Rosa Barba has a way of taking our world’s most magical and most fundamental elements, then folding them in on one another—taking them apart, making them anew. Since the 1990s, she has been remaking film into sculpture and astronomy into film, fascinated by how each of these things scramble time and space. For her latest exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she upped the ante, turning a black box gallery into a cello. Long wires stretch from floor to ceiling as film projectors pull strips of celluloid across them. Scotch tape that holds together these splices plucks the wires while passing over them, making low sounds, a celluloid symphony.
The exhibition, “The Ocean of One’s Pause,” is an unusual survey of 15 years of Barba’s work: over a dozen cinematic sculptures are displayed in one a room, arranged so that they almost become one installation. Central to the show is Barba’s latest 25-minute film, Charge (2025), co-commissioned by MoMA and the Vega Foundation. The film was shotat CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, and will be screened at Moynihan Train Hall and in Times Square, where the work is being shown as part of the “Midnight Moment” program throughout July.
At MoMA, the film builds to a crescendo of experimental music that is elegantly complemented by the mechanical clicks of various analog apparatuses Barba has used to make sculptures. Charge shows the sun through a telescope and a vast array of reflective solar panels in the Mojave Desert. Eventually, the screen cuts to white, illuminating the sculptures in MoMA’s black box. Here rigorous studies of light, whether solar or artificial, create a feeling of wonder. In a time of slick screens and black boxes, Barba’s mechanical tinkering feels refreshing, even urgent—a reminder that we have the agency to take things apart and put them back together anew.
You’re committed to analog film at a time when that’s kind of anachronistic. This is clearly about a lot more than just nostalgia. You mentioned in a conversation with Joan Jonas for Bomb that you couldn’t make your work using video.
It was never about nostalgia. Early on, I started to fragment the cinematic apparatus, partly as a way to go against immersion, trying to leave the viewer alert and activated, and in this mode of mentally changing gears. Mechanics are important for this kind of work.
There are many other reasons. I realized right away with my first film, Panzano(1990), that using an analog film camera really defined my work. It makes the process performative: you have to be very precise in how you deal with the limitations of the material and of time. Also, the object of the film projector has quite a presence in the room. Often, I work with non-actors, and I find that the big presence and loud sound of the film camera gives people a clear way of understanding they are being filmed, which makes them change gears and be who they want to be in front of the camera. That feels respectful, to me, and helps me get around some of the problems that come with filming people and voyeurism.
Even if I’m not filming people but rather the landscape, there is a kind of alchemy that comes from holding the camera, which has a certain weight that requires me to use my whole body. Questions like “how long can I hold a sequence?” start to define the length and the time of certain scenes. Increasingly, I have also been responding to various architectures, dismantling cinematic elements until they become sculptural, engaging the materiality of the machine.
Your work is thoroughly researched and often takes on scientific subjects, but it’s never didactic. It clearly resists telling people what to think and embraces mystery and unknowability. Often, it ends up being quite elegant. What role does beauty play for you?
My work always involves a search for the sublime in some way, and explores perception and how we look at things, even if they are dangerous or catastrophic—like with my film Bending to Earth (2015), which shows a uranium field. But there is always this sense of fragility: catastrophe and beauty are often very much linked, and I’m interested in walking this line. I’m also interested in the unstableness of knowledge, and in what we as human beings want when we try to reach beyond knowledge, and in how we want to inscribe ourselves.
It’s often beauty and enigma that get many people interested in studying things like astronomy. But many of the scientific formats like diagramming have this way of removing the mystery, whereas you retain the magic. You’ve long had an interest in the ways both astronomy and cinema can collapse space and time. That becomes almost meta in this exhibition, where you’re collapsing around 15 years of work until it almost becomes one installation. Where did that idea come from?
I’ve been working with this idea of creating a conference or dialogue between works for some time. When I was invited to curate an exhibition with works from the Reina Sofía collection in 2010, I showed different pieces switching on and off at different times. Before that, at the Venice Biennale in 2009, I made an installation called Coro Spezzato: The Future Lasts One Day, where different projectors were synchronized and the voices would turn off and respond to each other. But it was at the Neue Nationalgalerie [in Berlin] in 2021 that I really took off with this idea.
At MoMA, I wanted to focus on sound pieces and sculptural works that connect to the ideas in the main film, Charge. As I got to know the space, I became very attracted by its floor-to-ceiling window. Whenever I work with architectures, I look for kinds of membranes to bring the inside out and the outside in. I did that here on both sides of the space; if you look up to or down from the fifth floor on the ledge, the exhibition there spills in and out. I wanted to understand the space as an experimental laboratory and deal conceptually with the idea of the light—with having the space transform from morning until evening. In the beginning of the day, the sculptures are more prominent, but over the hours, the film gets brighter; there is no hierarchy as to which works are more dominant. I started understanding the whole space, with its incredible height, as an instrument. I tested the wire pieces for a long time in my studio, but had to retune them to the space as the whole gallery became a kind of cello body.
There are three-and-a-half minutes in the film where you just hear the sounds of the wire pieces becoming louder, the scotch tape plucking the wires pizzicato. The scotch tape returns in this kind of prismatic circular sculpture that is also based on an early experiment about how to make our colors visible for our eyes.
You’re always combining film and sculpture, and here, the installation itself becomes kind of time-based. Tell us more about the new film.
As in all my films, I was interested in how we as human beings inscribe ourselves: in how we want to reach beyond, in how we want to understand more about the universe. There’s so much that we don’t know about. I wanted to explore light in this vein, continuing my work on the overlap of astronomy and cinema, and taking it further, to the physics laboratory. I had this relationship [as an artist-in-residence] with CERN already; a few years ago, I filmed their cloud chamber and these collusions of light that they produce. Then I learned of this incredible radio astronomy lab[Nançay Radio Observatory] in the middle of France, on a piece of land was bought in the 1950s and kept free of all kinds of disturbances, so that scientist could just collect radio waves and gather knowledge. Light is used there to translate it all into code: in the middle of the film, a lens moves at the speed of the earth and reinforces the faint signs of radio waves. I’m interested in the space that is all around us, and its many dimensions and layers.
I filmed some experiments, one after the other, each introducing a different light source. The process was kind of alchemical: I was filming with a 16mm camera, having the light inscribed on material. I was able to capture things that were not visible with the more standard digital recording of the experiment—which was pretty exciting.
Tell us about the performance, too.
I’ve been developing this shutter system that reacts to drums for 9 years now: shutters open up in response to different frequencies. Recently I started working with a choir, because I’m also interested in how every human has a different scale of frequencies, and in how all these different frequencies produce different kinds of cinema. This is my first time working with one vocalist, Alicia Hall Moran, and one percussionist, Chad Taylor. I’m on the cello. I play the cello with the film projector, pressing the cello against a film that is running, and meanwhile the wire piece plays, too.
