Autrewise 
New York Spring 2025

Camille Henrot’s A Number of Things at Hauser and Wirth centers around a number of rather idiosyncratic dogs tethered together, evoking a dog park, which we learn later from Camille is based on the dog park she takes her dog to on the upper west side. She suggests there seems to be a tacit competition to see who can adopt the most difficult or disabled dog. The large light filled Chelsea gallery has been fitted with a pleasant playground like turf, set on a grid, and holding a number of playful sculptures. The ludic spirit of this collection of objects is paired with a quote from David Graeber on how arbitrary our codes and rules are, and how easy it is to be made differently. Downtown at the Elizabeth street garden the struggle continues to keep a small, beautiful ludic space from the encroaching developers. 

The Laura Owens painting show was on everyone's lips. Another ludic, instagram-ready immersive space of beauty, wonder and humor. Tyler Mitchell’s presentation at Gagosian gracefully reanimated photography's material possibilities, while honoring a formal history wistfully cinematic and tonally subdued. A couple of days prior, I was at the ICP to hear a lecture by Fred Richen on his new book about the implications of AI in photography, and especially so for journalism. Ritchin opened the talk with some complex ethical dilemmas posed by these technological developments, including the decision to post the heroic image of the Trump assassination attempt and a recent AI generated image of Colombian protesters used by large liberal news organizations to protect the protestors identities. 

Ritchin, long laboring in the murky ethical waters of journalistic integrity, advocates for a system of best practices he calls four corners (link), a digitally native interface intervention providing additional context, by way of an author's statement, editorial context, related images and relevant links or citations. It’s a brilliant and pragmatic response to the arbitrary and failing journalistic conventions persistently reprdocued through the digital turn. It struck me listening to his talk that while written journalism endeavors, at least in theory, towards objectivity and a multiplicity of perspectives, visual journalism has tended simply towards iconicity and sensation. Ritchin maintains a commitment to the power of images to effect social change and earnestly advocates for a mediascape in which images can be better evaluated, widely circulated and acted upon.

Cross town at the Performance Garage, the Wooster Group’s Nayatt School Redux resuscitated a Spalding Gray piece—self described as his first fully formed monologue and conceived with Elizabeth LeCompte—from an archival tape with mostly unintelligible audio. Kate Valk reenacted the 1976 proceedings in front of the video as she overdubbed, intervened and commented on what happened and how things developed in the group's history. A beautiful, nostalgic, loving act, reflective appraisal and generous window into this incredible and enduring group. 

I made it to the performance after being conscripted to a music video for the artist Nona Hendryx at Jack Shainman's impressive new Tribeca location, where Nick Cave's towering sculpture was drawing large crowds of Instagrammers. Jack gave us a tour of the inner vaults, built on reinforced concrete before the building was erected around it. Earlier in the afternoon, I saw Dustin Hodges' beautiful paintings at the absolutely gorgeous Orient 15.  Evenings arrived and friends, almost biblically, would suggest a kind of pilgrimage down to The River, a stuffy, lively basement bar in Chinatown. A new friend at a venerated Lower East side art bookstore, suggested an experimental writing space on Orchard called Earth. A kind of collectively articulated longing for a greater ecology perhaps. 

At MoMA, a beautiful survey of the Mumbai Collective CAMP’s diverse archival, social and visual projects. The highlight, a piece stitched together with early cell phone videos of sailors on the Indian Ocean in varying moments of curiosity, wonder, joy, and exhaustion. A beautiful internal portrait of contemporary maritime trade flows and the people who enable them. Many of the videos were set to popular song. A low resolution and exuberantly scored clip of a pod of dolphins breaching playfully in the shimmering light was truly magnificent. 

The Jack Witten painting show was excellent, I particularly loved the smaller works on paper, done during a residency at Xerox. Julio Galán between Kurimanzutto and Luhring Augustine was strong. Joan Jonas’ empty rooms memorial installation to lost friends was very beautiful, simply constructed floating rice paper sculptures, silhouettes and Jason Moran’s piano. 

