Gazi Nafis Ahmed. Shahinoor & Nipa #2, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist. “I am a woman and I love another woman. I want to live with my lover. I don’t want anyone to come between us. We don’t want anyone among us to commit suicide, to get hurt, to become addicted to drugs, to cut themselves. Let us live the way we want to. Now is the time to open up and talk about it.”

In the United States, we tend to think of citizenship as a privilege, but it is not hard to imagine how it could instead be a curse when your very right to exist is challenged in your home country. In 2015, Europe received more than a million refugees—many of whom destroyed their own identity cards in order to erase their national identity so that they could not be deported back to their home countries. The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention guarantees asylees the right of non-refoulement, which prevents any signatory state from sending refugees back to countries where their lives are in danger due to persecution. This was a response to the persecution of Jews and others under Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Convention constitutes an effort to ensure that such genocides never happen again. But as the global refugee population climbs to sixty-five million, receiving countries struggle to adjust, and many countries have closed their borders altogether so that refugees might never arrive. Forced migration is an issue that often remains in the shadows, but many artists are struggling to find a place where they can express their own views without fear of persecution.

The singer Paul Robeson famously quipped that he was a citizen of the world, and while this sentiment is more common than ever in our globalized age, Robeson’s own experience demonstrates citizenship’s limitations. While speaking out against injustice in the United States, he was hounded by Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and was even denied the right to travel abroad in the 1950s. Robeson’s story is tragic and represents a kind of wound that many artists confront to this day. Ai Weiwei was jailed in 2011 and had his passport confiscated for years by Chinese authorities due to his criticism of the government. These cases are but symptoms of a much larger trend of persecuting artists whose work transgresses the norms of their eras or expands social or political conversation beyond the views advocated by the government. Robeson and Ai allow us to see how making art with a conscience can lead to a form of precarious citizenship.

Read the full article here.

Camille Pissarro. Apple Harvest, 1888; oil on canvas; 24 x 29.13 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Take away the more iconic images of Impressionism, whether sylvan glades or water lily umbrellas, and you might find something entirely new under the teeming surfaces of colorful brushstrokes. Organized by inveterate Impressionism scholar Richard Brettell and coordinated here by James Ganz of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Pissarro’s People at the Legion of Honor reconsiders an essential figure of the Impressionist movement whose name is not as familiar as Monet’s or Renoir’s. Even the most astute students of art history may be surprised by this exhibition; at last we have an Impressionist’s vision of domestic life, agricultural work, and radical politics joined in a single presentation. Those who think that the best lessons on anarchism can be found at Occupy Wall Street are bound to discover that artists have been there long before.

Read the full review here.

Andres Felipe Orjuela. Luis Aldana Uno de los Antisociales Detenidos en la Mañana de Hoy Cuando Trataba de Huir (Luis Aldana One of the Antisocial Arrested in the Morning While Trying to Escape), 2014; photograph on cotton paper, illuminated with Marshall’s pigments. Courtesy of the Artist and SF Camerawork.

SF Camerawork’s current exhibition of contemporary Colombian photography was curated by a pair of Colombian curators, Carolina de Ponce de León (former executive director of Galería de la Raza) and Santiago Rudea Fajardo, an independent curator and critic. Though the exhibition features only four artists, it successfully captures a wide range of topics and approaches in the photographic medium.

Zoraida Diaz and Luz Elena Castro are primarily photojournalists whose straight photography captures the political context of Colombia in the 1980s, as well as more recent images from political protests in Baltimore this spring produced by Diaz. Diaz has a fantastic eye for human expression, unearthing a deeper truth behind protests and political events. Castro is subtler, and her array of images covering revolutionary violence and peace negotiations say much more about the exercise of power than any protest slogan could. Her empathy for her subjects is nowhere sharper than in La Moda Nace Aqui [Fashion is Born Here] (1993), a portrait of a young girl selling toy cars on the street in Leticia, Bogotá in front of a closed boutique with a painted mural on the front of its security shutter. The child is dressed in her Sunday best and she just beams in front of a shabby, awkward mural of a fashionably dressed woman. Her pride makes the viewer forget that this is an image of child labor.

Read the full article here.

Susan O’Malley. Less Internet More Love, from the series Advice From My 80-Year-Old Self, 2015; mural at Bob McGee’s Machining Co., Inc., 2735 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley. Courtesy of Kala Art Institute. Photo: Bob McGee’s Machining Co., Inc.

