusters of immune cells. At times, they look like kidneys. They are connected by rope-like, bulging veins similar to the ones we sometimes see winding beneath the surface of the skin — coarse, tense, and serpentine.

Funny — in 1972, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. There, there’s a chapter entitled “The Body Without Organs.” What do they mean? The metaphor of a body (or self, or system) without organs expresses the need to imagine a body — a social body, a group, a society — capable of resisting being organized, coded, or stratified by particular social narratives, psychological guidelines, or biological structures.

This is a beautiful image. The body, as we know it, is conceived as an “organism,” a functioning unit shaped by external demands: each part having a function (the heart pumps but feels; the brain thinks, etc.). Imagining a body without organs means imagining the body before it is programmed with all the codes of capitalism and its psychological narratives (anxiety, exhaustion, guilt…). It is easy to see how the artistic practice of Eva Fàbregas has been going deeper and deeper into the political substance of producing works able to address this process of de-territorializing the body — unbinding it from imposed order. It is a process towards liberation, towards a personal — at first — and collective — later — inquiry into learning how a new structuring of those organs is possible, how to conceive ways of escaping the relapse into fixed roles, patterns, functions that limit how desire or life can flow.

It is simple: her work is all about the possibility of sculpture becoming the site for rethinking how we live, feel, and desire — outside conventional systems. 

– Text by Chus Martínez

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In his monumental drawings, Pieter Slagboom reveals a world in which birth, death, and sexuality are inextricably linked. On large canvases, lines swirl together to form bodies that contort and swarm in cramped compositions. With radiant, almost pulsating colors, Slagboom seduces the eye. Inducing a longer look, scenes unfold that strip the body of shame and reveal how our most intimate corners underlie our existence.

 

Slagboom’s work, Scent of Hypnosis, is a new series of commissioned works, in which he further explores and expands on his existing themes. The exhibition is based on a complex system of more than 170 studies, which form the basic designs for large diptychs and triptychs, as well as individual drawings. The figures in these works remind us of the cyclical nature of life: creation, death, and survival seamlessly follow one another.

 

The raw and daring images challenge taboos and social rules. Slagboom resists the polished conventions of our society and reveals what we prefer to keep hidden. He relentlessly confronts the viewer with our deepest vulnerabilities. The discomfort this evokes is as inescapable as life itself.

 

Pieter Slagboom (born 1956) received his master’s degree in 1981 from the St. Joost Academy of Art and Design in Breda. His work focuses exclusively on drawing and has been exhibited at Vleeshal (Middelburg), Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Office Baroque (Antwerp), and Bridget Donahue (New York).

Àngels Miralda (1990) is a writer and curator. She has worked on many national and international exhibitions, including recently Contemporary Biennial TEA (Santa Cruz de Tenerife), Something Else III & IV (Cairo Biennale), Radius CCA (Delft), PAKT Foundation (Amsterdam), Indebt (Amsterdam), Mutter (Amsterdam), and De Appel (Amsterdam).

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The emergence of linguistic form remains largely unknown. As the origins of language (1) reach beyond reliable traces or documentation, and as their transparency—or accessibility to analysis—is bound up with the emergence of words themselves, with language that resembles our own enough to allow meaningful comparison, any attempt to construct a definitive timeline or account of its development beyond this condition of comparability is necessarily considered speculative. Historical linguists have approached this question along several lines:

• anatomical – positing the necessary development of the brain to provide the capacities required for language (Homo erectus, ca. 1.5 million years ago) 
• technological – positing critical innovations, such as tool-making (from early stone tools ca. 1.5 million years ago to watercraft ca. 40,000 years ago), whose creation and use could necessitate verbal communication, and
• cultural – positing signs of symbolic expression (ostrich eggshell beads, ca. 40,000 years ago, and later cave paintings) as the emergence of expressive, symbolic thought.

The legibility of form—and the comprehension of its genesis—depends on similarity, on the transferability of elements that enable comparison. Assimilation Complete: Autocatalytic Form Replication touches on key structural points in such emergence of form—not only linguistic form, but form itself, in its indeterminate otherness. 

Assimilation Complete articulates and maps a development no longer bound to the elements of successful particular states—those that might survive and carry forward into subsequent expression. Rather, it traces unsuccessful elements—evolutionary dead ends destined to vanish. In doing so, it inevitably moves beyond the boundaries of knowledge defined by transparency and legibility into the viscous core of speculation.

The installation consists of a large-scale imprint situated within the spatial construction of artificial leather patches that serve as its environment. The imprint (2), as a technique of reproduction, destabilises the relationship between the matrix and the copy. Instead of marking a clear distinction between the original and its repetition, it generates a field of uncertainty in which every trace is simultaneously confirmation and erasure of the matrix. Within this field, form ceases to exist simply as content or expression; it asserts itself in space as an anachronistic trace, engaging the real through an enigmatic absence—the absence of the matrix—by which the drawing opens itself to the incursions of ontological contingency.

The outcome is not mere repetition but the opening of new trajectories, each carrying its own internal necessity. Hence, Assimilation Complete: Autocatalytic Form Replication is not a mere site of genesis and technical reproduction but also holds its distinct teleology. It distances itself from conventional coordinates of drawing, associated with the principles of articulation or capture, and follows instead the logic of speculative prognosis and abstract asignification, through which graphic transfer unfolds its own inherent development and flight.

 

(1) See Guy Deutscher, The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention (London: Arrow, 2006).

(2) See Georges Didi-Huberman, Podobnost prek stika : arheologija, anahronizem in modernost odtisa (Ljubljana : Studia humanitatis, 2013).

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Mondo Cane 

Jonathan Santoro 

Race Street Pier 

September 29 – November 02, 2025

Curated by Libby Rosa

Jonathan Santoro’s Mondo Cane is a site-specific sculptural installation on the Delaware River at the Race Street Pier. Challenging the conventions of public artworks, it is quasi-concealed within a designed void in the pier’s structure, framing a floating tire with an anthropomorphic hubcap bearing a worried grimace, cast adrift in the river, nearly submerged. “Mondo cane” is an Italian curse translating to “a dog’s world,” inferring a period of struggle or difficulty. Exploring pathos, callousness, and spectacle, the installation challenges the viewer’s response to anxiety in a time of reactionary change and increasing uncertainty. 

 This project was made possible by the generous support of The Delaware Riverfront Corporation, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Joseph Robert Foundation.

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ArtVilnius Opens Amid Cultural Ministry Overhaul

Temnikova & Kasela, installation view, ArtVilnius 2025. Photography by Jonas Balsevičius

ArtVilnius

Litexpo 3-5 October, 2025

Vilnius, Lithuania

 

Review by Àngels Miralda

 

Kogo Gallery, Installation view, ArtVilnius 2025. Photograph by Jonas Balsevičius

 

Amid contemporary art fair fatigue, context-specific and region-focused alternatives offer respite from the global homogeneity of large-scale events. ArtVinius, which ran from the 3-5 October in Lithuania’s capital did just that by offering a curated focus on the Baltic region through a democratic selection of galleries that operate on the commercial, public, municipal, and academy levels. All of these positions were brought under one roof to offer a deep-dive into the art scenes of the Baltic region.

Installation View, ArtVilnius 2025. Augustinas Zukovas, Penktadienis 122.

The fair was composed of a traditional booth structure framed between a curated sculpture exhibition titled Takas (The Path) and  a museum-scale presentation of Baltic collecting practices. This selection was curated by Maria Arusoo (Estonia), Inga Lāce (Latvia) and Sonata Baliuckaitė (Lithuania). The hall dedicated to private foundations and individuals focused on some of the most noteworthy collections in the region that each offer a different aesthetic and focus for a rapid entrance into the contemporary art scene as well as modern art positions of the Baltic region. The galleries in the commercial sector were a mixed array of local spaces with international recognition to municipal galleries across Lithuania. This wide array gave a democratic feeling to the fair that offered an open space for collectors with varying budgets, as well as a wide art audience interested in keeping up with developments in the cultural scene.

Performance Galerie Nivet-Carzon, Kamilė Krasauskaitė and Louis Danjou, ArtVilnius 2025. Photograph by Andrej Vasilenko.

By the selection alone, ArtVilnius goes beyond the function of a traditional art fair, offering the public service of a platform for a wider art scene. It is difficult to find such spaces in an industry often built on niche spaces disconnected from other artistic contexts. Furthermore, it went beyond the traditional function of an art fair and positioned itself on the forefront of current events as a platform for the political demands of the general cultural sphere. This was evident before stepping foot into the building whose doors were adorned with a sign board displaying the word “kultūra” dropping off a cliff signalled that the fair had taken a position in the issue currently shaking Lithuania’s art scene.

After the Lithuanian general election late last year, months of deliberations led to a new mixed government being formed. An unlikely coalition of the Social Democratic Party (LSDP) and the Dawn of Nemunas Party (NA) was agreed on based on the handover of the Ministry of Culture to Ignotas Adomavičius. This move sent shock-waves through the Lithuanian art scene whose cultural production and exhibitions have been consistently supportive of Ukraine since the Russian full-scale occupation and whose young art scene has been put together by the cooperation of many cultural actors with the country’s government support. The Nemuno aušra party was described as “anti-Semitic, anti-Ukrainian and pro-Russian” by CAC Director Valentinas Klimasauskas, (1) fitting the profile of similar extreme-right parties that have recently emerged in countries like Hungary or Slovakia. 

