AUSTIN Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin These abstract, cloud-like forms consciously evoke another traditional story, this one from the Coast Salish tribe, in which the Coast Salish (joined by many other tribes, all speaking different languages) collectively unified to push the collapsing sky back up into its rightful place.
Delaine Le Bas
GLASGOW Tramway Through an interweaving of textiles, embroidery, painting, collage, costume, soundscapes, installation, and performance, Le Bas draws on her British Romani heritage to survey centuries-old outsider tropes, fears, and witch hunts, frequently gesturing toward stereotypes directed at Romani, Gypsy, and Traveler peoples.
Oren Pinhassi
NEW YORK Lehmann Maupin Constructed through a distinctive process of layering sand over burlap-wrapped steel armatures, these faceless geometric/anthropomorphic structures defy consistency of form, yet each one stands on a base of toed “feet” that resemble soft talons gripping a stone.
Ibrahim Mahama
EDINBURGH Fruitmarket In what amounts to a palimpsest of ideas and materials, Mahama brings scraps and fragments salvaged from the German-built Henschel trains used on the railway together into contemporary works that evoke something of the mental and physical anguish of that history, transplanting it into a gallery that appropriately sits atop a major arterial railway station.
Ho Tzu Nyen
SINGAPORE Singapore Art Museum Ho Tzu Nyen’s recent exhibition “Time & the Tiger” foregrounded the slippery relation between sculpture and film—two seemingly contradictory media—playing up cinematic form with a sculptural attention to the means of presentation.
Standout National Pavilions at the 60th Venice Biennale
As in previous Biennales, these artists challenge, critique, and subvert the idea of being aligned with the politics and policies of their birth or home countries—indeed, the very idea of representing a country seems somewhat archaic in our multicultural and nomadic world.
60th Venice Biennale
VENICE Various locations An overwhelming number of exhibiting artists have never previously participated in a Biennale, making the show a journey of discovery for visitors. It’s also the first Biennale exhibition with more dead than living artists.
Shilpa Gupta
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Shilpa Gupta’s recent exhibition of minimal, poetic interventions took on time, space, means of communication, and memory in ways that linger in the heart and mind.
Nairy Baghramian
ZURICH Hauser & Wirth Vulnerability defines these sculptures, and Baghramian forces the viewer to look into details and juggle anomalies of shape and composition for their significance.
Robin Frohardt
NORTH ADAMS, MASSACHUSETTS MASS MoCA The cooler offers skim bag milk to pour over Caps ’n Such cereal topped with blue bag berries. Delight is subsumed by acute nausea. This grotesque place has tricked us into hungering for plastic.
