Tauba Auerbach and Sam Hillmer
Before the premiere of their multimedia collaboration LIGATURE, visual artist Auerbach and saxophonist Hillmer talk about connectivity, geometry, and the nature of mind.
The artists discuss painting landscapes, from transient rays of moonlight to the immensity of environmental changes.
The artist reflects on the personal and creative challenges that led to her first feature-length documentary, Instructions on Parting, which recently premiered at MoMA.
On the eve of Signs of Empire, his current show at the New Museum, the British artist and filmmaker elaborates on how philosophy and the history of cinema have influenced his practice.
While taking a road trip across the US, the German artist reveals how digital technology, humor, and the human body inform his paintings and installations.
On the release of Al Di Là, a collection of her sound works, Forti guides us through her decades-long practice of observation, intuition, and kinaesthetic awareness.
The author discusses her forthcoming novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, fiction as impetus for personal change, and the inhumanity of the creative class.
The poet’s first novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love, concerns a woman’s unnamed grief, as well as the meta-dialogue between the narrative’s author and the critic reading her manuscript.
The Haunting of Reza Abdoh by Marc Arthur
Reza Abdoh, the first large-scale retrospective of the late Iranian-American theater director's work, is on view through September 3 at MoMA PS1. The comprehensive exhibition was co-organized by Bidoun's Negar Azimi, Tiffany Malakooti, and Babak Radboy alongside MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach.
The Trees of Sawtooth Park by Ben Marcus
Dr. Nelson wanted me to feel something. In the palm of his hand was a pale yellow mound of powder.
He came in search of clues for an article about the disappearances that happened months before he arrived.
Under a boat are a pod of Orcas, but before they are under a boat they are breaching some distance away from The White Boys in their small rowboat.
These poems are excerpted from Annelyse Gelman’s Heck Land: The Resorted Text, a lyrical reworking of the definitive edition of William S. Burroughs’s seminal anti-novel Naked Lunch: The Restored Text. There are twenty-five in all—one for each chapter of Naked Lunch—each a scalpeled, reappropriated cut-up tape-mounted to projector transparency, then photographed recto and verso, along with dust, fingerprints, squashed bugs, and other process artifacts.
for a fee I guess / my sovereign entity / muckrake / frowning sun and yet it is a storyteller
Devon Marinac is a visual artist whose practice includes painting, drawing, collage, and zine making, often in combination. Devon was born in British Columbia, raised in Mississauga, and currently resides in Toronto.
These drawings are from a series of 210 on view at the Graham Foundation in Chicago as part of Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School through July 28, 2018.
I should say a few things / Before I begin. Hell is easy, / We brought us here / And not for the first time.
Otobong Nkanga’s To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again by Jason Foumberg
Through layered symbolism—such as sticks and roots threading and pricking interconnecting bodies and mounds of earth—the Kano, Nigeria–born, Paris-trained, Antwerp-residing artist Otobong Nkanga works through the trauma of decolonization by probing links between Europe’s economic growth and the exploitation of African lands.
Huddled in front of a suite of bulletin boards filled with military charts, folding his fingers over papers as if they were slices of pizza, licking his lips, jowls quivering—this is Senator Joseph McCarthy as he appeared live on ABC in 1954 as part of the 36-day, 188-hour televised extravaganza that would come to be known as the Army-McCarthy Hearings. He’s berating a colonel, insinuating that “phony charts” have been submitted to the floor of the Senate. “The television audience,” he yells, “they are the jury in this case.”
What kind of novel would you write if you had never read a novel before? Would it have the mounting tension of a campfire tale? The breathless cadence of fresh gossip shared with a best friend? If you’re Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug, you unspool 50,000 words with the inventiveness of Scheherazade and the guilelessness of a Red Bull–fueled, hyperarticulate ten-year-old. This is Wait, Blink.
Peru is an experiment—from colony to slavery to independence to diasporic migration; from military to revolutionary to criollo dictatorship; and then from corruption to neoliberalism to democracy to, finally, more corruption. (Can someone rewind the tape and get us back to side A please?) In the 1970s, out of this motley salad of historical tensions came musicians Arturo Ruiz del Pozo and Miguel Flores, who questioned the nature of Peru’s cultural production and identity with sound.
Let’s begin with death. “Let’s say that in the course of all human experience, death is pure conjecture: it is, as such, not an experience. And all that which is not an experience is useless to mankind.” The speaker here is Ledesma, one of a cadre of lovelorn, thoroughly chauvinistic doctors up to no good at a sanatorium just outside Buenos Aires.
I first encountered Sesshu Foster through his cotranslation of Juan Felipe Herrera’s masterpiece Akrilica and an anthology he coedited, Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry. It was 1990: I’d just returned from six years of intense political and cultural involvement outside the US. The Gulf War was right on the horizon, and in the hyper-stratified world of US poetry, where class and cosmos had taken backseats to an almost purely theoretical politics and poetics, I was in search of allies and kindred spirits. With Foster’s work, I felt I’d struck pay dirt.
When I arrive in the lobby of Kalimpong’s famed Himalayan Hotel, I move around clumsily and with caution. I’m wary of touching objects left behind by long-gone visitors, and the pop-up ghosts of soldiers, businessmen, and mountaineers startle me.
