ArtReview #167 - Counternarratives - September 2024

ArtReview #167 - Counternarratives - September 2024

For good or ill, the world is an interconnected place. The September issue of ArtReview explores some of the routes and channels – historic, personal, economic, ecological – that make up this unbalanced network, through the work of artists and thinkers who reflect on a global reality, and how we got to where we are.⁠
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If the museum is a place both of remembering and repression, its relationship to historical facts is always unstable. But as Izabella Scott asks in her essay, can there be history without facts? Surveying the works of artists such as Mercedes Azpilicueta, Shannon Alonzo and Dalton Paula (Paula’s painting Zeferina, 2018, appears on this month’s cover), Scott examines how artists deploy forms of fiction to rework and augment the often fragmented and biased historical records, to recreate the possible lives of queer, Indigenous and colonised subjects otherwise lost, to ‘create a missing ancestry by recovering forgotten lives’.⁠
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The political theorist and historian Françoise Vergès, meanwhile, has pursued a decades-long campaign to excavate the forgotten history of France’s postcolonial politics. In a new book, she turns her attention to the controversies that rage over the politics of Western museums. Talking to Sarah Jilani, Vergès explores the problems that come from demanding the museum’s reform while leaving its underlying structures unchanged. “When people in power understand that a certain form of inclusion does not threaten them,” she tells Jilani, “they are ready for it. So we must acknowledge that recognition is not the end of the fight.”⁠
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Elsewhere in the issue, London-based duo Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen talk to Chris Fite-Wassilak about how their complex, ironic work loops global supply chains back onto themselves, revealing the human and social histories of commodities and materials. There are reviews of Pacita Abad, Otobong Nkanga, Minoru Nomata, and many more. Plus, a new series of one-off comic commissions continues with a cryptic encounter by Joseph Kelley.⁠

About ArtReview:

Founded in 1949, ArtReview is one of the world’s leading international contemporary art magazines, dedicated to expanding contemporary art’s audience and reach, and tracing the ways it interacts with culture in general. Aimed at both a specialist and a general audience, the magazine and its sister publications, ArtReview Asia (launched in 2013) and a quarterly Chinese edition of ArtReview (published in partnership with Yishu Shijie and launched in 2022), feature a mixture of criticism, reviews, commentary and analysis alongside commissioned artist projects, guides and special supplements.