 

Drifts Gallery, installation view, ArtVilnius 2025. Photograph by Andrej Vasilenko

The examples that have been set by the string of removals of directors that occurred in Poland (2) and later in Slovakia (3) increase the rightful anxiety among the art community of the destructive potential of this political maneuver. Yet, in Lithuania’s signature style, the art scene stood together against the incoming political existential threat. ‘“We are all united in this struggle” affirmed Klimasauskas as he visited the fair, (4) and this was corroborated by the amount of signs present around Vilnius all making the same demand. The signs were visible not only in contemporary art institutions, but in historical museums, design offices, project spaces, and shops demonstrating the broad societal support for the initiative. The fair also became a site for social vindication challenging the stereotypes of the art market’s separation from politics and as a real space for dialogue. The signs were placed on the entrance doors, flashed on screens across the fair, and even included inside of some of the booths including Matas Duda’s presentation at the Vilniaus Dailės Akademija booth in the third hall. 

Detail from Matas Duda installation at Vilniaus Dailės Akademija, ArtVilnius 2025. Photograph by Àngels Miralda.

The fair showed its solidarity and political affinity in action, not only in the inclusive voice of its selection, making it a pressing and urgent addition to the voices demanding respect for the importance of culture in times of encroaching fascisms. The focus on Baltic collections, uniting private supporters of contemporary art across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, was already a political show of unity across all three young Baltic states. The result of activist’s demands had an immediate effect, and on the 3rd of October, Ignotas Adomavičius’ resignation was made public after public pressure against his candidacy. (5) Confronted with the impressive views of Zenta Logina’s textile works from the Zuzāns collection produced during the 1970s and the final years of the Soviet Union, demonstrate the struggle that the artistic community has had to face in this region and the long history of artist’s resistance against the imperialism of its encroaching neighbour. Other collections such as the TAAD Foundation and Boris Symulevič showed an impressive support of today’s most recognized young artists including Augustas Serapinas, Anastasia Sosunova, Pakui Hardware, and more. 

Works by Zenta Logina in the Zuzāns Collection, Photograph by Andrej Vasilenko, ArtVilnius 2025.

Drifts Gallery, installation view, ArtVilnius 2025. Photograph by Andrej Vasilenko

Some of the most outstanding booths included proposals from young and established galleries including Drifts Gallery (Vilnius), Kogo Gallery (Tartu), Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn), and Makslas xo (Riga). Regional galleries including Vilkamirgės Gallery and Panevėzio miesto dailės galerija from the Aukštaitija region brought important works to the capital. Artvilnius serves as an alternative to the homogeneity of most international art fairs who compete to platform the biggest international galleries on the market and offers instead a deep-dive into a local context that is beneficial for visitors both familiar and unfamiliar with the Baltic context. It breaks the stereotype of the market’s isolation from local issues and separation from artistic political demands by including protest firmly within its agenda and taking a stand in unison with the cultural community. 

 

(1)  Written in a Facebook post 23 September, 2025.

(2) https://metropolism.com/en/feature/49005_the_authoritarian_turn_on_the_crisis_of_the_polish_institutions_of_contemporary_art/

(3) https://artreview.com/purge-feared-as-multiple-slovakian-arts-heads-dismissed/

(4) Conversation with Klimasauskas 3 October, 2025.

(5) https://echogonewrong.com/the-cultural-communitys-protest-conversation-with-arunas-gelunas-and-gintaute-zemaityte/

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Anupam Roy

…ing: Scenaries without Sovereignty

 

Project 88

Ground Floor, BMP Building, N.A. Sawant Marg
Colaba, Mumbai – 400 005

 

 

Review by Vittoria Martinotti

 

 

If you walk into Anupam Roy’s “…ing: Sceneries without Sovereignty” expecting quiet contemplation, turn around. This is not a show that whispers, it screams, scratches, and claws its way under your skin. It doesn’t soothe, it scrapes, and that’s the point.

The grotesque is not a gimmick here, it’s the language. Roy’s work unravels in an aesthetic of rage: jagged brushstrokes, monstrous bodies, twisted limbs, slogans that punch instead of speak. This isn’t rebellion packaged for a gallery opening. It’s raw, unfiltered, and politically volatile, a terrain where propaganda is a weapon, not a genre.

Across drawing, sculpture, print, zine, and video, Roy assembles a scattered chorus of the dispossessed: eco-oppressed bodies tangled in root systems, skeletons marching in bureaucratic drag, slogans like “EAT THE RICH” or “REBELLION IS GROTESQUE” screaming across textures that feel closer to protest banners than canvas. The materials bleed urgency. This is less exhibition, more field report from the edge of a collapsing world order, from a dying old planet that lacks the footing for its rebirth.

 

 

And yet there is structure in the noise. The title “…ing” suggests the continuous, the unfinished, a grammar of resistance. Roy doesn’t deal in aftermaths, his practice lives in the throes of things, of grief, of uprooting, of revolt. Sovereignty here isn’t a right but a phantom, as the artist points out, the land doesn’t belong to anyone, we belong to it. But what happens when that land is taken, sold, strip-mined, renamed?

Violence, in Roy’s lexicon, is not spectacle, it’s structure. “Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed,” reads one of the quote’s published in his book “Weaving Labyrinths” (2020.) “They themselves are the result of violence.” These works don’t ask for your empathy, they dare you to admit complicity. A distorted foot sinks into soil, rats swarm at its base, veins become roots. Colonialism never left, it just changed costume, and Roy, like a visual exorcist, is here to tear the mask off.

 

There’s humour too, the kind born of despair. Characters like Post-Tooth, a gorilla-like anarcho-mascot , holding a broken wrench like a club, feel ripped from a dystopian graphic novel, or the ancestor of one if the Italian brainrot figures,  the margins of a prisoner’s sketchbook. Roy’s zines and prints channel a kind of punk anthropology, part field note, part scream. Think Kafka inked by Ralph Steadman in the middle of a riot.

This is an artist who knows his rage is not singular. The pieces throb with collectivism, made with and among others, they resist authorship as much as they resist finality. The monstruous here is not a distortion of reality, it is reality, once the polish is stripped.

You leave the show not with answers but with noise in your ears, a feral echo of something repressed for too long. It’s not clean, it’s not resolved and it doesn’t want to be. Because what we’re witnessing isn’t a conclusion, it’s an uprising in progress. An exhibition that doesn’t linger in a cold white cube space, and thank god for that.

 

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The 16th edition of ArtVilnius returns to Litexpo from October 3-5, 2025.

This year’s fair brings together 81 contemporary art galleries and institutions, with a varied selection of commercial, public, and educational galleries. ArtVilnius’25 featured the theme of practices of collecting in the Baltic States, highlighting the region’s dynamic and evolving collector culture through an exhibition curated by Maria Arusoo (Estonia), Inga Lāce (Latvia), and Sonata Baliuckaitė (Lithuania). Characterised by its strong regional focus, ArtVilnius serves as an opportunity to get familiar with the Baltic art scene through its showcase of a contextualised selection of historic and established, mid career, and emerging artists from the region. 

 

1. Vytenis Burokas & Agnė Juodvalkytė at Drifts Gallery (Vilnius)

 

2. Kristi Kongi & Sabīne Vernere at Kogo Gallery (Tartu)

 

3. Roman Korovin at Māksla XO Galerija (Riga)

4. Merike Estna at Temnikova & Kasela (Tallinn)

5. A. Junkutė, S. Ū. Gečaitė, D. Misiūnas, & G. Trimakas at Vilkamirgės Gallery (Ukmerge)

6. Mariam Shakarashvili & Arturas Savickas at Eristavi Gallery (Antwerp)

7. Kamilė Krasauskaitė at Galerie Nivet-Carzon (Paris)

8. Ramunas Grikevicius at Panevėzio Miesto Dailės Galerija (Panevėzio)

9. Jelena Škulis at VVJ Meno Galerija (Vilnius)

1. Gustas Jagminas & Paulius Sliaupa at Gallery Meno Niša (Vilnius)

 

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Jaap van den Ende

Active Landscapes

 

AKINCI

Lijnbaansgracht 317

1017 WZ Amsterdam

 

11 April – 10 May 2025

 

Review by Àngels Miralda

 

 

The first room of Akinci opens up to various paintings by the Dutch conceptualist master Jaap van den Ende. The first pairing of works across from each other initiates an extraordinary dialogue between two of his own working periods – one of recent works connected to the title “Active Landscapes”, and the other from the late 1960’s and 1970’s anchored firmly in the minimalist works of the time, simultaneous to the pioneers of computer art. 

On the left of the entrance, Kwadraat – structuur (1969) is the earliest work in the exhibition. Its perfect squares in alternating colors made with near-perfect precision produce effects of minimal op-art without the exaggerations of Vasarely. This early work reveals a deep interest in complex mathematics and in the creation of systems for variations on colour. The hues of this work belie the logic of the square by creating a yellow sphere out of contradictory angular geometry.

 

 

Across from this earliest work, Procesmatige ordening (2023) introduces van den Ende’s new series and makes visible the intensive development that has taken place over a period of 45 years of practice. The new series bursts the regularity and routine of the square into unpredictable “active quadrangles.” This term of his own refers to the trapezoid or rhomboid forms that are regularly found on these new works on linen. The square never appears on the canvas, but it is the form of the canvas itself. Split into three, this work is composed of separate rectangular pieces that come together to form a square exactly the same size as the work from 1969, creating a portal for the visitors to pass through into the interior of the exhibition through this threshold of the quadratic form. 

