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Our understanding of a given place is a mutable thing. The Summer issue of ArtReview ponders how the essence of a city or country, somewhere we might call home or visit, is made up of so many opaque variables that precision becomes impossible. This is something the Berlin-based Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh understands in his multisensory works, which have ranged from honey beer to a series of soundscapes that portray a place as a repository of audio DNA from elsewhere, audio scraps that trace the migratory routes of any given environment. “The nonvisual world speaks a different language,” the artist tells Martin Herbert. “It resonates with our emotions and bypasses sight’s limitations.”
Where all that information goes once it is inside us is another question, one that Carsten Höller hopes to answer in his new dream factory, a hotel room set up inside a museum – a sculpture “designed to take you away” – where visitors are invited to stay the night, and in which the artist aims to influence their subconscious. J.J. Charlesworth sat down with Höller and his collaborator on this project, Adam Haar, an MIT dream-science researcher, to talk ethics, desires and control.
How do we encapsulate a place like Palestine, and what does the capturing of images say about its history of occupation, violence, identity and displacement? This is the question that runs through the work of photographer Ahlam Shibli, whose imagery of her home, ‘made unhomely through either unceasing violence… or the pain of exile’, has never been more urgent, Sarah Jilani writes.
How history, conflict and colonialism forges a sense of place that is migratory and extends beyond geography is a theme Palestine’s Lebanese neighbours might find affinity with too. In her research based videowork, artist Joyce Joumaa, now based in Canada, studies both her home from afar and the geography of the migrant’s experience, Alexander Leissle finds, be it the borders they travel or the bureaucracy they negotiate.
Elsewhere in the Summer issue, Jessica Lanay speaks to US filmmaker Ephraim Asili; Alastair Kwan offers advice on congee, the savoury rice porridge, in an artist project; Orit Gat wonders what Apple was thinking with its news iPad advert; and Anakwa Dwamena examines David Adjaye’s architectural legacy in Accra. Also in this issue, reviews of Joan Jonas’s retrospective at MoMA in New York; the unlikely pairing of Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland at Studio Voltaire in London; the multifaceted world of Roni Horn at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne; the architectural interventions of Yoko Terauchi at Hagiwara Projects in Tokyo; and many more solo and group shows globally. Plus, among the books our critics have had their noses in for this issue is All That Glitters, Orlando Whitfield’s memoir of fraud and crime in the artworld, and China Miéville’s adaptation of Keanu Reeves’s epic warrior graphic novel series BRZRKR.
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