Almost four decades after its creation, Mikhailov’s Sandwich series was on view at Barbara Gross Galerie in München, Germany a year ago. Created during the late 1960s and 1970s, this series represents the poetic side of Mikhailov’s early conceptual work. Overlapping motifs lead to multifaceted interpretations, in which ironic allusion to food shortages, gloomy living […]

The photographers of 1978 were searching for new visual territory. By that year, with Diane Arbus dead for more than half a decade, the decisive moments captured by the likes of Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand over the past three decades had been depleted of fresh potential. Street photographers, it seemed, had run out […]

In an era when the police can be summoned if you so much as produce a camera on a children’s playground, Julia Fullerton-Batten has made life deliberately difficult for herself. The London-based artist’s latest project focuses on the taboos of life in a teenage girls’ school. Bullying, humiliation, and occasional moments of sympathy can all […]

Tal R’s exhibit Adieu Interessant was featured at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in Berlin as part of the German capital’s citywide gallery weekend this past May. The Israeli-born Danish artist displayed ten large-format collages on two floors of the David Chipperfield designed space. The canvases in Adieu Interessant resembled abstract compositions from afar, two-dimensional […]

I have always been fascinated by the notion of the animal—as a symbol, but more significantly, as a kind of physical entity. Bataille, in "Theory of Religion," talks about a space he calls “animal intimacy”—a conceptual space or age that has existed before the age of human production/consumption, which introduced a fundamental hierarchy. But he […]

Change is much more painful than progress, yet infinitely more rewarding. Imagine if Guston decided to continue with his muted abstractions? Imagine if he succumbed to the pressure of expectation from dealers and collectors? Then I imagine he would exist as a marginal abstract expressionist who rode the wave of America’s first great art movement. […]

Over the last nine years, New York City has grown to be my favorite city. The island of Manhattan alone has such a dense, mysterious network of man-made structures soaring fifteen hundred feet aboveground and digging 800 feet below. The five boroughs of New York are connected by more than 35 bridges and tunnels that […]

For me, the first encounter with the aesthetics of terror took place in front of the TV. Growing up in Tel Aviv, one could not help seeing images of state and underground terror on television. During the 1990s, when the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombers first emerged, it had a distinct visualization—suicide bombers’ videos. These […]

For the past several years I have been working on a series of cartographic installations comprised of layers of hand-cut paper, light, and shadow. These constructions depict aspects of the world which we cannot normally see: a microscopic organism, an image from the depths of our interior anatomy, a labyrinth of pipes and systems buried […]

Meaning is deduced from presences: the presence of sound, of speech and language, of sight, of touch. Subtract a familiar presence—for example, the element of sound—and you are left with the perplexing space of absence, as it flirts with the urge to interpret. Silence is perhaps the most traumatic signifier of absence, and, when present, […]