 

Each of the recent works follows a precise logic – three canvases arranged together made up of two abstract compositions flanking a realistic figurative mountainous terrain. Van den Ende sets out to capture the movement of territory, its constant degradation and the sculptural poetry of the mountains through his mathematical compositions that float as if freed from the compression of earth’s gravity. The repetition of each mountainscape creates a visual codex for understanding his way of seeing the world through graphic forms that collide on the diligent and infinitely calculable surface. 

Although the subject matters may appear divergent, the methodology shows incredible consistency over a long time-span. This is seen in one inclusion of an unusual diptych at the entrance of the back offices. Informele systemen (2008) is the only work which is neither from the 2020’s or the early series – rather, it acts as a conceptual bridge between the two. A figurative bouquet of flowers is accompanied by a graphic interpretation of its forms. It is a disciplined exercise in how to reduce visuality to the minimum of interpretability and simplification of organic shapes.

 

This exhibition is an excellent opportunity to gain an in-depth understanding of the development of painting practice over decades of work from the hand and mind of van den Ende.

 

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I Wish This Was A Song

Curated by Tlön Projects

Works by: Bani Abidi, Tim Ayres, Pavel Büchler, Becket MWN, Laurent Fiévet, Natalia Papaeva, Susan Phillipsz, Anri Sala, Tris Vonna-Michell

 

Luther Museum

Nieuwe Keizersgracht 570

1018 VG Amsterdam

28 March – 15 June 2025

 

Review by Àngels Miralda

 

 

I Wish This Was a Song (28 March-15 June) is an exhibition curated by Tlön Projects for the Luther Museum in Amsterdam. It includes a selection of artworks that each approach the power and uses of song in the formation of identity, community, place, politics and culture. Each artwork is a self-contained object that integrates into the 18th century canal-side diaconate house and the permanent collection of historical artefacts related to Amsterdam’s Lutheran community. The exhibition runs parallel to Zing!, an exhibition on the musical compositions of Luther himself, whose hymns served as protest songs that ended up defining the Lutheran community and even serving as a battle anthem in Germany.

Before entering the contemporary exhibition, the last case in Zing! displays a wooden lute that would have played the 16th century songs. Its wooden material produces imaginary metallic sound waves flowing into the next room, where the first work is a similarly wooden instrument – an impossible three-keyed piano accompanied by an altered score. Anri Sala’s Was it Mi (2013) questions the limitations of music, and establishes the possibilities of sound within the instruments of the time, with its own distinct nod to a recognizable Lynchian ballad from Twin Peaks. Although the piano suggests a soundscape, what can be heard emerges from a small sculpture across the room. Becket MWN’s Speeches from the Factory Floor is a sculptural sound piece that plays a compilation of clips from pop stars who used the stages of the MTV Music Video Awards ceremony to denounce political conditions. From Kurt Cobain to Kanye West, musicians take to the stage with words of political dissent.

 

 Most works in this exhibition are small and self-contained, integrating seamlessly with the period décor. Sometimes they are hosted in obsolete recording technologies or old television screens adding a historical reference to our analog and digital experience with sound. A vintage television screen plays Laurent Fiévet’s Water Bucket (2015) where a re-edited Snow White sings in a Disney Classic. Pavel Büchler’s You Don’t Love Me (2007) is a kinetic and sonic sculpture whose short tape passes over a tipped-over whiskey bottle, slowly degrading with time. Tris Vonna-Michel’s Audio poems: distracted listening (2015) serves as a sonic souvenir from a trip to Japan that the artist made in 2008. It records sound through a tourist gaze, one that thoughtfully creates a listening scrapbook of travel impressions.

On a flat screen in the third room, Natalia Papaeva’s Yokhor (2018) shows the artist singing two lines of a song from her homeland of Buryat in Eastern Siberia. Many communities of the region have been subject to colonial control and cultural erasure; the artist repeats the two lines like a mantra, holding on to this fragment of her cultural identity. The last room continues the theme of song and loss in Susan Phillipsz The Dead (The Lass of Aughrim) (2000) referencing a short story by James Joyce, Ireland’s most famous writer. In the opposite corner, a large box-like television screen shows Bani Abidi’s Anthems (2000). This work reverses the powerplay of sound, this time playing the national anthems of India and Pakistan in reference to the violence and trauma of colonial partition. Separated by a wall, two women dance to each national anthem, turning the volume up to drown out the other in a piquant 3-minute gestural video about song’s ability to divide.

At the exit of the exhibition two paintings by Tim Ayres I wish this was a song (2024) and A song a world to me (2023) hang on the final wall of the museum. The exhibition, titled after this work, is a wide historical and material analysis of music in society. The title, referencing Ayre’s painting, confronts the format of music and exhibition-making. This selection of works that spans the first 25 years of the 21st century is resolutely material and open-ended, it opens a discussion through choral dissonances that offer a variety of positions on the use of song as personal or pop, as power, as protest, as authority, and as counter-authority to the times we live. The exhibition acts as a compilation that does not narrate or constrain, but rather opens discussion onto the role that music plays in the construction of ourselves and the power structures that surround us.

 

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In the speculative world of Paul Rosero Contreras, biology and mythology meet at the precipice of time. His multimedia practice unravels fictional narratives combined with field-recorded data through sculptural and cinematic assemblages that provide us with a hopeful ground for speculating on the future. The title The World Ablaze refers to times of environmental collapse. We are witnessing an ongoing mass-extinction along with extreme meteorological phenomena due to the man-made disequilibrium of the planet. A planet with millions of years of dramatic changes —from iceball earth to fireball earth— which resulted in chemical and physical conditions that gave rise to our evolution. From the perspective of a biologist or mystic figure who sees the drawn-out process of geological time, it is not the planet as a living being that will end, but rather the survival of human and non-human beings.

The World Ablaze recognizes the climate anxiety experienced by a generation witness to the extreme effects of global warming. In response, Rosero’s artistic proposal moves away from the anthropocentric perspective and offers a non-human view that is present on a planetary scale and entangled with our daily lives. The characters in the works include orange corals that inhabit the acidic waters of underwater volcanic shafts and who are currently expanding their territory, and colonies of lactobacteria, humming to the rhythm of the Earth’s beating core. These beings transport us to cosmic times and chemical rhythms that transmit pulsating life and define our resilient, fragile and wonderful planet Earth: the location of our symbiotic and irreplaceable origin.

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“Milagro”

Flávia Vieira

“Milagro” stretches the thread which unspools from this question, which is as legitimate to formulate as it is difficult to answer. Flávia Vieira is well aware of its historical dimension, especially in terms of dialogues between pre-Columbian cultures and the artistic practices that, over time, have drawn inspiration from these symbolic and material universes. She also realises that in the present day, beyond the revolutionary project of the

avant-garde – which projected a new humanity based on a new sensorial and technical arrangement of the world – the weft that tries to interweave reality is now unravelling and becoming frayed.

For all these reasons, Flávia Vieira is keen to present Miracle as an exploration – forging an open and contingent dialogue with the museum collection’s pre-Columbian artefacts. The thirty-three objects derive from the Inca, Chimú, Chancay, Moche, Aztec, Nicoya, Misteca, Talamameque, and Nayarit cultures, which occupied part of the territory of Central and

South America, and pertain to the chronological period approximately between 500 BC and 1532 AD. Flávia Vieira views natural materials and traditional handicrafts as both a substitute for a vanished experience, and also a means of reestablishing it, notwithstanding the loss and in the face of the ongoing joy of making things for no reason in particular.

 

 

Location
Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (CIAJG)
https://www.ciajg.pt

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Tudor Ciurescu’s exhibition Pulcinella unfolds like an absurdist theatre play, where logic crumbles, and objects become protagonists in their own right. A meditation on balance, absence, and the tension between stability and collapse, the exhibition embraces the spirit of Eugène Ionesco’s theatre, where the mundane is distorted, and reality is a precarious illusion. Inspired by Ionesco’s exploration of the absurd, Pulcinella questions the structures we rely on, only to reveal their inherent fragility.

At the center of the exhibition is a precariously balanced chair, leaning at a sharp angle, accompanied by a pair of empty leather shoes. A scene frozen mid-action, yet eerily indifferent to time, as if a performer has just vanished into thin air or has yet to arrive. The setup feels like a stage in which movement is both imminent and impossible, a paradox Pulcinella himself would revel in. The masked trickster of Commedia dell’arte exists in contradiction—simultaneously foolish and wise, clumsy and cunning, absurd yet profound. Pulcinella does not obey the rules of physics or society, much like Ciurescu’s chair, which resists logic, balancing on the edge of collapse yet never falling.

Pulcinella thrives in absurdity, surviving through trickery and improvisation, where confusion is his natural state. His movements are exaggerated, his gestures oscillating between control and chaos. Ciurescu’s sculpture echoes this strange theatricality—an object behaving unnaturally, suspended between gravity and defiance. The empty shoes reinforce this sense of dislocation. Are they a remnant of a hurried departure, or do they belong to a character who was never truly there? The chair, like an actor trapped in an existential farce, leans, waits, and teeters, embodying the liminality of absurd theatre—where meaning dissolves into pure performance.

The work possesses an undeniable cinematic quality, as if the viewer has pressed pause on a film at a moment of critical suspense. The tension of an imminent event lingers in the air—has something just happened, or is something about to unfold? The stillness is deceptive, charged with an eerie dynamism, much like a film scene where an unseen force has momentarily suspended reality. The sense of an interrupted narrative invites speculation, reinforcing the absurdity of the moment.

The exhibition’s dramatic tension is heightened by the use of chiaroscuro, as a spotlight isolates the chair and shoes against a deep red velvet background, evoking both theatrical grandeur and a sense of impending doom. The stark contrast between light and shadow accentuates the sculpture’s precariousness, as if it exists in a fragile moment of revelation, caught between presence and erasure.