You can catch Barba’s performances at MoMA June 26–29.
Fiber art is everywhere these days, in case you haven’t heard. And the trend tends toward work that is clearly labor-intensive and handmade, favoring folk traditions and natural fibers—which is hardly how any of us encounters fibers in the wild.
Giulia Crețulescu’s work stands apart for being made of material that’s more familiar: synthetic fabric. She sources it from a Ford automotive factory near her hometown—Craiova, Romania—repurposing the stuff of cheap seats. It’s rare to see such ubiquitous surfaces without a single stain. Even more impressively, Crețulescu manages to make the material somehow sexy.
This has a lot to do with all the straps that hang off her works, bondage-like. And the scale: her geometric shapes, mounted on walls, are roughly torso size. The straps include repurposed industrial seatbelts and other appendages that are intricately handmade. With Crețulescu’s craftsmanship, it’s tough to tell the difference between elements found and fabricated.
Crețulescu recently completed a PhD program in graphic arts in Bucharest. Her training is evident in the armor-like outlines she stitches as if in bas relief. She started sewing after growing frustrated with graphic design work that, done on a computer, “goes so fast.” Working with her hands, she found “a place to breathe.” Then, doubling down on resisting efficiency, she decided against making anything functional at all.
Before using Ford fabric, Crețulescu used pinstriped cotton, resulting in abstractions more like clothing that resemble armor-corset-suit conglomerates. They are decidedly androgynous and exquisitely tailored, made of material she bought as deadstock and will therefore never find again. That’s deliberate: Crețulescu bemoaned how clothes pile up in landfills, the synthetic fabrics resisting degradation. “I love fashion, but I cannot bring more clothes into the world,” she said when we spoke, shortly after she had returned to Romania following an impressive show at New York’s Fragment Gallery.
Growing up in an auto-industry town, Crețulescu became especially enamored of motorcycle gear. “It’s very graphic, and very close to the body,” she noted, describing padded jackets designed to protect the spinal cord. Such features began to stand out as she grappled with health concerns of her own, prompting her to think of motorcycle gear as contemporary armor. Soon she got into medieval armor too, fascinated by the way it can abstract anatomies into graphic geometries.
Crețulescu’s shapes evolve in drawings, then she makes patterns to scale. Though they are armor-inspired, the thought of executing jagged angles in metal struck her as unpleasant, sharp edges having as much potential to cause injury as to prevent it.
Her process shows that she thinks not only about the look but also the feel of her work. This gives her an advantage over those Minimalists who wanted to make art that viewers engage with their bodies as much as with their brains. Often, they did so in shapes and materials that were cold and uninviting, like metal squares. Crețulescu’s is definitively work that you feel in your bones.
In her cartoonish yet sophisticated paintings of people, Louise Bonnet toes lots of lines—between familiarity and misrecognition, seduction and ick. Speaking of toes, she is especially skilled at painting big ones, those underappreciated appendages that allow us to stand upright and thus, according to Georges Bataille, be human. Pisser Triptych (2021), which featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, boasts an overlapping set of feet painted in incongruous scale, as if belonging to different humanoid species: a small set of big toes are jammed into a fleshy, larger pair. In Kneeling Sphinx 2 (2021), clenched, extra–long toes indent a squatting woman’s rump.
Bonnet’s paintings feel true to life, though not because they are rendered with accuracy. Rather, her strategic exaggerations deftly capture the ways that bodies are sites of both pleasure and discomfort, how they can disgust and also delight, can feel alien yet also like home. Acknowledging all of that simultaneously is what makes her work refreshing and rare.
The Los Angeles–based Bonnet takes on the female nude—art history’s favorite subject, and feminism’s most debated—and transports her to a fantasy world, where she is blissfully free from both moralizing and misogynist ideas of how she “should” be. Her body is her own—often appearing to burst out of the canvas’s rectangular confines, her flab and rolls shiny and supple—but this doesn’t always mean her corporeal experience is pleasant. Itchy awkwardness is palpable; mysterious bodily fluids abound.
To discuss Bonnet’s latest work, we met up ahead of the opening of her two-person exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, a duo show with Elizabeth King titled “De Anima” that focuses on a shared affinity in both artists’ approaches to figuration, centered simultaneously on objecthood and liveliness. Complementing Bonnet’s cartoons are King’s uncanny wooden dolls. The two had been working in dialogue for a year or so, but after the LA fires in January, Bonnet felt compelled to begin her work for “De Anima” anew. Meanwhile, SITE Santa Fe International commissioned the artist to create a new series for the next edition of the biennial, opening in June. We discussed both bodies of new work below.
Emily Watlington: The first thing I noticed in your paintings at the Swiss Institute is that they are closer crops; in previous work you often showed the full figure, but here you are focused specific body parts.
Louse Bonnet: I really wanted to emphasize gestures that are routine but that we might not be totally aware of, or see ourselves doing. One is called Shoelace, another is Bra (all works 2025); they show people tying and fastening, but the garments have been removed. I imagined explaining these movements as if to an AI or an alien—or even to a man or someone who doesn’t wear bras! I was also reading about British spies who, during World War II, learned various gestures so that they might pass as French. They would parachute in, then hide their parachute really fast, and then walk down the road as if they were French. They’d eat garlic chocolate so that they would smell French. They re-sewed their buttons in the French style rather than the British. They never put their hands in their pockets.
I also painted walls and screens and doors in order to emphasize that you are seeing something intimate, peeking in. I’m always thinking about movies, and with this work I kept picturing a scene in Rosemary’s Baby—which I’ve seen a thousand times—where she’s on the phone sitting on the bed, and it’s shot from behind the door, so that she’s hidden.
EW: You have a way of mashing together pop cultural references and art historical ones rather seamlessly—and yet there is a productive awkwardness to the amalgamation, too. I know your background is in graphic design. What got you interested in the more painterly, art historical realm?
LB: I’ve always been interested, but I guess I got better at being able to paint. All the plants in these paintings come from the Garden of Eden, like figs and lilies. It’s more an art history version of the Bible than it is about following the text. Like Adam and Eve, the figures in my paintings are naked; their garments are missing.
EW: Naked and without shame—that makes sense, because to me, your paintings take on the female nude and bodily grossness while avoiding shame or moralizing. I’m curious about the proportions, like the huge foot in Shoelace and the tiny foot in Shoe.
LB: I wanted to try making the shape kind of abstract, especially with Shoe. I also worked from pictures for these paintings, which I never do. I noticed I was starting to basically copy the picture, and I wanted to fight that.
EW: The heavy top figure with the small foot really captures the feeling of wearing heels and wondering if you’ll topple over. You’ve talked before about being drawn to the unidealized proportions of Manet’s Olympia.
