Juan Acha is finally getting some recognition. Try searching for his texts in English and you will find a handful of articles about his importance, but little directly from the man who remains one of Latin America’s most relevant contemporary art critics and theoreticians twenty-two years after his death in 1995. As a remedy, Juan Acha: Por una Nueva Problemática Artística (Toward a New Artistic[…..]

What if the imagination made mountains rise up? Georges Didi-Huberman poses this question in Soulèvements (Uprisings), a new exhibition at the Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris. Throughout the museum’s galleries, contemporary artworks, books, historical documents, and photographs present a potent survey on the theme of social rebellions in the West, ranging from Victor Hugo’s call for the abolition of the death penalty (in[…..]

Phantoms of Latin American conflicts loom in Spectres, an exhibition by Fredi Casco, Teresa Margolles, and Rosângela Rennó at Mor Charpentier gallery in Paris. Inspired by Roland Barthes’ seminal text Camera Lucida, the exhibition organizes itself around the concept of the spectrum, as understood by Barthes—who wrote the book while trying to symbolically conjure the presence of his recently deceased mother—as the object pictured in[…..]

Francesc Ruiz’s solo exhibition at the Florence Loewy gallery in Paris, No Words, 3 Walls, 3D Porn is an exercise in media archeology, with the central subject Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Images of Nazi book-burning campaigns combined with social anxieties concerning the increasing hegemony of media suspected of the 1950’s newest technological advancement, the television, inspired Bradbury’s 1953 novel. Bradbury presents a society in which[…..]

After thirty years of the Guerrilla Girls presenting statistics that repeatedly show the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of women in public collections, museums, and galleries around the world, one would think that these institutions would have been driven to promote changes en masse, if only out of shame. Yet, as the New York–based feminist group keeps evidencing, the archaic status quo in the art world has proven[…..]

May 1, 1931—Thousands of people gather in the forest of Vincennes in the eastern outskirts of Paris to stroll around newly built re-creations of pagodas, palaces, and huts while observing the forest’s temporary tenants: whole tribes and families brought in from the French colonies in Africa and Asia. Meanwhile in Paris, the Surrealists are at work staging a counter-exhibition and publishing “The Truth About the[…..]

In a major solo exhibition, Ujamaa, at La Ferme du Buisson in the Parisian suburb of Noisiel, Kapwani Kiwanga addresses Tanzania’s uprisings. Known for using methodologies from the social sciences without being didactic, the artist draws on two significant moments in the history of the eastern African country to remember and question the ideals of pan-Africanism. The first is the 1905 revolt of Kinjeketile Ngwale,[…..]