Bruce Nauman’s 1985 sculpture, Double Poke in the Eye II, depicting two human heads outlined in neon inspired the title and format of the exhibition. A student of Robert Arneson and William Wiley at the University of California at Davis, Nauman was involved with the nucleus of so-called Funk art, the region’s most widely publicized art-historical category of the 1960s. Although the Funk roster doesn’t typically include Nauman’s work, the sculpture’s motorized neon fingers poking at the eyes signal the goals of Funk’s aesthetic iconoclasm.     

Funk is a pivot point for curator Carrie Dedon, who has split the exhibition into five thematic galleries. The first displays a Funk icon, Arneson’s John with Art (1964), a lumpy, stoneware toilet sculpture with ceramic excrement in the bowl and gestural splashes of color on the tank. Situating their work somewhere between neo-Dada and Pop Art’s poke at the high-art citadel, Arneson and his colleagues shamelessly embraced amateurish craftsmanship, in-jokes, put-ons and quirky narratives. John with Art, one of Arneson’s first “mature” works, illustrates basic visual tenants of Bay Area ceramic Funk—cartoonish figurative form, vernacular subject matter, adolescent humor, and a provocative disrespect for aesthetic dogma.  

Alongside Arneson’s toilet are works by Seattle ceramist Howard Kottler (1930–1989), who, along with University of Washington colleague Patti Warashina, were initially classified as northern exemplars of Funk, albeit a formally “clean” variant of the Bay Area’s production. These local renegades, who shared the Californians’ taste for visual puns and irreverent disregard for tradition, serve as this show’s conceptual lynchpin.   

Kottler began his career at Ohio State University, where the ceramics program was centered on glaze technology and Asian traditions. After he earned a rare PhD degree in ceramics and began teaching at the University of Washington, he gradually abandoned his earlier conservative production in favor of more flamboyant forms, blatant eroticism, lush metallic glazes and punned titles. Impressed by Arneson’s irreverence, Kottler made frequent travels to San Francisco, immersing himself in the city’s gay culture. Starting in 1966, he began creating editions of manufactured white plates decorated with the satirical decal collages for which he is best known. Among the hobby-shop decals he sabotaged were those representing well-known works of art. Inspired by Warhol’s appropriated media images, he decided to “see if small changes in the art-work decals could forever change the way we see these pictures,” as he once put it.

Examples of Kottler’s 1972 “American Gothicware” series, plates decorated with decals based on Grant Wood’s infamous American Gothic painting of a glum farm couple, are included in the show’s introductory display. The farmers become a convincing same-sex couple in Look Alikes, where the farmer’s wife’s head is replaced with that of the farmer. In Silent White Majority, the couple has white faces and no mouths; the same figures appear in whiteface with mouths in American Minstrels. Each plate has its own soft, leather envelope and the set is packaged in an elegantly crafted wooden box, with as much attention lavished on the packaging as the product.

Kottler’s plates overlap chronologically, if not formally, with Bay Area Funk, but the most challenging grouping of his work dates from the late 1980s. Mounted on a mirrored pedestal in the center of the first gallery are a series of glittering self-portrait sculptures executed as elegant parodies of classical Cubism. Here Kottler references his gay identity with flat silhouettes, shadows and faceted reflections, dissolving physicality in optical illusions. With the exception of one title, Kottler Posing as a Cubist (1987), viewers would be unlikely to experience these sculptures as portraits, but they are readily accessible as send-ups of high modernism.

Another poke at Cubist masters, Robert Colescott’s Les Demioselles d’Alabama: Vestidas (1985), is mounted nearby. During the early years of his career Colescott lived in Seattle and Portland, where his first solo exhibition was held in 1963. Colescott’s cartoonish figures and parodic appropriation of renowned artworks, the show argues, are recognized here for the first time as aligned with the West Coast’s countercultural aesthetic, a genre associated almost exclusively with the work of white artists.

The exhibition continues with examples of craft techniques employed to skewer craft traditions, ranging from Arneson’s 12-foot ceramic swimming pool to Washington jeweler Ken Cory’s silver and brass belt buckle embellished with a service-station logo. Patti Warashina’s sculptures are installed in the next two galleries devoted to visual humor and figuration. Warashina rarely invokes art historical categories when speaking about her art, instead offering accounts of technical developments and biographical stories.  She explains, for example, that the inspiration for her Airstream Turkey (1969), a perennial audience favorite in Seattle, came when she began working with a slab form resembling a loaf of bread. An Airstream trailer parked near her house, she noticed, was also shaped like a loaf of bread. “It just kinda came to mind,” she says. “I like things that are not quite right. Kind of loony. I guess I see the world that way.” Also on display is her 1966 Faucet Pot, where explicit female between-the-legs anatomy is framed with on-off faucets. Warashina places Faucet Pot within her shift at the time from “a very conservative period to an anti-art rebellion I kind of liked.”

The gallery devoted to figuration, according to the curator, represents West Coast artists who “daringly went against the grain and depicted human figures when celebrated East Coast artists abandoned figuration.” (Perhaps major Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann, Mel Ramos, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol don’t count as “celebrated.”) Contemporary artists are included here, among them Seattle and Portland ceramist Jeffry Mitchell, who is represented by a mind-blowing multimedia installation, the 12-foot-long Jesus in a Crowd (after Ensor), from 1991. An admirer of Kottler’s appropriations, Mitchell reimagines a famed James Ensor painting as a tableau with a stuffed puppet standing in for Christ, surrounded by a crowd represented by small globs of papier mâché inscribed with tiny faces. “Jesus is super clown-like. It’s ridiculous,” Mitchell explains, “but I don’t mean [the puppet] to be merely comical. His sort of hollow, oval eyes and mouth are not unlike a sort of Greek mask of tragedy, that kind of hollow horror. So he’s holding out his arms. He’s showing his pierced hands…. The focus is on a kind of helplessness.”

The show’s final gallery introduces Seattle to a sample of recent work by celebrated textile artist Xenobia Bailey, who describes herself as “a practitioner of the evolution of the Aesthetic of Funk in the African-American life style.” Bailey’s crocheted headpieces, full-scale tents, and vibrant wall mandalas evoke the roots of Funk in the decorative resourcefulness of black homemakers and the merger of blues and soul in Black music. The sampling of Bailey’s work tells us that the jubilant formal talent on view, unlike other iterations of Funk, needs no business with pokes in the eye.