In Pulcinella, the ordinary becomes strange, the stable becomes unsteady, and the act of sitting—so fundamental, so unquestioned—becomes a site of absurd drama. By weaving together historical allegory, theatrical chaos, and the fragile materiality of his chosen media, Tudor Ciurescu invites us into a world where balance is an illusion, action is hesitation, and the only certainty is uncertainty itself.

Pulcinella is not just a character, nor just a title—it is the stage on which we all play, constantly shifting between presence and void, between comedy and collapse.

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Colloquially known as “mother”, MU/TH/UR is the AI mainframe that powers the crewed vessels in the film franchise
Alien. This decision-making supercomputer is thought to possess a great sense of morality but, in time, ends up sabotaging the crew, leading to their demise.
This ironic plot twist is emblematic of present-day society’s dependence on information systems. This pursuit of perfection, which might blur the speculative lens of when science fiction becomes a reality, is truly symbolic of the carnivorous
greed of modern civilization.
The work in this exhibition seeks to identify how material culture practices place value on the technological rituals of
this age in time.

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Take Long Take is an exhibition conceived specifically for the third floor of CentroCentro in Madrid. It invites visitors to immerse themselves in a visually enveloping experience, where moving through different settings becomes a continuous cinematic exercise, without cuts. Almudena Lobera’s proposal unfolds as an immersive experience in which the symmetrical structure of the space generates a palindromic reading, allowing the journey to be perceived similarly from both ends of the imposing building.

“Take Long Take is a site-specific project,” explains the artist, emphasizing that the unique architecture of the Palacio de Cibeles was the inspiration behind the narrative that shapes this exhibition. “What first caught my attention about the third floor was that, depending on which elevator is used, the journey begins at one end or the other. The floor has a horseshoe shape with an open balcony, which led me to decide that the exhibition should be mirrored. From either wing toward the center, one exhibition unfolds, and from there toward the other wing, a similar one appears—but with nuances. I wanted to create a palindromic effect, where the route feels the same from both sides, and as visitors cross the central axis, they experience a sense of déjà vu, as if they had already lived that moment, but with subtle variations.”

The concept of a long take materializes through the interconnection of the different rooms, where each space builds upon the previous one, creating a seamless flow without interruptions. Lobera faced the challenge of unifying a 500-square-meter space, where disparate elements such as columns and fire extinguishers coexist. The solution came when she noticed the glass railing encircling the central void of the building, which she decided to use as a visual reference. In this way, she treated the structure as a symbolic water level. “I covered the glass panels with blue vinyl and painted the walls the same color at that height. This way, the space becomes a vast pool, immersing the visitor in the exhibition, with a conceptual band that creates the illusion of water reaching up to the neck.”

This approach not only establishes a dialogue with one of Lobera’s previous works, Where the Interior Begins (2021), but also deepens her ongoing exploration of recurring themes such as the visibility of the hidden and the coexistence of opposing ideas. In that 2021 silkprint, Lobera drew a strange swimming pool where water expands infinitely, while the universe remains contained and measurable within it—a staircase offering passage either into the exterior or out toward the interior, an access point between two dimensions. Take Long Take feels like stepping into that image, immersing the viewer in a space of transformation and transition.

A clear example of this duality is the video The Beautifate, which opens the exhibition and is presented at both ends of the route. In this piece, a palm reader and a manicurist engage in a performance where the palm reader beautifies the manicurist’s nails while reading her hands. This interplay between the aesthetic and the spiritual, between the front and back of the hands, reflects Lobera’s ongoing exploration of the complexities of what is seen and unseen.

At the entrance, just before the video, visitors encounter the work Floating and Falling / Falling and Floating—sculptures of nautical buoys covered in salt that evoke the famous scene from Alice in Wonderland, in which the protagonist grows uncontrollably and creates a sea of tears. This symbolic image alludes to moments of suffering and resilience in artistic creation, inviting reflection on pain as an essential part of the creative process.

Music, a recurring element in Lobera’s exhibitions, plays a crucial role in shaping the emotional atmosphere. “The music that accompanies my work is an essential part of my creative process,” the artist notes.

This tribute to sound is embodied in the site-specific work Melancholy and Restraint, a suspended sculpture made of oven-baked iron tubes hovering over a black-tiled pool. The tubes form a sound wave from Teardrop by Massive Attack—a song whose lyrics Elizabeth Fraser dedicated to Jeff Buckley, who tragically drowned in the Mississippi River in 1997.

Another piece exploring Lobera’s ongoing interest in perception and visuality is The Light in the Shadow is Blue / Blue is the Light in the Shadow. These twin installations examine how light behaves underwater: a glass surface suspended at 1.40 meters is crossed by translucent fabrics, illustrating how colors vanish with depth—red first, then orange and yellow, until only blue remains—just before darkness takes over.

The central space unexpectedly pays homage to filmmaker David Lynch, referencing experimental cinema and the depths of the human mind. Visitors enter the exhibition’s core through a curtain, where they find its centerpiece: a sculpture of a golden fish split in half. This work symbolizes the culmination of the creative process, representing the search for profound ideas within consciousness. The sculpture also makes a direct reference to Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish, in which the director reflects on the depths of the mind in search of inspiration.

The journey continues toward the opposite end of the space, where subtle changes in the works reinforce a sense of ambiguity and distortion, leading visitors to discover an environment that challenges traditional expectations associated with an exhibition in a landmark like CentroCentro. Along the way, viewers also encounter a series of drawings that offer subtle clues to the ideas explored by the artist throughout the installations, acting as conceptual anchors within the immersive experience.

While some of the pieces echo recurring themes in Lobera’s career, all have been created exclusively for this project, aiming to construct an immersive scenography that surprises the viewer, inviting them to explore states of introspection beyond the visible and the tangible.

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Hannah Black

The Directions

Vleeshal, Markt 1, Middelburg

26/01/2025 – 13/04/2025

 

The Directions – Review

Text by Àngels Miralda

 

The beating heaviness of global violence as genocide unfolds on this planet is glaringly absent from most institutional settings that claim to represent contemporary conditions. In this banality of the everyday, lies a discomfort that many of us carry, and it is this false naiveté and uncanny calm that underlies Hannah Black’s The Directions. Through an all-encompassing architectural installation, the artist lays bare the conditions of life at this cosmic moment of unceasing onslaught by confronting the normalisation of this oppressive and horrifying truth.

 

I take the handout from the desk. What at first glance appears to be a floorplan is circular – an astrological chart that says “Name: Al Aqsa Flood.” It never occurred to me to do an astrological reading of an “event” of true philosophical definition. This name conveys a before and an after – one that has already radically transformed our collective identity. Sun sign, Libra, Ascendant, Libra – the sign of balance or of shifting equilibriums. Behind it, another floorplan with the layout of the Vleeshal with an order of planets suspended as in the night sky above the visitors.

 

Inside of the Vleeshal’s open space, a wooden and metallic structure leads out to various rooms, windows, and exits like the minotaur’s labyrinth. I first encounter a framed work marked on the floor plan with the number 2, corresponding to “Works from the BKR Municipal Collection Middelburg 1949-1987.” The BKR was a basic income for artists in the Netherlands that lasted during the listed dates. In exchange for a dignified income, Dutch artists provided works to build up public collections in the post-war shadow. This programme made the Netherlands a place where artists could live dignified lives without relying on the art market, it created a boom of experimentation and sustained the practices of otherwise unviable experiments.

 

What does this have to do with the Al-Aqsa Flood? The corridor proceeds to two exits of the structure which both face the metaphorical outside – archival images of the destruction of Middelburg during the second world war. The viewers stand inside of an architectural frame buttressed between reminders of past ruin. During the Second World War, the city and its colonial harbour that brought enormous wealth from the enslavement of colonised people around the world, its churches, and  the Vleeshal building itself were destroyed by Nazi bombs. The reconstructed walls of the exhibition space were put back together, stone by stone, creating an artifice of originality and history where it had been razed to the ground. The walls hold archival images of men in suits inspecting the rubble of their wealthy homes. These images bring home the war that never ended in many parts of the world and the suspended planets serve as a premonition of our interconnected destinies.

 

 

The structure, a shield from this exterior destruction, unfolds as a metaphor for the safeguards of socially-oriented society. Within this precarious security, the framed works accompany intimate videos filmed in dark exterior environments. Friendly chatter fills the video room while the camera captures the distant light of the universe. There is something intimate but unnerving in these dialogues, togetherness provides a brief respite. Outside of this framework is eternal ruin, a Cypress tree is a manifold reference – for mythology, for the graveyard, for poetry, for the island. All of it is draped in the mystic spheres of the orbital planets – a design for human destiny.

 

 

As social programmes across the globe are being dismantled by extreme-right politics and artists are increasingly censored, deported, and imprisoned, the framed works of the BKR are a historical reminder of the fragility of the systems we construct. Even within these glimpses of comfort, exclusion prevails – the all-male Dutch cohort of artists signal a society where access has never been universally granted and has quickly unraveled. The walls of the structure lie half-dismantled, a skeleton designed as a ruin within ruins, marked for demolition.

This exhibition doesn’t give answers. It does however, offer a moment of catharsis in solidarity with others unable to shake the uneasiness of survival among daily reminders of ongoing unjustifiable crimes. Regardless of whether one believes in astrology, the chart serves as a metaphor for the spiritual and philosophical question of free-will. Are we active agents in our own destruction? The exhibition comes full circle – an ouroboros of biblical time that knows that a messiah has been born of the rubble of history, and in the meantime, we hold on to each other unflinchingly doling out small comforts. The Directions leaves me with the sensation of having seen an omen, an unmistakably important meditation on what it means to make art in these unthinkable times.

