On the cover:
Zhanna Kadyrova, PALIANYTSIA (PAR/S) (detail), 2022. Found river stone, dimensions variable. Photo: Oak Taylor-Smith, Courtesy Zhanna Kadyrova and GALLERIA CONTINUA.
Editor’s Letter:
If anything unites the artists in this issue, it is a commitment to the political valence of art, often at one remove. Issues aren’t addressed head-on but rather underlie practices. Even Zhanna Kadyrova, who had politics foisted on her when her country, Ukraine, was invaded by Russia in 2022, tends toward more oblique expressions, such as loaves of a type of bread (the word for which became a military password early in the war) cut from stone. Of her work Harmless War, which repurposes bullet-punctured sheets of metal, she says: “It’s a kind of ‘conservation’ of physical violence, preserving trauma in material form while also abstracting it. This work criticizes the view of people living outside Ukraine.” As an Indigenous Native American, Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the U.S. in the 2024 Venice Biennale, also had politics thrust upon him. His multi-hued sculptures and installations affirm rights, celebrate Indigenous aesthetics, and ensure participation through collaboration with other Indigenous makers. Nicola Turner’s biomorphic sculptural interventions, consisting of tendrils and tentacles, do not seem to make arguments. Yet, as her interviewer, Penny Florence, explains, they are “profoundly ecological,” produced almost exclusively from waste materials and recycled whenever possible. Like Turner, Julia Padilla repurposes organic and inorganic materials—shells, towels, hair, parts of old machines—though not for “moralizing,” as she puts it. Rather, her works “configure scenarios for an imagination that would renew ways of representing the world and propose new relational models of being, thinking, feeling, and co-existing in present-day ecosystems.” Through metaphor and gesture, Lili Dujourie’s pieces, which periodically shift medium and approach, explore authoritarianism, albeit through forms that are as beguiling as they are evocative. Describing an early, famous work, Dujourie says, “Like American imperialism itself, the piece adapts to its context and evolves according to the available space.” Adapting to context and evolving according to available space could be taken as a definition of contemporary sculpture. And, as these artists remind us, in contemporary sculpture, issues and conflicts lurk not just below, but at the surface. —Daniel Kunitz, Editor-in-Chief