This year’s FEMSA continues that trend. The 15th edition, in the state of Guanajato, is split across two cities: the eponymous state capital, a picturesque former mining town, and León, the region’s trade center, well-known for its tanning businesses and robust industrial sector. Managing the biennial in just one city would be tricky enough; stretching it across two places is a flex.

The two-city model comes with logistical problems. Unexpected closures and technical issues at certain venues impede this edition, rendering high-quality art unseeable at times. Has FEMSA, the crown jewel of the Mexican art calendar, become too sprawling? This show seemed to propose that there are limits to its curatorial ambitions.

The Bienal FEMSA, part of the charitable arm of the ubiquitous bottling company FEMSA, started out more modestly. It began as an open contest in the city of Monterrey, where artists submitted work for judgement by a committee of senior artists, critics and curators. That committee would then choose a few works to be acquired for the company’s art collection, which ballooned quickly.

If the show was once boring and corporate, it gained new life under the directorship of Willy Kautz, who, starting in 2016, began moving the biennial in a less traditional direction. In 2018, he inaugurated the traveling model with a show in Zacatecas. Two years later, an edition in Michoacán followed, only to be closed early by Covid, and reopened a year later. (The 2022 edition was postponed altogether.)

Mariana Munguía, the current artistic director, said of the biennial, “I think of it more as a program,” a measure of how the biennial has shifted away from merely exhibiting art under the company’s name, toward a curatorially driven show that constitutes more than the exhibition itself. This year’s edition, opened in May, also includes a zine and book fair, a traveling film program, and live performances.

In a country where the federal government has typically done much of the heavy lifting to support the arts, the Bienal FEMSA’s approach is a much-needed alternative to the canned prizes and contest exhibitions of the ­National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL). In Munguía’s words, “It’s been a virtue to be able to adapt to the needs of the cultural scene in Mexico.”

Precisely because the program seeks to redirect the art scene’s focus away from the country’s traditional art centers, none of the venues are likely to be on the radar of the international art world.

In León, at the Museum of Art and History of Guanajuato (MAHG), rising star Miriam Salado is showing the astonishing kinetic sculpture Detonaciones (Discharges, 2024). Lit like a totem, this horned, fringed, leather-clad metal column twists violently back and forth on its axis, making a thunderous rattle. At first glance, I mistook the adornments on the fringe for beads or shells, like those worn on the ankles during ritual dances by several Indigenous groups in Mexico. A heartbeat later, I realized they were in fact empty bullet cases, and that the racket they made as the centrifugal force slammed them into each other was a gesture not only toward the tumult and confusion of gun violence, but also its horrifying ritualization in Mexican society. I can’t think of a comparable work on the topic realized in as sobering a manner as this sculpture.

Galería Jesús Gallardo, a downtown municipal gallery that’s a short drive away, is showing the latest work by Miguel Fernández de Castro, another artist exploring the topic of violence with a focus on the US-Mexico border. Shot in desolate territory, Los bárbaros (The Barbarians, 2024) is a two-channel video installation about the ambivalence between fact and fiction on camera. It’s best to go in without knowing too much, but the most unsettling part of the video essentially replicates, in Spanish, a shot-for-shot scene of Native American scouts employed by US Customs and Border Protection looking for traces of drug smugglers along the border. The graininess of the English-language footage contrasts with the high definition of the Spanish version, but otherwise, the scenes are eerily similar. Teasing apart the original from its replica is complicated further by parts of the video that throw doubt on the camera’s sense of objectivity. Los bárbaros is a razor-sharp critique not only of how authorities respond to violent events—which have become sadly unexceptional along the border—but also of the implicit trust placed in the moving image when used to document such incidents.

If Galería Jesús Gallardo and the Museum of Art and History of Guanajato represent conventional exhibition spaces, another unmissable venue, Torre Andrade, epitomizes León’s underground art scene. An independently run exhibition space in an abandoned building’s car park, Torre Andrade’s graffitied facade is currently host to wheat-pasted drawings of unnervingly anthropomorphized orchids and grinning, bewigged skulls by Javier Barrios, from his series “Buddhist Visions of Hell”(2021). The unfinished concrete walls and rudimentary furnishings make Torre Andrade a perfect venue for the travelling film and live performance program, which tends toward the unconventional.

Unlike the venues in León, which are dedicated arts spaces, the two main sites in the capital are history museums. The Alhóndiga de Granaditas, a late 18th-century grain storehouse that played an important if gruesome role during the Mexican War of Independence, is managed by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). On view is Nestor Jiménez’s whimsical interactive sculpture Totentanz (Dance of Death, 2024), which illustrates a recurring theme in many works across the biennial: the persistence of the macabre in Mexican art. Six upright, life-size wooden marionettes, joined together at the hands with bamboo poles to form a sinister conga line, jump into the dance of death whenever an audience member takes the lead and uses the poles to set a stiff choreography. Facing the lifeless marionettes is the painting La muerte arquera (Death with Bow and Arrow, 2024), a towering replica of a common symbol of death in New Spanish Baroque: a skeleton with a scythe, bow, and quiver.

A few doors down from Diego Rivera’s childhood home, the Museum of the People of Guanajuato’s second-floor galleries follow a predetermined route set by the museum’s administrators, which acts as an unintended Mexican Art History crash course. Contemporary works share the narrow spaces of the building’s colonial architecture with 19th-century portraits, religious ex-voto paintings, and nationalist murals by José Chávez Morado—inside a chapel, no less. It’s a wonderfully eclectic hodgepodge of Mexican visual culture, and perhaps the hardest space to curate. Amid it all, video art shines: Daniel Godínez Nivón’s El sueño del oyamel (The Sacred Fir’s Dream, 2024) was shot with the Indigenous Otomí-speaking community of San Ildefonso Cieneguilla, Guanajuato, and documents the beauty of what often appears like inhospitable terrain. It’s also one of the few works that speaks directly to the biennial’s official title, “The Voice in the Mountain.”

For its 15th edition, Bienal FEMSA set ambitious goals, many of which were realized through outstanding artworks and public programming. Logistically, however, Bienal FEMSA is not yet a well-oiled machine: unannounced closures by the INAH and municipal authorities have occurred at many sites, and mechanical issues with the kinetic artworks are pervasive. If the biennial truly intends to bolster the arts outside Mexico’s large urban centers, the next edition must find a way to coordinate with sites effectively and make sure they remain reliably open and accessible to visitors traveling expressly to see the show.

As it stands, some venues, like the Alhóndiga, clearly do not feel ownership over the project, and will close to visitors on a whim to accommodate their own organization’s needs. Some even occasionally lack manpower, relying on interns to stay open. FEMSA’s massive localized network should be able to leverage its prominence in favor of the biennial without much difficulty, an advantage the artistic team could lean on in future editions. Here’s to hoping that the lessons learned in Guanajuato will, in two years’ time, foster something even better.

