“We think that we’re the only ones that are keeping these memories. But the land and different non-human beings in this land can also have the memory,” Abou-Rahme told ARTnews in a recent interview. “We’re not incredibly spiritual people, but these things that happened during the filming left a big impact on us.”

Memory, history, culture and the land lie at the center of that installation, titled Only sounds that tremble through us, and the artists’ new exhibition—of the same name—at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, which represents a major evolution in Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work.

For nearly 15 years, the duo has dedicated its artistic practice to creating an archive. In 2010, the artists were in Palestine, watching the so-called “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, like everyone else, through the pinhole lens of social media. As videos and images of protesting, dancing, and singing passed through the slipstream of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, Abbas and About-Rahme became determined to counteract the “amnesia” of the online space. That impulse evolved into “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth,” an ongoing project that has taken many forms: installations, an interactive web project, public performances, and sculptures, among others. Many of those works are on view at MIT, but it is undoubtedly the title work that will linger in audiences’ psyches long after they leave. 

Only sounds consists of a 34-minute, three-channel video projected onto walls fronted by steel and concrete panels. Like many of Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s works, the video collages fragments of text, poetry, and video clips appropriated from a variety of sources. However, in this installation, those elements are interwoven with original footage of the performances by Baransi, Makmakkuk, Haykal, and Julmud, as well as a two-channel sound composition of percussive electronic music that pervades the space.

The three channels respond to each other and sometimes compete for attention, and often change tone in a split-second, jumping from a peaceful performance of a song in an unidentified valley to archival footage of what appears to be an Israeli bulldozer destroying a Palestinian structure. The steel and concrete panels bear a striking resemblance to the West Bank Wall (termed the “Apartheid Wall” by many Palestinians). Here, they serve as both a screen and an obstruction, fracturing the videos projected onto them. The impression is one of “disjuncture” and “disjointment,” which Abou-Rahme said the two artists believe are central to Palestinians’ lived experience.

“It was very important for us to formally translate the disjuncture and disjointment to create a work that wasn’t too smooth,” Abou-Rahme said. “We were afraid of creating a work that was too smooth and too easily digestible or fetishized, because in a way, what we’re talking about is that fragmentation and that destruction—how within the fragmentation, people are creating different possibilities of life.” 

Fragments are a recurring motif in the exhibition beyond the “sampled” gestures, movements, and melodies of Only sounds. Adjacent to the installation lies Where the soil has been disturbed, a 2022 work that consists of a field of free-standing steel panels fronted by concrete bricks from which petrified Syrian thistles grow. (The artists position the plants as symbols of resistance, since they often grow in areas of disturbance and have appeared after Palestinian villages have been bulldozed.) The steel panels serve as canvases for the artists’ fragments, from drawings to screen-grabbed snippets of TextEdit poetry and inverted stills of dancers and protestors. The overlapping fragments call to mind a cluttered computer desktop—a motif in an earlier iteration of “May amnesia”—and allow the artists to connect seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian life. 

There’s an image in this piece that looks like a topographical map of a river valley, which is paired with a drawing of a woman next to a thistle. This woman’s circulatory system visually mimics the riverbed from the map, while another nearby drawing shows a mouth whose tongue becomes a river. In others, computer-generated avatars of Palestinians are paired with negative macro-pictures of thistles. The pieces seem to assert an inseparable link between Palestinians and the land. 

“The land in all its multiplicity is a character and a being in the work,” Abou-Rahme said. “A lot of what we thought about was, what are the inscriptions that are already in the land? And what are the things that the land remembers that we have forgotten? … And what is it that we, in our consciousness, have forgotten, but our body actually remembers?”

The installation also establishes a deep connection between past and present. Abou-Rahme said that she and Abbas were captivated by how songs and protest chants were modified as they moved from Syria to Palestine to Egypt during the Arab uprisings. Watching videos on social media, they observed, in real time, how the revisions formed a digitized call-and-response, echoing a longstanding tradition in oral poetry, song, and dance of the Arab world.

“We were thinking a lot about what it means to take a gesture or a phrase or part of a song from something that was performed in Iraq—that is, speaking about a specific set of conditions—and then seeing how that specific set of conditions of colonial violence and erasure is then echoed in Palestine,” Abou-Rahme said. 

While early versions of “May amnesia” meticulously archived social media posts of cultural practices, with Only sounds, the artists aimed to create new performances rather than merely reproducing elements of their archives. According to Abou-Rahme, the call-and-response format became literalized in the making of the piece. Instead of asking their performers to simply reproduce Palestinian or Arab songs and dance, Abou-Rahme and Abbas encouraged them to “fragment” and “mutate” them in singular gestures, refrains, or rhythms. Before they edited the footage, Abou-Rahme and Abbas wrote the poetry and text that appears in the final video, and then produced the sound composition in relation to this “script.” In the final stage, they edited the footage, text, and archival clips together alongside the sound composition.

“There are multiple calls and responses and echoes in the work,” she explained. “There’s the archive, there’s the new performances, and then there’s us in the studio responding to all that and creating this sound composition. Sometimes we’re also singing with them. So, we re-perform and sing.”

Portions of this work are immediately legible to any reasonably informed viewer, but other parts will be accessible only to Arabic speakers or Palestinians. While much of the text and song is translated, entire stanzas are left in Arabic, and certain oblique references are not explained. And the translation of songs and chants is not one-to-one. The artists wanted the piece to speak to anyone, but it was important to them that certain messages remained coded, due to what Abou-Rahme called the “suffocating” representations of Palestine that are pervasive in the Western media.

