Accept Baby is the second part of an exhibition series at Forde in Geneva taking on the relationship between art and desire, focusing especially on the artist as creative persona. Subjectivity, authenticity, interiority—the themes approached are vast, their preconceptions embedded in the legacy of modern art discourse. The causality that prevailed between artwork as expression of subjectivity, a causality rigidified in the writing of art history, seems to be toyed with in these works. 

On February 13, an anonymous petition called for the reinstatement of Beatrix Ruf as director of the Stedelijk Museum. The petition comes at a time when further investigations into the affair have not yet yielded any results that could shed some light on the current level of autonomy of public institutions in general—an issue that, in fact, begs debate.

Rigged to a free-standing display system, close but not touching the wall nor grounded, eight screens stand on their side, upright, sealed in a grid. Together their 8, 16:9 aspect ratios form a 5:4 aspect ratio. The unknown aspect a provocation to the now. The now, a provocation unto itself. On either side a speaker, by the entrance/exit door a subwoofer faces the screens, the body. The image holds the body. The space between simulation and failure holds the image. The words: «an image is a hustler » resonate. Shahryar Nashat’s An Image is an Orphan is a newly commissioned 18’22” HD video with sound, the core piece within Nashat’s solo exhibition The Cold Horizontals at Kunsthalle Basel. Below are notes on the content of the video and its mediation.  

 

On January 30, 2017 we published a review of an exhibition by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Kunsthalle Basel on Brand-New-Life. One of the questions the article raises is why the debate accompanying the exhibition doesn’t touch on the implications of the fact that the paintings of the British artist with Ghanaian roots depict exclusively dark-skinned figures. In response to the article, Elena Filipovic, the curator of the exhibition and Director of Kunsthalle Basel sought a dialog with us. We thereupon invited Elena and a few other individuals whose opinions on the topic we were curious about to a private discussion. Finding a date proved difficult, though. As a result, we ended up sitting in the Kunsthalle library twice with groups of, in each case, slightly different composition. Although the initial question was the same, the two discussions unfolded in different directions with different thematic priorities. Still, both discussions are an attempt to reflect on the ways in which issues of blackness may be discussed in Switzerland—in art and with art. In passages, we even demonstrated such a way of speaking.

Last year, Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick was adapted for television by Jill Soloway, and was released as an Amazon Prime show in August. Unevenly updated for 2017, it shows traditional patriarchal power under attack by ‹identity politics›, displaced into the field of art, in a bizarrely conservative imagining of the left in contemporary America. 

For the past five years the paintings of Vittorio Brodmann have relied on a commitment to small-scale canvases and surrealistic animated figuration. In his first major institutional solo, Water Under the Bridge, Brodmann keeps the latter while adding monumentality to the scale of his artistic ambitions. It’s an invigorating and generous slam dunk, breaking open new and exciting avenues for his work.