British artist and conceptualist Stanley Schtinter, in town for the premiere of his impossible Snow White remake Schneewittchen, did a run at Anthology and an evening of cuts and stories from his legendary purge.xxx record label at NYU’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture accompanied by an unbelievable performance by the Colloquium’s own Sukhdev Sandhu.

I saw the Swamp Summit at Dia:Chelsea, thoughtfully convened by José Esparza Chong Cuy, as part of an ongoing exploration through his epistemic framework of the swamp. A theme of hydropolitics and their infrastructures emerged intersectionally with indigenous led presentations and collaborative projects from the Mexican Gulf and the Mekong. Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan hosted visitors the following day at their brilliant transnational South Asian exploration of hydropolitics and poetics HOW MUCH WATTAGE IS ONE HANDBREADTH OF WATER? at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Their travelling exhibition draws out connections between iconic architectures, hydroelectric dams, and indigenous land rights. 

At McNally Jackson I found and promptly began book-clubbing Constantine Tsoucalas’ The Age of Anxiety, a mature diagnosis of our globalizing, neoliberal, alienated, psychological maladies. At printed matter, I sat with kimi malka hanauer’s hands-on, researched based, participatory archive and self publishing project ungovernable. I’ll include an extended passage from Printed Matter’s website including a statement from the artist:

The artist’s everyday archive takes as its point of departure poet and author Mahmoud Darwish’s 1992 ode “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia.” In the poem, Darwish mobilizes the collective memory of Andalusia, the society that coalesced during a period of Muslim governance over much of the Iberian Peninsula, as a metaphor for a “lost paradise” and recalls the nightmare through which it eroded. Picking up where Darwish’s ode leaves off, hanauer’s archive aims to engage the “after-ending” of this historical commons. Through material and research-driven interventions, they surface the mirrored political demands of Darwish’s positioning of Andalusia and their own attempts at its recollection as a dislocated familial origin story. As they write in their accompanying text:

In the after-ending, we find that many “worlds” have already ended, and yet, here we still are as carriers of their potential: agents of their possible reemergence and/or participants in their continued destruction. The after-ending might begin in language, but it tasks us with material demands: to return that which empire claims as its “ruins.” In the after-ending, Darwish writes, “Soon we will search / in the margins of your history, in distant countries, / for what was once our history.” And I attempt a response: We return with many Andalusias—and all they represent—“on the land” and “in the poem.” This, afterall, is what Darwish exemplifies as the everyday work of a resistance poet—to steal back imperial conceptions of time and wield, in language, the unmaking of the “world order” that they require.

The exhibition archive dovetailed with a strong talk given contemporaneously by Ariella Azoulay at CARA on her two two recent books on Muslim Jews and their pre European colonialization harmonious coexistence. One a nearly 700 page experimental epistolary collection published by Verso and the other a children's book for her granddaughter, both intent on remembering peaceful times, strong kinship and artful practices. 

I had a lovely evening celebrating the release of Eva Diaz’s After Spaceship Earth, a decade in the making and exploring our grim present cosmopolitcal projects and alternative space imaginaries. The evening was hosted by Cabinet Magazine and offered a conversation with Trevor Paglan, a short from Allora & Calzadilla, and a musical performance by Nick Hallett.  

Hiwa K screened some artist films and spoke with Anton Vidokle at e-flux about his challenging journeys and his poetic responses and sublimations. He told a story of being a young man travelling to Europe from Kurdistan by foot, walking through Iran, Turkey, Greece and Italy to Germany, a voyage he would later reconstruct slowly while balancing a tall sculpture made of mirrors on his nose. When he arrived in Germany he went to a party and saw a group of young people. He bought a handful of beers and delivered it to them asking ‘what did I miss?’ He went on to describe that encounter as him wanting deeply a sense of belonging and friendship, and treating the situation as if he had just gone to the bathroom and was returning warmly to a group of friends. This as-ifness, as he put it, was a driving force in his work.