 

 

Àngels Miralda is an Amsterdam-based curator and writer. She has been a member of Daily Lazy since 2018. She has curated many exhibitions including the Contemporary Biennial TEA 2024, two editions of Something Else: Cairo Off-Biennale, two editions of Survival Kit in Riga, Curated By Gallery Festival in Vienna, has curated group exhibitions at the Tallinn Art Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile, Radius CCA in Delft, the Museum of Angra do Heroísmo in Azores, and has curated solo exhibitions of artists including Paul Rosero Contreras, Bita Razavi, Anastasia Mina, Jinsook Shinde, Andrej Skufca, and Andrea Knezović. She has written various artist monographs published by Phaidon Press, Cukrarna, Printer Fault Press, and Grimm Gallery. She was a writer for Artforum from 2019-2023 and is currently editor-in-chief at Collecteurs.

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Jiří Pitrmuc’s exhibition titled 15 minutes at Kostka Gallery explores the phenomenon of time — particularly time as it relates intimately to our existence, bounded and finite, defining the length of a human life. To make practical use of this limited resource, we divide it into smaller units that suit our daily needs. In his installation at Kostka Gallery, the artist splits the space into four separate quadrants, each allowing visitors to view only one painting at a time. If we attempt to see the other works at the same time, however, we are thwarted at the very center of the installation with  a gigantic umbrella  hanging  overhead. It resembles a massive dome divided into twelve segments, reminiscent of the face of a clock. Each segment of the umbrella symbolizes  a five-minute interval, while below it, the exhibition space is symbolically divided into four fifteen-minute segments. This segmentation—this process of portioning, halving, or quartering—carves out smaller parts from a whole. The artist adopts it as a unique metric by which we can delineate what is difficult to grasp rationally, yet we feel compelled to engage with it in one way or another. The umbrella as a metaphor recurs repeatedly in Pitrmuc’s work. An object that naturally serves as a protection from the elements becomes an archetypal, time-frozen symbol, one that can effortlessly transform into an unanticipated  actor in grotesque situations. A certain childlike directness and the hypothetical possibility of these comical scenarios—whether involving an umbrella, an old locomotive, or a rusty washing machine drum—nevertheless hide a peculiar blend of humor, seriousness, and something intangible that, as viewers, we strive in vain to uncover. In any case, Jiří Pitrmuc’s magical umbrella becomes a place where fifteen minutes might be just around the corner. Or perhaps not.

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The hovering shifts between realities evoke the sort of nostalgia that Rita Koszorús is after. This reminiscence is static. Not only that, but it is a voyage between dimensions that summons the supporting nuances of time and space. The ropes of the interdimensional align in a particularly fleeting manner, lingering on the threshold.

This in-betweenness is born out of the contradicting and simultaneous existence of something at the intersection of a ‘safe bubble’ and the apocalyptic, resonating with its tension of emergence and disappearance. The parallel realities are not only presented through different media – painting and installation- but also through the levitation, movement and rearranging force of utopian and imaginary landscapes. These places have both familiar and unfamiliar atmospheres, making uncanny their shared language and now letting ‘spatialization’ into the dialogue.

Transient and momentary, as the exhibition title suggests: these states are never fixed, no linear narrative is involved. They unfold through the act of perception itself, as the recurring and familiar elements of the paintings and the installation articulate themselves, then teach us to attune to them. This structure resists resolution. Instead, it invites a slow navigation through fragmented memories, visual echoes, and imagined futures. The layering of images, surfaces, and gestures becomes the cartography of the intangible. Memory here is not a source but a medium, the fluid material that drifts image to meaning without ever fully settling. The boundaries between media dissolve just as the boundaries between inner and outer worlds do, revealing delicate parallel realities.

Rita Koszorús’ works, with their interwoven abstraction and subtle textures, become arenas where memory and imagination coalesce. In this interplay of form and void, presence and past, realm and fantasy, she offers a contemplative space where the echoes of the past resonate within the mutable dynamics of the now.

Eda Meggyeshazi

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The Still is Life

Attila Bagi, a visual artist with ties to Debrecen and currently living and working in Budapest, presents his solo exhibition in the Project Space of the MODEM Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art, which aims to showcase emerging artists. This exhibition draws from his series that reimagines the tradition and medium-specific possibilities of still life representation within the transformed object culture and technological environment of the 21st century.

Can we glimpse our own individuality through the contemplation of mass-produced consumer goods? What opportunities arise to express personal identity amidst the impersonal indifference of our everyday objects? Can items designed to be disposable serve as tools for preservation and legacy?

Each piece in the exhibition The Still is Life attempts to reinterpret the longstanding tradition of still-life painting: the arrangement of objects, its tropes, and its scenography. Rather than questioning the relevance of this artistic genre, Attila Bagi’s works explore its potential for tradition-conscious yet innovative evolution. To this end, the artist often pushes objects beyond the boundaries of the picture plane, creating installation-like situations and generating tension between objects and their representations. The exhibition reflects the drastic shifts in the conditions of viewing and audience behavior that necessitate rethinking and reinterpreting genre painting practices, offering visitors a chance to approach a system of conventions from a non-conventional perspective.

Curator: Edward Kovács

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 The Central Antituberculosis Dispensary (Sert-Subirana-Torres Clavé, 1933-37) is an emblematic building of the functionalist avant-garde architecture in Barcelona, with Josep Lluís Sert (1901-1983) as its main local advocate. It is also one of the landmark projects of GATEPAC and a symbol of the progressive healthcare policies of the Spanish Republic period (1931-1939). Additionally, it represents the first redevelopment aimed at regenerating the Raval neighbourhood, following the principles of rationalist hygienism. In 1932, AC magazine, published by GATEPAC, dedicated an issue to the Raval (then called Barrio Chino o Distrito 5 [Fifth District]), denouncing its insalubrity and its long-standing reputation as Barcelona’s underworld, a sort of chronic disease within the fabric of the old city. In retrospect, this building can be seen as the starting point of a long process of urban reform in Raval, a process that became particularly decisive in the 1980s and whose regenerative or “curative” impulse still persists today. 

With the decline in tuberculosis rates from the 1950s onwards, the building’s use gradually shifted toward outpatient medical services. In the 1980s, the dispensary was integrated into the new Catalan Administration’s public healthcare network. In this context, the Dispensary represented a historical legacy of progress, which gained renewed significance with the restoration of democracy in Spain in the late 1970s, after Franco’s dictatorship and within the broader framework of the urban process that architect Oriol Bohigas called the “reconstruction of Barcelona” (Oriol Bohigas, La reconstrucció de Barcelona, 1985). 

 In 1982, a first renovation of the building was carried out, with the direct involvement of Sert himself, who had returned from the United States the previous decade and would pass away the following year. His collaborator was Mario Corea, who was also part of the team that later led the major rehabilitation between 1990 and 1993 (architects Corea-Gallardo-Mannino). The goal of this intervention was to adapt the building to its new function as a Primary Healthcare Center (CAP), a role it has maintained since then: CAP Raval Nord or CAP Dr. Lluís Sayé, renamed in honor of the renowned Barcelona-based tuberculosis specialist. 

This rehabilitation was part of the “From the Liceu to the Seminary” plan (Clotet/Tusquets/Bassó, 1981), a set of urban initiatives that shaped Raval’s evolution into a new central area since the 1980s, where cultural institutions played a key role in urban regeneration (and gentrification). The core of this redevelopment was the cultural cluster constituted by the CCCB (Contemporary Culture Center of Barcelona) and MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona), built on 

the former site of the Casa de la Caridad (charity house or poorhouse). The culmination of this transformation occurred within the larger urban renewal projects for the 1992 Olympic Games. 

In 1993, the young photographer Gregori Civera, a recent graduate at the time, photographed the Dispensary for a monograph by Antonio Pizza (published by the College of Architects of Almería, 1993), coinciding with the completion of the renovation. Around the same time, Civera also documented the construction of MACBA, completed in 1995. Two decades later, in 2016, minor maintenance work was carried out on the Dispensary. At that time, Jorge Ribalta was photographing the building as part of a series of projects on Barcelona’s urban evolution, which he had been developing since 2005. His work critically examines the post-2004 Fórum era, a period he interprets as marking the symbolic end of Cerdà’s Barcelona. Some of his photographic series have been set in Raval. His series on the Antituberculosis Dispensary (2015-17) is a reflection on the origins of modernist architecture and its relationship with hygienist policies. Ribalta was partly influenced by the work of Beatriz Colomina, who argues that the fight against tuberculosis played a seminal role in shaping modernist architecture, where the search for light and ventilation was a guiding principle (Colomina, X-Ray Architecture, 2019). Modernism thus shaped not only a concept of health but also of morality: the triumph of good over evil. 

Civera began photographing the Antituberculosis Dispensary in 2024. His interest stems from the anticipated change in the building’s use and is part of a broader long-term documentation of the reform of Plaça dels Àngels, which began in late 2024 and is set to continue until 2027. This redevelopment continues and potentially concludes the urban plan “From the Liceu to the Seminary.” 

The aim at describing the current historical moment of Barcelona, the tension between what is ending and what is about to begin, is what unites these two photographers in this new exploration of the Antituberculosis Dispensary. Their convergence was largely coincidental. Each has photographed the building at different moments, independently of one another. Although their approaches differ, both share a commitment to capturing the materiality and public life of the building, steering clear of the idealized images that often dominate architectural representation. 