“It’s so easy, when you come from somewhere like Palestine, to make work for an English-speaking audience and to let that be your trajectory,” she explained. “For us, we always wanted to make work primarily that other Palestinians were going to get something from. Of course, it can speak to more and more and more people and of course, we don’t see Palestine as a singular or a unique issue. We see it as part of a very long history and present of colonial bullshit that’s been killing the planet.”

The exhibition has one other call-and-response embedded in it. Originally scheduled to open last fall, it was postponed following the October 7 Hamas attack. Nine months of Israeli military operations in Gaza later, the context around the works has shifted. Many locations filmed in Only sounds are no longer accessible to Palestinians due to security restrictions or the threat of settler violence, and a whole new set of songs, chants, and dances have entered the online space as activists and protestors connect US policies to its effects internationally.

“The work becomes a call to think more deeply about the intersections between communities that are dispossessed and how the connection can become a powerful force. That’s what we see with the mobilization around Palestine right now,” Abou-Rahme said. “We understand the intersections. We understand that what happens here is connected to what happens in New York.”

“Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only sounds that tremble through us” is on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston through July 28, 2024.

“It’s going very well, but it’s not without its frictions,” she told ARTnews in a softly spoken yet determined German accentat the opening of two exhibitions at Mudam on July 11 – “Xanti Schawinsky: Play Life Illusion” and “Agnieszka Kurant: Risk Landscape.” “Changing management in any museum is always extremely difficult. It’s getting better and we are getting there, but it’s not easy. We have higher visitor numbers [up 15 percent]. We’ve changed many things, like looking into artists who can deal with this architecture.”

She meant Mudam’s grided glass windows that trap heat. The state-funded museum is an unintended hothouse. It was designed by Chinese American architect Ieoh Ming Pei. He retrofitted the stone ruins of Luxembourg City’s Fort Thüngen in the style of the west wing of Washington D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, which he also drew. Good looking? Debatable.

“It was built in the optimistic nineties, this is not a sustainable building,” she added. “It gets very hot so we’re having conversations about working with artists in the future who can work in a greenhouse, like Vivian Suter. It’s highly exciting to think about using this space according to its conditions… from the outside it’s a fortress but on the inside it’s vulnerable on many levels.”

Steinbrügge’s struggle to be more daring has ruffled some feathers. She pointed to her commission and curation of Jason Dodge’s Tomorrow I walked to a dark black star installation. In layman’s terms, it’s a load of trash currently scattered across two of the museum’s floors. In artistic terms, it asks viewers to “think of a pocket emptied out on any day, the traces of a part of use can be seen in bits of paper, some coins, a ticket for something, some dust, proof you were here, proof you were living.”

“I caused a huge scandal with Dodge… the museum team was so angry, the cleaners kept trying to remove it,” she said. Some of the higher-ups, however, were pleased with the conversations the piece was sparking, she added. “People made such amazing memes [of the installation]. It was the talk of the town and also society dinners.”

So, she enjoys causing a bit of a stir? “I do, yes,” Steinbrügge said mischievously. “I’m not a conservative museum director.”

One of her first projects at Mudam’s helm was curating “A Model,” an ongoing group exhibition with 37 artists which she described as an “experiment.” It includes Dodge’s trash installation, a series of benches by Finnigan Shannon, and I am paper, a performance piece based on Tomaso Binga’s poetry.

[“A Model”] brings everything together that I’ve done in my curatorial life,” she said. “When I arrived here, this museum had a very specific way of working with the collection and its architecture, and I wasn’t so fond of it. The museum is now bigger than its six galleries because I’m using all of the transition space as well. We want immersive spaces.”

Performance is important to Steinbrügge and she wants to bring more of it to Luxembourg and incorporate the artform into Mudam’s permanent collection. “In Europe, especially in Germany, all of the museums have the same collection… I want to commission more works for this collection that are connected to Luxembourg,” she said. “We are working on changing the program. We don’t want to have summer openings any more – but we want to have a performance season each summer.”

In her former role as the managing director of Kunstverein in Hamburg, a non-profit contemporary art center in Germany, she didn’t hold back. “Kunstverein provided me with a space to go crazy,” she explained. “With Peaches [the Canadian performance artist and musician], I organized her first and only show on a double masturbator with kinetic sculptures and a light performance that last six hours. It was really funny.”

Mudam’s board of directors was obviously drawn to Steinbrügge’s risqué cultural approach before she was hired. She’s certainly a more left field choice than her predecessor, the Australian Susanne Cotter, who was appointed in 2018. “I need the freedom to experiment,” the German said, “otherwise I can’t work.”

Cotter invited international artists like Suki Seokyeong, Dahn Vo, and Leonor Antunes to exhibit at Mudam before moving on to direct the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Whether Steinbrügge brings Peaches and her dildos to Luxembourg remains to be seen. For now, though, it’s unlikely given she’s trying to engage more families and children. There are plans to build a playground and an “arena for teenagers so they can hang out and smoke their first cigarette, or do whatever teenagers do.”

Steinbrügge said Cotter “opened up the museum to the world” but the German is now taking Mudam in “two directions.” “For example, I’m opening it up with a Bauhaus artist [Schawinsky] – but not a mainstream Bauhaus artist – and combining it with a contemporary performance. I am fostering performance. We can have the weirdest performance and people come.”

She was talking about British artist Monster Chetwynd, who was invited to create an installation – titled Xanti Shenanigans – in response to Schawinsky’s oeuvre and retrospective, “Xanti Schawinsky: Play Life Illusion.” The installation was accompanied by a performance by Chetwynd and per [the artist asked to be referred to by the pronouns “ze” and “per”] troupe on the evening of Mudam’s July 11 summer party.