LB: Yes, they’re why I think that painting is so great: something’s wrong in it. Another painting [of mine] is called Zipper, and I was hoping that you might recognize the gesture maybe not with your eyes but with your body or muscle memory—like when you see someone scratching and you want to scratch. Bodies know things.
EW: Your paintings are always of women, or else ambiguous.
LB. I think of it really as painting myself. I don’t know how it is for other people, but I’m not always looking at myself and thinking “woman.” Still, I don’t have a penis, so I don’t know how to paint from that experience. I can only speak to what I feel.
EW: That makes sense: you’re more interested in embodied experience than in women or identity. The female nude has a lot of art historical baggage, which you seem to joyfully disregard.
LB: In the end, if the work is “about” women, it’s not because I’m making a statement. Any social agenda that comes through is an accident. And I’m glad to not to be thinking about what I “should” do in my work. Instead I am interested in thinking about the sometimes arbitrary things we consider acceptable to show and not to show. I was reading a manual for manners from a few centuries ago that said you can blow your nose in your hand, but only if you don’t look at it.
EW: That reminds me of what Julia Kristeva says about the abject—that things are not inherently abject, but they become so when they are out of place. Hair, for instance, can be lovely when attached to someone’s head, but is considered gross once detached. You’ve talked before about being drawn to things as a kid or teen and not knowing they were “wrong,” like R. Crumb.
LB: To me, that worked seemed very inventive and like such good ideas. You could see that people had so much fun making them. You could feel the joy, even in the horrible things. I’m sure the message still infiltrated and did some damage, but that energy was important to me.
EW: Fun and joy really comes through in your work. You seem to mash together paintings and cartoons, humor and the grotesque. How do you balance it all, or does it just come naturally?
LB: It does, but it helps that I didn’t go to art school or learn the “rules” of painting. I didn’t have parents who ever said, “No, you can’t do this” or “No, that’s not how you do that.” I never even once heard my mother complain that anyone was fat or ugly. We went to nudist camps every summer. I didn’t grow up with any sense of what I was “supposed” to do. That means I have technical problems—I was repainting stuff this morning!—but I don’t feel the weight of art history judging me. Instead I just start with a feeling, which means there are probably 10 paintings behind the final one. I have to make the painting to see that I don’t like it, then I build from there. I’ll make a sketch, mostly to see the proportions, but it almost never really ends up like the sketch.
EW: What are you showing in the SITE Santa Fe International in June?
LB: D.H. Lawrence [novelist who figures as a “person of interest” in the exhibition, which is structured like a story] made erotic drawings that will be included. They were banned in England! I am making some small paintings to go with those. While making those, I re-read Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1926) and realized how afflicted he was by the feeling of not being in your body. The British were so anti-feeling-things.
EW: Which gets us back to the British spies you mentioned earlier. A lot of the skepticism toward figuration has to do with voyeurism—and for good reason. But your work reminds us that spying isn’t always bad: the British were trying to stop the Nazis, after all.
LB: Yes, and it’s important to me that I am never making fun of the figures I am painting. I want to spy on them, but I’m thinking about them, not who’s going to see them and what they will think.
Correction 5/22/2025: A previous version of this interview incorrectly stated that the artist lost her paintings for the exhibition to the fire. Instead, the fires prompted her to start over on the series.
Pictures shot dead-on and then arranged in rows or grids comprise almost every contribution to “Typologien,” a survey of 20th-century German photography at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. No horizon line is even mildly crooked, and all fall where they ought to—in the picture’s bottom third—or else are eliminated by way of a backdrop or an aerial view.
That’s not surprising; Germans are famous for their love of rules, plenty of which, when it comes to photography, they invented themselves. But the show, curated by Suzanne Pfeffer of Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), emphasizes the beliefs underpinning these rules and the motivation behind the formal decision-making. It’s a refreshing return to form at a moment when photography criticism and exhibitions are placing outsized emphasis on content, a healthy reminder that ethics and aesthetics have long been seen as one and the same.
The show begins with plant pictures by Karl Blossfeldt, Lotte Jacobi, and Hilla Becher; these continue the work of German Naturalists who, in the 18th century, saw art and science as one. Right off the bat we see one of the problems inherent in typologizing: Becher’s black backgrounds, incongruous with the uneven light on her flowers and leaves, are so dark and flat that it’s obvious they were manipulated in the darkroom. Her attempt at “objectivity” privileges perfect pictures over naturalistic ones, ideal specimens over ones randomly chosen. Efforts to remove the human hand from pictures can often mean more manipulation, not less.
Amid so many perfect plant pictures, Thomas Struth’s photo of a sunflower just beginning to unfurl stands out with its awkwardly clenched petals. Its more conventionally beautiful stem-mate is blurry and cut off by a corner. Titled Small Closed Sunflower-No° 18 (1992), the photo invites more looking than the other flowers in Struth’s row, which, with their dew drops and use of a macro lens, feel a lot like screensavers: boring in their beauty.
Andreas Gursky offers this section’s grand floral finale with Untitled XVIII (2015), an aerial view of flowers planted in astonishingly neat rows. The print is so large that the subject is defamiliarized, looking more like a painting than a photograph. Gursky’s photography doesn’t render a subject more understandable but, rather, more enigmatic.
Gursky and Struth, like several artists in the show, studied with Bernd Becher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. (Hilla, his wife, was not officially employed there, but tellingly, many artists describe themselves as students of “the Bechers.”) The show borrows its title, “Typologien,” from the couple’s major series, shown in the exhibition’s center. It comprises grids of images of water towers and buildings shot from multiple angles. Each view is carefully calculated and evenly spaced, the building always dead-center in the frame.
Unsurprisingly, the work of the Bechers’ students betrays both influence and rebellion. Sybille Bergmann cleverly used her teachers’ approach on a building’s interior, photographing every living room in one apartment complex. Each room has the same layout, each picture the same lighting from the same window; what stands out amid the monotony are the personal touches that make a house a home. On view opposite the Bechers’ “Typologien” series, Bergmann’s photos exude warm humanity—no small feat for a gray grid.
On the same wall, Candida Höfer takes on specimens like her forebearers, but emphasizes their context instead of burning it black. Her photos of lone animals in zoos emphasize the solitude and squalor any organism might endure when displaced from its habitat for human study. Höfer includes a giraffe—its neck looming among painted clouds—and a mournful Moo Deng doppelganger: a baby hippo all shiny and sad. The artist had never especially excited me before, but contextualized here, it was evident that her retort to all the typologizing was essential.