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Gregori Civera (A Coruña, 1971) is a specialist in architectural and editorial photography. In his work, he highlights the follow-up of new emblematic architecture in Barcelona after the 2004 Forum of Cultures. Between 2013 and 2014, he did a report for the Italian magazine ‘Ottagono’ about the new buildings by international authors that were emerging in areas of new centrality in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. He has been the photographer for the Ricardo Bofill studio for over two decades. Gregori Civera has been part of the exhibition: An Unknown City Under the Fog. New Images of Barcelona’s Neighborhoods, curated by Jorge Ribalta for MACBA, Barcelona, and which is part of the Neighborhood Plan 2021-2024. Among the artists featured in the exhibition, we highlight: Jeff Wall, Martha Rosler, Manolo Laguillo, Pedro G. Romero, and Mabel Palacín. 

Jorge Ribalta (Barcelona, 1963) seeks to insert itself into the tradition of the reinvented documentary, which dismantles and abandons the modern myth of photography as a transparent medium and universal language, making evident its insertion within power relations. The goal of his work is to produce a representation of the work in the field where he operates, namely, the field of cultural institutions. He is the National Photography Award 2024. Recently, his exhibitions have included: Everything is True. Fiction and Documents at the Mapfre Foundation and the University of Navarra Museum (2021-2022) and at the Botín Foundation, where he showcased the project Variations Güell (2023). He has also exhibited in institutions such as the Württembergischer Kunstverein, MOMA, Palais de Tokyo, La Caixa Foundation, MACBA, Reina Sofía Museum, and at the Rotterdam Photography Biennial, among others. With a long career as a photography curator, in 2024 he carried out for MACBA and the Neighborhood Plan the exhibition An Unknown City Under the Fog. New Images of Barcelona’s Neighborhoods. 

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GDA is pleased to announce and host the first solo exhibition of Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino in São Paulo. Opening on February 7th, from 5pm to 9pm, and on view until March 15th, the show marks the beginning of the gallery’s program in 2025. All the works presented in the exhibition are new and were produced in the space where the presentation takes place, at Rua Barra Funda, 654, São Paulo, Brazil.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino (Brazil, 1989) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through score, sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video, the artist addresses the remaining structures of the transatlantic colonial project, focusing on institutional critique, language, and objecthood. Their work has been shown in Germany and internationally, including exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig (Germany), Kunsthalle Bremen (Germany), Kunstverein Kevin Space (Austria), Galerie Molitor (Germany), Kunsthal Nord (Denmark), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), Simian (Denmark), Museu Nacional da República (Brazil), Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (Germany), Curitiba Biennial (Brazil), and Oscar Niemeyer Museum (Brazil). Amongst institutional collections and commissions are Kadist (France),  Museu Nacional da República (Brazil); the One Minutes Foundation at Sandberg Instituut (Netherlands); Instituto Moreira Salles, (Brazil), and Pampulha Art Museum (Brazil).  Celestino was awarded numerous grants, prizes, residencies, and fellowships, including the ars viva prize for visual arts 2025 (Germany), Pampulha Grant (Brazil), Ducato Prize (Italy), Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (Germany), La Becque (Switzerland), PACT Zollverein (Germany), British Council (UK), and Pivô (Brazil). In February 2024, their lecture ‘From Language’ was presented at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, anticipating following presentations at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, Kunstverein Nürnberg, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, Akademie der Bildenden Künste München, the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg, and the Kunsthalle Bremen in January 2025. Among their 2025 exhibitions are solo exhibitions at GDA (São Paulo), Kunstraum Leuphana (Lüneburg), Between Bridges Foundation (Berlin), and Sharp Projects (Copenhagen), as well as group exhibitions at Haus der Kunst (Munich), Palais Populaire (Berlin), and Bonniers Konsthall (Stockholm). Also in 2025, Wisrah will participate in the artistic residency at Salzburger Kunstverein, Austria, and in 2026, in the Fogo Island Arts, Canada residency program.

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“At the beginning of the 17th century, during an evening in Lucerne or London, the splendid story began. A secret and benevolent society (whose members included Dalgarno and later George Berkley) was founded in order to invent a country… After a two-century hiatus, the persecuted fraternity re-emerged in America. Around 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of the members conversed with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. Buckley let him speak with some disdain – and laughed at the modesty of the project -. He told him that in America it is absurd to invent a country and proposed the invention of a planet.” – Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941.

 

Two years into the second World War, Borges’ novel The Garden of Forked Paths (1941) reflected his vision of the way in which the old colonial powers were re-drawing their objectives. From Buenos Aires, his words counter the narratives of Western press. Is the victory they speak of the erasure of the great civilisations in the Middle East behind newly drawn colonial borders? Was it the loss of his great friend and poet Federico García Lorca to fascist forces – from whom he had been gifted a great love for the Arab World – and the fall of the Spanish Republic to the Franco regime? Was it the new colonial interests of the United States that had already begun their deeper penetration into the South American continent and that would soon develop into planned military coups and the disappearance of thousands of his countrymen? For Borges, magical realism was not only a literary style, but a way of surviving in a world in which what is written does not appear to fit with reality.

 

This exhibition mirrors the seven chapters of Borges’ famous novel with seven artistic proposals that function as short-stories to a surrealist narrative of our times through imagination and abstraction. Borges’ role as an artist was that of an agent of subversion who used culture to reveal the indisputable machinations of a world in flux, an 80 year cycle with parallels to the cosmogenic shifts of today. This project positions Cairo as the timeless cosmopolitan city that the buildings of Darb al-Ahmar invoke as an escape from the silence and indifference that has taken hold of Europe in reaction to the fight against its strongholds and in an effort to fight against the colonisation of the imagination.

 

The artists in this exhibition present a new speculative reality that is constantly created through our words and faculties. It lies within the non-linearity of time and the idea that modernity is not true progress. It creates a multiplicity of stories that inhabit a reality which is the subsoil of all invented hegemonies. There is an everlasting resistance that survives in the mass and the multitude, in the forgotten silent words of centuries of civilisations that accompany us in the ancient streets, trades, livelihoods, and spirituality of Islamic Cairo. 

 

“In our memories, a fictitious past has already taken the place of another, of which we know nothing with certainty – not even that it is false. Numismatics, pharmacology and archaeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatar… A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our predictions are correct, within a hundred years someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.”

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Longtermhandstand is proud to present the duo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Erin M. Riley and Hungarian painter Mónika Kárándi. This showcase highlights the striking contrast between two distinct artistic approaches, not only in their chosen mediums—Riley’s handwoven tapestries and Kárándi’s contemporary painted landscapes—but also in their exploration of the individual versus the collective. Erin M. Riley’s meticulously crafted, large-scale woven works unravel the intimate, erotic, and psychologically raw terrain of personal history, relationships, trauma, and resilience. Using a collage-like process, she weaves together moments from personal archives, internet imagery, and media clippings to construct deeply personal yet universally resonant narratives. Her work lays bare the complexities of the female experience, exposing how trauma etches itself into the psyche and body. Each tapestry acts as a vessel of memory, inviting viewers into a space of vulnerability and self-examination. Mónika Kárándi, in contrast, expands the notion of identity through collective transformation. Her painted landscapes explore the body’s extension beyond its physical boundaries, merging it with the natural world. Inspired by the ancient desert plant Welwitschia Mirabilis—an organism that has endured for millennia—her figures stretch, tangle, and intertwine like tendrils reaching for both sky and earth. These hair-like, morphing forms embody endurance, resilience, and the longing for connection. Kárándi’s work blurs the line between human and plant life, suggesting a profound interdependence between individual existence and the greater forces of nature. As she describes, “Even if I did separate them, they would again and again long to merge with each other.” Through Riley’s deeply introspective, singular narratives and Kárándi’s expansive, interconnected visions, “Deep Inside in the Safest Place” invites us to consider the interplay between isolation and unity, fragmentation and continuity, trauma and survival. In this dynamic juxtaposition, the exhibition offers a meditation on endurance—both personal and collective—and the fluid boundaries that shape our identities over time.

Péter Bencze

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The Karussell Association APS presents Anime di Cristallo: a research project by artist Silvia Mariotti that will be developed over the course of two years between Italy and Portugal.The project, made possible thanks to the support of the Direzione Generale Creatività contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura (General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture) within the framework of the Italian Council program (13th edition, 2024).

 

The exhibition Anime di Cristallo, installed in the former science laboratory of the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência of Lisbon, is inspired by the theories of biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, who attributed a form of intelligence even to inorganic matter, and questions the role of humankind in the transformation of nature. Mariotti’s works – including sculptures, installations and photographs – explore hypothetical lifeforms generated by the coupling of natural and artificial elements, evoking suspended and changing worlds.At the heart of the project lies an investigation into the transformations and connections between the natural and the artificial, between human and nonhuman elements. Inspired by Haeckel’s studies, reinterpreted and amplified by the research of Italian scientist Laura Tripaldi, to whom the artist owes much in terms of her first embarking on the present project, Mariotti questions how nature evolves and changes through contamination and hybridization, modifying and adapting to processes of anthropisation. Through a combination of photography and sculpture, the artist simulates hybrid ecosystems, where imaginary creatures – the upshot of the fusion of organic and inorganic elements – are found as contemporary fossils. The works evoke worlds suspended in time, offering a reflection on humankind’s role in interfering with and altering the natural environment and how – even in its inorganic dimension – it is capable of adapting and responding in amazing ways even to the most violent of impact. Anime di Cristallo represents a profound inquiry into the consequences of human activity and the urgency of adopting new perspectives, mindful of the importance of nature as a basis for life and an entity in a constant state of renewal, forever generating changing forms of existence.

