| Description |
Contents
Interview
Shape Shifting
Cécile B Evans interviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak
The Belgian-born, US-based artist uses digital avatars as tools to explore differences between constructed and felt realities. Here she chooses to respond as characters from the cast of her most recent project.
Weather: I'll answer this because I can afford to be idealistic and wrong at the same time. I'm the weather, it's my nature to change.
Feature
No Surprises
It is time that the art world put its own house in order argues Jennifer Thatcher
For too long galleries – both private and public – museums, universities and other cultural organisations in the UK have ignored the true scale of sexual and other abuses in the arts.
The art world is quick to denounce exploitation related to global capitalism and politics, yet is far slower to recognise and condemn the institutional, psychological, physical and emotional abuses perpetuated within its own ranks.
Feature
Red Africa
The Cold War didn't end in 1989 argues Amna Malik
New publishing and curatorial initiatives highlight the continuing role of the former Soviet Union in African independence struggles in countries like Ghana, Mozambique and Angola.
The scope of Red Africa offers a timely opportunity to draw such connections out, namely the possibilities created by art to occupy a space of resistance and thereby to transform mainstream politics.
Editorial
#WeToo
The sea change in attitudes towards workplace harassment post-Weinstein is long overdue, but addressing the wider culture which has allowed abusers to act with impunity requires sustained collective action across society as a whole.
Abuse, whatever form is takes, is about power: the power of the abuser over the abused, of the powerful over the powerless; it is ultimately about inequality – political inequality – whether it is to do with gender, race, sexuality, wealth or health.
Letters
Manifesto not Manifested
Matthew Noel-Tod questions the Useful Museum approach to curating.
Artnotes
Creative Chaos
Creative Scotland causes chaos with its recent funding (and defunding) announcement; New York's Queens Museum and LA MOCA both lose board members over political differences; artists accused of sexual harassment have their museum exhibitions cancelled; the German culture minister green-lights a help desk for victims of sexual harassment in the arts sector; specialist art press Black Dog Publishing goes bankrupt; plus the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.
Exhibitions
No, No, No, No
Cell Project Space, London
Amy Budd
Andreas Gursky
Hayward Gallery, London
Martin Herbert
Gilberto Zorio
Castello di Rivoli, Turin
Martin Holman
Break in Transmission
Holden Gallery, Manchester
Bob Dickinson
New Contemporaries
Block 336, London
Kathryn Lloyd
Rachal Bradley: Interlocutor
Gasworks, London
Joseph Constable
Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson: In the Family of the Carbons
Turnpike Gallery, Leigh
Natalie Bradbury
Everything we do is music
The Drawing Room, London
Virginia Whiles
Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983
MoMA, New York
Saim Demircan
Sheffield Round-up
Graves Gallery • Persistence Works • Bloc Projects
Matthew Bowman
Ireland Round-up
Limerick City Gallery of Art • The Glucksman • Gallery of Photography
Joanne Laws
Reviews
Artists' Books
The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin
Randall Couch: Peal
David Briers
The overall feel is very much that of the Assembling Magazines culture of the 1970s in which mail artists and others were invited to submit the same number of photocopies of a new work to a central collating and distributing editor.
Reviews
Books
The Art of Civil Action: Political Space and Cultural Dissent
Dave Beech
This collection of reports resituates the well-documented overlap between contemporary art and activism not as a type of artwork or a class of artists but as a form of collective self-organisation.
Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain
Lauren Velvick
It is important to note that Ruth Catlow, Marc Garrett, Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner are not seeking to put across a coherent argument as to whether blockchain technology is utopian or dystopian, a tool for emancipation or one of oppression.
Reports
Small White Monkeys
Shameful
Naomi Pearce
A former gentleman's reading room seems an appropriate setting for an afternoon of readings and performances on the subject of shame.
Reports
Letter from Buffalo
Boom and Bust
Dominik Czechowski
Alongside its multi-layered social and industrial history, cultural innovation has always played a significant role and Buffalo prides itself on its avant-garde heritage and pluralistic, socially engaged forms of artistic expression.
Reports
Dhaka Art Summit
Magmatic Metropolis
Adam Przywara
This edition of DAS combined contemporary and historical artists, foregrounding art in the context of decolonisation, political economy and history. |