Essential because in Germany, of all places, typologizing had horrendous consequences. On view in a smaller gallery upstairs is a major series of portraits by August Sander, who set out to photograph every “type” of person in the Weimar Republic in the 20th century, beginning in 1911. His project is the show’s largest in volume and impact—the Bechers drew much influence from him—though he never finished the 600 portraits he set out to take, and lost plenty to fires and Nazis. Sander was interested in physiognomy—what the structure of a face might reveal about a person’s character—which might seem a foreboding progenitor of Nazi eugenics. But the Nazis banned Sander’s project, arresting his son Erich, who died in prison, and drafting his other son Gunther, who fought for the wrong side of history. For many artists, the World Wars would destroy any faith in rationality, but Sander clung to his belief in photography’s neutrality and the importance of documents, continuing to photograph rich and poor, oppressor and oppressed.
Amid his many portraits—each exuding pathos and individuality, all hard to typologize without the aid of captions—I found myself tiptoeing around every corner, wondering if I’d see a Nazi, and if I’d recognize him when I did. First I wondered this of the art and then of life, past and then present.
From Sander, the show manages to gently ease us to lighter, even funny work, first with pictures from the 1980s by Christian Borchert, showing East German families full of character posing in their living rooms. Adjacent to those are Struth’s big color pictures of fancy families that feel considerably more lifeless and staged, among them Gerhard Richter’s quartet. Next is a row of ears that Isa Genzken photographed, then blew up; big and headless, they look positively strange. And then a big laugh before things get dark again: Rosemarie Trockel, the funniest German, tries the Bechers’ many-angle move on a few dogs who, sitting and even smiling for her camera, must have been very good boys.
The last room is devoted to work by Richter, ominously enclosed. Inside is part of his famed “Atlas” series (begun in the 1960s), with a selection focused on harrowing scenes from the Holocaust. Richter grouped and arranged these images on large sheets, emphasizing the sheer quantity of them; there is more awfulness on view than one can take.
I happened to enter the room as two children, speaking Italian, were seeing these images seemingly for the first time. They had many questions. Linguistically, I could only kind of follow, but on another level, I understood.
It made me want to say this: photography, as an art form, seems stuck right now, left adrift in the wake of abundant criticism that the camera is inherently violent and extractive, burdened by uneven power dynamics—all of which is true. Pictures of mass graves and death camps in “Typologien” are no exception; looking at them feels kind of wrong, very uncomfortable. But I’m glad those kids saw them, despite the knot in my stomach while watching them see, a knot that has returned as I write. I think now of pictures of Gaza and the way they show us what colonialism has probably always looked like, only much of it took place before photography was invented. Would pictures have helped then? It’s hard to know, but it does seem certain that metaphoric violence has nothing on the real thing.
Amalia Ulman broke the internet in 2014 when she started an Instagram account for posting images of her beauty routine. There, she thanked followers for supporting her as she underwent plastic surgery and solicited opinions on her hair color and outfits. It was all a performance, soon titled Excellences and Perfections, designed to draw out revealing reactions and highlight the way that social media can frame women as yours to look at.
It was also a story with a narrative arc, pictures, words, and an actress—all the ingredients that make up a movie. So it should not surprise that Ulman now finds herself a rather accomplished filmmaker, with her second feature, Magic Farm, in theaters nationwide starting May 16. Magic Farm follows her dark comedy El Planeta (2021), in which a mother-daughter duo scam Spaniards in order to make ends (barely) meet, all while rocking fur coats and glamorous sunglasses. Ulman’s new film, starring Chloë Sevigny, tells the story of a crew of American journalists traveling to Argentina to record an episode about a musician who, it turns out, lives in a different San Cristobal—a town name ubiquitous in Latin America. There, they meet memorable locals, several visibly affected by pesticide pollution. The result is an absurdist satire of American hipsters.
There’s a thread connecting Excellences and Perfections, El Planeta, and Magic Farm, but it is not a visual or stylistic one. At first, all three seem to center on obsessions with superficial things, like beauty or online followers. But what resonates most is the social and political commentary that Ulman sneaks subtly into her work, always with a light touch—and without necessarily taking a clear stance. Below, she opens up about her big pivot between the worlds of art and film.
How has it felt to go from making art, where you have your hands on every aspect, to directing big film productions?
I still have my hands on all the parts, everything from photography to costume design. That’s why I’m going to stop acting in my own films—acting, directing, and producing can be truly a nightmare and more than is physically possible. On top of that, I don’t even like acting that much; it tires me.
I have a very clear vision of what I want, though I love delegating when people are good at their jobs. [Laughs]. Which is why I think directing always starts with casting: Who do you pick to work with you that you trust?
You wrote Chloë Sevigny’s part in Magic Farm for her, and you also worked with friends.
Yes, and my director’s assistant, Carmen de la Roca, has been involved in my work since I was making video art. For Magic Farm, I was surrounded by people that I trust—girls that I trust, really. I started in the art world when I was very young. I was abused both financially and physically, and then I got into [a bus] accident. It was all very traumatic, and I’m not just throwing that word around. There was all this exposure, but no mentorship, no guidance. Just all these older men moving me around, and a lot of galleries thinking I might be a money cow.
But I don’t work that way. I never wanted to have a large studio with a lot of people working for me. I don’t even have a studio practice. I mostly work by walking around, getting on buses, looking at people, and then writing. For specific projects, I might hire some help. I quit all my galleries last year, but I haven’t quit art.
The film industry is insane too. People work until they have a heart attack. But I’ve always been surrounded by people who care about me, and also about the longevity of my work—not just taking advantage of me. El Planeta was the first time that I had mentors I could call and ask, “Hey, what do you think about this?” or “How does this work?” I felt protected, and like people were rooting for me. In the art world, I felt hyper-exposed and then abandoned once I didn’t do another Excellences and Perfections.
How did you find your mentors, and who are they?
It happened organically. In film, there’s more incentive to share, because everything is so collaborative and you need people. [Fellow director] Eugene Kotlyarenko gave me the best advice ever: Get a cameo from a known actor. I got Nacho Vigalondo, who is very famous in Spain, to play the part of the john in El Planeta. That gave us this stamp of legitimacy. And then Miranda July sent the film to Sundance. She’s also the one who got me my current agent. Scott Macaulay, the editor of Filmmaker Magazinebut also a producer—he produced Gummo—is one of my best friends, and I talk to him all the time. It helps so much to able to ask, “Is this normal? Am I getting ripped off?” My friend, the director Daniel Schmidt, gives me intel regarding how much things sell for. The list of people doesn’t end. I never had that in the art world.
For an issue of Art Papers I edited a piece you wrote about having invisible disabilities. I noticed you included some visibly disabled people in Magic Farm.
What are peoples’ expectations of somebody with disabilities? How do you react to somebody that looks different—like [actor] Mateo Vaquer, who I found on TikTok? I saw a video of him on the shoulders of his friend, throwing around his T-shirt at the club. He was so good at dancing. We met up when I was location-scouting, and I saw that he was very extroverted and fun, and loved the camera. I altered the script to fit him in.