The Danish painter (1864–1916) remains relatively obscure, though his inclusion in a number of international exhibitions at venues from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, has garnered him a growing, almost cultish following. And that following will likely only grow, especially in the United States, as the Art Institute of Chicago recently purchased his 1907 painting, Interior. The Music Room, Strandgade 30, for a record $9.1 million at Sotheby’s last year.

“It’s really beautiful to show such a historical, well-known artist, who is still kind of an unexpected surprise,” said dealer Carlo Knoell, who recently closed his eponymous gallery to join Hauser & Wirth as a senior director.

Hammershøi was also an anomaly for his time. Influenced by 17th-century Dutch painting, particularly Johannes Vermeer, Hammershøi veered into his own way of making, which feels fresh even today. Described as a painter of “silence” and melancholy, Hammershøi renders stark gray interiors. Pared-down versions of what he observed in the rooms of his Copenhagen apartment, they lean toward the surreal.

Titled “Vilhelm Hammershøi. Silence.” and featuring 16 works, the exhibition shows off Hammershøi’s signature stark restraint and  somber gray palette. On view are a few actual masterpieces that are a rare treat to see in person. Hammershøi’s paintings feel very much alive.

The air hangs thick in these foggy, blurred scenes, so much so that this stillness feels not dismal but hopeful. In their cold stillness, these paintings are heaving. Some works show nearly empty rooms, like Interior in London, Brunswick Square (1912), in which the London fog seeps in to the three paned windows, while others show a woman, usually Hammershøi’s wife from behind, the nape of her neck the only skin exposed. She often stands still, to the side of a table, as she does in Interior with a Writing Desk (1900), showing rays of light diffusing the tension of the scene as the woman appears to read a letter. The gallery space’s history as a 19th-century silk ribbon factory adds to the ease of the display here, a comfortable home in which to take it all in.

Across the book’s 12 chapters, Small guides readers through the roller coaster of NFT hype, and its associations with the boom-and-bust and regulatory concerns of cryptocurrencies. Tyler Hobbs, Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), Justin Aversano, and Erick Calderon, the founder of generative art platform Art Blocks, are Small’s protagonists of the 2021 boom, taking readers from Christie’s record-breaking auction of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5,000 Days to the unexpected synchrony, a year and half later, between Art Blocks’ Open House in Marfa, Texas and Sam Bankman-Fried’s resignation from FTX, the now-bankrupt crypto exchange and hedge fund.

Small’s telling contains engaging anecdotes and the occasional digression to art historical antecedents—the evolution of photography and Donald Judd settling in Marfa—that provide obvious cultural references to anchor readers in this emergent technology. But for someone who participated in and was a close observer of the NFT boom, Token Supremacy seems mostly to reiterate popular magazine articles without providing significant new research or insights. This deficiency is underscored by Small’s goal, outlined in the introduction, to contribute to the history of cultural economics and the dynamics of speculation. There is much to say about the gnarly web that links artists, platforms, hedge funds, venture capitalism, regulation, and global finance, but it is not to be found in the four case studies and breezily recounted recent history that form this book. The shortfall between the book’s stated aims and its execution led me to wonder if Token Supremacy had not tried to fulfill the demands of two audiences: to present the art world’s particular usury in its dealings with crypto for those with some knowledge of both art and crypto and, at the same time, provide a Vanity Fair-esque retelling of NFTs that could credibly be a beach read.

The demands of the latter lead Small to truncate important events, eliding their deeper complexities. For example, in the book’s first chapter, while Small recounts the desires of and the difficulties faced by the Christie’s employees driving the Beeple auction in March, they bypass telling how, several months earlier, Metapurse, the crypto-focused venture capital fund, sold fractionalized ownership stakes in 20 Beeple works as part of its B20 coin investment scheme. It isn’t mere trivia that Metapurse was then the buyer of Everydays for nearly $70 million, but material to why they had a vested interest in driving up Beeple’s prices. And while Everydays served as a kind of advertisement for B20, those works were not added to the coin investment scheme, as initially reported by Amy Castor. The B20 coin and Everydays would be an ideal case study in speculative tokenomics, and might have been used to explain how insider knowledge and “rug pulls” (where a group draws investors, only to abandon the project) operate within NFTs and crypto markets. Small, however, does not illuminate this connection or its implications.

Further, there is insufficient discussion of the dangers or negative impact that centralized marketplaces like MakersPlace or OpenSea had, nor the model they are based on: the decentralized platform Rare Pepe Wallet, established in 2017, which evolved from the Pepe the Frog, the cult internet meme that went from slacker icon to far right co-optation and, eventually, subsequent reclamation, partly via two Asian projects.

Another important financial feature deserving of greater analysis is resale royalties—Hobbs took in $9 million after an initial $400,000 sale at Bright Moments in 2021, as Small identifies—that were fought for by a group of artists led by Matt Kane in 2020. That recompense was lost during the spiraling of 2022 when marketplaces dubiously claimed they could not sustain it. Similarly, though Small mentions DAOs at regular intervals, unmentioned are the early experiments by artists (like Jonas Lund or Primavera de Filippi), the research initiative and insightful publication led by Furtherfield in London, the 2021 Wyoming legislation recognizing them as legal businesses, or the venture capital funding that was poured into incubators and accelerators. This might have provided insight into how hedge-fund money moved markets within the space, created packages or derivatives, including the possibility of shorting cryptocurrencies, which may have accelerated the crash while still producing a profit for a small percent of financiers. Such investigation would be worthy and meaningful not only to this NFT example but to understanding dangers in current market operations, especially for art’s increasing deployment as an investment vehicle. That would have required more than cocktail parties and dinners with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” (as Small describes a moment returning from a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano), which sounds more Sex and the City than To Catch and Kill.

It is true that, say, Winkelmann and Calderon represent obvious figures within the boom market of that moment, though others like Dmitri Cherniak, Prince Jacon Osinachi Igwe, Sarah Meyohas, or the collective and creative platform DADA could have widened the lens on the impact of surging interest in NFTs and offered a more global perspective. For example, Cherniak is a leading artist who donated the revenue from Dead Ringers: Edition in February 2022 to the NYC Food Bank, providing 16 million meals (a value of approximately $3 million); Osinachi is a Nigerian artist whose work celebrates LGBTQ people in a nation with some of the harshest anti-gay laws and who launched an incubator to help onboard others into digital art; Meyohas produced Bitchcoin in 2015, before Ethereum, and garnered renewed interest in fractionalized work and her market; DADA was created by Judy Mam and Beatriz Ramos to connect participants through a shared digital drawing practice, which developed into an exercise in “the Invisible Economy” that seeks to distribute funds to the community as basic income.