Performance art is often an acquired taste and Xanti Shenanigans was an unprepared riff on the British dating show “Blind Date” that felt like a bad school play. Will it make Mudam’s permanent collection? Perhaps not.  

That being said, Schawinsky’s son, Daniel – who was in the crowd – told ARTnews that his dad “probably would have liked it.” Thorsten Blume, an artistic associate of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, was also at the event and apparently approved. “He came up to me after the performance and said very interesting responses,” Chetwynd told ARTnews. “One was that it contained pure ‘positivity.’ He invited me to do a residency at the Bauhaus HQ. I also had a lot of people who enjoyed the performance without speaking English – this is important to me, I usually work with mime. This time I wrote a careful script. The action and use of the set were all carefully planned to allow of flow of action that anyone could enjoy…I saw a glowing mass of excited faces in the audience, I am not in any delusional state, the audience loved the performance. I worked hard for months. They know when they are being served a great dish.”

Steinbrügge forewarned ARTnews about her programing before Chetwynd’s skit, “Some people will understand – and some won’t.” These words might just forge the German’s legacy in Luxembourg. 

The women are guided by the voice of singer Lois Deloatch, who soulfully intones:
I’ll fly away
To a land where joy shall never end
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away, oh, Glory
I’ll fly away

When they reach the top of the courthouse steps, Lanier extends her hand above her head and, with a closed fist, she knocks on the door twice. She waits briefly, stretching her fingers as she presses her open hand against the door’s surface; immediately the courthouse bell tolls as the two 12-foot-tall doors swing open to a gentleman welcoming the group of women into one of the oldest courthouses in the United States.

The 1767 Chowan County Courthouse is the site of an installation, Memorable Proof, by artist Letitia Huckaby that is part of the “Harriet Jacobs Project,” an ongoing initiative directed by Lanier and curated by Rivers. Collectively, their work is dedicated to the memory of Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, a trenchant autobiographical account of her enslavement in Edenton and escape to freedom. Jacobs wrote the book under a pseudonym Linda Brent, in 1860, revealing the harrowing details around the mental, physical, and sexual abuse she suffered from her de facto owner, Dr. James Norcom, whose torture she fled, hiding in a small garret in her grandmother’s home for seven years.

While Incidents was lauded within abolitionist circles upon its publication, it eventually drifted into obscurity for about a century. Historian Jean Fagan Yellin eventually resurrected the book’s legacy, proving the work was not a fictional account as was long believed. She conducted extensive archival research to conclusively link Jacobs to her writing and her subsequent abolitionist work in the postbellum North and South, publishing the biography Harriet Jacobs, A Life in 2004.

In 2006, Lanier, director of North Carolina Historic Sites, learned of Yellin’s scholarship, and began pursuing a unique activation dedicated to Jacobs’s legacy. At the time she was the organization’s curator of cultural history, and in 2008, Lanier organized a book release event in Edenton for Yellin’s publishing of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. As Lanier recounted in a 2008 article with UNC Press, “One of my goals as a public historian is to help create spaces where visitors can experience emotional impacts, discover connections to the past, or have epiphanies of historic relevance. In such moments, an internal bell rings out in the face of human experience preserved in the amber of historic preservation.” Since the 2008 launch, Lanier has picked up the baton of this historical stewardship from Yellin, and she is now passing the curatorial baton to Johnica Rivers to ensure that the memory of Jacobs is indelibly tied to Edenton.

With Memorable Proof, Huckaby and Rivers activated the historic courthouse using a combination of photography and textiles to create portraits of members of the Fannie A. Parker Woman’s Club, an Edenton-based civic organization founded in 1909 by Black women under the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, established 13 years earlier in 1896. To create these silhouetted portraits, Huckaby photographed Edenton chapter members on location, placing them behind a floral sheet as she shot the images, later printing them on sheer panels of flag fabric. In the windows of the courthouse, her subjects appear like ethereal apparitions. The sheerness of the fabric lets in light that reveals the gridlines from the windowpanes and the views outside, giving the work a layered, palimpsestic feel.

Rivers said she envisioned Memorable Proof as a “site responsive” installation: the silhouettes’ placement above the judge’s bench, lining the courthouse’s semicircular apse, evokes the exalted reverence of saintly figures memorialized in the stained-glass windows of a church. Here, she situates the women with a regal presence that centers their status as community caregivers and historical caretakers. This site holds important familial connections to Jacobs; her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, secured her freedom in this courtroom, and as a manumitted woman, Horniblow bought the Edenton home that concealed her enslaved granddaughter for seven years.

Memorable Proof is part of a larger activation of Jacobs’s hometown, organized by Lanier and Rivers who have created a cultural experience through a series of artistic interventions. Titled A Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs, the pair brought together an interdisciplinary group of women who have studied, written about, or invoked the memory of Jacobs within their academic, artistic, and cultural work. The inaugural Sojourn activation encouraged a deeper engagement with research materials and ideas that artists and writers draw upon in their work. Addressing the group over dinner one night this past March, Rivers said of their mission: “What we are embodying here is land as source material. It is not enough to go into the archives. You need to go to the place.”

With the Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs project Lanier and Rivers draw upon Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, positing the idea that everything is art and that art can be used to transform society. Analogous activations include Rick Lowe’s development of Project Row Houses, in which artists are invited to create work within the context and community of Houston’s historically Black Third Ward. For Sojourn, the duo have created an environment in which artists work in concert with the community and visitors to that community to realize the final works.

Lanier and Rivers approached this unique curatorial project by asking themselves, “How do we reveal the hidden markers of their lives on the land?” They created an experience akin to a close read of Incidents by highlighting elements of Jacobs’s life alongside her historical context as a way to bring her story to life and deepen the community’s connection to her life’s work.