Thankfully, my producers were flexible. I know from my own disability how important that is: I didn’t want to give him a super-strict schedule. So I decided that, whenever he’s feeling good and ready to go, we’ll add him to the scene. I didn’t want to force it. I know how tempting it is to lie about how well you are doing and push through. A lot of the stories that he tells in the film are stories that he just brought up during lunch. I wanted him to represent himself the way he is. You can be disabled and also be super-sassy and love drugs or whatever! Yet whenever you see people that look like Mateo onscreen, it’s a scary film. I just wanted to normalize it all.
In the film he’s disabled because of pesticide poisoning. You also had family members whose health was affected by agricultural chemicals.
Harm is everywhere. That’s what the film is really about: There is no escape. It’s not like the Americans will go back home and then be safe. My mom’s side of the family—my grandma is in the film!—is part Indigenous, from Northern Argentina. In the ’70s, there was a mass exodus from the countryside to Buenos Aires. Most of the family moved, but a few people stayed in the countryside. One person was going blind, but nobody wanted to talk about it. My mom was outraged: Where were the activists?
Part of the problem is that it’s hard to prove a culprit scientifically, since it can affect everyone differently—cancer, a missing limb. It takes a serious study to start seeing patterns, and these studies are rare in small villages. Plus, when you’re sick, the idea of fighting against multinational monsters is a lot.
You have your own production company, Holga’s Meow—named for your late cat.
It’s partly a way for me to get credit for the production work that I do, but I also want the company to start funding smaller projects. I want to help other women and younger people coming from the art world. I learned from my own experience that a little guidance can go a long way. I want it to be like Elara Pictures [a production company cofounded by the Safdie brothers and others] for girls. Elara is very bro-y.
Did you always see yourself making films?
I’ve always been very narrative, but I never really thought I could make a film. I knew the way I liked to work made my life hard as an artist. I work project to project, on things that have a clear beginning and end. But when one picture from a series would get shown out of context, it was hard for some people to understand, and hard to market. At least when there’s an excerpt or screenshot from a film, you know you’re missing context.
A lot of your characters have somewhat glamorous or exciting lives but are struggling financially, which is a lot like working in the art world. Do the working conditions of the film industry feel different?
In film, there are unions that make sure everyone gets paid. Sometimes I butt heads with the unions, especially when it comes to disability, because they make things less flexible. But at the end of the day, I’m happy that people get a living wage. Also, since film is more collaborative, burning bridges is risky. You can’t be too big a douchebag, because you’ll need to ask favors of other people.
In film, you need protections like insurance on set in case someone gets hurt. But in the art world, I went to so many fairs with so many galleries and never felt protected, even when I devoted my whole life to a project. In fashion and in art, people suffer—and do a lot of Adderall and cocaine just to sustain what they are doing.
In the art world, I felt like I was having to prove myself to galleries over and over again. When I felt confident about an idea, it would usually sell—even things that are supposed to be hard to sell! Whereas some things that galleries pushed me to do, thinking that they’d be more commercially viable, didn’t sell. I stopped trusting the galleries and started doing my own thing.
What’s your next film about?
It’s based on a short story I wrote called “The German Teacher.” It’s set in Spain, and based on a real private debt collection agency, El Cobrador del Frac, that you can hire. They send a guy in coattails and a top hat to follow you around, and everyone knows what it means. He trails you and shames you, until you pay. In my story, the government implements a law requiring every company to diversify. So the protagonist becomes the first female cobradora. The man she’s hired to follow happens to
be this German teacher she had an affair with when she was in high school—and hadn’t
seen since …
In the mid-1980s, Sheree Rose, a photographer and dominatrix, instructed her partner Bob Flanagan to keep a journal of their sex life for one year. When they were finished fucking, she had him reach over, grab a pen, and write down what happened. She was always giving him prompts, in writing and in bed. With this project—which would soon become a book, titled Fuck Journal—she combined the two.
“Bob was my invention,” Rose said of the way she encouraged Flanagan turn his life as a masochist with cystic fibrosis into art. Before they met—at a Halloween party in 1981, both dressed up dead—Flanagan had been a poet. Rose was a middle-aged divorcée, a housewife-cum-punk; her partner-to-be was 10 years her junior, with two years to live.
Or so he thought. Instead, Flanagan lived until 1996, by which time collaborations with Mike Kelley and the Nine Inch Nails—as well as Visiting Hours (1994), a touring installation that combined chronic illness and sadomasochism—launched him into fame. Both Kelley and NIN discovered the artist after he nailed his penis to a wooden board for an infamous performance titled Nailed (1989), and the band subsequently hired him to star in a video that was soon widely banned. In it, a mechanical device tugs Flanagan’s nipples and genitals as he reclines in a wheelchair, eventually pretending to die.
When Flanagan died for real, at the age of 43, it was the longest recorded life anyone with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder, had ever lived. And it’s tempting to wonder whether his longevity had something to do with the way he embraced the facts of his body—its limits and its pains—instead of fighting or hiding them.
But back to Fuck Journal. It was first printed in 1987 in India by Kalakshetra Press, a publisher of religious tomes. When a shipment of Flanagan’s books eventually made its way to customs, officials glimpsed the title and, apparently offended, dumped them into the sea.
So writes Rose in her foreword to a new edition of the book. Fuck Journal has been something of a cult favorite—widely storied, hard to find, with only 300 copies having been smuggled out of India. But that stands to change thanks to Hanuman Editions, whose reissue, out in May, boasts a memorable introduction by Johanna Hedva, Flanagan’s fellow disabled artist and writer.
The book is smut, and it is matter-of-fact. “Like a grocery list,” Rose writes. Flanagan’s entries are short, scrawled out in a state of bleary bliss, ranging from the banal (“Valentine’s day fuck in spite of being tired”) to the transcendent (“I wonder if I’m still alive”). It gets a lot kinkier than that.
Keep in mind that all the while the man was dying, his body becoming undone in less recreational ways; he was enjoying a bunch of little deaths before the final big one. He was finding pleasure in the pain, surrendering corporeal control, submitting to Rose. Life was going to turn his body inside out whether he liked it or not. So he found a way to like it—which seems wise.
Though an intricate sprawling feat of both Maximalism and engineering, David Altmejd set out to create his latest tour-de-force sculpture The Serpent (2025) with little planning—opting instead to figure out his work’s meaning and form as he worked, letting his materials guide the way. Many of the best artists work this way: After all, if you already knew what a work was going to be, or could say in a few sentences what it means, why go through the hassle of making it at all? In the final form, which is on view at White Cube in New York through April 19, Altmejd’s process of play and exploration is abundantly evident. And though the Los Angeles–based Canadian artist works intuitively, he reflects thoughtfully all the while, learning from and dialoguing with his creative process—as captured in the interview below.
