Gleanings

At the Polish Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale, Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, an artist and activist of Romani origin, covered the walls from floor to ceiling with her monumental textile installation, interjecting the myths, astronomy and ancient customs of Roma culture into European art history. Inspired by the Hall of the Months frescoes in Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, each of the twelve textile panels — two of which are in the Bonnefanten Museum collection — represents a month with its characteristic zodiac sign coupled with imagery familiar to ancient Greece and Rome plus Christian motifs.

In addition to presenting Re-enchanting the World (2022), ‘This is not the End of the Road’ includes several brand-new fabric and acrylic paintings by Mirga-Tas (1978, Zakopane, PL) in addition to earlier examples. Varying in size, most of her fabric paintings focus on her identity in the context of Roma history and culture. This exhibition also features three wall-mounted altars (hinged three-panel wallworks), including the debut of her Noncia altar, that explore mystic and religious themes.

The Roma represent Europe’s largest ethnic group, of which 70 per cent currently inhabit Eastern Europe. Arriving in Eastern Europe during the fourteenth century, many of the Roma people who left India in the eleventh century remain noticeably transient, often preferring to inhabit close-knit caravans rather than settling in villages that disperse community members. The transnational Romani have experienced a reverse-colonisation, since repeat migrations have subjected them to the same brutal rejection as colonised people; however, their exodus is not believed to have been prompted by invaders.

Mirga-Tas’ exhibition dialogues with Sinti artist Morena Bamberger’s large-scale installation, whose covered wagon leads visitors to ‘DREAM ON,’ a presentation of artworks new to Bonnefanten’s collection. Bamberger (1994, Roermond, NL) considers this caravan a small sanctuary that pays tribute to the Sinti and Roma ways of life. (Sue Spaid)

Co-curated by Meghan Forbes, Jan Tichy and Jordan Troeller, ‘Lucia Moholy: Exposures’ features more than 600 photographs, microfilms, letters, articles, books and audio interviews. Spanning Moholy’s sixty-year career, this exhibition explores her contribution to photography, the arts, publishing and information science.

Born in Prague in 1894, Moholy (née Schulz) left Bohemia to work in the publishing industry in Germany, where she met László Moholy-Nagy whom she married in 1920. In 1922, they co-authored an influential article regarding visual, textual and auditory reproductive methods for the art and design journal De Stijl. While teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and later Dessau, she photographed her peers. Following the couple’s divorce in 1929, she taught at the Johannes Itten Schule in Berlin, where she photographed colleagues. With the rise of fascism, she immigrated to London in 1933, leaving behind hundreds of glass negatives. In the late 1930s, Walter Gropius kept many of these for use as Bauhaus publicity stills without ever crediting Moholy. In paying homage to her 330 missing negatives, artist Jan Tichy’s installation explores the importance of cultural preservation, photography as an art and women artists at the Bauhaus. 

Having to restart her career as an émigré in London, Moholy not only photographed Bloomsbury Circle members and other prominent intellectuals, but also published a best-seller, A Hundred Years of Photography 1839–1939 (1939). During the war, she reproduced German scientific documents for Britain’s war use and projected texts so that bed-ridden wounded soldiers could read. After the war, she opened the consulting firm Documentary Services. In 1959, she moved to Zurich, where she dialogued with younger Swiss artists and secured a spot in feminist art history.

In addition to organising a symposium and publishing a comprehensive exhibition catalogue, Praha Kunsthalle will re-publish Moholy’s 1939 book in Czech. In spring 2025, ‘Exposures’ will be on display at Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur, CH. (Sue Spaid)

While it’s not unusual for the Louvre to present artworks by living artists — Georges Braque, Anselm Kiefer, François Morellet, Cy Twombly and Wim Delvoye spring to mind — it’s rare still for the Louvre to empty out a gallery so an artist can make their mark temporarily. In this case, the Louvre has commissioned the Antwerp-based artist Luc Tuymans (1958, Mortsel) to create four frescoes on the walls of the Valentin Rotunda, a space once reserved for Nicholas Poussin’s The Four Seasons (1660–1664), and more recently paintings by Valentin de Boulogne, the gallery’s namesake. Tuymans’ art is included in the exhibition ‘Le monde comme il va,’ concurrent at Bourse de Commerce in Paris through 2 September.