“It has been painful to me, in many ways,” Jacobs writes in Incidents, “to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark and troubled sea.”

During our own sojourn to Edenton this spring, Lanier and Rivers took the group to the Providence Burial Ground where Horniblow and Jacobs’s mother and father are all interred. Along a nearby creek bed, volunteers handed out white rose petals from baskets for guests to cast into the slow-moving current as church bells peacefully rang in the distance. It was a moment of quiet reflection and meditation as we called upon the memories of loved ones who have traveled into other realms. The intense emotions conjured throughout the day prompted tears of sorrow and joy as friends and strangers alike comforted one another as we traversed the land and the profound sensations of grief, loss, gratitude, and hope.

To quote Jacobs, “The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own, I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own.”

Sojourn itself asks participants what it means to be called to the hearthstone of someone they’ve never met, to break bread with them, to walk the land they once trod, to smell their favorite spring flowers, to gaze upon the waters that set them free, to raise a glass in their honor.

For Lanier and Rivers, the goal of Sojourn for Harriet Jacobs is to embody the care to community that its namesake gave to Edenton, with the goal of making sure Jacobs is never forgotten again. Back in the courthouse, tucked in a small vestibule on the second floor is a fireplace with a vintage Victorian-era pole screen next to it. Above the hearth is a photograph of Harriet Jacobs, seated in a large gothic Victorian parlor chair boasting a slight upturned grin, welcoming us to her very own hearthstone.

Dunbar introduced the artist to Lennon, who then examined another piece instructing gallerygoers to hammer a nail into it. When Lennon asked if he could give it a try, the artist initially demurred, preferring that the object remain untouched until the opening the next day, but then relented, saying that Lennon could proceed for a fee of five shillings. Lennon replied “Well, I’ll give you an imaginary five shillings and hammer an imaginary nail in.” Thus, one of the most famous romances in rock-and-roll history was born.

The artist in question was Yoko Ono, and it is no surprise that her story’s intertwining with Lennon’s made her one of a handful of artists whose pop cultural reputations were commensurate with their oeuvres. But unlike her peers in this respect—Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso, for example—Ono’s notoriety overshadowed her practice to the point of displacing it, thanks to her misogynistically conferred reputation as the woman who broke up the Beatles. Seen as little more than a character in a real-life soap opera, Ono was transformed from an artist into an artifact in the public imagination.

But Ono had already been a well-established figure in the postwar avant-garde by the time she met Lennon, due to her association with the Fluxus movement. Interdisciplinary and international in scope, Fluxus focused on process over product, becoming foundational to the development of the performance, conceptual, and video art that followed. Whatever else he might have thought of them, the works that Lennon encountered comported with the Fluxus ideology of merging art and life.

In the decades since Lennon’s 1980 murder at the hands of a delusional fan, Ono (as author, filmmaker, and musician as well as visual artist) has enjoyed a renewed admiration within the art world and beyond. The first significant Ono revival, for instance, occurred in 2000 with “YES,” a show at the Japan Society in New York that subsequently traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among other venues. In 2015 MoMA presented a survey of Ono’s work between 1960 and her “unofficial” MoMA debut in 1971: an unsanctioned one-woman show in which she released hundreds of perfume-soaked flies inside the museum, inviting visitors to follow them. This year London’s Tate Modern has mounted a major monograph spanning her practice from the mid 1950s to the present.

Welcome as these encomiums were, however, they often created the impression that her time with Lennon represented an interruption of her career, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As her 1971 intervention at MoMA makes clear, Ono pursued projects well after meeting Lennon. Moreover, he became her partner for various collaborations in which she took the lead (though some regard these efforts as celebrity hijinks). For these reasons, it’s worth taking another look at Ono’s life and art.

The Trellis Art Fund, a New York–based private foundation, said it had specifically awarded two of the awards to working parents in recognition of the challenges they often face.

“Making a grant unrestricted is akin to funding basic science research,” Corina Larkin, Trellis’s executive director, said in a statement. “We wanted to relieve our grantees from the financial challenges of being an artist at every stage of life, and allow them to deploy resources on their own timeline. More than anything, artists need time, space, and stability to be in the studio and engage deeply with their work.”

More than 75 curators, historians, artists, and art world professionals from around the world were invited to nominate up to three artists earlier this year in January. Any artist eligible to work in the United States was considered. In February, those who were nominated were then invited to apply for the award, after which an anonymous jury then decided the final 12 recipients from a pool of 157 applicants.

Those selected work across a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, video, performance
and social practice, and hail from a number of different locales. The funds are unrestricted and can be used to fund personal or professional needs.

Speaking on behalf of the anonymous jury, Trellis Art Fund advisory board member and sculptor Arlene
Shechet explained, “There is nothing simple or straightforward about the process of elimination and
selection, but we are immensely pleased and grateful that, in this inaugural year for Trellis,
twelve astoundingly dedicated and talented artists will receive substantial, no strings attached,
funds towards realizing their dreams and sharing their visions.”

The recipients are as follows:

Candida Alvarez, Chicago, IL
American Artist, New York, NY
Ja’Tovia Gary, Dallas, TX
Every Ocean Hughes, New York, NY
Autumn Knight, New York, NY
Young Joon Kwak, Los Angeles, CA
Lorraine O’Grady, New York, NY
Paul Pfeiffer, New York, NY
Ronny Quevedo, New York, NY*
Alison Saar, Los Angeles, CA
Shizu Saldamando, Los Angeles, CA*
Jorge González Santos, San Juan, PR

*Artist parents with children under 12 years old.