Citations in Token Supremacy are sometimes peculiar and often unclear. Small never cites Zsofi Valyi-Nagy on Vera Molnar, though she is very likely the leading scholar on the artist, nor Amy Whitaker, a prominent author on the art market with research as early as 2019 exploring blockchain use cases for art. Though the book’s interviews are initially introduced with date and place, when interspersed with information and quotes from other articles, it becomes difficult to discern Small’s contributions from the established information. For example, in Chapter 3, they recount the heist of 309 CryptoVenetians from the Bright Moments DAO and gallery, but despite having spoken to participants, the tale seems largely cobbled together from Matthew Leising’s three-part series for Decential Media. In Chapter 2, Small tells the Berlin backstory of Jonathan Monaghan’s Mothership, an early proto-NFT, and McCoys’ Quantum, but the Quantum dispute was explored in reporting by media outlets during the court case, including ARTnews. In addition, they write in this section that Sotheby’s head of digital art Michael Bouhanna’s “poor skills of observation and historical knowledge about digital art would push the NFT market towards destruction.” Whatever one may think of Bouhanna or the auction houses, that description seems like overreach.

Sometimes quotes from articles misrepresent the speaker and the article’s original context. At the height of the NFT boom in March 2022, critic Blake Gopnik wrote in the New York Times that Tina Rivers Ryan, then-curator of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and now editor-in-chief of Artforum, suggested that “the new world of tokens may instead bring about ‘an impoverishment — and not just of digital art, but of art full stop, because it reduces art to being a frictionless commodity,’” with that quote within his text being hers. Small shifts Gopnik’s moderate sounding “may instead bring about” to a definitive and indicative present tense: “NFTs are “an impoverishment…”” This alters Ryan’s likely intent, given that she continues in Gopnik’s article to point out good examples of presenting NFT art. This is the kind of confusion that mitigates confidence in the book overall.

The lack of citations around certain claims becomes more problematic when alluding to major museums: “The investors who had spent lavishly during the bull market had drained their accounts, leading to embarrassing situations when these crypto ‘millionaires’ who pledged generous donations in exchange for seats on acquisition committees at museums like the Whitney and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art were booted after failing to pay their dues.” In answering questions about this, Angela Montefinise, the Whitney chief communications officer, explained in an email: “At the Whitney, acquisition committee members are invited based on their expertise. We have not had anyone removed from our acquisition committees for any reason, including failing to pay dues. This has not happened.” Similarly, Jessica Young, director of communications for LACMA wrote in an email, “This claim about the museum is absolutely not true and does not align with the standards of the acquisition committee and our institution.”

(Small, for their part, told ARTnews in an email, “That is contrary to what members of their own museum boards told me in the course of reporting this story.”)

Nevertheless, art and money, which are seemingly accessible to anyone, have this elusive quality that cultivates a kind of voyeurism; good narratives allow us behind the veil. Readers will find titillating moments. There are beautiful sentences in which meaning is not particularly important: “There in the digital filing cabinet is a sleepless delirium, an insomnia that turns the art-money into a parade of hallucinations that dance on the fence posts dividing perception and imagination.” Some art world readers will wonder why basics, like the Venice Biennale, are being explained, but may want greater detail on the regulatory blockades, given the ongoing discomfort with increased Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations overseas. Some general audiences may wonder why those museums that famously did collect NFTs during this period aren’t examined in greater depth.

But, as Small writes, “the best strategy for fooling wealthy people into buying art is to make them feel insecure before throwing economic data in their face.” There are a lot of facts and data thrown about in Token Supremacy but they don’t add up to much. For a moment in art deserving of such a cultural studies perspective, it is unfortunate for all the artists, galleries, museums, investors, critics, and audiences of the period that this book is a crash landing.

In the meantime, two other books have been released this year by participants in the current art economy: On NFTs (Taschen) offers an extensive eye-candy overview of many of the leading artists; and Right Click Save: The New Digital Art Community (Vetro) gathers important essays and interviews by scholars, curators, and pioneering and emerging artists about the global, fiscal, and cultural implications of NFTs. The cultural history, however, is yet to be told.

Editor’s Note, 6/17/2024: A previous version of this review inaccurately implied that the Berlin backstory of Mothership had already been widely reported. In addition, the review initially identified Small’s description of a dinner with “large burrata salads, wine, and mojitos” ending in “a taxicab headed back uptown” as taking place at an after-party for Erick Calderon’s opening at Venus Over Manhattan. It was for a Quantum Art dinner with artist Justin Aversano. Additional minor changes have been made to this review for clarity and precision. ARTnews regrets the confusion. 

And at the center of the BKC is the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), opened last year by art patron Nita Mukesh Ambani, whose husband, Mukesh, sits at number 9 on the Forbes “World Billionaires List.” After a show dedicated to TOILETPAPER, the magazine and creative studio founded by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, and one on American Pop art, the NMACC has shifted its focus closer to home, with its third exhibition “Liminal Gaps” (through June 9), focusing on four contemporary Indian artists and collectives as a way to reshape “perspectives on India’s evolving cultural identity,” according to the catalog.

In explaining the exhibition’s approach to liminality, Mafalda Millies, one of the show’s curators and a cofounder of TRIADIC, a self-described “creative house and cultural engine,” said, “we aren’t from here and wanted to understand India in today’s time and space. We noticed that art in India has always had a historical element while shedding light on the present. India seems to thrive in this liminality between the past and the future and that is how the theme came to us.”

The exhibition takes over the four floors of NMACC’s Art House venue, with each artist getting their own floor: Ayesha Singh, Raqs Media Collective, Asim Waqif, and Afrah Shafiq (from the ground floor up). With the works on view, the show insists on sensorial and cognitive participation from its audience, asking them to occupy the museum’s many lines and nooks—to touch, click, scroll, play, listen, read, think, scribble, walk, stop, chuckle, rest, and most important, take pictures.

Roya Sachs, a cofounder of TRIADIC and its artistic director, said the group wanted to approach this exhibition in an untraditional format, as it had with the TOILETPAPER show and with its editions of the Format Festival in Bentonville, Arkansas. “We come from different worlds—art, performance, production—and our ethos has been to mix mediums and people,” she told ARTnews. “The contemporary art world is a disruptive space where we increasingly witness interdisciplinarity: choreographers working with visual artists, fashion designers creating sculptures, or sound engineers collaborating with painters. We are always trying to make bridges, take risks, and find magic in the unexpected.”