While the invitation to make an ephemeral artwork at the Louvre is not entirely unprecedented (in 2020 choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker introduced Forêt at the museum, a dance project she realised together with Nemo Flouret), the choice of Tuymans to invigorate the Valentin Rotunda is geographically fitting. Known for being bathed in both shadow and light, the Valentin Rotunda is situated at the heart of the Louvre’s seventeenth-century French painting collection, at the junction of the Sully and Richelieu wings, adjacent galleries focused on fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Flemish painting. The nearby Galerie Médicis features the Marie de’ Medici Cycle (1623–1624), Peter Paul Rubens’ monumental 24-panel series chronicling the life of a Florentine orphan turned Queen of France, originally commissioned for the Palais du Luxembourg. Following her coronation, her husband Henri IV, the ‘peace-loving king’ who expanded the Palais du Louvre, was slain, leaving her widowed. Marie de’ Medici’s great uncle was Charles V, so her hiring Rubens to paint her life story suits her maternal heritage. Despite France’s anti-Habsburg foreign policy, she formed an alliance with Habsburg Spain, strengthened by the double marriage in 1615 of her son and daughter to Phillip III’s daughter and son.

Tuymans is renowned for painting eerie pictures consisting of evidential fragments gleaned from films, his drawings, the Internet, photographs, postcards and TV. Painted in muted, sombre palettes, his pictures typically capture the visual residue of trauma, lest we forget our propensity for inhumanity. As he puts it, ‘I don’t want to make art for art’s sake but a painting of history, or rather a painting of memory and trauma’. On this level, his oeuvre complements Rubens’ nearby Marie de’ Medici Cycle, however different their stories, styles and scales.

So what does Tuymans have in mind for his four frescoes, painted directly on the museum’s walls and displayed at eye level amidst the Valentin Rotunda’s surprisingly contemporary architecture? The heart of this historic space, once Marie’s palace, is now a place to experience historical paintings. His four-panel installation, ‘The Orphan Cycle’, consists of a fresco based on his lost painting L’Orphelin (1990), accompanied by three frescoes related to the cleaning of painters’ palettes, loaded with pigments. The original L’Orphelin depicted the back of a doll’s head, whose nape remains especially visible. With the orphan adjacent to images of palettes, one cannot help but be reminded of the orphan turned queen who is renowned for her arts patronage, even though Tuymans’ orphan painting has nothing to do with Marie de’ Medici. While some describe Tuymans’ palette paintings as cruel, they’re especially emblematic of the Louvre’s special role as a ‘school of the gaze, an inspiration for artists by artists, a place of copying in academic times and a territory of creation that is alive and well today.’

When the exhibition closes in May 2025, the Valentin Rotunda will be repainted and rehung with paintings from the Louvre’s collection. Tuymans’ orphan will disappear, but it will no longer be lost to history. (Sue Spaid)

In March, the Polish artist Mikołaj Sobczak (1989) staged the musical The Universal Empire at the Mennonite Church in Amsterdam. For ‘Impossible Songs,’ his art exhibition at Jester in Genk — the first under its new artistic director, Koi Persyn — Sobczak has translated the musical by recombining elements of the stage set and costumes (including a costume worn by the William Blake character) with filmed and sound recordings of the staged play. The Universal Empire tells the fictional story of two members of an Anabaptist commune in Amsterdam and the turmoil they experience when the painter-poet William Blake joins their commune. Playing with the ideas of economics, spirituality and modernity, the three characters represent the Tria Prima, the alchemical properties of Salt, Sulfur and Mercury, whereby the latter refers to Blake.

In the musical, the Blake character — a messiah of sorts —tries to help the commune escape the threats of modernity, such as capitalistic overproduction and the homogenisation of society. However, the Anabaptist commune considers religious persecution the main threat to its survival. Blake terms any process of conformity the ‘universal empire,’ since modernity’s demand for a shared consciousness engenders oppression and erasure, as in the case of queer history.