This three-minute-long take appears in the 1979 video Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), an early masterpiece from Bill Viola, who died this past weekend at 73. To make the video, Viola journeyed to remote locales—snow-laden prairies of the US and Canada, a heat-warped desert in Tunisia—and captured the sights seen, rarely moving his camera at all. He’d sometimes spend days trying to get a shot, waiting until the weather aligned with the image he desired.

Viola wrote that his goal, in braving what he said felt like “the end of the world,” was to reach “the edge”—the place where perception breaks down and life starts to look very different. “It is like some huge mirror for your mind,” Viola wrote, adding, “Inside becomes outside. You can see what you are.”

The irony is that in Chott el-Djerid, and in many other works by Viola, there is not always much to see. Long takes of unsettled waters and shadowy figures are constants in Viola’s oeuvre. Abstract images composed of indefinable light and inky darkness recur as well, even in his later multiscreen video installations, which are more narrative-driven.

But there was always more than what was portrayed on screen in Viola’s works, which forced viewers to see beyond the exterior world. He brought art to its limits, showing that the act of looking at an object requires gazing inward, too.

He was not alone in producing perception-bending experiments using video. During the 1970s, artists a generation Viola’s senior, such as Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, had already harnessed filmed themselves live and had onlookers reflect on these images in real time. Jonas and Acconci produced tapes that were icy and clearly very conceptual—an entirely different sensibility than what is obvious in Viola’s early works. His tapes could be categorized as capital-R Romantic in the same way as Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, since Viola’s videos are also about the sublime.

Many of Viola’s works inspire awe and terror, in particular the ones that allude to the artist’s own near-death experience. When he was 6, Viola was vacationing with his family when he almost drowned. What should’ve been the scariest moment of his life ended up becoming the most beautiful one: he spoke in interviews of feeling as though he had reached “heaven.”

In The Reflecting Pool (1977–79), one of Viola’s earliest works featuring aquatic imagery, the clothed artist walks up to a pool and jumps. But before he can complete his cannonball, his body comes to a halt, suspended mid-air above water that continues to ripple. Gradually, Viola disappears, only to emerge from the water, this time in the nude. He has been physically transformed by being beneath the surface, which remains invisible to viewers.

Viola’s work from the 1980s onward sought to inspire a similar spiritual metamorphosis in his viewers. His 1983 installation Room for St. John of the Cross was a breakthrough, merging sculptural elements and video footage to obliquely recreate the nine-month imprisonment of the titular 16th-century Spanish Catholic saint. When the Museum of Modern Art presented it, a small cubicle with a video monitor and a jug was set before a larger projection of an unbroken shot of a mountain. Throughout the room played audio of roaring wind.

Art historian Jean-Christophe Ammann once wrote that he was so moved by the installation, he no longer wanted to visit a Frank Stella show that was also on view at MoMA at the same time. Instead, Ammann said, he returned to his hotel room, “carrying in my heart the trembling treeleaves” heard within.

What inspired such a reaction? One can only speculate, as Ammann did not specify. But it probably had something to do with the way that Viola slowed things down, making viewers observe the passage of time, as St. John did when he inhabited a cramped, windowless cell that was so tiny, he could not even stand upright. Time is not something that can be seen. It can, however, be felt.

Religious content became a fixture in Viola’s late-career work, which drew on his studies of Christianity, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism. As these works exploded across multiple screens, they unfurled epic cycles having to do with birth, life, death, and the afterlife. Going Forth by Day (2002), the one I wrote my undergraduate thesis on, features a figure moving through a uterus-like pool, a lamentation-like gathering for a dying man, and an inexplicable resurrection (involving water, naturally). Works like that one tend to be seen as religious experiences or spiritualist drivel. Critic Adrian Searle once dinged Viola’s late-career works for devolving into “theatre and spectacle.” I always felt a twinge of embarrassment every time I had to admit that Going Forth by Day made me cry.

It seemed to critics like Searle that Viola had moved away from the concerns that guided works like Chott el-Djerid, producing extravagant pieces that were big, loud, expensive, and obvious. I’d argue otherwise. Viola had merely continued his project of depicting the undepictable. His new reference points—Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel, Jacopo da Pontormo’s Carmignano Visitation, and the like—were equally engaged in the difficult project of representing that which cannot be seen, be it death or a gust of wind. Viola had simply used a camera instead of paint.

Even though he was deeply engaged with the Western art-historical canon, Viola frequently spoke of using a video camera to represent things that had never before been represented. In the case of Chott el-Djerid, he pointed his camera at some of the hottest stretches of desert in Tunisia, areas that are known to produce hallucinations because of their extreme temperatures and vacant settings. He estimated that, as he peered into his lens, he could not see around 90 percent of the desert while shooting. An “eye without a mind,” his lens was able to capture “even less of this big world than what you’re trying to see all at once,” he once said. “And that was the way to get into the mirages!”

A basic description of Chott el-Djerid might make this video seem like a bunch of heat-distorted shots of sand, but this work is more than what’s shown onscreen. It’s a video that succeeds in feeling like a journey to a place unknowable to rational eyes. Viola said he was “cutting out an enormous amount of what I was seeing and narrowing it down to this tiny little portal. Then, suddenly, when you do that, the mirages are completely here; you’re in their world.”

Konstantin Akinsha, the curator of the Royal Academy of Arts’s “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900–1930s,” spent several frustrating years trying to convince Western museums to host the show. But he kept hitting roadblocks: some were uninterested, and some were simply unable to take it, due to political tension. At long last, the exhibition has arrived in the British capital, however, having first appeared in Madrid in 2022.

The exhibition tells the story of a group of modernist artists who helped define Ukraine’s cultural identity. It is therefore deeply ironic that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his claims that the country doesn’t exist, not to mention the Russian military raining missiles down on its museums, eventually made it possible.

