Best show in a commercial gallery
Agnes Scherer, “My refuge, my treasure, without body, without measure” and Füsun Onur, “This story will continue” at ChertLüdde, Berlin.
Two respective exhibitions by Agnes Scherer and Füsun Onur at ChertLüdde in Berlin stood out. Agnes Scherer’s folkloric paintings and mummy-like plaster sculptures conjured a hypnotic glance at gendered economies and cultural mythologies. In a masterfully sparse installation comprised of a sound piece, an umbrella, and perfume, Füsun Onur poetically evoked the loss and emptiness that saturate the present.
Best show in a museum
Thea Djordjadze, “all building as making at Gropius Bau, Berlin and Lydia Ourahmane, “Barzakh” at Kunsthalle Basel.
In Thea Djordjadze’s exhibition at Gropius Bau, the artist playfully defamiliarzed the spatial conventions of exhibition and display, offering a dramaturgy of rearranged objects that gave refuge to all things discarded and dispossessed. In Barzakh at Kunsthalle Basel, Lydia Ourahmane’s uncanny relocation of her apartment in Algiers into the exhibition space unearthed the specters of colonial histories and their endurance in global regimes of borders and surveillance.
Best show in a nonprofit space
Adam Farah, WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM YOU AND MYSELF (PEAK MOMENTATIONS / INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE MIX) at Camden Arts Centre, London and Aykan Safoğlu, I’ll be your mirror at Kunstverein Göttingen.
Adam Farah’s maroon-tinged scenography of 90s nostalgia, Mariah Carey, and queer and diasporic worldmaking at Camden Arts Centre celebrated the subcultural desires that survive in London amid gentrification, Brexit, and technological control. Throughout Aykan Safoğlu’s photographic, moving image, and text-based artworks at Kunstverein Göttingen, the artist forged intimate modes of kinship with the wayward trajectories of migrant lives between and beyond the borders of Germany and Turkey.
Best virtual show or virtual art experience
Vdrome.org – films by Cana Bilir-Meier, Yalda Afsah, and Kani Marouf and the online “Talking” program of GOSSIP at M.1, Hohenlockstedt.
I always take an interest in Vdrome.org’s curation of artists’ films and videos alongside interviews with artists, and I was particularly impressed by Cana Bilir-Meier’s This Makes Me Want to Predict the Past, Yalda Afsah’s Vidourle, and Kani Marouf’s Images of a Favour. I also enjoyed the three respective online talks on gossip, algorithmic discrimination, and community-oriented exhibitions as part of the curatorial program GOSSIP at M.1, Hohenlockstedt, available on its YouTube channel.
Best Film
Cemile Sahin, Bad People, Bad News, 2021
Cemile Sahin’s essayistic film Bad People, Bad News (2021) was presented as a video installation within the exhibitionArbeit am Gedächtnis – Transforming Archives at Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and was screened at the 2021 Kurdish Film Festival Berlin. Sahin’s brilliant film explores the afterlives of dictatorship, state terror, and the building and destruction of monuments through a satirical subplot in which three Kurdish woman throw an annual hotel party to celebrate the death of Sadam Hussein.
Other highlights included the program of Sinema Transtopia at Haus der Statistik, Berlin, run by bi’bak; Traces by Aysun Bademsoy; All of Your Stars are but Dust on My Shoes by Haig Aivazian; and the new restoration of Ulkomaalainen/Yabancı (1980) by the Turkish-Swedish director Muammer Özer, a predecessor to contemporary films on migration.
Best Reading
Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds. Fitzcarraldo, 2021
Artist-run publications
My most compelling reading of the year was Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton, a writer and translator of Japanese literature. The book is a memoir of Barton’s experience learning Japanese and living in Japan, imaginatively structured as a glossary of the Japanese language’s onomatopoeic sounds. Throughout her impassioned narration, Barton describes how immersive language-learning profoundly reorients the body, desire, and the limits of linguistic and cultural understanding.
Amid another year of pandemic-induced precarity, I remain inspired by artist-run and independent publications that center marginalized voices, experimental forms, and modes of community among writers and readers, especially through funding and production structures separated from art/literary markets. I particularly enjoyed Failed States, Pilot Press, Fieldnotes Journal, and The Against Nature Journal, among others.
Best Text on Art Criticism
Boaz Levin, On Distance, (ed. Laura Preston), Atlas Projectos, 2020 and Brad Haylock & Megan Patty (eds.), Art Writing in Crisis. Sternberg Press, 2021.
I read Boaz Levin’s book-length essay On Distance in January 2021, and its ideas endured throughout my year. Through an intimate and recursive approach to its case study—Philip Scheffner’s documentary Havarie (2016), a filmic meditation on an adrift refugee boat—Levin entangles notions of spectatorship, separation, and longing, which the pandemic has intensified. I also greatly appreciated the volume Art Writing in Crisis, whose essays chart art writing’s current “crises” and reimagine new aesthetic and political trajectories for creating in the interstices of “art” and “writing.”
Best Fashion Show
SERAPIS, Let The Sea Resound, And All That Is In It, FW21 and SS22
How I long for anything from SERAPIS’ 2021/22 collection, in which the Athens-based collective continues their reinvention of Greek maritime culture through ethereal polychromatic garments of custom prints and local textiles.