Hyperallergic – M+B Collection

December 19, 2024May 18, 2025

Artists Find Energy Justice in Grassroots Acts

In the 1970s, the humanist geographer Yi Fu Tuan speculated that “in some ideal future, our loyalty will be given only to the home region of intimate memories and, at the other end of the scale, to the whole earth.” Half a century later, Energies at the Swiss Institute adopts Tuan’s dual vision while dispelling any notion of an ideal attained. Instead, the show’s hyperlocal roots and global reach offer a trenchant critique of the power relations that inhere in the act of generating energy. The spark is a story of grassroots activism set in the 1970s East Village.

From the ravaged cityscape of the 1973 oil crisis sprang the first sweat equity co-op at 519 E 11th Street. On the roof, residents installed a two-kilowatt wind turbine paired with solar panels that supplied the community with electricity as it experienced frequent outages. Energies includes archival documents and works by Becky Howland and Gordon Matta-Clark, who were involved in local regeneration projects in the 1970s: Howland’s sculpture “Oil Tankers on Fire” (1983/1996/2024) and Matta-Clark’s Energy Trees (1972–73) drawing series. It also brings a contemporary lens to questions of energy justice through a sharply curated artist cohort.

Installation view of *Energies* at the Swiss Institute, New York. Left: Liu Chuang, “Untitled (The Festival)” (2011), single-channel video (color, sound), 5:14 min.; right: Saba Khan, “Indus Water Machine (number 3)” (2020), console, headphones, fixed LCD TV, plastic hook, USB, MP3 player, glass cube with lid, and LED strip light (image courtesy the Swiss Institute)

The show radiates into the neighborhood with a nearby mural by Otobong Nkanga (whose current monumental installation at MoMA is a must-visit) and a recreation of Matta-Clark’s rosebush enclosure at St. Mark’s Church. Inside the Swiss Institute, its three floors are replete with works that collectively attain planetary scope through quirky means: Vibeke Mascini’s installation powered by cocaine confiscated in the port of Rotterdam; Saba Khan’s retro-futuristic sculpture referencing World Bank-funded hydropower projects on the Indus River; Joar Nango’s structure made of wood, reindeer sinew, and the aforementioned halibut stomachs, used in Sámi architecture for their transparent and insulating properties; and Cannupa Hanska Luger’s mirror shields devised for water protectors of the Standing Rock Reservation.

The artworks are modest in size yet ambitious in concept, begging the question: How impactful are cerebral, historically informed interventions, in a perilous time for environmental safeguards? The exhibition’s origin story suggests an answer — the residents who erected the wind turbine were sued by the near-monopolistic Con Edison company for forcing it to buy back their surplus energy. With the unlikely support of a former Attorney General, William Ramsey Clark, they prevailed, opening a path for decentralized power production in the United States and, like the show that they inspired, planting hope in the rippling wake of small local acts.

This review appeared in Hyperallergic on December 19, 2024.

November 12, 2024January 5, 2025

Penny Siopis’s “Poetics of Vulnerability”

Penny Siopis, the South African artist of Greek descent, should be a household name in contemporary art. Through a major retrospective that spans five decades of painting, video, sculpture, and installation, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST) makes exactly that proposition. For Dear Life, curated by Katerina Gregos, is Siopis’s first such show in Europe. Works of breathtaking breadth and depth explore violence, memory, and what the artist has called “the poetics of vulnerability” in media ranging from oil paint and glue to ephemera and found film, spanning the intimate to the monumental.

True to its ambition, the retrospective includes work from each of Siopis’s major series, demonstrating the artist’s risk-taking and ever-evolving process. Formally disparate works are tied together by sensory and conceptual threads — with an emphasis on materiality and the interweaving of personal and public histories — that make her entire oeuvre far more than the sum of its parts.

Installation view of *Penny Siopis: For Dear Life* at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Pictured: *Cake* series (1982) (photo Paris Tavitian)

Siopis first garnered attention for her Cake paintings (1980–84), rooted in her early experiences in the family bakery in Vryburg. These feed on cakes as symbols of celebration and commemoration, but also on their ephemerality: elaborate confections are destined to grow stale or be devoured, suggesting the intimate horror of aging and decay. Everywhere in her work, private and public histories are entangled. Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Siopis has described the bakery as a charmed space interrupted by the reality of apartheid. In the catalog Penny Siopis: Time and Again she recalls the day when one of the Black workers arrived at the family’s doorstep bleeding from an act of racial violence as “a traumatic moment in a kind of idyll.”