“In the Eye of the Storm” maps the upheaval in Ukraine at the start of the 20th century through artistic experimentation. No Ukrainian city had its own art academy at the turn of the 20th century, so artists traveled to European capitals like Paris and Munich to study. When they returned to Ukraine, they brought with them new ideas rooted in Cubism and Futurism. However, by the mid-1930s, Joseph Stalin’s rule was becomingly increasingly distrustful of Ukrainian artists and their modernist experiments, bringing an end to this particularly fertile period.

The exhibition serves a double purpose: it brings a vital and largely under-recognized chapter of modernism to the British public, but it also saves these works on view from being destroyed by Russia.

ARTnews spoke to Akinsha to discuss how he expects this exciting yet tragic period in Ukrainian history to resonate in London, and how he managed to haul the artworks out of a war zone.

This interview has been edited lightly for concision and clarity.

ARTnews: How was the idea for “In the Eye of the Storm” born?

Konstantin Akinsha: I wanted to organize this exhibition long before the war. Ukraine was viewed as a lost land—Europeans weren’t really interested in my country. This doesn’t mean, however, that exhibitions of Ukrainian art weren’t held before—there was some international interest in the 1990s when Ukraine announced its independence. There was one good exhibition in Zagreb in Croatia from 1990 to 1991, titled “Ukrainian Avant-Garde.” To be honest, though, this was the only decent exhibition.

I really wanted to organize a serious exhibition of Ukrainian modernism, and I nearly did it in 2018. It was agreed that my exhibition would be shown at the Museum Ludwig Budapest, which offered two floors—one to exhibit contemporary Ukrainian art (which I also curated), the other to show Ukrainian modernism. However, at the last minute, Budapest clashed with Kyiv because Ukraine adopted a new education law that the Hungarians interpreted as oppressive to the Hungarian minority in Ukraine. This was used as a battle cry because Hungarian elections were going on at the time and the Hungarians froze all financial projects with Ukraine, so we couldn’t get insurance for our exhibition. It was cancelled. The contemporary show did happen, though, and we were awarded an American prize [the YOU-2 GFAA Award] for the best show of the year. The modernist paintings never crossed the border.

After this, I tried to place the modernist exhibition in different museums, but I was rejected everywhere. A German museum director refused to recognize the difference between Russian and Ukrainian art, and other museums said the artworks were beautiful but refused to show them because they were working with Russians, which made it difficult to work with Ukrainians as well. So ironically, at the end of the day, the best promoter of my exhibition was Vladimir Putin. He ultimately made it possible by invading Ukraine.

Who supported you in making the exhibition a reality?

Two weeks before the war, I wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, telling Ukrainians to evacuate immediately, but my plea fell upon deaf ears. As a result of this denial, the museum collections of Mariupol, Melitopol, and Kherson were lost, removed by Russians or partly destroyed. When the war started, I decided that, if they don’t want to evacuate the collections, I had no choice but to start my own war. I was adamant that we had to move the paintings that eventually comprised “In the Eye of the Storm” abroad because the prospect of the show would be more acceptable than an evacuation. We made an appeal to the presidential administration. To my surprise, our undertaking was supported by President Zelensky. Once we were given the green light, my co-curators Katia Denysova and Francesca Thysen-Bornemysza worked heroically to make it happen with the help of Yuliia Lytvynets, the director of the National Art Museum of Ukraine (NAMU).

How did you manage to transport the artworks?

We loaded the trucks with the paintings and sent them on their way with a military convoy and state guarantees instead of insurance. Then, more drama ensued. As we left Kyiv early one morning, the largest bombardment of Ukraine targeting the entire territory started. Luckily, by 10 PM the same day, the convoy reached the Polish border. We were ready to open the champagne. Not so fast, though, as a stray rocket exploded in Poland killing two people and creating a general feeling that World War III was starting. The Poles closed the border, and the Ukrainian ambassador in Madrid worked around the clock to convince Warsaw to allow our trucks into Poland. By some miracle, the trucks arrived in Madrid on time for the exhibition. It made a very big splash. We had an unbelievable amount of press. Even Chinese TV turned up.

I’ve read that you are not a fan of the term “Ukrainian avant-garde.” Why?

I prefer the term “modernism.” Today, Ukraine talks about Russian stealing its art but it was not just Russia, it was the international art market. When these avant-garde works entered the western market in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, demand was high and supply was low, so the various characters involved started smugling art out of Ukraine from artists who were not connected to Russian art world in any way, like Oleksandr Bogomazov and Vasyl Yermilov. When these artworks reached the West, they were classified as being of the Russian avant-garde because nobody wanted to hear complicated explanations about the difference between Russia and Ukraine. Another reason I don’t like the term is because Ukraine incubated a unique and local school of modernism. It had many connections to Russia but it had influences from other countries too, including Germany and, in the late ’20s, Italy.

“In the Eye of the Storm” includes artists who were not Ukrainian, but who left an imprint on the development of Ukrainian art. Some of these artists spent just a short time in Ukraine but helped ferment modernist trends. One example is Alexandra Exeter. If you look on Russian Wikipedia, you’ll read that she is a Russian artist; if you read Ukraine’s Wikipedia, you’ll see she was Ukrainian; and the French Wikipedia says she was French. The truth is, she had roots in all three cultures. In reality, she was born in Belarus to Greek and Jewish parents. In Ukraine, she played an instrumental role in Kyiv’s Futurist school because in her early career she was connected to Paris and Rome. She was the founding mother of this modernist trend in Ukraine. Then she formed the School of Ukrainian Theater Design, then moved to Moscow and Paris. Her role in Ukraine was extremely important.

