Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal’s Forms of Intimate Documentation, Kindl Berlin, 2023

In Voices without borders, Etel Adnan and Simone Fattal’s personal, creative and political connections play out in textiles, paintings, etchings, sculptures and writing – what the artists might call intersecting ‘orbits’. (Life partners, they shared a love of interstellar travel and the American space programme, and Adnan saw astronauts as martyrs.) Most intriguing, this show suggests, is their mutual exploration of the role of the witness via ephemeral and material entities: as colour, text and form, as the sun.

Adnan, who died in 2021, was a formalist; a lover of colour, of shape and its relationship to space. Two small oil paintings, Satellites 18 and 22 (both 2020), and the larger Composition dans l’espace (1960s/2003), clarify the Lebanese-American artist and writer’s aesthetic upfront. Brightly coloured geometric shapes hover, intersect and nest within each other, referencing modernist abstract paintings and childlike drawings of suns in skies; they’re joyful in their apparent straightforwardness, spirited in their gravitation towards the cosmos. Across the room, under glass, five minimal but equally energetic etchings (all 2020) by the Syrian-born Fattal indicate her own take on space and form. These works assume a bird’s-eye view referencing earth rather than sky, looking down. At first, Fattal’s gestures read as evidence or strange lingual marks to be followed like prints in sand. Closer, they become soldiers, buildings, bodies, bodies of water, forests, the titles suggesting an Arab cavalry, a mountain, a river in Damascus and a pre-Islamic Arab clan.

Review-Border crossings Mag

Yayoi Kusama,Gropius Bau, 2021

If anyone can teach us how to adapt, transform and persevere, it’s Yayoi Kusama. Her retrospective at the Gropius Bau in Berlin was staged chronologically, giving the audience clear (in)sight into the unfolding of her life, practice and career. At aged 92, Kusama’s authority in the art world as the oldest living and highest paid female artist was reflected in the colossal and inflated hot pink, polka-dotted tentacles installed in the building’s inner courtyard but also in the numerous black and white reproductions of Kusama, shown alongside the artworks. These mega-sized photos, often taking the size of the museum walls, helped to reveal what the exhibition texts could not: regardless of Kusama’s ability to shapeshift (drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, light, film, performance …), there is a body at the root, as fluid as she wishes it to be.

In the first of many galleries, an immense photo of 23-year-old Kusama amidst floor-to-ceiling paintings meets the audience, followed by another of young Kusama in a fur-collared coat, the latter printed on a giant hanging fabric. These rooms contained the artist’s earliest works, including those from her first two solo shows in Matsumoto in 1952. Made up of small to medium-sized framed drawings and oil paintings, they’re simple but stunning in composition, the colours surprisingly dispirited: muddy, bloody and dark. In Accumulation of the Corpses, 1950, for example, thick and curving rustred ropes rise from the bottom of the frame, taking on sinister figurations. Behind, a barbed-wire fence delineates a horizon.

Review-Mousse magazine

Berlin Gallery Weekend, Spring 2022

Compared to 2021, this year’s Gallery Weekend in Berlin felt surprisingly joyous. Visitors to Tanya Leighton on Friday met an impressive crowd (a novel experience since the days of COVID-19). In the nearby Mercator Hof, home to galleries Esther Schipper, Max Hetzler and a number of fashion designers, a food kiosk nourished stylish visitors, while galleries in Mitte maintained lingering Venice vibes by offering Aperol Spritz. Unexpectedly upbeat it was, considering the war in nearby Ukraine, Germany’s increased military spending, rising energy prices, and the plight of refugees in the city. Perhaps in response to, or in spite of this, the artists on exhibit this year displayed a trust in materials, putting art to the test in terms of its perceived role in times of catastrophe.

As Toni Morrison said in 1996, “Crisis, like war, demands final answers, quick and definitive action—to douse the flames, draw blood, soothe consciences.”1 Reflecting on approximately twenty of fifty-two official exhibitions, it seems gallery goers were asked to curb their need for immediate solutions, to hold their requests for artists to create future hypothetical models, albeit only for three days. Instead, they were asked to engage with artists who, rather than propose art should enact immediate change (it rarely does) or protect us (it never does), chose steadfast methods to communicate the tense confluence of events that is now. Feelings of anxiety, helplessness, and insecurity are anything but lacking. As a result, many exhibitions connected in unforeseen ways, creating unanticipated dialogues that spanned mediums, generations, and neighborhoods.