The medium of print has a long history of expanding art into the public realm, and Print Public at Kala Art Institute has boldly pushed the envelope of the role of print in the urban context via a highly inventive series of public workshops and interactions that led up to the current gallery presentation. Kala presents this project not only as a gallery show but as a long-term collaboration with its neighbors and UC Berkeley: “Print Public was conceived in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of City & Regional Planning as an arts-integrated approach to urban planning and community activation.” Because the project was developed and elaborated over a two-year period, the involved artists had ample opportunity to design innovative ways to integrate the local community into their projects. Most devised a public dimension designed to bring attention and visitors to West Berkeley, where Kala is located, and then collaborated with residents to produce interactive, or at least locally informed, works. The exhibition organizers call this a “place-making initiative.” Such terminology can have many meanings, but the intent in this case was for the assets of the neighborhood to be explored by the artists and then reflected back to give residents a sense of their own community. Perhaps it is not so much place making as place finding.

Read the full article here.

Kim Anno. Water City Kids, 2013; large-format photograph; 38 x 28 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future of humanity through a multiplatform work of art offers an answer with play and consistent hope, despite imagery of rising waters and the gravitas of an ancient Greek chorus.

Water City Berkeley—a live musical performance centered around a dual projection that ran for two shows on Saturday, December 7, at the Kala Art Institute—is the fourth chapter in Anno’s Men and Women in Water Cities series, and it is the most ambitious to date. This ongoing project of Anno’s, who is Professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, marks two important turns that inform one another: the first, from abstract painting to film-centric work that engages contemporary political content; and the second, from working solo in her studio to a collaborative mode of production. Anno has embraced other artists—composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, even cheerleaders—in order to enrich and to complicate the visions she harbors of our world and its future development.

Water City Berkeley’s vision of a half-submerged future draws on collaborations with Oberlin Dance choreographer KT Nelson, who has contributed beautiful compositions to the film performed by dancers half-submerged in the waters of the Bay. Composer David Coll’s provocative score, played live by SF Sound Players and the Berkeley Chamber Ensemble during the performances, is full of whimsical surprise due to its enigmatic rhythms and diachronic temporality.

The film itself is a carefully edited, 21-minute dual-screen projection featuring three sections carefully paced to deliver both a narrative and powerful imagery. The first sequence, “Work and Days,” features men and women in corporate dress on the beach and in the surf. The next segment, “Inexorable Tea House,” was filmed in the Tea House at the Oakland Estuary and combines readings from Oedipus Rex with a musical performance by a masked band of musicians (Kingdom of Not) accompanied by dancers. In the last and most dazzling section, “Poseidon’s Race,” a game of Capture the Flag is played on the beach, including dancers in referee costumes, athletes, cheerleaders, and children who seem to be performing a kind of ritual. Echoes of political domination are re-created in the form of play via the flags and airborne chest bumps. The visionary effect of the cinematography is enhanced by episodic interventions from an extra-filmic live chorus, who recite passages from Greek tragedies from behind the seated viewers. The august voices of ancient playwrights, newly retranslated by Anno, give the film’s images a sense of history and a common destiny amid our world’s changing ecology. By the end of the performance, there was not a hair left resting on the back of my neck.

John Zarobell is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Chair of European Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 

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Trevor Paglen. Circles, 2015 (video still); video; 12:00. Courtesy of the Artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.

Trevor Paglen’s career has taken off like a spy satellite. He has become a key political artist of our time, despite the fact that his larger project is to represent something quite difficult to depict visually—namely, government secrecy. His work draws our attention to (if it does not always actually reveal) the network of sites, operations, and practices on which our government spends our tax dollars in the name of protecting us. The arrival of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden in the popular consciousness, and all of the related revelations that subsequently emerged, have only made Paglen’s work seem more prescient and relevant. His fascinations are now our fascinations. And so Paglen, whose contributions to the 2014 Snowden documentary Citizenfour recently won him the right to share an Oscar, finds himself a standard-bearer for committed political art.