The process of making is always at the heart of my sculptures. That’s why I leave all the seams and traces of my hand untouched: I’m fascinated by how an object can carry the memory of its own making.
For the past few years, the snake has been slowly emerging in my work, shyly and subtly. I work very intuitively, so when I say things like “the snake emerged in my work,” I really believe that’s how it works. At first, I wasn’t ready to tackle such a loaded symbol. But recently, maybe because of where I was in my life, I became ready to face it.
I decided to make a snake from a series of heads. I had no idea what it was going to look like, the size that it was going to be. But I’ve been working on heads as long as I’ve been making sculptures. The process felt like making a necklace out of beads, putting pearls on a string one after the other.
Because I knew The Serpent was going to be unpredictable and chaotic, I decided first to make a sculpture called Snake Charmer (2025)as a kind of counterbalance. Snake Charmer was present in the studio, giving out calming vibes as the chaos was emerging. The sculpture shows the bust of a figure playing the flute multiplied 36 times, combined into a sort of grid.
Then I started working on The Serpent. At first, I imagined that all the heads making up the serpent would be identical. But very quickly, I learned that the limitations of the process [cast epoxy clay] meant that it would be better to let each head have its character. So I decided to push the work in that direction, making all the heads different. They’re all casts of my head, but sometimes, I changed the nose or made the head more feminine. Soon, it was as if the heads all symbolized different moments in a life. Stepping back, I could even see clear chapters: There’s a rise, there’s a fall, there’s a death, there’s decay, there’s a transformation. But as I said, I work very intuitively. So these are reflections that I have while I’m working, not ideas I’m trying to illustrate.
People have been asking me if The Serpent a self-portrait. I guess so, in certain ways. But I also wonder what defines a self-portrait: Does it have to be a conscious representation of the self? Because this wasn’t. Almost every sculpture I make starts with a cast of my own head, just for practical reasons.
I’m becoming more and more aware that whatever shape a sculpture takes results from a desire that’s in the material: The material always wants to be shaped a certain way. I think a lot about the unconscious as defined by Carl Jung, and think that maybe, there’s some an invisible energy in the material’s unconscious that’s just waiting for me to help it manifest.
Many people have described my work as Surrealist. In the past, I didn’t really understand this because in my mind, I understood Surrealism as more of a style. And sure, my work has weird stuff: animals, unpredictable objects. But I thought this was a superficial comparison, until I realized I’m doing exactly what the Surrealists were doing: letting the unconscious manifest.
That’s the fun of making the work: not knowing where it’s going to go, believing in the process, letting the material decide the shape. I love the unpredictability. I’m very comfortable with chaos. And I suspect chaos likes me too.
The show really began with the sculptures on view upstairs, of musicians playing swans as instruments. After making them, I thought: Oh, they could be playing music for dancers. So I made dancers, and I started to think that, as a sculptor, really I’m just playing music and making the material dance. I don’t want to impose a choreography on it. I want to let it find my rhythm.
In the corner of The Serpent’s plinth, a rabbit is peeking out of a hole. I’ve been working with rabbits for a few years. I started doing so because I’m always drawing on my sculptures, but with a human bust, cheeks and foreheads don’t leave room for big drawings. So I thought: If I made big rabbit ears, I could use them as a drawing surface.
Afterward, I realized that my connection with the rabbit is much deeper, dating back to my childhood. Soon, I became really interested in the rabbit as trickster—not necessarily as in a character that plays tricks, but as a sort of spirit that can both be in the world, and also go underground through a hole, navigating dark channels underground. In Alice in Wonderland, it’s the White Rabbit who leads Alice into her own unconscious, where she meets the Queen and all these characters. For me as an artist, that’s the most important tool I have: the ability to dig beneath the surface and to access the darker space of the unconscious—and then come back above ground.
—As told to Emily Watlington
As I write this, Los Angeles is ablaze and Accra, Ghana, is recovering from a fire; Richmond, Virginia, lost its potable water to a storm just after Asheville, North Carolina, finally got its supply back two months following Hurricane Helene. These climate disasters are having lasting impacts on, among other things, human health, dependent as it is on the health of our environment—the water we drink, the air we breathe. We are seeing whole populations, human and other, rendered disabled by chemicals and catastrophes. In her new book, Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (2024), Sunaura Taylor even declares that climate change is ushering in an “Age of Disability.”
Taylor, a writer and artist, was born with her own Anthropocene-era disability on Tucson’s southside. There, toxic synthetic chemicals entered the groundwater by way of activities at Hughes Aircraft, a United States military contractor. By the 1970s, locals noticed that the water supply was killing their plants; their pets and livestock were ill; lupus, testicular cancer, brain tumors, and leukemia were popping up at high rates; and stillbirths and disabled newborns were unusually common.
In the course of writing her book, Taylor returned to Tucson to study not only the water that had disabled her, but the ways her community organized in response. There, she noted that while residents “told stories of often debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries,” they also mapped out “alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance” that we’ll need in the coming decades. This Tucsonian “vision of justice… included treatment for both human communities and landscapes.” As for herself, Taylor found that her “feelings toward this water are not of fear or anxiety or anger.” Instead, “they are of solidarity.”
A similar “vision of justice” is echoed in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint Is Family” (2016–22), a series of photographs gathered in a 2022 book. Scenes from the series comprise the standout contribution to “Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice,” an exhibition about health and the environment that recently traveled from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles to the Moody Center for the Arts in Houston.
Like Taylor, Frazier knows intimately the effects that environmental pollution can have on one’s body. As a child growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier contracted lupus in response to chemical emissions from the United States Steel Corporation that have caused illnesses in three generations of her family, some of them terminal. “Flint Is Family” is a group of striking portraits of dignified disabled residents of Flint, Michigan, organizing and proving themselves resourceful amid a water crisis. While the book mentions the effects of lead poisoning on children, as well as Flint’s unusually high rates of cancer, lupus, and Legionnaires’ disease, Frazier’s focus is on introducing us to people who, confronted with the emotional, bodily, and economic effects of living without access to clean water, have adapted and persevered.
One example of resourceful perseverance comes from a Flint resident named Amber, who creates her own natural shampoo after doctor-prescribed pills and cream fail to redress the infected-looking bald spot on her daughter’s head. The hair grows back in three months, and Amber begins selling her product to other Flint residents facing similar symptoms. A desire to protect their community drives her family’s entrepreneurial spirit: They buy and steward land, rather than entrusting it to systems that have failed them.
The photographs do not resort to simplified clichés of what sickened or impoverished people look like. What comes through instead is resourcefulness and resilience, persistence and creative adaptation.