 

The advent of the iguanas

Silvia Mariotti amid catastrophe and transformation

Lately, there is a name that has been come up frequently in the tales of Silvia Mariotti, one who has been talking about ‘crystals’ for years. Not just crystals that form spontaneously in nature but also artificial ones. She says they are endowed with a soul, a sora of consciousness or cognitive ability to self-organise. She has read all the studies of scientist Laura Tripaldi on the ‘intelligence of materials,’^[1] which she is fascinated by. Crystals are formed in the wake of a transition of state in matter, i.e. through the process of the gradual solidification of a liquid, and take shape in orderly structures of various sizes. A natural type of crystallisation is visible in mineral rocks as stalactites and stalagmites: particular calcareous formations present in caves subject to karst phenomena.^[2] The formation periods of mineral deposits are extremely long, but seeing these stratified dripping forms (the Greek origin of the names in fact means ‘dripping’, ‘droplet’) is like witnessing the time captured in an image. Just like happens in the photographic process, recurrent in the work of Mariotti. Like photography, crystals create the illusion that time may be halted. When we speak of ‘crystallising’ in the figurative sense, we in fact mean the ability to block the flow of matter in an image. Like a crystal – which means ‘ice’ – time is frozen in a shape. Stabilising this process of the transformation of matter is part of Mariotti’s intention: making visible three-dimensional snapshots, and thereby visualising a possible future time in space. Her landscapes are presented simultaneously as real and virtual, organic and inorganic, human and artificial, past and future, living and non-living. Within them, traces of human presence, organic materials and inorganic compounds are to be found side by side. I am reminded of the descriptions of J. G. Ballard, an author very dear to her, in The Drowned World:^[3] a novel from the ‘catastrophic’ tetralogy by the British writer. Because of the increase in temperatures and the ensuing rise of ocean levels, the Earth changes climate and appearance: buildings are coated in layers of moss, and the grey ribbons of tarmac with the rusting shells of cars had been submerged by water, and now only boundless forests rise skywards. Reptiles “had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.” Who knows whether, should they have the ability to do so in the future, human beings would choose to put a stop to the ‘advent of the iguanas’, or if on the other hand, they would prefer to let themselves be swallowed up by the new world, embracing a shared destiny of transformation, as the protagonist of the book chooses to do?

Giulia Bortoluzzi

 

^[1] Laura Tripaldi, Menti parallele. Scoprire l’intelligenza dei materiali, effequ, 2020.

^[2] Karst territories were the centre of interest in Mariotti’s research as a symbol of collective memory in Dawn on a Dark Sublime (2016).

^[3] James G. Ballard, The Drowned World, Berkley Books, London 1962.

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In the exhibition Pillar of Societies, the collective Center for Peripheries explores gestures of the appropriation of places by minorities in ethnic enclaves in cities of the global West. Unlike strategies or tactics, which presume a form of organisation, a defined goal and a structured plan, gestures are acts of our daily lives that are charged with moments of resistance. In the Neue Galerie, Center for Peripheries looks at these everyday rituals of resistance, which oppose the vanishing of migrant communities and identities and often coincide with forced integration. The exhibition Pillar of Societies is part of the annual programme The Resistance of Nothingness curated by Bettina Siegele.

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This ProtoZone* collects stories of those who are left behind. They are stories of loss and remnants after death, destruction or extinction. Who or what is left behind, and how could these stories be possibly told?

Stories of Those Left Behind resists the notion of a world divided into the realms of the living and the dead, into life as being in the world versus non-life as non-existence. It approaches places of refuge on an unexcited backstage that takes care of what we are left with when left behind.

A person is left behind when a loved one dies. People are left behind when they are socially excluded, discriminated against or even wiped out. More-than-human forms of existence are left behind when their habitats are destroyed, when they become extinct. Each of these experiences leaves traces in the form of memories, objects or stories. Attending to these traces becomes a labor of mourning.

The participating artists show ways of dealing with personal, collective and planetary loss. They suggest how to nurture our relationships with the dead and how to get in touch with our ancestors. Possibly, their memories persist in our bodies, shaping our past and future.

ProtoZone17 suggests a kinship that goes beyond bloodlines and biological origins. How can we build relationships with more-than-human beings? What can we learn from them about care and transience? The works create spaces where transience becomes tangible.

These spaces are both intimate and monumental. They suspend, slow down or stretch time. Because death changes our relationship to time. How does one live in this other, new temporality?

 

*A Protozone gives space to collaboration and to exhibitions, whose openness is still visible. The Protozone can accommodate any form of art, and it gives room for workshops and scholarship, which in turn engage in a process with other elements in the zone.

The Protozones at Shedhalle are designed to be inclusive, and they enable the collaboration of artists and people with different backgrounds. They allow for slow and persistent action, they create a space where processes can unfold. Shedhalle and its Protozones are places for unconventional practices and for experiments. They give a platform to artists who work in different disciplines, and whose complex biographies and identities we want to accommodate. We perceive the Protozone as a starting point for a community of artists and activists who do not conform to the demands of the art market.

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Fábio Colaço is a young Portuguese artist who presents his first solo exhibition at ADN Galeria: YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW. The exhibition is a critical reflection on the current socioeconomic state through a series of allegories that mix cultural references. These are also organized in an exhibition route that fictionalizes the symbolic structure of a house.

The result is an exhibition that describes a dystopian reality, an intricate network of associations that reflect different readings of our time and different historical episodes. In Untitled (1984), for example, we find George Orwell’s book 1984 rolled up in the form of a monocle and arranged at the level of our eyes, turning it into an instrument of surveillance. A materialization of the “Big Brother” described in the same book.

Colaço’s works transcend the traditional boundaries of sculpture, his main area of artistic training. He uses alternative materials and devices, adapting each technique to different investigations. A good example of this is Faust (2024), an object piece made of a pair of shoes and a stack of euro cent coins. The absence of the body absorbed by that pile of low-value coins shows that the character alluded in the title has sold his soul in exchange for being left without power, health, or glory.

Thus, the subversive nature of the works and also their irony, creates allegories that facilitate new interpretations by the viewer. In each title there is an analysis of certain social traumas typical of nowadays, where our economic system takes center stage. In this sense, the element that integrates several works as raw material shaped by the artist is especially relevant: money.

As we have seen, in this exhibition apparently familiar and banal images and objects are appropriated, metamorphosed and recontextualised. In Untitled (timeline) (2024) we see a wall clock where numbers are replaced by words that allude to certain ordinary, often unnoticed, moments in our daily routines. A metaphor for how time is used, emphasizing the banality that fills it.

In short, Colaço expresses a rebellion against museologically consecrated forms, challenging the way in which we perceive power. YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW is the opportunity to discover for the first time in Barcelona the pertinent and poignant work of an artist whose pieces are already recognized and that are part of several collections in Portugal.

Text by Paulo Mendes

The exhibition will open on November 30th at 12 pm. at ADN Galeria (C/ de Mallorca, 205, L’Eixample, 08036 Barcelona), and will remain open to the public until January 25th.

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Sharif Baruwa’s dense yet precise, playful yet deep and nonchalant yet always carefully arranged environments seem to achieve both. They maintain a certain eeriness and opaqueness while revealing cracks and layers that allow for readings of the artist’s experience and cosmovision as well as the sociopolitical underlying structures that shape them. These readings are not fixed though, and as one moves through space, the singular elements appear to have an iridescence of a conceptual nature, meaning that as the visual connections between them change also their readings may vary.

Effortlessly assembling drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, video and poetry into a fragmentary unity, Sharif’s environments provoke feelings of familiarity as they integrate not only materials but also objects present in everyday life. The techniques, as well as their level of precision differ according to necessity, varying from hyper realistic and detailed moments to less defined representations which at times only demand a few strokes to achieve a certain image or effect. At the same time, painterly and sculptural deliberations such as composition, proportions, combinations of materials or specific colour palettes are never neglected and put into the service of concept and content.

Sharif’s practice speaks from a position of loving resistance to the logics and forces of oppression that have led us to a moment in time where gruesome crimes against humanity are committed overtly and with impunity on the stage of world politics and it has become impossible to ignore the endless trail of broken promises. (Laura Amann)

 

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Galerie Martin Janda is showing Fables, Hugo Canoilas’s second solo exhibition from 6th December 2024 until 18th January 2025. The show presents a compendium of the artist’s latest works, including large–scale paintings, drawings, and sculptures produced within the last two years.

The etymology of the word fable traces back to Old French, meaning “falsehood, fictitious narrative; a lie, pretense.” The word is derived from the Latin fabula, “story with a lesson, tale,” and from fari, “to speak, tell, say.” The later meaning “animal story” comes from the popularity of the Greek Aesop’s tales, which defined it as a short, comic tale making a moral point about human nature, usually through animal characters behaving in human ways.
Promptly, its meaning shifted from serving the purpose of speaking to others, communicating a shared reality, to storytelling and later on to the creation of fictitious or speculative realities. In other words, a fable is a literary form able to contain in itself both reality and fiction, human and non–human, natural and artificial, physical and immaterial, figurative and abstract.

