The “Year of the Doll” may be over (“Critics at Large” from the New Yorker podcast of the same name announced it back in 2023, tracing the theme from Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster Barbie movie to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things), but the doll itself is immortal. Yet it is also a memento mori, as Alissa Bennett emphasizes in the latest installment of her “Fiction/Nonfiction” column. Bennett’s longstanding engagement with death, first publicly manifested in her Dead Is Better zines, has led her to a fascination with that which exists on the threshold between life and what lies beyond. A recent encounter with the immortal remains of E.T. at The New Museum prompted her to share her thoughts on how certain dolls – as well as doll-like preserved corpses – communicate with us about life, death, and our own existence as the (still) living.

Listening bars are currently all the rage in Berlin, with devout music lovers increasingly eschewing noisy clubs and bars to listen to choice vinyl selections on audiophile sound systems. A recent event by Christopher Williams put a unique spin on this trend by presenting two recent adaptations of a vintage radio play, originally broadcast in different East and West German versions in the early 1970s. The listening party format might seem custom-made for Williams, as an artist whose work often requires both a high standard of technical expertise and a high level of attention from viewers in highlighting the gaps and continuities that exist within technological processes of transmission – between different places and times, and between different systems and ideologies. Tom McDonough was in attendance and experienced Williams’s characteristic complexity in maximum fidelity.

Trisha Donnelly’s work often conveys a sense of muteness, either by giving concrete form to what defies verbal articulation or by stripping established modes of representation of any obvious referential basis. In doing so, the artist draws our attention to what remains when communication lacks any clear object or message, foregrounding aspects of perception or reception that usually go unnoticed. The defiant nature of Donnelly’s practice means her work is often labelled as opaque or even obscure, at times leading to gendered readings that frame the artist as deliberately withholding. But as Bruce Hainley writes in his discussion of two recent solo shows by Donnelly (and a concurrent group exhibition), to focus exclusively on the ontological opacity of her work means overlooking its true center of gravity: the complex movement between the concrete and the cosmic.

Das malerische Universum von André Butzer, der die Narrativierung seines Oeuvres seit den Neunzigern nicht nur mit seinen Bildern, sondern immer wieder auch in Prosa und Poesie vorantreibt, hat mit freischwebenden Frauenköpfen und Fruchtstilleben jüngst ein neues motivisches Zentrum gefunden. Vergangenes Jahr erstmals bei Max Hetzler in Paris zu sehen, wird Butzers Reihe der Frauen und Früchte nun in den Berliner Räumen der Galerie in der Potsdamer Straße neben Porträts historischer Denker präsentiert. Wie Anna Sinofzik beobachtet, sind letztere als ambivalente Figuren mit komplexen Körpern dargestellt, während die mit Früchten gepaarten Frauen vergleichsweise schematisch bleiben. Vor dem Hintergrund des aktuellen Heftthemas „Misogyny“ regt sie dies zur Reflexion der den Motiven und Darstellungsweisen eingeschriebenen Hierarchien und Geschlechtervorstellungen an.

„Where were you in ‘92?“ Diese Frage stellt Henrike Naumann in ihrer schriftlichen Diplomarbeit und beantwortet sie ebendort mit einer Serie privater Schnappschüsse. Auf einem Foto, aufgenommen in Zwickau, performt sie im Alter von acht Jahren als Backgroundsängerin bei einem mit Freund*innen nachgespielten David Hasselhoff-Auftritt, an der Wand hinter ihnen hängt ein Bild mit sozialistischen Motiven. Welches Lied sie wohl singen? (...)

Gesellschaftliche Umbrüche zeichnen sich – sonst wären es keine – auf allen Ebenen des Lebens ab. Zwar nicht in der eigenen Wohnung, aber in den Wohnräumen ihrer Mitschüler*innen beobachtete Henrike Naumann Anfang der 1990er Jahre Veränderungen. Die auf wenige Modelle beschränkten Möbel der Volkseigenen Betriebe (VEB) wurden aussortiert und durch pastellfarbene oder wild gemusterte Objekte und Accessoires der Postmoderne ersetzt. Aber nicht nur die Einrichtungen änderten sich, sondern auch die Betriebe und Institutionen. (...)

Upon receiving Henrike Naumann’s completely unexpected last goodbye email, which was sent from her own account, announcing her death shortly after it occurred, I was not just utterly devastated about the disappearance of a great artist and dear friend but also immediately concerned about her legacy, which is as immense in its ideas as it is complex in its physical dimension. (...)

The local, social, economic, individual, and temporal characteristics of an artistic practice can be summarized under the concept of “idiom.” Just under ten years ago, an entire issue of TEXTE ZUR KUNST was devoted to this topic – exploring how the specificity of artistic expression is addressed, negotiated, and sometimes misunderstood in the globally interconnected art world. In her review of the duo exhibition by Tereza Glazova and Sveta Mordovskaya, Leonie Huber examines the way in which the two artists both evoke and destabilize a contemporary art “look,” contrasting it with preconceptions of an Eastern European idiom. For this, she also takes into account the characteristics of Autokomanda, the Belgrade exhibition space in which Glazova’s and Mordovskaya’s works are presented.