***Subscribe now or get your copy from our online shop***
Are you worried about life? Having a hard time figuring out what’s going on in the world right now? If so, worry no more. ArtReview Asia’s summer issue is about entanglements and how to deal with them. Both in terms of untangling (for optimists) and acceptance of a certain amount of ‘entangulation’. Along the way, this issue looks at knotty clumps of colonialism, race, language, cultural tradition and a certain amount of armed conflict. Yep, just another day for ArtReview Asia.
Singaporean artist Priyageetha Dia’s work perpetually enquires after the spaces that remain for resistance against the boxes into which contemporary society wishes to place us. Or as Adeline Chia writes, it fights against ‘the oppressive and extractive structures under which modern life takes place’. Working largely with digital animation, sound design and installation, Dia’s recent work draws on the Black radical tradition, which she adapts in her unpicking of the Tamil diaspora in Southeast Asia and more broadly in the Indian Ocean world. From labourers on rubber plantations to migrant workers undertaking perilous sea journeys, Dia charts the logics and methodologies of colonial extraction through to the infrastructures and architecture of contemporary tech regimes.
Shaunak Mahbubani, meanwhile, takes a look at rippling consequences of the Iran War and how they are transmitted as a result of our widely neglected ‘evolutionary connection to the soil and seas’. Looking to artists and thinkers who refuse a collective amnesia of our shared beginnings (an amnesia that allows for the continued military plunder of our environment), the author looks to different understandings of ‘ocean memory’, and to works that highlight ‘the relations between water and those who inhabit or interact with it’. Among them Hira Nabi, who highlights the human and nonhuman interactions in a shipbreaking yard in Pakistan; Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, who records the sounds of a similar yard in Alang, India; and Charwei Tsai, who invokes the wave-emulating rituals of women from the Tao community in Lanyu, off the coast of Taiwan.
The writer Shahrnush Parsipur and the artist Shirin Neshat reflect on the novel Women Without Men (1989). Written by the former and made into a film by the latter, it follows the lives of five women, set against the backdrop of the 1953 coup that overthrew the Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The book was banned in Iran shortly after its publication. In Neshat’s 2009 adaptation, the political context is made more explicit, following four women from different social backgrounds whose lives intersect during a period of political unrest in Tehran, and including scenes of public demonstration and military intervention. Now, following a publication of a new English-language translation of the book by Faridoun Farrokh, the writer and the artist discuss the original text, its afterlives, its translation into film and its continuing relevance today.
Also in this issue, Yiyi You argues that despite its restrictions, closures and a generational exodus, Beijing’s art scene remains uniquely compelling; Pallavi Surana considers the questions, both intended and unintended, about what constitutes ‘home’, that are raised by the Indian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale; Max Crosbie-Jones wonders what you get when you combine art, marine conservation and tourism in the Cambodian resort town of Kep; Fi Churchman considers the work of Uzbek filmmaker Saodat Ismailova that explores how present realities are shaped by the ever-shifting entanglements between humans, nonhumans and the landscapes they co-inhabit or haunt in Central Asia; and Stephanie Bailey speaks to Palestinian filmmaker Shuruq Harb about ‘looking for a way out’.
Plus, exhibition reviews of Spectrosynthesis Seoul, Kawita Vatanajyankur in Bangkok, Oototol in Jakarta, Cian Dayrit in Hong Kong and more; alongside reviews of books by Bassem Khandaqji, Sohrab Hura and Ali Kazim and Hammad Nasar.
***Subscribe now or get your copy from our online shop***
