Growing After the Embers: A Review of Bùi Thanh Tâm’s Solo Exhibition Here on and after

Installation view of Here on and after

For a long time, when I was young, I felt distant from the idea of “history.” In textbooks, history always appeared through years, wars, reforms, and changes of political power, as if it were made of events already organized and settled. Yet the history that truly remains in the body often appears in more hidden forms. It may be a silence within family narratives, a memory that one generation chooses to avoid, a recurring pattern in festive images, or a color that seems joyful while quietly carrying a wound. Very often, history continues to exist in another form, lingering in images, bodies, and everyday experience.

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Farideh Sakhaeifar: You Are in the War Zone

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Farideh Sakhaeifar, You are in the war zone., 2016-17. Gelatine Silver Print, 8 x 10 inches

In her latest solo exhibition at New York’s Trotter&Sholer gallery, Iranian artist Farideh Sakhaeifar invites the viewer to reflect on the human experiences that connect us all. You are in the war zone confronts conflict, war, and social injustice head-on. Presented in partnership with the non-profit arts organization KODA, and curated by Klaudia Ofwona-Draber, the exhibition covers Sakhaeifar’s rich artistic practice, from her performance pieces to her sculptures to her hand and digitally manipulated photographs made over a seven year period. The works in the show underscore the artist’s strong critique of US foreign policy and Western portrayal of war in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as her impactful representations of shared experiences, the subjectivity of the media, and the inevitable distortion of memories and information over time.

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Artists on Coping: Rodney Dickson

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

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Born in 1956 in Northern Ireland, Rodney Dickson grew up during the troubled years of civil disorder that engulfed that country. Having drawn and painted since childhood, he reacted to his early experience by considering the futility and hypocrisy of war through art. As time went by, he developed an interest in Vietnam and Cambodia where he researched and completed a number of art projects since 1992. There he witnessed the aftermath of conflict in its indiscriminately brutal form and it is from that point that his work proceeds.

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