Texts
Essays and reviews on contemporary art
Tanoa Tasraku Morale Patch
"They call these baubles. Well, it is with baubles that men are led!" This perhaps apocryphal quote from Napoleon Bonaparte about the newly created Legion of Honor, the most prestigious French national order of merit, would be a fitting epigraph…
Sammy Baloji Mines Congo’s Hidden Histories
The history of colonial violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) may call to mind the atrocities of rubber extraction under Belgian rule inscribed onto the bodies of Black laborers and their families. The video “Aequare. The Future that…
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…
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)…
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…
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).…
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,…
Visions of Plants
Fipan Grass is the first exhibition outside Africa for Cameroonian artist Bienvenue Fotso (born 1989 in Bandjoun). Fotso is part of a new generation of painters from Cameroon, one of the countries at the forefront of the revolution in contemporary…
Sleeping pools
The rectangular shape of the bedframe doubles as the archetypal shape of the swimming pool, while the green glow of the LED lights suggests the lit, shimmery pool at night, a vision of luxury and indulgence. A quintessential marker of…
Green is the new black
Thebe Phetogo’s haunting paintings stun the viewer with their vivid green. Not one of the soft greens found in nature but mineral, chemical pigments redolent of the color of absinth and cobalt bromide. A bright artificial green, a poisonous, magic…
Follow the yellow brick road
Serge Attukwei Clottey is famed for his use of cut up plastic jerrycans ironically known as Kufuor Gallons in his home country of Ghana after John Kufuor, the country President who oversaw the country during water shortages that plagued Ghana…
Commissioning Invasion
Invasion was commissioned during the 2020 pandemic. The artist chose a subject that spoke to the global moment while utilizing her signature plant forms. Invasion carries a double meaning in this work. The white flowers play host to tiny organisms that float across the…