Much of Instagram's video content is organized around transformation-the virtual magic of the before-and-after and clips that show cause and effect. A person makes pasta from scratch in 20 seconds via edits that compress time-intensive labor.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini emphasize motifs of collage at Friedman Benda in New York, while the Berlin show, Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality, turns attention to the built environment, tracing how architectural thinking negotiates environmental conditions and history through research-driven practice. Questions of time, inheritance, and transformation run through the month.
Marshall Smith, aka Farsight, has consistently crafted gelatinously wobbling basslines that reverberate throughout his distinctive, progressive dancefloor arrangements. Over the past four years, the former San Francisco DJ-producer-painter has been refining the formula, enhancing a dynamic mix of trap, Jersey club, reggaeton-meets-UK funky, and tribal house. When we last spoke in 2022, he told me that his inspirations ran the gamut from experimental heads such as Photek, Pearson Sound, Bloom, to locally minted players Bored Lord and Bastiengoat.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
Baca, who was awarded the National Medal of Arts by former US president Joe Biden, is working with a team of artists to tell socially engaged stories on 12ft-tall panels. "I want to use public space to create ... consciousness about the presence of people who are often the majority of the population but who may not be represented in any visual way," she says.
We were supposed to be Frieze's special guests. And we feel like we're being censored, racially profiled and discriminated against. Having worked with the fair for five years, she says she will not continue beyond this weekend.
After hearing gallerists' complaints about the rising cost of fair participation, he says he began planning Enzo last summer with the goal of creating a low-cost, collegial environment. "There's no build-out, there's no division, there are no walls," he says. "It feels almost like one presentation amongst nine galleries I really love."
The Doha debut of the venerable Swiss fair offers a stress test for the Art Basel brand, art fairs writ large, and the Gulf's collector base. One looming question: Can a market-oriented model take root within a state-led, institutionally focused cultural ecosystem? Sales on day one were limited, but sales are perhaps not the focus of this debut, which was aided by ample state support.
"Drawings at the IFPDA make great sense," said Jenny Gibbs, Executive Director of the IFPDA and IFPDA Foundation. "Museums group them together because both media represent graphic thinking and the transmutation of ideas through line and pressure."