Also, take Kazymyr Malevych. He was born in Ukraine and even claimed in his memoirs that he was Ukrainian, but he worked in Belarus and Russia. Of course, he was Polish by ethnicity, but what we are focusing on is his presence in Kyiv in the late ’20s, when Russia was freezing artistic policies and Ukraine was saving liberally artistic policies. He was invited to Kyiv and granted professorship in the Kyiv Art Institute. He spent two years in Kyiv teaching and publishing his treaties in the main Ukrainian art magazine Nova Henetatsiya (New Generation) all the while influencing students from the institute. For this reason, he is included in the exhibition.

We are not only focused on Ukrainian artists. There is a special focus on a Jewish group called the Kultur-liga, which was created in Kyiv during the short-lived independent Ukrainian state, and which was perhaps the most important arm of the Jewish cultural renaissance. At this time, a young artist from the Pale of Settlement, areas where Jews were permitted to reside in the Russian empire, came to Kyiv. It was a cultural explosion that influenced Ukrainian artists too. It’s artists who influenced the formation of this national Ukrainian modernism, and who didn’t try to nationalize it.

How important is it to separate Ukraine’s artistic identity from that of the Soviet Union?

It’s important and it’s impossible. Ukrainian identity was formed by the Soviet Union—and was then destroyed by the Soviet Union. After the revolution, the Bolsheviks adopted the policy of so-called Rootization, which was called Ukrainization in Ukraine. This policy had many purposes. One of them was to destroy the remains of the administration and structure of the Russian Empire. Ukraine was granted cultural autonomy. Ukraine’s education and literature, for example, were supported, as was the Ukrainian language. In some way, this Ukrainian identity was created by the system, and then it was mercilessly destroyed during Stalin’s repression.

Ukraine paid an unbelievable price. The entire intellectual elite was basically wiped out. Artists in Ukraine were not only punished as formalists but as Ukrainian nationalists, so more Ukrainian artists were killed than Russian ones during this time. In addition to the repression there was an artificial famine which cost millions of lives. Now, it’s understandable why Ukrainians are fighting for their identity, which obviously exists. Mr. Putin repeats every other day that Ukraine’s identity and culture doesn’t exist, but “In the Eye of the Storm” proves that it does.

Is Ukraine’s avant-garde market riddled with fakes, like the Russian avant-garde market?

Unfortunately, yes. It is very interesting that this avalanche of fakes coincided with the first interest in the so-called Ukrainian avant-garde, which started to form in the early ’90s. We have a massive amount of low-quality fakes. To name the most faked artists: [Vasyl] Yermilov and [Alexander] Bogomazov. These fakes are being sold at secondary auctions.

Between the first exhibition in Zagreb and our exhibition in the Royal Academy, practically all other efforts, almost without exception, to show Ukrainian modernism were spoiled by using them as a vehicle to exhibit fakes.

How many modernist paintings have been destroyed, not only since the start of the war in Ukraine, but since the Stalinist repressions?

We are talking about multitudes of modernist works. Due to the anti-modernist policy after the 1930s, scores of paintings were confiscated from museums and institutions and put in special secret repositories, and the idea was to destroy all of them. However, most of this destruction was prevented by World War II. After the war, many paintings were saved by the director of Ukraine’s National Museum in Kyiv, who stored them in cellars. He obviously knew the Soviet system very well, because he marked all of the paintings with zero value, and do you need to destroy something with no value? No. So this saved many paintings.

Since the beginning of the Russian aggression, some important modernist paintings vanished during the Russian occupation of Kherson. It is not clear if they were removed by the Russians to Crimea or stolen.

What is your outlook for the future of Ukrainian museums amid Russia’s ongoing invasion?

We are in a very difficult situation because the war is not over yet. The destruction is continuing. Museums are in danger. “In the Eye of the Storm” has inspired other museums. For example, there is a very important collection of Byzantine icons that was sent from the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv to the Louvre and exhibited in Paris on long-term loan. I am very pleased about this. Other Ukrainian museums are sending exhibitions to Switzerland and Germany.

But after this war is over, a lot of Ukrainian museums need very serious reshuffling. It’s funny to say, but in a certain sense, this war brought the cultural isolation of Ukraine to an end. The international museum world is much more open to Ukraine that it was before. Ukrainian museum curators now have much closer contact with Western institutions, and I hope that when this war is finally over, and Ukraine hopefully joins the European Union, the reform of Ukrainian museums happen.

As a curator and a US citizen who was born in Ukraine, how frustrating is it that it has taken a war to draw the Western world’s attention to Ukrainian modernism?

It is extremely frustrating. As I told you, the best PR agent for “In the Eye of the Storm” was Mr. Putin, but of course, I would have preferred to do it without his help. Unfortunately, this was impossible. It has been frustrating that Western museums have not paid attention to Ukrainian modernism. If you want to have a revised and serious history of art, it’s vital to be open to developments in other parts of the world.

Before being transformed into a showcase for paintings by the likes of Berthe Morisot, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and many more, the Victor Laloux­–designed building played several roles in the life of the city. After being decommissioned as a station, it served as a reception center for prisoners after World War II, was a film set for Orson Welles’s 1962 movie The Trial, and was used as an auction venue while the Hôtel Drouot was closed. Its conversion into a museum was led by architects Renaud Bardon, Pierre Colboc, and Jean-Paul Philippon.

Here are 25 masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay’s collection. (Please note that not all of these works are on view at a given time—we have indicated those that are currently displayed and where they may be found on this map.)

The flight to Japan from art world centers like New York, London, and Paris isn’t exactly short. Those that do make the trip this year, however, won’t be disappointed with the art offerings, which span modern to contemporary. This week, during the Tokyo Gendai fair, the shows to see in the city are dominated by strong sculpture.

