Featuring the gut-wrenching art of Dafna Maimon, the Mutaverse and digital world-building, Noémie Goudal’s illusions of landscapes and the role of the art critic in an age of environmental collapse
The January & February issue of ArtReview – out now – focuses on bodies and networks, and materiality and virtual reality, to look at the various ways physical and non-physical worlds overlap or collide. How are artists making sense of those extremities?
Dafna Maimon makes gut-wrenching work. Literally, as Chris Fite-Wassilak finds. Through her video and installation work, she questions how much our body determines our actions, and in turn how much society (media, technology…) determines that corporeal state. Fite-Wassilak offers one example: ‘Medicine’s demands, particularly around issues of hygiene, are becoming ever more determinant of modern living, and yet we still ignore the body as a thinking, feeling aspect of being’.
The shift to the online world means that the environment we inhabit has in many ways become more distant for us. Big tech is now pushing hard to make our online lives even more ‘immersive’ (think Metaverse), but as Fiona Glen argues, artists have been pushing in the opposite direction, using digital world-building as a way to pay attention to how humans are entwined with all manner of nonhuman systems and entities, from the natural environment and its organisms to the disembodied influence of computer algorithms and AI.
But is this the real life, or is this just fantasy? Mark Rappolt dives into the work of Noémie Goudal, which spans photography, moving image and installations to create illusions of the natural world that posit questions around the nature of representation when it comes to constructing such landscapes, and what happens when what is concealed beneath the artifice is eventually revealed. In doing so, Goudal’s work asks its viewers to consider our relationship with planet Earth by comparing the consequences of humankind’s destruction of nature with the insignificance of our species in relation to deep planetary time.
Also in this issue
It’s not all doom and gloom. Rosanna McLaughlin introduces us to Pandora Storm, an activist-critic for whom life just carries on. How much of an environmental impact can a little trip to the Swiss Alps for an art summit make, anyway? Plus, if one is to make a difference in the artworld via the art of protest, one must take it to wherever the curators congregate – which just so happens to be a luxury Alpine lodge.
Ross Simonini sits down with E’wao Kagoshima, whose paintings dabble in surrealism, abstraction and postmodern playfulness. “Some people think about being a doctor, but I still think about being a fine artist,” he says.
And Mark Rappolt talks to Josef O’Connor, founder of CIRCA, which showcases digital art, both online and on advertising screens in London’s Piccadilly Circus, and has since expanded to incorporate screens in Seoul, Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles and New York.
Plus
Can Hong Kong’s newest museum live up to the hype? Aaina Bhargava looks at the potential and peril of M+’s ambitions to speak for Asia. At the opening of V-A-C’s huge new art centre in Moscow, Oliver Basciano considers whether such cultural institutions can navigate a new Cold War between Russia and the West. And Adeline Chia finds a soothing charm in the past and future of Singapore’s weirdest themepark-museum.
And the usual mix of exhibition and book reviews from our critics around the world: from Gillian Wearing’s Wearing Masks at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, to C.A. Davids’s How to Be a Revolutionary, Chloe Aridjis’s Portrait in Four Movements and David Graeber & David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything.
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