Taylor’s and Frazier’s books are both primarily portraits of communities—how they come together and adapt, how they organize. This community focus is fitting, for if there is one thing both disability and ecology reveal, it is how incredibly interdependent we all are.
If, as Taylor writes, “the future is disabled,” that disabled future is already here; but, to paraphrase William Gibson, it’s just not evenly distributed—owing largely to environmental racism. Tucson’s southside is predominantly Mexican American, while Flint is majority Black. Poverty, meanwhile, is America’s fourth leading risk factor for death, per the American Medical Association: It follows only heart disease, cancer, and smoking.
FRAZIER AND TAYLOR did more than document the ways their communities are adapting: they modeled new ways to get actively involved. For Frazier’s part, after three years of photographing Flint, she found she “could no longer idly stand by and wait for the government to do its job.” This was in 2019, after all the criminal charges against city and state employees were dropped, even as residents remained saddled with hefty utility bills for undrinkable water. The artist turned to Amber, asking what could be done.
Amber told Frazier about an invention by a man named Moses West: an atmospheric water generator that could collect clean water by extracting condensation from the air. It runs on solar power and generates water perpetually. Being off-grid, it does not require the kinds of governmental infrastructure the community had rightly grown to distrust.
The catch was that this contraption weighs 26,000 pounds, and had to be shipped from Puerto Rico, where West lived: This was costly, around $50,000. So Frazier chose to offer money from sales following her recent exhibition at the gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; the donation was matched by a grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. In Frazier’s photos, the generator’s arrival in 2019 appears triumphant.
The final “Flint Is Family” photos were shot in color. In her 2022 book, these colors burst brightly against the sequence’s black-and-white buildup, as if leaving Kansas for Oz. We see residents relishing the atmospheric water generator, the water, and one another. They are hugging and beaming and praying in front of the green rectangular apparatus, filling jugs, playing in sprinklers, drinking from the spout.
But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine post-generator. The machine gets vandalized anonymously, though it is quickly repaired. Still, the instance seems to affirm suspicions that the water crisis was more intentional than simply neglect or ineptitude, more than lack of funds or inevitable environmental degradation. “It crossed my mind that they want us to die off and then redevelop,” says a Flint resident named Melvin. Certainly, making land unlivable is a tried-and-true tactic of dispossession, as Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, referring to the colonization of the Americas. Still, Melvin dwells less on intent than he does on taking power back into his own hands: “My advice to Black people in Flint is, don’t move away, let’s build it up and let’s buy property.”
We’ll need the kinds of creative and communal adaptation Melvin describes in order to survive and care for one another amid this mass multispecies disablement, especially under a federal administration that appears unlikely to help. “Flint Is Family”is successful as an art project for the way it makes this resiliency visible in a climate where, for many people, survival is assumed, struggle is left outside the frame, and water is taken for granted.
TWO OTHER RECENT artworks stand out as modeling how we might adapt, tending to our health and to our environment too. The first is Ekene Ijeoma’s Black Forest (2022–), a project that will see the planting of 40,000 trees in Black neighborhoods across the United States. The trees bear tags that read “Black Forest: a living monument and archive for Black lives lost to Covid-19” alongside a QR code that links to a crowd-sourced archive. The trees foster the health of Black neighborhoods and residents by helping mitigate warming temperatures, offering shade, and cleaning the air.
Ijeoma was inspired in part by the Neighborhood Tree Corps, founded by activist Hattie Carthan, who became known as “Bed-Stuy’s Tree Lady.” In the 1960s, Carthan planted more than 1,500 trees throughout Brooklyn, many thriving today. Black Forest also responds to 2020 reports that Black people were twice as likely to die from Covid as white people; living in tree-lined rather than redlined neighborhoods benefits the respiratory system.
In making Black Forest an art project rather than merely an environmental action—labor likely to go unnoticed—Ijeoma draws attention not only to how environmental racism distributes vegetation unevenly, but to the human hand behind the intervention, showing that ordinary people can intervene, too. The sleekly designed Black Forest tags call attention to this, as do the community events during which the trees are planted, on both public land and volunteered private property. “For some people, this will be the first time they’ve planted a tree,” Ijeoma told the Art Newspaper. “That alone is a profound experience”—a reminder of the agency we have over our environment.
That agency was present too in Asad Raza’s 2022 exhibition “Diversion,” which saw the artist reroute Frankfurt’s Main River to flow through Kunsthalle Portikus, located on a small island in the river. The water streamed into one of the museum’s galleries, where it was passed through a very fine coffee filter and boiled before an attendant added minerals. This simple intervention made the water drinkable; museum visitors were invited to partake, and thereby reconnect to their environs.
OF COURSE, THE IDEA of agency may seem paltry when you consider that 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to just 100 companies. But as Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein argues, “the pessimism of some who believe in climate change is just as detrimental as those who deny it outright.” Here, environmentalism might take a cue from disability politics, which centers accommodating and caring for people in whatever their state rather than finding a cure.
Instead, the mainstream environmental movement has had a thorny relationship to disability justice. As Taylor details in Disabled Ecologies, environmentalists have a habit of enlisting disabled people to monger fear or as a cautionary tale: Better protect your environment and your health, so you don’t end up disabled. One side effect is stigma perpetuated, with disability framed as a personal tragedy and not a political failure.
Taylor suggests the two movements team up—and shows they weren’t always so separate. She writes that for over a century in the United States, environmental protection and human health were grouped under the same governmental branch, until 1970, when Richard Nixon founded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
He got a lot of reputational points for the EPA, and for pouring money into the National Cancer Institute as well. But the moves in the end benefited corporations: separating the two endeavors saw a decrease in environmental cancer studies, and in researching the chemicals that cause disease. Paradoxically, Taylor notes, all this happened on the heels of Rachel Carson’s bestsellers, particularly Silent Spring (1962), which had placed the health effects of synthetic chemicals on the mainstream mind.
So still today, in the US, chemicals are innocent until proven toxic. Whether testing forever chemicals or microplastics, you and I are the lab rats. This uncontrolled pollution that puts profit over people is the enemy, not disability.
The coming decades, Taylor suggests, might look something like the revenge fantasy in Audre Lorde’s 1980 book Cancer Journals, where an army of single-breasted women gathers at the Capitol Building to protest chemical contamination, their bodies the evidence. The changing climate, Taylor writes, is starting to resemble “something impaired, precarious, dependent, filled with loss and struggle, requiring assistance, accommodation, and creative forms of care.” And so disabled people—experts in all these things—“should be sought out as leaders in climate adaptation conversations.”
Charles Darwin noted something similar. In The Origin of Species, his focus was not only on “the survival of the fittest,” Taylor reminds us, “but on variation as the driver of life.” For Darwin, it was not exactly the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent—to say nothing of the wealthiest. Rather, it is the ones who are most adaptable. If you want to know more about creative adaptation, Taylor suggests, ask a disabled person.