Very different in style are the History paintings (1985–95), whose baroque excess draws on European traditions of allegory. History painting, long considered the most elevated genre of classical European art, was originally unavailable to women, who were steered instead toward still life and domestic themes. “Melancholia” (1986) offers an ironic take on this legacy of exclusion by pairing classical sculpture with food and flowers: an orgy of consumption that doubles as a critique of Western ideological and extractive sprawl. Another important work, for its provocative medium and theme in 1980s apartheid South Africa, is “Patience on a Monument: ‘A History Painting’” (1988). Siopis combines a collage of racist images from school textbooks with a thick impasto, conveying in both form and matter the banal dissemination of colonial ideology as a catastrophe of meaning, edging out truth by filling the mental and pictorial horizon to the brim. A Black Patience figure seated at the center recalls cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s reading of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus“: the angel of history whose face is turned toward the past experienced as an ever-mounting pile of ruins. She is quietly peeling a lemon. This generative intermingling of mundane and rarefied references is a signature of Siopis’s style and key to its layered signification.

So is innovation born of Siopis’s idiosyncratic collecting, shown in her video works (1994–2021). The artist spliced together home movies found in flea markets with her mother’s family footage and added soundtrack and captions. “My Lovely Day” (1997) draws on her grandmother’s exilic stories of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and Siopis’s own diasporic identity to draw parallels between Greek and South African political violence and trauma.

The halting, ghostly assemblages bear witness to larger narratives, from the unlikely assassination of the architect of apartheid, H.F. Verwoerd, by the Greek Mozambican migrant Demetrios Tsafendas in “Obscure White Messenger” (2010) to the quiet epidemic of domestic violence running alongside COVID in “Shadow Shame Again” (2021). Historical narrative is stitched together from the contingent, flawed visual archives of strangers and embroidered with the pathos of transience and loss.

The same aesthetic of the assemblage assumes a radically different form in Siopis’s installations, Charmed Lives (1998–99) and Will (1997–ongoing). In these still-growing, ever-morphing accretions of personal, found, and gifted objects — some of which are destined to be dispersed among the artist’s friends upon her death — human itineraries are charted through the social lives of things.

*Penny Siopis, “Charmed Lives” (1998–99), three panels, ∼78 3/4 x 59 x 20 inches (200 x 150 x 50 cm); Collection of the artist (photo Paris Tavitian)*

Siopis’s practice draws on many theoretical currents: feminism, anthropology, psychoanalysis, late 20th-century French philosophy. But concept is not allowed to dominate matter or empty it of its tactile, sensuous appeal and, often, horror. Her thick application of paint takes on the texture of food or skin in the Cake series; her melding of figure and ground unsettles the division between abstraction and figuration in the more recent Pinky Pinky series (2002–4). Pinky Pinky is an urban legend in South Africa that speaks to the uncanny cultural and sexual tangle of female adolescence: a half-human, half-animal creature that prowls on prepubescent girls in restrooms. Here, the artist plays with the limits of form at its most visceral, “dragging it to the verge of formlessness,” as she notes. Color and texture that trouble the boundary between skin and flesh, bodies both intact and flayed, or distilled into a single anatomical part with its appendages of teeth or nails, Pinky Pinky embodies materiality outstripping language to convey an unspeakable or nameless dread.

Few artists have such power to make us aware of our dual modes of cognition, cerebral and visceral. Few artists compel the visitor to alternate between the states of perpetrator and sufferer, viewer and viewed, intimacy and exposure.

The exhibition is the flagship event of a year-long cycle, centered on female-identified artists, titled What If Women Ruled the World? A possible answer might be that cultural amnesia about past violence and its ongoing legacies is harder to maintain in the presence of Siopis’s haunting entanglement of the body in history.

This review appeared in Hyperallergic in November 2024.

March 7, 2024January 4, 2025

Georges Adéagbo Channels a Humanized Abraham Lincoln

Create to Free Yourselves—Abraham Lincoln and the History of Freeing Slaves in America, which opened on November 18 at the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, is the culmination of more than two decades of artist Georges Adéagbo’s fascination with the United States president. The exhibition, curated by Karen Milbourne, reinvents at scale an installation by Adéagbo that was shown at Lincoln’s Cottage in DC early in 2023. Its inception goes back decades, to Adéagbo’s original vision for an installation on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Its current incarnation was informed by a 2021 fellowship that enabled the artist, born in 1942 in Cotonou, Benin, to research Lincoln and channel the collection of memorabilia — including letters, artifacts, and clothes — located in the Smithsonian Museum of American History into his art.