“Liminal Gaps” begins with visitors physically entering Delhi-based Ayesha Singh’s Hybrid Drawings (2024), a white-box room housing a wireframe installation of a two-point perspective. As you move around the space, architectural elements from different cultures and eras—Mughal, Indo-Saracenic, Sikh, Hindu, and modern—come into view. While the lines are a technical abstraction of Delhi’s architecture, they could be representative of any ancient city in the Indian subcontinent where imprints of past civilizations continue to transcend time and space. Even so, there is a clear erasure of the complexity, chaos, disarray, and entropy that resides in Delhi, or any Indian city for that matter. Singh’s work purges and reduces the city into sanitized lines of black against the spotless white of the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Established in 1992 by three artists (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Raqs Media Collective presents several works that are meditations on time. The first, titled Nerves (2018), starts in a stairwell that leads from the floor where Singh’s work is installed to the other Raqs pieces. Set against a deep cobalt blue background are line drawings of neurons as they were represented in the early 20th century; running alongside them are expressions like “hit a raw nerve,” “nerves of steel,” or “you have some nerve.”

This passageway leads to Chromacron (2023), where stripes of Pantone’s Color of the Year from 2000 to 2024 line up in chronological order, leading to the installation called Escapement (2018). As the name suggests, its liminality derives from the mechanism in clocks (escapement) that governs consistent and uninterrupted motion of its arms. The work’s 27 seemingly identical clocks are set to different time zones. However, there are two aberrations: the hours are denoted by moods and emotions—remorse, awe, fear, epiphany—instead of numbers, and three clocks, running counterclockwise, are tagged to fictional cities (Babel, Shangri La, and Macondo). Nearby, a giant 24-hour clock sits by itself toward the end of this space; its digits are replaced by words in the Devanagari script that take on literal and symbolic meanings associated with time, such as shran (second), pran (life), atithi (guest), ritu (season), and kaal (era).

The center of the room looks deceptively empty wherein sits Betaal, an augmented reality work of abstract geometric figures that can be seen using iPads. Raqs has said they see this work as an entity that moves in the liminal gap between time and consciousness. There is a comfortable rhythm to Raqs’ work, the repetition and symmetry of clocks for instance lull you into reading it as an obvious rendition of time, until you are faced with the giant clock that compels you to dwell on the immense volatility of time and how it shapes our lives, language, and consciousness.

On the third floor is Asim Waqif’s Chaal (2024), an elaborate bamboo structure that is brought to life as you walk around or into it. While the work, and the exhibition as a whole, could perhaps be interpreted as an escape from the world, Waqif sees it differently. “I am nauseated by celebration right now, especially in the arts which has become a medium of celebrating redevelopment projects, real estate, new infrastructure, or just about anything. So Chaal while being playful is intended to have a dark mood, an element of unsettlement owing to its unpredictability.”

That unsettling feeling can come in the form of sudden sounds and lights activated by stepping on the bending bamboo structure or getting lost in its crevices—like entering a maze that has no exit. The experience can often vacillate between a childlike curiosity or a melancholic sense of doom.

In thinking about Waqif’s work within this context, BKC, the real estate development where this work is now sited, itself become a negation and denial of the realities of Mumbai, especially its poor. BKC and the NMACC within it are technically open to everyone are traversed by few, and comfortably so by even fewer. The looming glass facades, luxury brands, and absence of public transport or affordably priced food all ensure that the barrier of class and caste stands inviolable. The show itself is priced at INR 299 ($3.60 USD), an amount that could buy three dinners in Mumbai; it is, however, free for art students, if previously booked online.

For Sultana’s Reality (2017), Afra Shafiq takes the liminal gaps of the exhibition’s title more literally, presenting a mini library of books written by South Asian women, which visitors can annotate using sticky notes and graphite pencils, and a black box displaying a fantastical interactive experience (it can also be accessed online). This multimedia story, which borrows part of its name from Begum Rokeya’s 1905 feminist utopian story Sultana’s Dream, explores the relationship between women and colonial education movement in India using archival imagery, humor, contemporary culture, and historical nuggets.

“Most conversation around women’s education in India has been in the lines of ‘beti bachao… beti padhao’ (translation: save the daughter by educating the daughter) devoid of women’s autonomy or even voice,” Shafiq said. “Even the early reformers—colonial and Brahmanical alike—never thought of women’s education as a way to make them equal partners, or to imagine a world where they’d be educated and hence emancipated. She sees this reform movement “as a software update” that is “full of bugs.” Indeed, a thinking, liberated woman would be disastrous to their world order, especially when taking into account that Indian women were to be taught “to read but not to write,” according to one primary source in the video, and “only literature on devotion, gardening, child rearing, perhaps poetry” but never mathematics, chemistry, philosophy, or political science.

How this exhibit will “reshape India’s cultural identity” remains an unanswered and forgotten assertion when actually visiting “Liminal Gaps.” The insistence on these artists’ Indian-ness, on the part of the curators and NMACC’s billionaire founders, fails to register.

Occupied City (2023), his four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Amsterdam during the Holocaust, seems most telling about his priorities right now. In this film, a narrator outlines the disenfranchisement of Jews across the city, but McQueen’s footage of the present-day Dutch capital never testifies to what is described. His camera drifts through apartments, down museum corridors, and across canals. More often than not, he doesn’t show us anything of much interest. At a time when images of police brutality and suffering have become pervasive, McQueen has moved away from representing violence altogether.

With his latest work, he shows us nothing at all. McQueen has parted ways with moving images entirely for Bass (2024), a new installation that fills the 30,000-square-foot basement of Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley with sound and light. The only objects on view are 60 boxes hung on the ceiling that slowly change their hue, turning the space a succession of vibrant colors, from the retina-burning red of a horror movie to the orange glow of a sunset.

The title of Bass is the giveaway: the focus is sound, not sight. The sounds were produced by five musicians, all belonging to the African diaspora, who performed together in Dia’s columned basement this past January. McQueen was there to act as conductor, not that these musicians really needed it—mainly, they just improvised. He has presented all 189 minutes of their music largely unedited.

