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.

In etlichen Nachrufen, die seit Rosa von Praunheims Tod im Dezember 2025 publiziert worden sind, wurde sein Werk als Filmemacher vom Nachwirken seiner grell schillernden künstlerischen Persona überstrahlt. Natürlich lassen sich Rosa von Praunheims Filme nicht losgelöst von seinem Einfluss als Provokateur betrachten, der im Leben wie in seiner Kunst unablässig gegen die heteronormative Bürgerlichkeit rebellierte. Jan Künemund erweckt den „Erdbeerfrosch“ hier nochmal zum Leben, indem er ihn durch die Linse einer kleinen Auswahl an Filmen aus seinem umfangreichen und dezidiert unangepassten Œuvre betrachtet.

While individualism rightly earned a bad reputation in the context of libertarian and atomistic isolationism, ruthless personal profit maximization, and the increasing social withdrawal that we are experiencing today, in authoritarian socialist regimes it can – in accordance with its original promise – still be viewed as an actual liberation of the individual. The curators of “The China Moment” at the Kasseler Kunstverein employ various forms and facets of individualism defined by historian Yang Guoqiang as analytic lenses to look at and structure contemporary Chinese art from two decades. The extensive research exhibition focuses on a peak phase of globalization when the Western art world “discovered” and connected with artists in China whose multifaceted individualism it presents as a creative driving force. The show also declares the end of that era – perhaps unjustifiably so, as Nikolay Smirnov suggests in his review.

Having first made a name for herself in New York’s 1970s performance art scene, Julia Heyward has now spent more than half a century creating works that take a humorous and defiant approach to tackling patriarchal systems of power and belief. While performance has remained at the center of Heyward’s practice, her work spans a wide range of media and modes, from spoken word and video to immersive installations and digital works. Now, Heyward is making her solo institutional debut in Europe, with two concurrent exhibitions at the Kunstverein Nürnberg and the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster. While the latter focuses on Heyward’s vocal experiments, the former presents early performances and archival materials alongside later works, including the artist’s ongoing interactive video game. Sonja Teszler visited Nuremberg and found a welcome sense of release in Heyward’s frenetic and multilayered practice.

Stylistically fusing elements of surrealism and socialist realism as well as incorporating Czech folk motifs and avant-garde pictorial forms, the work of Eva Švankmajerová defies easy categorization. A key protagonist of the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists, she has long been overlooked, both as a woman artist within the group and as a painter from Eastern Europe. Isabel Jacobs visited the late artist’s retrospective in Prague and situates Švankmajerová’s work within the context of the Czech avant-garde while also emphasizing its critical engagement with representations of female liberation in socialist Czechoslovakia.

In her recent letter to Bruce Hainley, Annette Weisser lamented the current wave of AI-slop and its role in normalizing fascism, while also reflecting on the challenges of raising a teenage son at a time when misogyny seems to be fully back in trend among many young men. In his response, Hainley picks up where Weisser left off, extolling the need for ambiguity in a world in which the information we provide is instrumentalized and the information offered to us usually serves an ulterior purpose. While Hainley sees little evidence of such complexity in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, he finds relief in Larry Johnson’s current exhibition in Cologne, which takes a multilayered and nuanced approach to interartistic dialogue and Hollywood’s hidden gay history.

Monira Al Qadiri’s work explores humans’ ambivalent and alienated connection to the natural world, often viewing it through the lens of petro-culture. At times, the artist highlights oil’s role in reshaping human culture and the environment; at others, she enlarges the microscopic chemical structures and organisms that either sustain life on Earth or enable its industrialized destruction. In her current show at the Berlinische Galerie, Al Qadiri navigates oil’s entangled relationship with the sea, highlighting the toxic impact of oil tankers on the ocean and retracing the surprising symbolic role played by a sea snail within the history of the industry. Eric Otieno Sumba visited the exhibition and found himself drifting in threatening waters, somewhere between the romantic ocean of the seafaring past and the modern, infrastructural sea.

Die New Yorker Galerie American Fine Arts, Co. steht exemplarisch für ein Projekt, das die merkantile Funktion des Kunsthandels mit diversen künstlerisch-diskursiven Aktivitäten verschränkte. Dem Projektion und Mythenbildung einladenden Phänomen der bis 2004 von Colin de Land betriebenen Galerie näherte sich 2011 eine Ausstellung in der Halle für Kunst Lüneburg und dem Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität einerseits kunsthistorisch an und andererseits mit Werken zeitgenössischer Künstler*innen. Im Zusammenhang mit der aktuellen Ausgabe „System Change: Art Market and Criticism“ veröffentlichen hier wir Hans-Jürgen Hafners Kurzbesprechung des Ausstellungsprojekts erstmals online. Er argumentiert darin, dass die Ausschnitthaftigkeit des historischen Materials die Faszination gleichsam abbildet und anschürt, während die künstlerischen Zugriffe riskieren, die ambivalenten Begehren einer Assoziation mit der Galerie zu unterschlagen.