The exhibition’s location on the National Mall matches the confidence of Adéagbo’s vision of Lincoln. Yet visitors may be surprised and challenged at first by the show’s eclectic materiality. Adéagbo is the artist in the archive, but also acts as collector, explorer, and curator. In his characteristic style, the installation brings together everyday or discarded objects, often sourced from local flea markets, alongside African sculptures and painted tableaux commissioned from artisans in Benin, as well as second-hand books, photographs, vinyl, and even a lost toy recovered from the park that surrounds the museum. The effect is humanizing and lyrical, yet highly conceptual. It brings high and popular culture, global networks and local belonging, the foreign and the familiar, into poetic proximity.

Most unsettling and poignant is the artist’s communion with Lincoln, across time and within this contained universe of associations. Central to one of the radiating assemblages, which resemble shrines, is an equestrian statue of Lincoln in a top hat, carved in Benin and facing an African sculpture. The objects’ encounter is suffused with the loneliness and pathos of Lincoln’s unfinished life’s work: Adéagbo was inspired by Lincoln’s daily commute from the Soldiers’ Home to the White House in the summer. The itinerant motif subtly recalls the global circulations, often forced and violent, that enslaved millions of people and brought artifacts into Western collections. The artist teases out the exploitative and exhibitionist currents in aesthetic traditions and museum display practices, yet his world-making reclaims the emancipatory values of creative expression, movement, and cross-cultural exchange.

Perhaps most astounding is the way an installation composed of seemingly modest elements conveys the role of Lincoln as a figure of not only American but global significance. It is no accident that Adéagbo has, all along, imagined his intervention as located at the center of the US capital, in the heart of the national narrative. Several years in the making, the exhibition has uncanny timeliness. Adéagbo’s cosmopolitan gaze exposes the parochialism of racist rhetoric, the shamefulness of narrow national interest, the fallacy of ignoring the interconnectedness of past and present, here and elsewhere. And he reclaims the violence of forced and cruel journeys, sublimating them into a sense of freedom and even exuberance: creating to free yourself.

This review appeared in Hyperallergic in March 2024.

May 21, 2023January 5, 2025

Seeking Histories and Futures in Soil

Starting in the mid-20th century, humans began to move around more soil than the natural forces of erosion and volcanic activity taken together — we became geological agents, as environmental historian John McNeill has written in Something New Under the Sun (2000). Land art took off at around the same time, with artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter De Maria changing the contours of remote places. Decades later we are contending with the consequences of our past actions as earth movers with limited understanding of soils and their histories. But as historian Gabrielle Hecht has argued, saying that “we” are terraforming agents responsible for erosion or ecosystem collapse obscures extractive histories and their unequal distribution among communities. Today’s artists often refrain from imprinting their vision upon the land, instead bringing the soil into the gallery as an archive of nature-human interactions: a cultural record of dispossession and abject ecologies, but also of resilience.

The land artists of the previous century also brought soil into the gallery on occasion — in the case of Walter De Maria’s 1977 “New York Earth Room,” recently reopened, no less than 250 cubic yards of earth weighing 280,000 pounds. But whereas the provenance of the soil was not important to De Maria, it is key to many of the artists working today. Kiyan Williams uses soil collected from sites of the African Diaspora: slave castles and sugar plantations in the Caribbean and the American South. Williams’s “Meditation on the Making of America” (2019), currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, is made of earth collected around the home of the artist’s great-great-grandmother in St. Croix, as well as a nearby plantation, where she was an enslaved laborer. The soil is a migrant and the substructure of the nation, intermingled with the lives and remains of the people who have toiled to build it.

Many 20th-century land artists eschewed the gallery to create monumental works in faraway locations that were hard to access. Their remote geographies challenged both the institutional and physical confinement of the museum and the art market’s capacity to render their work “collectible.” One striking departure were Robert Smithson’s Nonsites, bins containing rocks and other elements from specific locations in New Jersey that were displayed in the gallery along with maps and photos of the original site. Smithson’s Nonsites bridged outside space and the gallery through ideas of deep time and geological process rather than human histories. Today’s artists are continuing to reshape the relationship between the gallery’s exterior and interior while rethinking the visitor’s access and, even, participation in their earth works. Kapwani Kiwanga dug up the material for her “Positive-Negative (Morphology)” (2018) installation right outside the Musée d’art de Joliette, in Quebec, where it was displayed.

