Fought Through Women’s Bodies: Mona Hatoum’s Early Performances
The first image is a close-up of a breathing, or perhaps pulsing, scarlet blob. Only when the camera zooms out do we see these…
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Claire Morgan’s “Dead Weight” in Paris
A pale woman clutches a dead fox to her bosom, her hold on its lifeless pelt somewhere between a cuddle and a throttle. Her…
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A Goodbye to Former Selves: Uncategorizing Sonja Ahlers
My favorite page in Rabbit-Hole, the latest bookwork by Sonja Ahlers, contains only one image and one line of text. The image is a…
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Tracking the Sapphic Social Imaginaries: Lesbian Art in Print
Often scraping by on shoestring budgets and volunteer labor, periodicals by, for, and about lesbians—lesbian being a capacious term that increasingly embraces queer, trans,…
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Christina Sharpe’s Perpetual Present
Free from an autobiographical or narrative format that would encourage an epic spun out from a punctum, Christina Sharpe’s newest book, Ordinary Notes, casts…
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“A Multiculti Blitzkrieg”: On the Ascendance of the Curator of Color
Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion of the Museum of Modern Art integrated the glass buildings on either side of the museum so that when you…
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We’re Alive, Pablo Is Dead
Pablo Picasso is so famous and so ubiquitous and so dead that he is easy not to think about at all. It’s as though…
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The Polyphonous Calls for Land (and Land Back) of Manuel Axel Strain
Among the works installed by Manuel Axel Strain in Unit 17’s florist turned gallery space were: A stolen white-picket fence hemmed in by a…
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Dataspace: From the Observed Object to the Participating Subject
The first time I visited Laboratorio Arte Alameda (LAA), a house of creative electronic experimentation in the heart of Mexico City, I didn’t know…
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The Art of Accumulation in an Age of Decluttering
My childhood home in California is filled with antiques. Fragile Han Dynasty ceramics, dirt-encrusted Chinese Buddhist sculptures, various porcelain, lacquer boxes, and snuff bottles…
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