As an ancient port city straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has long been a place where different cultures and political forces meet and sometimes come into conflict. A fitting setting for the Istanbul Biennial, whose organizers have come under fire from two sides in recent years: While a scandal around a previous Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale saw the Istanbul Biennial’s governing body come under pressure from a censorious Turkish government determined to uphold its own revisionist historical narrative, the Biennial itself has also been criticized by some in the art world for overlooking local issues and actors in favor of a more international agenda. Its latest edition seeks to address this criticism with a new director and a stronger regional focus, with a title (“The Three-Legged Cat”) that alludes to themes of instability and precarity through a nod to Istanbul’s famous population of feral cats. George MacBeth visited the city recently for the Biennial and found an engaging but ominous portent in these feline residents.

Annette Weisser ended her last letter to Bruce Hainley on a somewhat pessimistic (realistic?) note, reminding us of Amelie von Wulffen’s idea of “Panic Realism” – an approach to painting which, as perhaps once practiced by the “New Objectivity,” is motivated by a general sense of being under threat. Picking up on this sentiment, Bruce Hainley’s reply takes a different direction, as it draws us into his personal, at times fairy-tale-like, Catherine Breillat film festival. With a keen sense of the films’ significance for the current moment, he zooms into the proximity of some of Breillat’s famously long and explicit scenes. A key figure of what has been dubbed New French Extremity, Breillat – like Virginie Despentes or Marina de Van – has been criticized for graphically violent explorations of sexuality and gender conflict. The director once defended her approach for offering a deeper and complex underlying purpose. As Hainley suggests, her work also communicates with the manifold contradictions of our present.

Although the figure of Dracula is so enduring as to be practically timeless, the image of a seductive but blood-sucking revenant seems more timely than ever at a moment when large language models and text-to-image technologies are increasingly draining cultural products of their human element. In his new film, Radu Jude turns this metaphor of AI-as-vampire back on itself, with an anthology of crude and anarchic stories that use absurd treatments of the Dracula character to lampoon the idea of AI as a creative tool, all bound together by a meta-narrative about a struggling Transylvanian filmmaker. But while this premise might be promising and the metaphor fitting, Daniel Schwartz argues in his review that the film’s one-dimensional approach to both its central character and the technology it is parodying ultimately make it a missed opportunity.

Like many pen-pal exchanges, the correspondence between Annette Weisser and Bruce Hainley, which runs here quarterly under the title “Supertramps,” started over the summer break. Now the winter term has begun, and in her autumnal letter to Hainley, Weisser looks back on the last warm weeks of the year, during which she visited Monte Carlo. While her teenage son indulged in his passion of chasing Jaguars, McLarens, and other luxury cars to post reels of expensive wheels online, she visited an Annie Leibovitz exhibition at Hauser & Wirth’s Monaco outpost. A particular portrait that Leibovitz took of Agnes Martin stuck with Weisser, prompting reflections on the state of art in uncertain times – and on Hainley’s somewhat romantic take on its return to the underground, which he shared in his last letter.

Das erfüllte Leben sei ein ständiges Sterben der Vergangenheit, vergangene Erfahrungen und gegangene Menschen seien jedoch keineswegs verloren, sondern blieben reichhaltig in uns erhalten – diese Gedanken des Psychiaters und Psychotherapeuten Robin Skynner gab Dara Birnbaum in ihrem Nachruf für ihren langjährigen Freund und Kollegen Dan Graham wieder, den wir vor gut drei Jahren publizierten. Wie reich- und nachhaltig das Wirken der im Mai diesen Jahres verstorbenen Birnbaum die Videokunst geprägt und um eine so wesentliche, weibliche Perspektive erweitert hat, hebt Brigitte Weingart in ihrem Nachruf hervor. Zudem erinnert sie uns an die Aktualität, die auch Birnbaums frühe Arbeiten bis heute haben.

The fact that Steirischer Herbst is Austria’s oldest and only avant-garde festival is recited with every iteration. As a response to the ongoing political swing to the right in the region this year’s edition, under the banner of the provocative slogan “Nie wieder Friede” (Never Again Peace), aims at a return to the festival’s antifascist roots. Calling on the festival’s mythologized founding year of 1968 and the ensuing history of conservative backlashes in postwar Europe, Steirischer Herbst probes the meaning of artistic and political freedom under the premise that, in the fragmented experience of our present, war and peace are interchangeable. Its self-reflexive curatorial concept allows for different and contradictory answers but, as Cecilia Bien argues in her review, it struggles to find a convincing form of address.

While the relationship between mother and child is often seen as the embodiment of nurturing, loving care, in Freudian thought, the mother’s capacity for desire also makes her explicitly threatening, producing a figure that is inherently ambivalent and potentially monstrous. This duality has often been embraced within gay culture, with older drag queens sometimes taking on the role of mother in both senses – nurturing younger queens while also playing the monster. This constellation was probed in suitably histrionic style in a recent exhibition by David Lieske and Than Hussein Clark, for which Lieske invited Clark to stage a durational play within his own exhibition. A twisted tale of mother and son that interweaved autobiography and fiction, the play mirrored the artists’ close personal relationship while fitting squarely within Lieske’s wider practice, as Tal Sterngast suggests.

Nicht nur in der Forschung war Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat eine Pionierin der feministischen Kunstgeschichte, sondern sie trug ihren Fokus auf Geschlechterverständnisse, wie sie sie beispielsweise in ihrer Dissertation zur Blickstruktur in Werken der frühen Neuzeit entwickelt hat, auch in ihre Lehre und in ihr universitätspolitisches Engagement hinein. Ihr Begriff einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Kunstgeschichte kumulierte schließlich in der Studie „Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare“ zur holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts und beeinflusste mehrere Generationen von Kunsthistoriker*innen, die in Wien bei Hammer-Tugendhat studierten, so auch die Autorin dieses Nachrufs, Karin Gludovatz.