In 1996, a six-year-old child was given a camera and sent out to capture the world through her eyes. She aimed the lens at her father’s back against the Twin Towers, at her own blurred hand, at a sculpture in a museum, at Buddhist drawings on the wall. She had recently arrived in the United States, and the world in front of her was made of curiosity, novelty, and strangeness.
Continue reading “This is Me Looking: In Dialogue with Wen-You Cai on Collaborating with Her Six-Year-Old Self”Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel on ./spiral at Fondazione Aversano
How does a field barely a decade old start to have a past? ./spiral takes up that question, gathering eleven artists who were present at the early days of AI, code, and blockchain art and asking each to pick up a formative work, tool, or loose end and carry it forward from where they are now. For co-curator Atay Ilgun, a London-based artist and technologist, the burst of new tools between 2017 and 2022 has only lately settled far enough into the past to be seen clearly. His fellow curator, SuperRare’s Jonathan Carmel, describes the return as a way of moving forward by first turning around. The works cross from screen into matter along the way, Helena Sarin’s ceramics drawing AI imagery toward ancient clay, Robbie Barrat’s Plexiglas prints nudging it back toward the glow of a monitor. Presented by SuperRare at Justin Aversano’s Fondazione Aversano in New York, September 3–10. Here, Ilgun and Carmel discuss how the show came together, the move from screen to object, and the histories their artists carry forward.
Continue reading “Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel on ./spiral at Fondazione Aversano”Do I Know You From Somewhere? at Transmitter: Alison Kudlow, Susan Meyer, Hanna Washburn, and Se Young Yim
Entering the bright gallery space, shared with Tiger Strikes Asteroid on the other side of the wall, you are welcomed by brightness and playfulness. Like walking into a kindergarten classroom, a playroom, or a yoga studio, the sculptural inhabitants are cordial yet also preoccupied with themselves. It is no coincidence that the curator and three of the artists are mothers who spend time with children.
Continue reading “Do I Know You From Somewhere? at Transmitter: Alison Kudlow, Susan Meyer, Hanna Washburn, and Se Young Yim “The Whole Water of a River at TSA Brooklyn with Byron Toledo
A dead opossum lying in a fetal position along a contaminated riverbank in Quito became, for Byron Toledo, both an encounter and a sculpture. That moment, tender and violent at once, is at the heart of The Whole Water of a River at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Brooklyn, an exhibition that follows the Machángara River from its mountain source through the city. Ceramic animals, distilled plant aromas, and sound recordings gathered along the watershed map the river as a living system that connects hills, ravines, plants, people, and the city itself. The project carries unusual stakes: in 2024, an Ecuadorian court ruled that the rights of the Machángara had been violated, a ruling for which Toledo’s own video work served as evidence. We spoke with the artist about walking the river, collaborating across disciplines, and what it means to make art inside an ecosystem fighting to survive.
Continue reading “The Whole Water of a River at TSA Brooklyn with Byron Toledo”Voices In Minor Keys: 2026 Venice Biennale
In Minor Keys, the central exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, arrived with a quiet proposition. The late curator Koyo Kouho envisioned a show that reflects practices requiring time and sustained commitment — some of them lifetime, even generational — and in doing so created a deliberate antithesis to the Biennale spectacle. Drawing almost exclusively on artists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, the exhibition is anchored in political concerns — identity, immigration, the environment — yet so many of the works felt personal, while reaching toward art history and even toward Venice itself. What follows is an account of its visual depth and strength.
Continue reading “Voices In Minor Keys: 2026 Venice Biennale”