ArtReview Asia - Autumn 2024

ArtReview Asia - Autumn 2024

ArtReview Asia recently became aware of what feels like a burgeoning trend whereby artists today describe their location of residence as where they’re ‘based’ – a word choice that relates more to pragmatism and transience than a sense of domesticity. Which makes ArtReview Asia wonder what is meant by calling a place home. The Autumn issue explores the different ways in which people relate to their environments, highlighting how they shape and share spaces with others.

For Pakistani filmmaker Hira Nabi, to inhabit a place is to experience a ‘shared consciousness’ with one’s surroundings, trees in particular. In her most recent work, Wild Encounters (2023) – part of a bigger project, How to Love a Tree, launched in 2019 – which will be presented at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv this month, the relationship between the forest in Murree, Pakistan, and its residents is explored, specifically the synchronised temporalities between the two. ‘At one point these temporalities are listed, as periods of climatic change or seasonal growth,’ Mark Rappolt writes. ‘At other times the video presents the forest as home to a litter of discarded ceramics, a human-made trash heap.’ This varying existence likewise has opposing consequences. ‘If part of the work, with scenes of the forest mists, is designed to take us into a leafy dreamworld, there are occasional reminders that this is only a dream.’

ArtReview Asia offers a mixture of criticism, reviews, commentary and analysis alongside commissioned artist projects, guides and special supplements.