I can’t think of a more relevant and necessary exhibition right now than Wafaa Bilal’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. It isn’t only that the exhibition is topical—though, sadly, its critiques of Islamophobia and the ways technology sanitizes warfare and distances us from its effects are timely. (Bilal takes on these topics unflinchingly, but we hardly need an art show to remind us of them.) Instead, what stands out is the way his faith in humanity carries on despite it all.
After learning that his brother had been killed by a remotely operated drone in Iraq, and after relocating as a refugee to the United States, Bilal took up residence in Chicago’s Flat File galleries for 30 days. For the resulting performance, Domestic Tension (2007), he connected a paintball gun to a video feed and chatroom, where people identified only by IP addresses could shoot yellow paintballs at a brown man in a keffiyeh. And shoot they did: in a surprise to no one, the relative anonymity of the internet enabled the unleashing of racialized hatred. Bilal was shot more than 65,000 times, and the site received more than 80 million hits.
But more memorable for Bilal were the moments of selfless kindness and basic respect that other strangers offered. When an Ohio-based IP address went at him relentlessly, Bilal politely asked for a break from the shooting: he was trying to eat dinner, and paintballs kept falling into his food. The shooter obliged, replying “Ouch, sorry.” Soon, users discovered that if they repeatedly clicked left and aimed the gun into a corner of a room, Bilal would be spared, and so 39 strangers organized shifts to protect him. He was so moved that he extended the project an extra day, saying moments like these had restored his hope for humankind.
Where politics and technology can abstract, time and again, Bilal brings things back to person-to-person scale, and he does so by putting his own body on the line. Such is the premise of Virtual Jihadi (2007), a remake of a remake of the popular 2003 American video game Quest for Saddam. In the earliest version of this first-person shooter game, players kill off civilian Iraqis standing between the shooter and Saddam Hussein. Tellingly, every Iraqi has the same face—Hussein’s. Three years later, Al Qaeda released their own version, changing it into a hunt for George W. Bush. Bilal’s version intervenes by introducing a third character: an Iraqi suicide bomber who, angered after his brother is killed by the US, is recruited to join a terrorist group. In this third version, both Al Qaeda and the US are the enemies, with the focus on figureheads clearing way for the people they most impact. Here technology onboards and recruits people to violence while alienating them from the impacts of war.
For 3rdi (2010–11), Bilal surgically installed a camera in the back of his head and, for one year, took a picture every minute. The abundant photos show things like pillows and strangers, and in a sense compensate, per the catalog, for the childhood photos Bilal left behind when he fled Iraq. The work is shown synchronically, meaning if you visit the show on March 27, 2025, at 4:32 pm, you will see what Bilal saw—or rather, didn’t see—on March 27, 2011, at 4:32 pm. The images are projected on a screen hung at a dramatic angle, giving the project a commanding presence in much the same way Bilal’s camera intruded into any given space. This was the point: Surveillance cameras are everywhere yet disappear; what if you could see the person on the other end?
Titled “Wafaa Bilal: Indulge Me,” the MCA show is hands-down the best museum presentation of past performances I have ever seen. Domestic Tension is shown as a room reproduced to scale, and though the museum shot far fewer than 65,000 paintballs at its walls, the presence of their yellow residue is chilling. Nearby, the live-streamed project is edited down into a thoughtful and manageable five minutes.
Bilal’s most permanent gesture is also his smallest. Responding to ISIS’s destruction of pre-Islamic culture, he took to 3D scanning a lamassu, a sphynx-like sculpture of a protective Sumerian goddess, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection after a similar and significant one had been destroyed near Mosul. Wanting to preserve the form against future political upheaval while also hiding it from the enemy, he compressed the file and then bioengineered it to appear in the DNA of wheat seeds. Among the first crops to be domesticated in the Fertile Crescent that the lamassu calls home, these wheat seeds—which visitors to the MCA can take away with them—are a reminder that small gestures can be powerful, too.
Smallness, though, is antithetical to traditional ideas of empire and authority—which is why Bilal responded to one of Saddam Hussein’s most far-out ideas by scaling it down. The Ba’ath party had proposed sending a golden bust of himself into space and geo-tethering it to Iraq so that he could look over the nation in perpetuity. It was never realized—until now, by Bilal and in diminutive form. During the run of the show, he will send it up into low Earth orbit where, rather than reigning forever, it will fall back down to the ground and disintegrate.
A painting by Jana Euler features on the cover of the Spring 2025 “Wellness” issue of Art in America. Below, see an interpretation of the work, shown here in full.
When Jana Euler debuted her 2016 painting Filled (health / beauty enhancer) at Cabinet Gallery in London, it was one of four renderings of “empty” faces, as she called them in a text she wrote for the show. These blank visages—eyes eclipsed by cucumbers, a vacant smiley face, and two watch faces hollowed out—simultaneously evoke things one might enlist to try to fill the proverbial void. In Filled (religion), 2016, a fancy wristwatch standing in for luxury is painted as if prolapsed, its upside-down numbers radiating out from the circumference and spilling off the canvas, its straps extending into the watch’s emptied center, looking like a receding highway.
Another painting in the show titled with two quotation marks surrounding a void—„ ” (2016)—caricatures the experience of trying to view your own body in total. We see every part of a brown-eyed woman—her nose big and blurry from up close, her feet far away—as if peering through her nostril as she looks up. Front and rear views frame a central void, offering completion without coherence.
As for our gherkin-goggled cover girl, this white woman at the spa—that quintessential image of wellness—is seen through two green circles that overlap like a Venn diagram, converging as things do when held close to your face. Covering the whole painting, they serve as a sort of membrane, and belong, it is implied, over the eyes of the viewer.
Filled (health / beauty enhancer) is easily Euler’s least ugly painting. As Rachel Wetzler described in this magazine in 2020, Euler’s works tend toward “the viscerally off-putting, grating, or garish,” in ways that often “itch.” Indeed, images of luxury wellness can be grating, not least for the inequities they embody. It is also worth adding that for Euler, who is German, wellness is less of a luxury than it is in the United States. In Germany, health care is a human right, and even saunas are municipal. I’ve wondered how this colors Euler’s perception of such imagery but can’t ask, as the artist does not give interviews.
For me, though, looking at this image of wellness today—after the rise of both Goop and the GOP—the translucent cucumbers resonate differently than they did when Euler first painted them. Audre Lorde wrote in an essay that “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” a quote too often isolated from her point that a preserved self is better equipped for action, not exempt from it. In times like these, caring for our well-being requires no small amount of maintenance, and it matters that we tend to it, so long as we forgo cucumbers so opaque that we can no longer see whether the world is on fire. Few of us can afford this and, anyway, as Euler so wryly suggests, self-care is not enough to fill the void.