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The September issue of ArtReview looks at how histories are written, whose narrative purposes they serve (and don’t serve) and the artists who focus on the past as a moving target, one that changes and morphs over time.
Take this month’s cover artist, Naeem Mohaiemen: his newest work, THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, is ‘not about dissecting past events per se,’ writes Oliver Basciano, ‘it’s about centring the way in which narratives surrounding those events have evolved as time progresses’. In his film, Mohaiemen considers the aftermath of two events in which student protesters were killed by authorities in the US in 1970: the difference in awareness of and response to the killings of white students at Ohio’s Kent State compared to that of Black students at Mississippi’s Jackson State, and the way the killings were remembered and memorialised at different stages in history.
Stephen Prina, meanwhile, opens a dialogue with the past and creates an expansive system of ideas, strategies and references that are ‘on speaking terms with the broader workings of the art system, but more often, more eagerly, willing to talk to itself’, writes Jeremy Gloster. Prina’s ongoing series Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (1988–) transforms the 556 paintings of Manet’s corpus as recorded in a 1969 publication into a series of abstract monochromes. His practice more broadly ‘has come to encompass sculpture, painting, video, sound and performance, often exhibited alongside one another within installations, projects that are frequently restaged, reworked and reconsidered over time’.
Jenny Wu takes a close look at Kerry James Marshall’s painting School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012), which is ‘laden with allusions to art history’s greatest hits’, including Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) and Chris Ofili’s Blossom (1997). ‘Marshall has spent his career restoring Black figures – in the form of figures whose skin is literally black – to the Western art-historical canon,’ writes Wu. ‘He has his Black figures perform a discursive function – that of filling a visual and epistemological void in the histories and institutions of art left by the historical exclusion of Black self-representation.’
Gala Porras-Kim takes on museums and private collections, and their modes of recording histories and people’s relationships with objects through time. Assembling and reorganising items from existing collections within her paintings, she seems to suggest that we might find new logics and alternative associations between objects. ‘Her work addresses the peculiar ways in which historical objects have been classified, displayed and organised, and how that, as a result, has limited and proscribed our own understanding of the objects, ourselves and the world,’ writes Chris Fite-Wassilak.
Elise Morton dives into Almagul Menlibayeva’s photograph Red Butterfly (2012), part of the artist’s series My Silk Road to You (2010–), in which ‘the artist examines how identity, gender and heritage in Central Asia are shaped by layered histories of empire, trade and erasure of the region’s cultural memory’. And Alessandro Rabottini discusses the ‘whispering proximity’ of Victor Man’s intimate paintings. Borrowing from the iconography of Western art history, they inhabit an ambiguous space both distant and familiar, writes Rabottini. In Pietäs (Flower of Gaza) (2025), for example these tropes are anchored in the current context of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and rendered in Man’s usual minor-key palette.
Also in this issue, Paz Errázuriz talks to Finn Blythe about photographing subjects outside of official narratives under the censorship of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship; Joanna Walsh asks why artists have to be the ones to police all the unethical sponsorship money that’s out there; Antony Gormley claims public sculpture might be the way out of the ever-increasing technological constraints of cities; and J.J. Charlesworth tells you what to think about Immanuel Kant’s 1784 article What is Enlightening, in which the philosopher argues you ought to think for yourself.
Plus reviews of exhibitions across the world, including the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, Wolfgang Tillmans in Paris, Stan Douglas in New York, Ser Serpas in Basel and Joana Choumali in Abidjan; and books by James Delbourgo, Bénédicte Savoy, Stewart Home and more.
That’s not all. ArtReview’s September issue is accompanied by a standalone publication celebrating contemporary Korean Art, supported by the Korea Arts Management Service. The publication includes newly commissioned projects by Sun Young Oh, Hong Jin-hwon, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES and Cha Ji Ryang, conversations between selected artists and gallerists, interviews with the curators of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale and the artistic directors of the Sea Art Festival, insight from local artists and gallerists on what to see and do in Seoul and a handy gallery guide.
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