Art Review Magazine | Boomers Daily

ArtReview (May 2023 Issue) – Featuring Frida Orupabo, Isaac Julien, Sarah Pierce, Kahlil Robert Irving and Christina Quarles; columns on faltering art markets and questions of what art should do for a society; and much more

Aki Sasamoto wins Calder Prize 2023

Aki Sasamoto, Yield Point, 2017, installation view. Image: Jason Mandella

The winner receives $50k, a three-month residency at Atelier Calder, and the placement of works in a public collection

Have We Reached the Endpoint of Revivalism?

Cao Fei, MatryoshkaVerse, 2022. Double Channel HD video, 16:4.5, color with sound, 37min 38sec © Cao Fei, 2023. Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

Art has long looked to the recent past for inspiration, but might the return of post-Internet art just be too much, too soon?

Frida Orupabo, on the cover of ArtReview May 2023, mines images sourced from colonial archives, film, fashion and family albums to create collages that carve representation and empowerment from stereotype. Her visual references, ranging from clips of singers like Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, to the art of Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker, are incorporated into multilayered works, some pinned with metal tacks to look like the kind of vintage paper doll whose appendages are manipulable. The sense of ‘reclaiming the power to choose how a woman’s body, and more specifically Black female sexuality, is presented and received’, writes Fi Churchman, ‘is a central theme of Orupabo’s work’.

In ArtReview’s October issue – out now – Chris Fite-Wassilak profiles Jeffrey Gibson, the artist whose works unpick and repattern mythologies around the depiction of native cultures: ‘Dolled up in intricate beadwork and bright kitsch plumes, Gibson’s flamboyant artefacts mock the anthropological impulse, while buzzingly suggesting new rituals’.

Renewal can be a fraught process, as ruangrupa found at this year’s documenta fifteen. ArtReview’s Mark Rappolt and J.J. Charlesworth spoke to the collective’s farid rakun and Ade Darmawan about their hopes for and the results of ruangrupa’s artistic direction of documenta fifteen – and what happens next. Their work confounded many assumptions about how this major survey exhibition should be organised – and who and what it should be for. One thing was certain: they “had to fight for every inch”.

It’s a story that has dominated recent cultural discourse – and is touched on by Naom Chomsky, interviewed by Nika Dubrovsky for ArtReview October. Chomsky, a keen admirer of David Graeber’s work, discusses with Dubrovsky the late anthropologist’s last project, neoliberalism and democracy, Western empiricism and imperialism, free speech, Roe v. Wade, and the war in Ukraine.