This quintet—Marcus Miller, Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, Laura-Simone Martin, and Meshell Ndegeocello—appears to have played as a unified whole, not as five soloists. It is difficult, for example, to discern which sounds were produced by Kouyaté, playing a West African instrument called a ngoni, and which were produced by Miller, a bassist who’s worked with many jazz greats. Together, the musicians have created a symphony of rumbles, bowed strings, and plaintive hums, some of which McQueen has arrayed across space so that they appear to echo across this vast gallery.

The relationship between the music and the lightboxes is oblique. Sometimes, coloristic shifts and sonic digressions sync to form associations. To my mind, a transition from deep blue to that burning red seemed to induce a horror-like state. Harsh knocking noises and aggressive pizzicato started to pour out of speakers overhead. The sounds continued until red faded to orange.

That, however, is an exceptional instance in this elegant installation. Most of the time, the music is set to a low simmer, with the sounds of fingers running across frets and the roll of bass playing whether the space is lit neon green, lush fuchsia, or haunting azure.

These hues recall the ones emitted by the Dan Flavin sculptures upstairs; the squarish, factory-made look of the lightboxes owes something to pieces by Donald Judd and his ilk. There can be no doubt that McQueen is situating Bass within the history of Minimalism, the movement that has provided the backbone of Dia’s collection. Yet whereas the Minimalists of the 1960s and ’70s prized austerity and order, McQueen’s latest contains an inner warmth. In that way, it’s closer to another recent installation that showed in this basement, Carl Craig’s more maximal Party/After-Party (2020), a light-and-sound spectacle that had the feeling of a wild night’s final hours.

The randomness of the sounds runs counter to the rigorous, strict arrangement of his lightboxes and the basement’s columns. And there is no designated way to experience Bass, either, since there are just a few benches set against the darkened walls. You can methodically weave your way through the columns, as I did, or you can plop down in the center and take it all in, as I observed others doing. McQueen seems to delight in all these possibilities.

What is Bass about? The work is abstract, but McQueen seems to have had concrete ideas on his mind. He told the New York Times that he’d been thinking of the Middle Passage as a state of “limbo,” and that he views Black people as being “post-apocalyptic.” Maybe that second remark explains the vacant, semi-abandoned look of the Dia basement in this artist’s hands.

But there is no one-to-one relationship: Bass does not simulate the hull of a ship ferrying enslaved people across the Atlantic, nor does it even feature representations of anything or anyone at all. If Bass is in some way connected to the Middle Passage, McQueen has approached the carnage that happened along the way using the same method he applied to the atrocities of the Holocaust in Occupied City: by not depicting it at all.

His reasons for doing so may be similar to those of many artists in the current Whitney Biennial, a show of art that deals with racism and other forms of prejudice without representing them. Perhaps McQueen, like those artists, rightfully assumes that we know enough about the barbarities of slavery and sees no reason to re-inflict trauma by depicting them once more. (He already did that anyway in 12 Years a Slave, his 2013 Oscar-winning film adapted, with a questionable degree of historical accuracy, from Solomon Northup’s memoir.) Perhaps, too, McQueen is suggesting that painful histories live on in ways that cannot be visualized, especially when those in power have been successful in expunging them from public memory.

And when that happens, invisible histories are spun into sound—stories get told and retold, songs record events that books do not, abstract musical tones recall clear memories. Bass is a sonic work about that which cannot be seen. Hear its hushed cacophony, feel its sounds vibrate in your chest, and find what exists out of sight.

Last May, the Cannes Film Festival debuted the newly restored 4K versions of the films to honor the centennial of Man Ray’s entry into filmmaking. Following the North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last fall, a wider release by distributor Janus Films begins this month, just as Surrealism celebrates its 100th anniversary.

Le Retour à la Raison (1923), Emak-Bakia (1926), L’Étoile de Mer (1928), and Les Mystères du Château du Dé (1929) comprise these wondrous 70 minutes that are now accompanied by a hypnotic avant-garde score, replete with guitar riffs, percussion, and droning synthesizers, by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan of SQÜRL.

Created two years after his move to Paris, Le Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason) was produced with the encouragement of poet Tristan Tzara for a Dada evening of performance. Man Ray, adapting his process for creating cameraless photographs (photograms he eponymously dubbed “rayographs”), placed objects directly onto celluloid strips and briefly exposed them to light. He fudged the editing by gluing strips together. In his 1963 autobiography, Self Portrait, Man Ray wrote of his early films, “My curiosity was aroused by the idea of putting into motion some of the results I had obtained in still photography.”

For Le Retour’s opening image, he sprinkled salt and pepper on film “like a cook preparing a roast,” as he once put it. Seasonings, dress pins, and thumbtacks pulsate on screen, sometimes reversed as film negatives. These compositions are interspersed with footage such as a revolving carousel’s lights and a woman’s nude torso turning in front of a window. Despite his attempt to adhere to a credo of randomness, Man Ray’s unrelated shots belie his aesthetic attention to line, pattern, and movement.

At its 1923 premiere, his inexpertly mounted film broke twice, causing an uproar. By the principles of Dada: a success.

Emak-Bakia (Leave Me Alone) similarly is the result of playful experimentation with professional camera equipment, a turntable, crystals, lighting, and distorting mirrors. According to Man Ray’s remarks at the screening, the film was “purely optical, made to appeal only to the eyes.”

A vibrating pattern of white on black is followed by a shot of daisies, alternating between the real and the abstract. The legs of model and artist Kiki de Montparnasse, Man Ray’s lover and muse who posed for many of his iconic works such as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) and Noire et Blanche (1926), appear in t-strap shoes dancing the Charleston while a Black man’s hand strums a banjo. A crossdresser finishes grooming and looks out at the ocean’s lapping waves. Soon, the camera rotates to invert sea and sky, an unusual move for Ray, who more often used a static camera to capture motion, akin to enlivening still pictures. A bit of trickery ends the film as Kiki awakens to reveal that her closed lids had been painted to look like eyes, echoing the film’s opening of Man Ray’s eye looking through a camera lens.

The most cohesive film, L’Etoile de Mer (The Star of the Sea), features a starfish with undulating appendages, providing an erotic motif amid dream-like sequences. An interpretation of Surrealist writings by Robert Desnos, it also stars Kiki.

Early on, through what appears to be smeared glass, a man and a woman climb a staircase to a bedroom. The woman undresses seductively and lies down. Surprisingly, the man departs. In his autobiography, Ray described his process of obscuring the scene to avoid censorship by using soaked gelatin sheets as a filter, “obtaining a mottled or cathedral-glass effect through which the photography would look like sketchy drawing or painting.”

