Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo
For her first solo presentation at the New Museum, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (also known as Puppies Puppies) has taken over the lobby gallery for an enduring performance that distorts and diverts our senses of sight and sound. Basking in the joy of found objects, the artist has transformed the space into a railroad-style apartment with a zen garden up front, a central room, and a back room filled with marijuana seedlings. Both the gallery and the museum café are stocked with an extensive selection of acid green products (perhaps referencing her name), including, among others: four bottles of Emerald Fabuloso cleaner, six dark jars of liquid chlorophyll, six bags of sour cream and onion Lay’s potato chips, eight cans of Del Monte canned green beans, seven bottles of lime Perrier sparkling water, three jars of Loisa Sofrito, three bottles of aloe vera hand soap by Dial, 25 bottles of Ito En green tea, and two boxes of Ito En Oi Ocha green tea bags. In this reflective environment that combines performer, performance, and product, the artist is present everywhere.
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist doesn’t embrace feminism. Rather, as she stated to The Guardian in 2011, she considers herself “politically,” but not “personally” feminist, which contradicts the 1970s principle that the personal is always political. Rist prefers other terms like ‘wild and friendly’. The utopia she constructs predates politics, more akin to the Garden of Eden than a militant commune. Her latest exhibition, ‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon’, displays storefronts with names of activists like Sojourner Truth and Amaranta Gómez Regalado, thus nodding to the political realm without making explicit comments. She has also drawn inspiration from other avant-garde women artists like Yoko Ono. Rist’s work may seem innocent, with a whimsical effect akin to Icelandic pop star Björk. Both women use art to evoke new, powerful worlds, captivating us with their wide reinvention of the damaged world we inhabit.
Shilpa Gupta
In recent years, Shilpa Gupta has explored various ways of paying homage to poets punished by governments for speaking freely. Her most iconic work, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017-18), is an auditory installation honoring the verses of 100 historically and contemporarily incarcerated writers. Addressing the solitary and anguishing plight of imprisoned poets worldwide, the piece consists of 100 menacing metal spikes piercing sheets of paper containing excerpts of poems, along with the years during which the writers were deprived of liberty. Each spike is accompanied by a hollowed-out microphone and a speaker playing a recording of each poet’s work, read or sung in their original language. At times, the speeches are individual, at others, they blend together, but they always offer a striking sonic representation of poetry’s persistence despite extreme repression.
Ligia Lewis
Ligia Lewis, Mame Diarra Speis, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, and Corey Scott-Gilbert are immobilized in angular postures on the floor. As I enter, they are emerging from their paralysis with slow, convulsive movements that suggest in various ways impact, fatigue, and rebirth.
Stand Here Still (2023) -the eponymous “experiment turned duration,” as the press release defines it, from Lewis’s exhibition at the Center for Art, Research, and Alliances (CARA)- is filled with pauses, stumbles, and dizzying landings that populate the artist’s early forays into stage and camera. There’s the tapping of legs, the stomping and wobbling pileup of insignificant objects (2016) that emphasizes the urgency of collectivity. There’s the tumultuous “meat in falling” -a term Lewis recently used in conversation- of Still Not Now (2021), where bodies collide and fall to the ground, losing their stability, their meaning. Guzmán resonates with the start of Water Will (in Melody) (2018) as he mimics a melodramatic smile that turns into a furrowed brow. Lewis’s shifting eyes blink complicitly and then swiftly retreat into an empty expression, a potent containment mechanism in More Dead than Dead (2020), projected on the first-floor gallery at CARA.
Aki Sasamoto Museum
“Expel us, expel us!” Aki Sasamoto exclaimed from behind a wall with a green door. The monotonous façade -just moments before, a static backdrop that was part of her installation-performance Squirrel Ways (2022)- suddenly emerged as dynamic as the artist who, ceaselessly yelling, propelled it swiftly towards the seated audience. Spectators hesitated, unsure, before they began to scatter. The wall absurdly continued its surreal advance until everyone was pushed out of the room. The performance had concluded. Squirrel Ways, which premiered in the United States at the American Academy of Arts and Letters this spring, presented a fluid environment of reconfigurable divisions inspired by Japanese fusuma and shoji, sliding panels used to shape the internal spaces of a dwelling and demarcate the interior from the exterior. Before expelling the audience from the “dwelling” and the performance, Sasamoto moved the divisions, twisted to slide and slip between them, and opened the mulberry paper panels of the shoji to extract embedded fishing lures and rulers. While ridiculing conceptions of architectural immobility, the artist ruminated aloud on our relationship with our belongings and with others, highlighting the instability of more abstract borders. At what point do our objects become extensions of ourselves, or do we become extensions of the objects? To what extent is the dividing line between self and other, or interior and exterior, porous? What happens to the reconfigurable?