Kapwani Kiwanga, *Positive-Negative (Morphology)*, 2018, written protocol, soil dug out from museum’s land and placed in the museum’s exhibition space, 30 × 50 × 460 cm. Photo Romain Guilbault. Courtesy the artist. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

The museum is located on Nitaskinan territory, homeland of the Atikamekw First Nation, who are still negotiating their land claim with the governments of Quebec and Canada. Kiwanga removed soil in front of the museum and placed it in the gallery to highlight the colonial legacies that still shape relationships to the land. Unlike Claes Oldenburg, who dug a hole in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art with the help of two grave diggers and then refilled it on the same day to create “Placid Civic Monument” (1967), the soil from Kiwanga’s excavation was “cooked” to eliminate any living organisms and then brought inside. Viewers were nudged out of their placidity by receiving a bucket and a protocol for returning the dirt to its source. Yet the sterilized soil behaves differently once re-embedded in its original location. The artist’s intervention has thus left a scar-like trace on the institutional grounds.

The current prominence of soil was evident in the recent Venice Biennale. In Delcy Morelos’s “Earthly Paradise” (2022), dark and moist soil rose above the ground to surround the viewer. Inspired by Andean and Amazonian cosmologies, the grave-like experience was imbued with the pervasive, intoxicating smell of earth mixed with cassava, cacao, cinnamon, and clove. These are plants that have traveled around the globe, bringing in their wake human migrations and transforming ecosystems; they are also reminders of soil’s capacity to absorb the dead to nourish the living.

Ιn Precious Okoyomon’s “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” (2022), soil in the gallery that supported an ecosystem of kudzu, sugarcane, and swallowtail butterflies was punctuated by sculptures composed of brown wool and blood. The installation restored the ghostly presence of toiling bodies of the past in a landscape of abundance that celebrated the resilience of nonhuman nature.

Today’s artists are rethinking the role of humans as geological agents transforming biota and landscapes. Their works are a reminder that soil is a finite and precious bridge between the animate and inanimate worlds, the foundry of life. In contrast to the monumentality of iconic land art works, these artists often engage in performative and ephemeral practices that invite the audience to participate in gestures of reparation and witnessing. They resist the idea of a dead earth-as-resource, choosing instead to reanimate the soil with past histories and future imaginaries.

Delcy Morelos, “Earthly Paradise” (2022), at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, *The Milk of Dreams*, 2022 (photo Yota Batsaki/*Hyperallergic*)

Installation view of Precious Okoyomon, “To See the Earth Before the End of the World” (2022) at the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, *The Milk of Dreams*, 2022 (photo by Clelia Cadamuro, courtesy the artist)

This essay appeared in Hyperallergic in May 2023

September 7, 2022January 5, 2025

The plant-human hybrid is the cyborg of our moment

Artist Hugh Hayden’s work “Nude” (2021), featured in his solo exhibition “Boogey Men” at ICA Miami earlier this year, is the cyborg of our moment. The philosopher Donna Haraway proposed the cyborg in the 1980s as an answer to the capitalist, technocratic, and patriarchal subjugation of nature. If the solution to what Haraway described in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” as the “border war” between nature and culture born out of “the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics” could then be imagined as a fusion of organism and machine, today it is urgently conceived as a plant-human. If technology seemed the greatest threat and promise four decades ago, the environmental crisis is center stage now.

Plants are invading the space of humans in art while human activity is invading every corner of nature

“Nude” is a headless skeletal figure made of bald cypress, sitting in a resigned or meditative posture with branches sprouting down its spine and along its limbs. Both personal and global in its fusion of wood with bone, the work taps into the artist’s family tree and that deep environmental current in contemporary art that wrestles with our forgotten embeddedness in the natural world. Plants are invading the space of humans in art while human activity is invading every corner of nature, threatening two-fifths of the world’s plants with extinction, even as we depend on their photosynthetic alchemy for the planetary life systems that sustain us.