What follows is typical Surrealist delight: scenes of trains and steamships in motion, newspapers flying in the wind, a woman holding a dagger—later a double exposure with a starfish in a jar, and a second man who leads the woman away from the first, to his dismay.

And finally, there is Man Ray’s most elaborate short, Les Mystères du Chateâu du Dé (The Mysteries of the Castle of the Dice), commissioned by Charles de Noailles, one of the day’s leading patrons of avant-garde film, to record his mansion in the South of France and his patrician guests. With the payment, Ray bought the fastest film and newest lenses available to realize his vision for the project. The blocky exterior of the château informed the theme of the film, which drew inspiration from Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem, “A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance.”

The film opens with two men in a Parisian café rolling a pair of dice to determine their actions. Over a bumpy road, they drive to a gray cement estate. Using a dolly, Man Ray provides sweeping shots that examine the various angles of the building, the garden’s outdoor sculptures by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and the rest of de Noailles’s extensive art collection.

Back inside the château, guests arrive and cast the die to determine their recreational activities in and around the well-equipped pool and gymnasium. Everyone wears face obscuring silk-stocking masks “for mystery and anonymity,” according to Man Ray. In striped swimsuits, the guests dive, juggle underwater, and flip into headstands as sunlight casts pleasing shadows around the pool. When night falls, a couple tussle in the garden and then freeze into place, posed like statues in a tableau, as the suspenseful soundtrack builds. A wooden hand holds a large pair of dice in the final closeup shot.

What connects these four films, other than their maker? Serendipity and the interdisciplinary art world of Paris in the 1920s. Through mesmerizing images and unexpected drama, Ray created magic in his filmmaking—another successful medium for the prolific and influential artist.

When Holzer exhibited similar dictums via a screen mounted to the Guggenheim’s spiraling ramp into 1989, critics praised her for bringing new modes of communication into the walls of museums. Thirty-five years on, she has returned to the project, this time with the help of AI technology to create new digital effects.

This work, titled Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024), initially appeared as stock ticker–like flow of commands and phrases in green, red, and yellow. Today, Holzer’s words linger behind blue fog, disintegrate into pixels, and leave behind menacing flares. The technology has been updated, but the maxims remain largely unchanged. Unfortunately, the sentiments feel more dated than ever.

Many of Holzer’s axioms function like bizarre advice or insidious directives: “STARVATION IS NATURE’S WAY,” “THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR WILL BE SECRET,” or the famed “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” from Holzer’s “Truisms” series. They exude ennui: desires are boring, war is a constant, and no one can be trusted.

Five decades ago, Holzer began pushing these made-up idioms, printed in the sans-serif typeface associated with advertising, into public spaces via posters and T-shirts. She embraced the language of power, as seen on screens and in the media, and aspired to expose the evil that existed beneath its platitudes. The challenging thing about her work was its attractiveness: pictures of a flinty woman wearing Holzer’s “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” tank top continue to go viral for a reason.

But now, the coolness of Holzer’s art—its icy interior, its beautiful exterior—feels inappropriately glib. Words like Holzer’s appear daily on social media feeds. No one needs her art to understand how power works anymore—all one must do to figure that out is simply log on to X or TikTok. Her museum-filling Guggenheim exhibition, a survey of sorts, shows how this once-great artist went astray, failing to evolve her cold text for another era.

Holzer does, at least, seem keenly aware of what the internet has done to language. With Cursed (2022), one of the many recent works in this show, she exhibits a row of distressed, unevenly edged metal plates that run along a wall before collapsing in a pile on the floor. Each plate is printed with a different Donald Trump tweet, from ones addressing Russia’s involvement in his election to ones that preceded the January 6 insurrection he fomented into being. Their cruddy look runs counter to Twitter’s sleek aesthetic, as if to suggest the relics of a ruined civilization.

Holzer’s point, it would seem, is to imply a continuity between her “Truisms” and Trump’s all-caps histrionics. Then again, so what? Anyone who lived through the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections need hardly be reminded of the thinly veiled cruelties of Trump’s tirades.

His sexist, racist, xenophobic words harmed many, and even got him banned from Twitter during the same year that Cursed was made. The irony is that Holzer exhibited this work at Hauser & Wirth in 2022, at a time when Trump’s Twitter account was offline, essentially ensuring that you could continue to experience this man’s textual hysterics, even when the platform’s moderators thought them too dangerous for mass consumption. Here again, Holzer limply re-presents Trump on his own terms, forgetting to perform critique along the way. (Mercifully, Holzer’s Guggenheim show, which opens to the public tomorrow, comes down on September 29, well before Election Day.)

This is not the only work in the Guggenheim show referring to the Trump administration. There is stake in the heart (2024), a series of giant gold-leafed paintings, each containing a fragment of communications to and from Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, on January 6. There’s also READY FOR YOU (2023), another golden canvas resembling a White House memo with a similar phrase to its title scrawled on it. That note was given to Trump by an aide ahead of the attempted coup d’état.

These are dark, unsettling works because of the mismatch between their gold-leafed surfaces—a style most closely associated with religious icons—and their abject texts. They are engrossing in that way, and also deeply problematic, since Holzer allows these fraught words to float free of context.

This is, to some degree, a shortcoming on the Guggenheim’s part, not Holzer’s. Curator Lauren Hinkson has installed this show without much wall text at all. Labels are placed in areas where they seem deliberately hard to find, and there is no explanation for any of the art on view. If viewers seek to learn more, they must scan a QR code and head to the Bloomberg Connects app—which is virtually impossible to download, anyway, in a museum whose heavy concrete walls limit cell service.

When I returned to my desk and finally went through that app, I found myself angered by some of Holzer’s choices. I spent time lingering over the descriptions for a new work called the beginning (2024), which Holzer did in collaboration with Lee Quiñones. The piece consists of quotations painted atop Inflammatory Wall (1979–82), a floor-to-ceiling grid of posters containing Holzer’s short writings. Within the Guggenheim galleries, a label notes that the beginning contains “testimony” from one Iranian, two Ukrainians, three Palestinians, one Israeli, and one American. (Testimony to what, you wonder? Don’t expect an answer on that from the museum.)

The sources of all that testimony, it turns out, vary widely. They are outlined in detail on the Bloomberg app, where one can discover that Israeli writer Yehuda Amichai’s quotation—“MY CHILD WAFTS PEACE / WHEN I LEAN OVER HIM”—is from a poem by him printed in a 1994 book. Meanwhile, a quotation from the Palestinian Abu Shaker—“I JUST STOOD THERE FOR AN HOUR SCREAMING MY CHILDREN’S NAMES”—was borrowed from a 2023 report on disabled Gazans that was published by Human Rights Watch.