First up on the itinerary: the Artizon Museum’s exhibition of Constantin Brancusi, the first proper survey of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work in Japan.

Brancusi’s The Kiss has it all: it’s cute, it’s romantic, it’s profoundly Instagrammable. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it also happens to mark the starting line of modern sculpture: from The Kiss’s economy of means, the rest was a sprint, from Picasso to Moore to Giacometti all the way up through Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread. So it’s no surprise that the Kiss is situated front and center at the Artizon show.

The exhibition neatly charts Brancusi’s wiggling free of Rodin’s influence and taking flight: the show culminates in a section dedicated to the form of the bird, represented by the rightly famous Bird in Space, an elegant skyward swipe of bronze. There are also photographs, and a section dedicated to recreating Brancusi’s Montparnasse studio. Purists will gripe about the large number of posthumous casts but, for a lay audience, the show serves as a decent dose of beauty and a fine introduction to a titan of modern sculpture.

If Brancusi conceived of the bird, Alexander Calder taught it to fly. Over at the Azabudai Hills Gallery is a compact survey of the master of the mobile—done in collaboration with Pace Gallery , whose huge new space is upstairs—assembled by the artist’s tireless grandson Sandy Rower, head of the Calder Foundation. The title? “Calder: A Japanese Effect” Why not. We’ve already had Calder paired with artists from Giacometti to Miro to Fischli and Weiss. As Rower has shown us over the past two decades, Calder is indeed the gift that keeps on giving. 

There are some real gems in this exhibition, including an unexpected series of drawings of animals in motion: there are no other words for these than just perfect, especially the cats, with their movements captured in just a few strokes of ink. A star of this particular show, though, is Japanese architect Stephanie Goto, who did the exhibition design. A black mobile set against a black ceiling? Unexpectedly brilliant. Other works are situated against a wall covered in large black sheets of paper, another effect that shouldn’t work but does. 

You may think of Brancusi again when you visit “MOON,” an exhibition of Los Angeles-based British artist Thomas Houseago at BLUM , the gallery formerly known as Blum & Poe. Best known as a sculptor, Houseago has several pieces in the show that recall the Romanian master, one of them an abstract egg-like shape set on a rough-hewn wooden plinth, and the other an owl in his signature technique of drawing in plaster.

For my money, the owl is the best piece in this show, displayed silhouetted against a large window. Like Ann Craven’s paintings of birds, this piece seems to capture the essence of the animal. Houseago has recently branched out into paintings, and they are dramatic and rich with color, if somewhat less successful than the 3D work. A large painting of an owl, for instance, is accomplished, but seems only to highlight the less-is-more brilliance of the sculpture.

After seeing the work of those three male sculptors, you will have to put on a different hat to experience the work of Rei Naito. Think of Henry James’s famous dictum and “try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” Because if you are not paying attention in the various displays of Naito’s work throughout the enormous Tokyo National Museum, you are going to lose quite a bit. 

Naito, who was born in Hiroshima in 1961 and represented Japan at the 1997 Venice Biennale, works in a minimalist tradition, but not in the sense of, say, Donald Judd. There is nothing heavy about her work. Instead, objects ranging from small to miniscule—pompoms, balloons, pebble-like blown glass bubbles, animal figurines, bones, little mirrors, a jar of water—are deployed in ways that demand meditation on the part of the viewer. In one long, narrow gallery of the museum, such things are arrayed against slate gray walls and under dimmed lights: the effect is of being inside the artist’s imagination. Along one wall is white fabric inside a glass display case, looking like a snowbank. What amazes about Saito’s work is just how close it gets to twee without ever stepping over that line.

In the 1980s, Naito said of a particular artwork of hers that she was attempting to “create a spiritual place of her own.” The same might be said for another Japanese artist of Naito’s generation who works in a very different mode. Mariko Mori became known in the nineties for photographs of herself posed in urban environments in Japan, dressed up as various stereotypes of a Japanese woman. But over the past two decades she has been working in a spiritual mode, right down to merging her art with her living quarters. 

The project currently on view at SCAI The Bathhouse is complex, involving crystals and a spiritualistic painting, and is connected to Mori’s artwork Peace Crystal (2016-2024), which is currently on view outside a palazzo in Venice during this year’s Biennale. At SCAI, Mori appears in augmented reality (you need to make an appointment) as a priestess whose attire draws on both Japan’s history and on the kind of futuristic effects found in video games. Like Saito, Mori has crafted an entire immersive world, one you can only enter in person.

For Theaster Gates, too, as a wall text explains in the Chicago artist’s first solo exhibition in Japan, at the Mori Art Museum , making art is a spiritual enterprise. Gates prepared for the Mori show by working with potters in Tokoname, which he had first visited in 2004, and came up with the concept of “Afro-Mingei,” a reference to the word for Japanese folk art, a movement that was overshadowed by the introduction of Western art to Japan in the 19th century. (“[W]hat is key for me is the way in which Mingei honors makers native to a place and resists external impositions of cultural identity,” Gates explains in wall text in the show.) 

The results are displayed in the final section of this survey of Gates’ work and they are by far the highlight. After an elaborate timeline that traces Gates’ links with Japan comes an enormous display case holding ceramics by Tokoname potter Koide Yoshihiro, who died in 2022, and an enormous wooden bar—stools and all—that fronts a set of shelves holding binbo tokkuri bottles (sake bottles) made in collaboration with Japanese potter Tani Q. There’s also a terrific soundtrack (Busta Rhymes was on when I visited) and a spinning disco ball in the shape of an iceberg.