Ben Davis
In the introduction to Ben Davis’s new book, a bracing and perspectival collection of essays titled Art in the After-Culture (Haymarket Books), he reflects…
Rearrange: Torkwase Dyson and Black Feminist Breathing
Spending time in a museum after it closes to the public holds a certain wonder. There is something invigorating about turning up where you…
The Final Fart: A Meditation on Hannah Wilke’s Last Work
Hannah Wilke knew what a death mask was. She knew that a death mask is an event, not an object. She knew that the…
Against Nations
At the 59th Venice Biennale, many of the stand-out pavilions were those that contested the pavilion structure itself. Consider Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’s lustrous…
Akram Zaatari: Dance to the End of Love
Dance to the End of Love is a four-channel polyphonic, visual fantasia composed of found YouTube footage of young men in the MENA region….
Wayne Salmon’s Portraits of Black Belonging in Kensington Market
In Kensington Market: Meditations on Home, photographer Wayne Salmon continues his decades-long rumination on the beauty of Black life within the wake of slavery….
Arushi Vats
“We are post-purity,” observes Arushi Vats, a Delhi-based writer and inaugural fellow of the Momus/Eyebeam Critical Writing Fellowship. Rooted in field research and expanded…
Where Do Dreams Live?
In Misdemeanor Dream, a new play presented at La MaMa by the performance collective Spiderwoman Theater, earlier this spring, Indigenous fairies sing, dance, tell…
Hypoxia and Hope
Last April, in the fog of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the bodies piled up, India heaved with hate. The Delta…
Mimi Ọnụọha: Making Data Matter
Data is often thought of as immaterial, floating in the digital sphere, and evasive. It slips away from our fingertips as we scroll, like,…
The Artist Is the Void
I didn’t expect to hate Michael Heizer’s seminal earthwork Double Negative when I visited it in 2017. I thought it would be a marvel,…
Mary Mattingly’s Way to Adapt
On an unseasonably warm day in mid-December, I took a ferry from lower Manhattan on the short trip across to Governors Island. I was…
Proving the Rule: The “Exceptionalism” Problem with Art-World Labor
It’s a rainy winter day in New York amid the ongoing apocalypse and I am struggling to think about museums. I do not, any…
Colossal Harbingers: The Monumentalism of Art About Climate Change
At the same time as the earth’s atmosphere grows more strange, giant anthropomorphic sculptures have been rising eerily out of the landscape. In the…
Rahel Aima
This month, Sky Goodden speaks with Rahel Aima, a prolific critic, art writer, and Associate Editor at Momus. We focus on a text Aima published in Momus, “Depleting…
A Lapidary Grief: Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour” Dares Her Critics
Sheila Heti’s most recent novel, Pure Colour, is a dream-like, funny, soulful, hard-to-wrangle meditation on what it means to live as someone else’s creation,…