And a quote from the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov—“NOW THE CITY IS IN RUINS / ON THE STREETS LIE THE CORPSES OF RESIDENTS”—comes from a 2022 text written following his country’s invasion by Russia. (Holzer obtained permission from the respective publishers to use these clipped phrases, according to the Guggenheim.)

Holzer’s troubling equivalency between wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere seems to elide nuance about how each conflict arose. Her appropriations are indelicate—they are all from different years, but this is not readily apparent anywhere other than the app, itself the creation of a philanthropic organization founded by a former New York City mayor who couldn’t always be trusted. She also seems uninterested in each speaker’s individual circumstances.

It seems odd, for example, to place Abu Shaker’s testimonial alongside Amichai’s poetry, given that Amichai, though critical of Israel, has sometimes been criticized by intellectuals. (One was Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, who taught his students Amichai’s poetry, which he variously described as “beautiful” and “dangerous,” according to the New York Times; Alareer was killed in December during an airstrike in Gaza.) Holzer mentions none of this, nor does the Guggenheim. Both she and the museum seem to hope we’ll read these sentences, acknowledge them as proof that war is bad, and move on.

There’s a lot of other historical material enlisted by Holzer: the artist Alice Neel’s partially redacted FBI file, US government documents about AI, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s dialogues on wartime strategy in Vietnam. Most of these forms did not become public until well after all this surveillance occurred. Holzer has repainted these papers, mocking them up at a scale just larger than standard paper size to ensure that their words remain visible to the general populace.

Those works are a bit more successful—even without Holzer there to speak for them, these paintings’ backstories are self-evident enough. the beginning and other pieces at the Guggenheim remain more opaque. Ironically, this is a show about words that’s in need of more of them.

Holzer has done the opposite of citing her sources: she’s concealed a lot of information, viewing political proclamations as nouns, verbs, and adjectives to be played with as needed. That approach worked in the ’80s, at a time when she needed to lay bare the slipperiness of language, but it does not work now, when the use of a single expression is enough to get someone fired or killed.

How might Holzer respond to that allegation? A shrug, maybe, or a giggle. “LAUGH HARD AT THE ABSURDLY EVIL,” reads one 1984 plaque shown here. Rather than being hung in the bays where paintings are usually presented, this piece is exhibited above a trashcan, next to a machine that dispenses hand sanitizer—which feels like a malevolent gag unto itself. Therein lies the problem: Holzer wants us to chuckle at her words, which demand greater scrutiny now than they once did. If only she took things a bit more seriously.

Percentage-wise, figurative painting ruled the fair, but the best works in that style bypassed camp and irony—the modes most commonly associated with it these days—for unaffected explorations of the self and our culture. Sculpture had a good showing, too, in particular the works by John Newman presented at Europa, the ceramic menagerie of Dorian Reid at Kapp Kapp, or the abstract design of Gérald Lajoie-Restrepo at Pangée.

The fair is on view through Sunday. Here are the booths you shouldn’t miss.

Together, the two form quite the duo. But depending on where you stand, they may both melt away into the skyline behind them, rendering them just another bizarre footnote in the vast New York ecosystem. Amid a downpour, the grinning spider may not be visible at all.

Petrit Halilaj, a 38-year-old phenom from Kosovo, is the maker of these sculpted animals, which are part of his rooftop commission for the Met. The museum has now done nearly a dozen of these commissions, each created by a different artist every summer. Most have been big, extravagant, and tacky. Halilaj’s, by contrast, is pared-down and minimal, and is the best of the bunch because of it.

The artist is no stranger to grand sculptures, having made a name for himself at the 2010 Berlin Biennale by showing a to-scale facsimile of the armature for his family’s Prishtina home. He’s even made another house-like structure for the Met’s roof, peopling it with a stick figure and a golden star. You can walk under the structure and peer up at a Picassoid eye that stares back down.

That’s the closest that Halilaj’s latest, an installation called Abetare (2024), gets to Instagram fodder. Setting aside the house and the spider, much of the steel components are spare, modestly scaled, and semiabstract.

Many feature words welded together that provide insight into Halilaj’s reference points. Some of the words are telling. The name Runik, Halilaj’s hometown, appears in one work. The acronym KFOR, short for the Kosovo Force, shows up in another. These act as reminders that Abetare, which refers to books used to teach Kosovar children the alphabet, is embedded within Halilaj’s own experience as a Kosovar whose life was disrupted by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s.

Amid war in Kosovo, Halilaj was displaced to a refugee camp in Albania as a teenager. There, he was encouraged to draw by a group of Italian psychologists who visited the site. For Halilaj, art became both a creative outlet and a means of self-preservation: drawing mountainous landscapes and soldiers holding guns was a way to process his tumultuous situation. He’s consistently returned to those sketches as an adult, at times enlarging them to form new artworks.

But Halilaj’s drawings aren’t the only ones that feature in his beguiling sculptures, which have more recently tended to feature ones he found in Kosovo schoolrooms. Here, he’s expanded his inquiry beyond his home country, focusing on other Balkan nations as well.

The spider, for instance, was sourced from a banged-up desk in Skopje, North Macedonia, where it was initially accompanied by references to Pokémon that are now absent. Another sculpture pairs a heart-shaped form beside a phallus and the word “tiddies.” Rather than simply repeating the found imagery, however, he mixes them, implying a form of solidarity among teens—innocent and horny alike—separated by national borders.

By appropriating kids’ marks, Halilaj warmly suggests that these doodles are artistic endeavors worth noting. It’s not possible to retrieve any information about who these budding artists were, however; their names have been lost. Abetare is infused with the sense that nothing lasts forever, hence the frail look of these steel creations.

But that apparent fragility may be misleading. Halilaj said that the Met required that his work be able to withstand a hurricane. In addition to fulfilling a contract, Halilaj has rendered these children’s drawings monumental, and ensured that they resist the test of time—and, apparently, climate change.

Even if Abetare presents a weighty commentary on the tenuousness of national histories, Halilaj has wisely offered moments of levity. Be sure to spot the cat person dangling from a flower-strewn pergola on your way out, and don’t forget the toothy kitty leaned against the area next to a bench.

Take a second, too, to muse before a louvered screen set within a low wall. Next to it, Halilaj has placed an evocative word: HERE. It could refer to a city (New York), a museum (the Met), or a particular part of an institution (its ventilation system). Technically, this HERE is from elsewhere (the Balkans), but it looks quite at home in its funky new locale.