To re-stage his play, Sobczak has transformed Jester’s brand-new kunsthal into a darkly lit, abandoned living space, whose immersive scenography plunges viewers into a theatre-like catacomb, where three shrines pay homage to heretics. Several wooden cutouts featuring collages of archival materials, photos and drawings thrust viewers into a narrative that spans centuries. The impossibility referred to in the title is the one constantly looming over any historical fact. As Blake himself remarked, ‘The history of all times and places is nothing else but improbabilities and impossibilities; what we should say, was impossible if we did not see it always before our eyes’. Paradoxically, the process of restaging anything makes it history. (Sue Spaid)

The multidisciplinary practice of Botswana native Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (1980, Botswana) comprises drawing, installation, painting and stop-motion animation. Her timeless landscapes explore the way people’s identities are tied to their geographic and cultural past. Having lived in Botswana, Canada, Malawi, the Netherlands, Panama, South America, Sri Lanka, Sudan and the United States, her figurative paintings patch together vivid memories of particular landscapes, as well as references from a vast array of films, literature, theatre and other story-telling forms. Driven by a fascination with ancient mythologies and scientific theories, Sunstrum’s artworks muse on the origins of time, geological concepts and ideas about the universe.

The title of the exhibition, ‘The Gods and The Underdogs,’ is taken from an essay by the influential South African writer Bessie Head (1937–1986) who was exiled in Botswana from 1964 until her premature death. In addition to exhibiting twelve recent paintings (since 2020) and a large-scale drawing, Sunstrum is presenting a new installation featuring the diptych Exit Permit (2024) staged with pieces of furniture from Kunst­museum Den Haag’s collection of applied art.

By combining ideas familiar to Afro-mythology with Afrofuturism, Sunstrum’s elaborately layered paintings simultaneously reference a distant past, as well as a hopeful future ensuring Africans greater empowerment. Given her use of delicately hatched zones of coloured pencil and crayon in addition to oil and acrylic, some of her paintings resemble school-book illustrations. Hardly portraits of particular people, her paintings and drawings depict ordinary people experiencing everyday situations; as the exhibition brochure puts it, ‘a nebulous cast of bodies in constant flux amidst ever-slipping and insufficient notions of selfhood and belonging.’ For example, women in their Sunday best wait on benches, a knitter proudly displays a skein of orange yarn, uniformed schoolgirls chat on their way to school, ancestors appear as ghostly apparitions and extinct species reappear. (Sue Spaid)

Ever since Kazimir Malevich, Mikhail Matyushin and Aleksei Kruchonykh staged the Russian Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun (1913) in St. Petersburg, artists have suspected that there’s a relationship between the sun’s presence and radical, even revolutionary actions.

Nothing could be more revolutionary than the sun’s disappearance. Absent the sun, there would be no time, photosynthesis or oxygen. The speculative exhibition ‘Genossin Sonne’ (Comrade Sun) interrogates the supposition that solar activities such as solar storms, sunspots, solar flares and hot gassy ejections spark human action. Peak sunspots, tracked since 1785, appear to correlate with extreme financial and political events, as evidenced by four graphs included in the accompanying exhibition brochure.

Such a view not only complicates the Enlightenment idea of freedom, but it also places Earth’s fate in the hands of an alien cosmos. Alternatively, ‘Genossin Sonne’ treats the sun as our comrade, or ally. ‘Genossin Sonne’ features artworks by twelve artists and four collectives who explore the possibility that spontaneous solar activities prompt social and political revolutions. Related exhibition events follow a calendar tied to the sun’s activities.

Particularly relevant are artworks whose media is light, such as Colectivo Los Ingrávidos’ Danza Solar (2021), Katharina Sieverding’s radiant video compiled from 200,000 NASA satellite images, Anton Vidokle’s playful video The Communist Revolution was Caused by the Sun (2015) and Gwenola Wagon’s Chronique due Soleil Noir (2019). Several artworks respond to the sun’s perceptible presence such as Kobby Adi’s glowing floorwork and Hajra Waheed’s How long does it take moonlight to reach us? Just over one second. And sunlight? Eight minutes (2019). Also included are two poems: Etel Adnan’s abstract poem on the sun from 1989 and Diane di Prima’s Rant (1990). Parallel with this exhibition, Brunnenpassage will present an open-air installation by Huda Takriti. (Sue Spaid)

If you know Tate Modern, you’ll likely recall the surprising moment when the eight-octave keyboard of Concert for Anarchy (1990) — a concert grand piano suspended upside down — dramatically flips out of the piano frame, making a tremendous clamour as felt hammers tamp on the strings. A later version of this remarkable artwork is one of numerous dynamic sculptures on view during Rebecca Horn’s (1944) remarkable six-decade survey at Haus der Kunst, which includes 33 kinetic objects spanning 1968–2017, 31 drawings made between 1964 and 2007, three photos and four films (remastered in 2024) from the 1970s documenting her machines in action.