While writing this text, I learned about an online library called Fable that can generate unique and random passwords. As far back as Ancient Mesopotamia, the Akkadian word for “password” was the same as for “omen.” Not only did the word celebrate the almost mythical difficulty of deciphering, but it also connotes a shared community responsibility.
An omen was a sign from the gods that indicated future events. It was believed to be a message from the gods about a complex system of correspondences that related all beings and events to one another. Omens can be found in many places, including animal entrails, observed in the sky through eclipses, or in everyday life occurrences, such as a spider spinning a web at a window.

Hugo Canoilas’s artistic practice, particularly known for its intersectional interest in ecofeminism and the interaction between natural and artificial environments, explores the physical and oneiric landscapes in this exhibition. Reflecting on the current political and social affairs, the artist was driven by impulses and intimate gestures deeply rooted in the influences of Fantastic Realism, German Magic Realism, Surrealists like Leonora Carrington, as well as Vinciane Despret’s speculative writing.

These influences are vividly depicted in the most recent fluid paintings, in which images as dreamlike visions are painted figuratively, strongly influenced by Kubin’s oeuvre. They are installed in direct relation to Who Killed Cock Robin?1, a series of handmade headwear, first presented as part of the opera Hold Your Breath that premiered this summer at Bregenzer Festspielhaus in Bregenz. This dark, see–through, layered set of hats functions almost like masks, disguising humans into shapes of animals such as a fly, a dove, a sparrow, a fish, and a beetle.

This year I started using Duolingo to learn and practice German. One of its most distinctive aspects is its eccentric sentences, which I‘ve been collecting via screenshots:

“The witch is bringing her date along, he is a bear.”
“My horse collects teeth.”
“I am crying and the onion is laughing.”
“My dog is unemployed and only has one eye.”
“Is she picking the horse up from the train station?”
“We are inviting a snail to the barbecue?”
“My horse is not an artist but an architect.”

The app website explains that these sentences are memorable examples helping learners remember vocabulary and grammar rules more effectively. One cannot help comparing this sentence-building operation with early Surrealist writings, animism — the belief in the “animation of all nature,” that non–human beings, such as animals, plants, mountains, and forces of nature like the ocean, winds, sun, or moon can be maintained social relationships with — and naturally, the act of “speaking” and “fantasizing” present in the etymology of the word Fable itself.

Crawling over History (2022) is part of a series of eerie graphite drawings on debris shells. These appear as if they were texts — almost beyond language — evoking and interweaving the historicity of those phantasms and self–made human projections. Canoilas’s animal-human landscapes, captured by delicate and lyrical graphite lines, lend themselves, as in Goya’s work, to exploring the boundaries and mutual overlaps between dream and reality

In Fables, Canoilas presents an oneiric ecosystem of new potentially narrative works that suggest and unfold relational and multiple visions of uncertain futures in a world of the most uncanny visions, where primordial crustacean animals and embryonic-looking hybrid creatures co–exist and interconnect. But by no means can dreams be considered a mere escape from reality, it’s rather about bringing forth the real from its potentiality through imagination.

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Text: Jiwon Lee

I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms

To understand the artist Hyunsung Park, it seems essential to begin with her 2018 work, Swinging (https://youtu.be/wcvnkoqdyOI), which is also included in this exhibition, I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms. This video captures the artist endlessly colliding her knees against the gallery wall while swinging on a self-made swing. Propelled by gravity and the pendulum-like motion of her body, the swing repeatedly lunges toward the wall, gradually dismantling the seated artist’s (performer’s) body.

This aggression toward the transparent wall resembles a shocking form of mania, a compulsive self-fracturing. As Heidegger might describe, the authentic self (Eigentliche)—one’s true self—and the inauthentic self (Uneigentliche)—the socially constructed self formed through relationships—are so intertwined that separating them seems to require such destructive acts of self-dismemberment. This act of physical destruction confronts its most extreme form—death—and evokes existential anxiety (Angst), enabling the artist to distinguish her being from the illusory personas that surround her. It is through this obsessive act of rediscovery, within the relational tension between self and others, that Park Hyun-sung’s work finds its foundation and driving force.

Fragmented Bodies

Park’s themes of self-fragmentation and separation become more visually explicit in her recent works, such as I Reach Out to You in Stretched Forms (2024) and Digesting Boundaries (2024). These pieces, primarily composed of fabric, extend the tradition of soft sculpture seen in the works of artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eva Hesse, and Lee Bul. Unlike sculptures made of robust materials like steel, stone, or bronze that withstand the passage of time, these works express fragility and transience through delicate and lightweight forms. The soft, flexible fabric evokes human skin, symbolizing human vulnerability in contrast to rigid materials.

In addition to fabric and textiles, Park employs materials such as IV stands, stainless steel, and PVC hoses to create forms that are abstract yet reminiscent of the human body. Layers of mesh fabric, stretched taut or draped loosely over internal stainless steel structures, resemble skin—pierced, pulled, or pooling on the floor. The installation conjures fragmented human forms: sagging skin, severed hands, exposed organs, hollow torsos, and shattered bones. These fragmented, partial representations of the human body echo the destruction and division seen in Swinging, where the artist paradoxically sought to preserve her essential self through acts of disintegration.

Suspended Yet Grounded

Unusually, Park chooses to suspend her works vertically in the exhibition space rather than arranging them horizontally. The resulting vertical structures, appearing to defy gravity as they sometimes flow upward, create a peculiar tension. In fact, tension has been a recurring aesthetic in Park’s work, evident even in her early chair-based sculptures. Across her installations, contrasting elements—hardness and softness, defined forms and anti-forms, order and randomness—engage in a constant push-and-pull at their boundaries. Her pieces, while seemingly painful and contorted like a tortured body, can simultaneously evoke a poignant gesture, as if reaching out for a handshake.

Furthermore, despite being suspended, all of Park’s creations maintain some connection to the ground. Softly cascading fabrics and materials extend downward, barely grazing the floor, but not in a way that firmly supports their weight. This ambiguous connection may offer a key to approaching Park’s work: the feeling of being suspended yet strangely tethered. This delicate point of contact might reflect her way of perceiving the world and engaging with others.

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To this end, the artist primarily creates installations involving objects that enter into symbiotic systems through assemblage. The combination of biological and technological elements allows him to reflect on the power of matter as an active substance through which energy flows and information is exchanged.

Lamas collects the materials for his works from a trove of objects found in either nature or urban environments as well as made objects that we typically relate to the milestones of history. Each of the objects selected, regardless of whether they are stone sediments, fragments of the plant and animal kingdoms, or plastic and rubber products and parts of cars, computers and scanners, is an important and equal vessel of information. When different objects are arbitrarily combined, the information inherent in them starts to leap out, overlap and change as the objects increasingly lose their original function. As a result, they no longer belong to their original categories because the meanings within the newly created relationships between them overlap and defy any labelling, while also opening up to multifaceted readings based on associations.

Lamas’ work is rooted in a keen interest in constructed social perception, which is built through the use of systematised knowledge. It thus focuses on the verification of models related to scientific research and the relentless striving for order, control and laws that govern the visible world. It looks for gaps in the ways in which we perceive, interpret and interact with the environment, particularly within the specific relationships between systems of representation and the notion of objective truth and irrefutable facts. That is why the objects he uses are taken from different sources: they are home to both the geological time – within which substances accumulate like sediments – and the linear time of the accelerated technological progress. By bringing various categories and the links between the past and the future together, the artist invites the viewer to reflect on the changing nature of all things that form part of the constant flow of growth, transformation and decay.

The exhibition consists of a selection of works created during the last decade along with the most recent productions. Its layout takes the form of a peculiar archaeological site featuring the remains of building structures, epitaphs of progress and, most certainly, the life, which always finds its way. Inside this dynamic domain, the artist famously highlights the multifaceted nature of changes along with the new meanings, references and values that emerge as an outcome of different materials interacting. Hybrid compositions, made of biological and technological remains and serving as the internal skeletons of both living creatures and machines, are placed inside modular structures reminiscent of urban exoskeletons. His use of platforms on different levels mimics the classification and conservation of artefacts in natural history museums – after all, many of Lamas’ objects could arguably be found in them – while at the same time, by raising the pressing issue of mass hyperconsumption it encourages the viewer to look for the beautiful in the mundane and abandoned.

As suggested by the exhibition title, Scenarios for Coexistence, Lamas is chiefly interested in the relativisation of our existence on the planet. By drawing our attention to other, potential forms of life along with possible interactions between all organisms, the artist reminds us that humanity is but a species and that survival depends on cooperation on a level playing field. Like an archaeologist who, based on clues from the past and without nostalgia, revises anthropological history, Lamas emphasises the rapid changes that increasingly defy our attempts to control them and, above all, explores the present moment in order to be able to better imagine possible future scenarios, new social structures, new modes of existence and coexistence.

Alenka Trebušak

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The idea for One of Our Fossils comes from a scientific paper. It predicts that humanity’s most lasting remnants will be plastic, nuclear waste, and chicken bones. I chose chicken bones for their absurdity, and because they represent a world obsessed with making everything cheaper and faster. The exhibition imagines how future civilisations might interpret these bones. It speculates on the myths and stories they might create from them.

It is absurd that, despite our power and ability to foresee the future, our attention span and sense of ‘now’ have rapidly narrowed. One might expect that more foresight would grant a longer view of time. Instead, it is as if we are mentally exhausted from dealing with the present, leaving us with no energy to imagine the future.

One of Our Fossils responds to that condition. It presents a space to reflect and have feelings about the deep future. The bones serve as a starting point to consider what kind of world we will leave behind and how future civilizations might try to make sense of it. It’s an invitation to consider both what we are now and what we are becoming.

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