Hayden’s plant-human is memorable but not solitary, rubbing shoulders with those of artists such as Barthélémy Toguo, Wangechi Mutu, and Firelei Báez. It is no accident that plant-human hybrids sprout in the work of artists from Africa and the African Diaspora, especially. Theirs are the global communities where the subjugation of plants in the plantation system accompanied the suffering of humans. If in Ovid’s Metamorphosis Daphne is transformed into a plant to avoid Apollo’s sexual violence, today’s plant-humans commemorate the kidnapping and brutality inflicted on millions of people and the human and environmental harm that resulted.

Cameroon, home to Barthélémy Toguo, was important to the Atlantic slave trade. In the 19th century the country was colonized by the Germans, and later the British and French, who profited from locally grown cacao, rubber, palm oil, and bananas. Toguo’s painting “Homo Planta I” (2018) translates the continent’s histories of forced labor into an agonizing posture punctuated by nails. Yet sap from the trees also flows through the body in a transferal of energy, linking the figure’s pathos to the ongoing threat to Cameroon’s rainforest. Moving between Paris, France and Bandjoun, Cameroon, in 2009 Toguo opened Bandjoun Station, an artist colony and coffee plantation. The home-grown coffee is sold in packets wrapped in the artist’s lithographs, highlighting the value of Africa’s natural resources. “We consider that it is not up to the West to fix the prices of our raw materials,” Toguo wrote in a 2018 exhibition catalogue.

Objectifying nature

Indigenous societies have practiced respectful reciprocity with their non-human kin for millennia. But in the modern period, Western states developed and exported techniques for objectifying nature, the better to subject her to extractive purposes. Modern systems of classification parsed out of the natural world into specimens that were removed from their ecological and cultural contexts, rendered interchangeable and thus amenable to scaled-up exploitation. Linnaean taxonomy, the binomial system of naming species introduced by 18-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and first applied to plants, exemplified the classifying urge that later underpinned ideologies of race and inequality. Societies viewed as “backward” or “inferior” were judged in need of improvement by Western colonizers.

The organizing impulse of taxonomy in the service of exploitative hierarchies is dismantled in works like Firelei Báez’s “Ciguapa Habilis (after Carl Linnaeus)” (2009). The Ciguapa, a creature of Dominican folklore, is a wild woman with beautiful hair, dangerously alluring but hard to track due to her backward-facing feet. She has been associated with Indigenous Taino culture but probably originates later, in the island’s Afro-Latin identities, oral traditions, and national mythmaking. Báez’ Ciguapa subverts racist and misogynist ideologies of passive femininity institutionalized under the Trujillo regime: her luxuriant hair is both plant thicket and serpentine braid and one of her hairy limbs ends in a fleshy heel. She defies categorization within nature or culture, showing kinship with the creatures of Wangechi Mutu.

The Kenyan artist’s collages, such as “Madam Repeateat” (2010), articulate hybridity through mixed assemblages harvested from fashion, travel, and pornographic magazines. Mutu’s collage practice captures the layered, fragmented histories of displacement and the complex, composite subjectivities they engender while interrogating racialized and sexist projections onto the Black female body. Her sculpture calls forth multispecies beings that seem eerily at home in our damaged world. Unlike the mythological Daphne fleeing sexual violence, Mutu’s “Tree Woman” (2016) confidently stands her ground.

By contrast, Hayden’s “Nude” lacks markers of race or gender. But in the ICA exhibition, it was exhibited near a hooded police car, while an earlier title for the sculpture used in the exhibition, “Roots,” recalls Alex Haley’s culture-shaping and controversial novel and the eponymous TV series from the 1970s. The family tree of Haley’s novel had its roots in the 18th-century slave trade in the Gambia and traced the horrors of the North American plantations. Hayden’s work ties these genealogies of human and ecological harm to today’s environmental crisis.

Unlike the exuberant, monstrous vitality of the other works mentioned here, Hayden’s hybrid is imbued with death, a sculpted emptiness. The relationship between human and plant is full of tension. Are the branches parasitic? Did they grow posthumously, or are they integral to a strange organism that can only be inferred from its remains? The haunting effect is reinforced by the monumental scale: The sculpture both commands and creates space, an environment for the viewer to circle around and peer through. The mood is elegiac, hinting at a past loss, or future extinction — of the human, at least. Whether the bare branches might sprout again, in a way no human skeleton can, is an open question.

This essay appeared in Hyperallergic in May 2022.