While still an art student, Horn developed lung poisoning from working with glass fibres without a mask. Bedridden for a year in a Barcelona sanitorium, she began to envision objects that she could attach to her body in order to experience life beyond her bed. Referring to such wearable objects as ‘extensions,’ she remarked, ‘I feel myself touching, I see myself grasping’. The Feathered Prison Fan (1978) perfectly captures this sentiment. Objects like Finger Gloves (1972) double as prosthetic tools, making Horn among the first artists to address ableism. Many of the wearable objects made by Horn — who is choreographer, inventor and prosthetist — enhance human perception by aiding us to see, feel, hear and do. Although visitors are not permitted to try out her participatory artworks, we can easily imagine the experiences derived from either standing amidst her objects or attaching them to our bodies. While Horn’s drawing machine is wearer-activated, her painting machines act on their own.

One of the most amazing aspects of Horn’s oeuvre is its felt sense of danger. Not only are there plenty of moving pointy things, knives and electric sparks, but her objects’ snapping, scraping and pounding sounds keep spectators at bay. Remarkably, she realised her objects’ performative potential early on and created several films that capture their dramatic possibilities. (Sue Spaid)

How many artists must have struggled with how to address the grandeur and overly ornate decay of the many palazzos, churches and Catholic embellishments of Venice? Perhaps the best answer is not to attempt it at all, as it seems like a losing battle from the start. At most, one might be able to work alongside this grandeur, or perhaps focus on a small yet impactful conceptual gesture, like refracting light back into a church.

In her exhibition at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Berlinde de Bruyckere has chosen an approach that combines the above, although some of her gestures are anything but small scale. ‘City of Refuge III’ is the third instalment in a series of exhibitions of the same name and is an official collateral event of the sixtieth Venice Biennale. The exhibition can still be visited until the very last days of autumn; the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, located on its own island, can be reached by boat from Piazza San Marco. Like the other two shows before it, ‘City of Refuge III’ revolves around the concept of art as a place of refuge and shelter, and not from the hustle and bustle of narrow streets and gondola tourism.

De Bruyckere worked in and on the church in at least two ways. In the church’s large central hall, her interventions are impossible to ignore. Three archangels stand (or hang or float) on what appear to be large metal containers placed on their sides, which seem to have withstood the test of time. A way of humanising the figures? These new works build on De Bruyckere’s familiar style, with the angelic apparitions here featuring clearly recognisable wings. Their unworldly depiction contrasts with their pathetic potential. Elevated on platforms of tangible matter, they are disconnected from superficial connotations, and become solitary figures between heaven and earth, people and their dreams.

A rather alienating combination. This is especially true when you consider the ecclesial setting, which is doubled in the space by huge, reflective panels, raised high up on slender posts, offsetting their fragility. De Bruyckere’s sculptures and installations are relatively earthbound for a house built to reach for the heavens. Further along, in the sacristy, trees fill the room. A suggestion of lifelessness comes alive here once more, particularly as the work resembles Kreupelhout – Cripplewood, the work the artist created for the Belgian pavilion in 2013. Similar to the angels in the main hall, this facsimile wood constructed mostly from wax is attached to an industrial body: metal tables. The soft tones of the fibrous material harmonise beautifully with the serenity expressed by the wooden architecture of the pews and panels, creating a silence that transcends the time span of a single life.

In De Bruyckere’s works, the weight of history is not erased but rather enhanced by linking used materials with the artificiality of her new ‘illusions’, crafted from her typical ingredients such as woollen blankets, animal skins, wax, wood and iron. While everything seems like a play on authenticity, few of the works at the Abbazia or in neighbouring galleries feel like the cheap (or expensive) work of an illusionist. Instead, there is a profound weight to them. The works feel incredibly cold, yet they radiate warmth, although they are much less soft and gentle than eleven years ago in the Belgian pavilion. These contradictions, which are characteristic of De Bruyckere’s work, are emphasised in this space. As De Bruyckere herself once said, some of her works are like metamorphoses; something old becomes something else, not entirely new, but never identified with the old. Believing in metamorphoses is crucial. It may even be the key to a kind of spiritual hope. (Bas Blaasse)