WASHINGTON, DC de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University What struck me most about “Around the Table” was the limited presence of food as material and image, a surprising approach for a show exploring food as a social connector. But curator Vesela Sretenović makes a strong case for her conceptual focus on global threads associated with sharing, including patterns of consumption and labor.
Phyllida Barlow
SOMERSET, U.K. Hauser & Wirth Over the course of a long career, Phyllida Barlow consistently challenged the possibilities of making with pieces that were experimental, audacious, and even seemingly impossible.
Earthly Paradise: A Conversation with Saad Qureshi
With a sensitive and empathetic eye, Saad Qureshi explores the essence of what it is to be human. Seeking out people of all faiths and none, he gathers their stories and weaves them together like silken threads, rendering memories and imaginings into otherworldly sculptural “mindscapes” that give a spatial presence to the narratives that help to make sense of life.
Monumentos vivos: Una Conversación con Alexis Minkiewicz
Nacido en Villa Cañás, Santa Fe, Argentina, el escultor Alexis Minkiewicz transita la urbanidad con una mirada que construye escenarios donde monumentos y estatuas son protagonistas de un recorrido artístico que lo lleva a esculpir a gran escala en materialidades tanto convencionales y académicas como más contemporáneas.
Little Capsules: A Conversation with Jorge Satorre
Working across sculpture, drawing, and installation, Mexican artist Jorge Satorre weaves complex, subversive narratives around a variety of themes, including labor, value, memory, and desire. As these diverse strands become fruitfully entangled, they create unforeseen meanings and serendipitous synchronicities.
Nicole Havekost
MINNEAPOLIS Dreamsong Nicole Havekost’s new drawings and sculptures demonstrate that, sometimes, complexity manifests most richly and strangely on the surface of things. Suturing, pricking, encrusting, sprinkling, saturating, slicing, waxing, burnishing, matting, and perforating are among the mark-making actions these works have sustained.
Kapwani Kiwanga: Material Equivalence and Exchange
Kapwani Kiwanga’s research-driven sculptures, installations, videos, and performances tie together objects from particular locales, evidence of economic and political power, the global African diaspora, and the history of colonialism to idiosyncratically reread established histories, often focusing on disruptions centered around belief, mythology, and impermanence.
All About Desire: A Conversation with Ghada Amer
Ghada Amer’s sculptures, embroidery paintings, and public garden projects create unsettled narratives of longing and love. Clear-cut definitions and judgments have no place in her work, which is all about ambiguity and paradox. Her recent bronzes are conceived as rectangular, mostly horizontal partitions, folded just enough to allow them to stand upright on the floor.
Tarik Kiswanson
GLASGOW The Common Guild As [Kiswanson] moves “outwards,” he addresses wider realities of humanity, using a variety of strategies to explore ideas around what he has called the “constant instability” of identity, and the embedded narratives and meaning that objects can hold.
New Mythologies: A Conversation with Suchitra Mattai
Suchitra Mattai’s multidisciplinary work explores how memory, myth, and oral traditions can be harnessed to unravel received narratives rooted in patriarchal and colonialist systems.