Paglen is interested in the landscape and the things our government likes to hide there. As artworks, his photographs and videos are usually without incident and gesture toward conceptual aesthetics—aren’t we all Duchampians now? In his latest show at Altman Siegel Gallery, Autonomy Cube (2014), a computer server encased in a Plexiglas cube, is poised on a pedestal in the middle of the gallery. The piece toys formally with Marcel Duchamp’s famous Fountain (1917) and the minimalist cubes of Robert Morris and so many others. Like many previous works by Paglen, for instance his pictures of secret government sites that can barely be perceived because they are so incredibly distant, or of satellites so tiny and far away that all we apprehend is the beautiful night sky, Autonomy Cube manifests the gap between the desire to expose something sinister and the desire to produce something visually cool and oblique. The distance between the work and its meaning is odd, even uncomfortable. That is the point.

Read the full article here.

Gohar Dashti. Untitled #5 from the series Today’s Life and War, 2008; pigment print. Courtesy of Cantor Arts Center, Palo Alto.

Countless narrative threads run through this unprecedented exhibition. Most of the women photographers who are featured hail from the Middle East, and all engage with dynamics of contemporary Muslim culture, violence, and the region’s complicated relationship with Western ways of seeing (and thinking). The curators who assembled the exhibition clearly meant to highlight photography as a storytelling device; almost all of the works in the show are drawn from series.

The decision to focus on women photographers exposes a [Western] political subtext of presenting the world from a female perspective. The politics involve the reversal of the gaze, the refutation of stereotypes, and the repudiation of Orientalism, that long-standing tradition of representation emerging from Europe that so often placed “exotic” women from “the East” in the position of objects to be consumed. This subtext introduces a curious paradox to the exhibition: These artists are not usually interested in telling stories that return the gaze of “the West” or correct false stereotypes. Certainly there are exceptions—Boushra Almutawakel offers correctives to the incursion of more restrictive veiling, while Shadi Ghadirian delivers send-ups of nineteenth-century Orientalist images of Middle Eastern women—but the overall message that emerges from this exhibition is not concerned with the perception of Middle Eastern women by Westerners or conservatives in their own countries. Instead, the viewer encounters moments of experience and glimpses of protest in images that are sometimes staged and sometimes straight but always full of personal meaning.

Read the full article here.

Kim Anno. Water City Kids, 2013. Large format photograph; 38 x 28 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Why celebrate when the world is going to hell? Kim Anno’s ambitious effort to envision the future of humanity through a multiplatform work of art offers an answer with play and consistent hope, despite imagery of rising waters and the gravitas of an ancient Greek chorus.

Water City Berkeley—a live musical performance centered around a dual projection that ran for two shows on Saturday, December 7, at the Kala Art Institute—is the fourth chapter in Anno’s Men and Women in Water Cities series, and it is the most ambitious to date. This ongoing project of Anno’s, who is Professor of Painting at California College of the Arts, marks two important turns that inform one another: the first, from abstract painting to film-centric work that engages contemporary political content; and the second, from working solo in her studio to a collaborative mode of production. Anno has embraced other artists—composers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, even cheerleaders—in order to enrich and to complicate the visions she harbors of our world and its future development.

Water City Berkeley’s vision of a half-submerged future draws on collaborations with Oberlin Dance choreographer KT Nelson, who has contributed beautiful compositions to the film performed by dancers half-submerged in the waters of the Bay. Composer David Coll’s provocative score, played live by SF Sound Players and the Berkeley Chamber Ensemble during the performances, is full of whimsical surprise due to its enigmatic rhythms and diachronic temporality.

The film itself is a carefully edited, 21-minute dual-screen projection featuring three sections carefully paced to deliver both a narrative and powerful imagery. The first sequence, “Work and Days,” features men and women in corporate dress on the beach and in the surf. The next segment, “Inexorable Tea House,” was filmed in the Tea House at the Oakland Estuary and combines readings from Oedipus Rex with a musical performance by a masked band of musicians (Kingdom of Not) accompanied by dancers. In the last and most dazzling section, “Poseidon’s Race,” a game of Capture the Flag is played on the beach, including dancers in referee costumes, athletes, cheerleaders, and children who seem to be performing a kind of ritual. Echoes of political domination are re-created in the form of play via the flags and airborne chest bumps.  The visionary effect of the cinematography is enhanced by episodic interventions from an extra-filmic live chorus, who recite passages from Greek tragedies from behind the seated viewers. The august voices of ancient playwrights, newly retranslated by Anno, give the film’s images a sense of history and a common destiny amid our world’s changing ecology. By the end of the performance, there was not a hair left resting on the back of my neck.

John Zarobell is Assistant Professor of International Studies and Program Chair of European Studies at the University of San Francisco. Formerly, he held the positions of assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and associate curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.