In Chung’s short stories, to survive and outlive is to encounter loss and solitude Bora Chung’s second compilation of short stories begins with a normal office drama, in which the main character, a low-level employee at the ‘Center for Immortality Research’, goes about preparing for the centre’s anniversary party. With its cranky humour and a storyline teeming with familiar bureaucratic ironies, the tale feels like an outlier to the seven macabre, apocalyptic sci-fis that follow. It is not until the story’s end that we learn that the section head was born in 1914 and is immortal. The theme of ..read more

A play by Olivia Erlanger at London’s ICA returns to the schools of philosophy that tried to decentre human subjectivity – and features horny, talking shower-heads After recently seeing a performance of Humour in the Water Coolant at the ICA, a play written by the artist Olivia Erlanger, I found myself wanting to reread a favourite book of mine from recent years. ‘I live, the way numbers live, and the stars; the way tanned hide ripped from the belly of an animal lives, and nylon rope; the way any object lives, in communion with another,’ reads a passage from The Employees: A Workplace Nov ..read more

Brussels Gallery Weekend 2023. Photo: Diego Ravier The 2024 edition of Brussels Gallery Weekend has been cancelled, its organisers announced. The news, which was shared via an Instagram post, marks the first time in 16 years that the event has not proceeded. ‘Various overlapping reasons have led to this decision,’ the organisers explain in their post, ‘including this year’s financial situation, which made it difficult to organize the event with the quality conditions to which the non-profit aspires.’ It is unclear whether Brussels Gallery Weekend has been suspended indefinitely, but the post e ..read more

Costa’s show at Emalin’s new space in London enlivens the critical tension between his scavenger sensibility and references to more refined modernist and minimalist forms Adriano Costa struggles to take off his pyjamas to a soundtrack of nonsensical chants and grunts, pausing to flex, twerk, stand on one leg and imitate a rabbit. Then he gets on his knees amid a pile of Tesco shopping bags, chewing them, stuffing them in his pants, waving one angrily at the camera, putting another over his head. Ever-present behind him is a version of Eero Aarnio’s spherical white ‘Ball Chair’, a slick late-mo ..read more

Nathan Carvalho, Porto Alege, 2024. Courtesy the artist. Prints sold in aid for flood relief Due to the devastating flooding in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, which has seen hundreds of fatalities and thousands displaced, the Mercosur Biennial has been postponed. The high-profile event, which has been staged in the state capital Porto Alegre since 1996, was due to open in September, but with many of venues at least partially damaged by water, it is not likely to not open until April 2025. Carmen Ferrão, the president of the Mercosur Biennial Foundation, said: ‘We believe in ..read more

The latest instalment of George Miller’s Mad Max saga finds The Wasteland as ravaged as our own world The Guardian of Gastown sets down his oils and admires his handiwork. It’s a scale copy of John William Waterhouse’s painting Hylas and the Nymphs (1896), and a carefully executed one. What might we take from this? The Guardian is a pallid, corpulent monster: maybe he envies the beauty of the young Argonaut Hylas. Or does he delight in knowing that the enchanting fairness of the boy is what will shortly doom him to swim among the naiads forever? Perhaps there is more. As we will come to see in ..read more

being alone at Soft Opening, London enforces something lewd about the gallery-viewing experience I was when I went into the gallery on a sunny Saturday afternoon. And it’s hard to imagine seeing Dean Sameshima’s being alone in anything like a group or a crowd. It would feel rude. In a way, unfaithful to what’s on show. The exhibition features 25 inkjet prints featuring individuals (in the main) who are seated (for the most part) in various small, shabby cinemas, with their backs to us, facing luminous, but blank, screens. Some of the spaces are more like domestic rooms; others fit more closely ..read more

Destiny Deacon © the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon has died aged 67. Deacon was best known for her darkly humorous take on racism, sexuality, feminism and the related historical injustices perpetrated against Australia’s First Nations communities. Credited for inventing the term ‘Blak’ in 1991, which is now regularly used to describe First Nations Australian contemporary art and culture, Deacon (of KuKu and Erub/Mer descent) made work via photography, video, performance and installation that often featured her collection of ‘Aboriginalia’. These kits ..read more

Wing Luke Museum, Seattle. Photo: Jmabel | CC BY-SA 3.0 Half the staff at the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle have walked out on the first day of an exhibition which they say conflates anti-Zionism with antisemitism. The museum worked with the the Washington State Jewish Historical Society on its Confronting Hate Together show and the protesting employees say texts within the exhibition ‘attempt to frame Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism’ and fail to present the voice of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslim communities. The museum, which is dedicated to the art and history of Asian ..read more

Al Qasimi’s shift to black-and-white in Toy World at The Third Line, Dubai burdens her usually visceral use of colour with a spectral weight Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs have long been associated with the clashing aesthetics of an unfolding Gulf futurism, in which living culture fuses with accelerative global capitalism. Living Room Vape (2016), for example, shows a domestic, Emirati space embodying the contemporary opulence of a gilded, Silk Road transculturalism. Colour and pattern play a visceral role in the artist’s imagery. During the pandemic, the move towards muted palettes and depicti ..read more