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.

The idea of “French Theory” is an Anglophone invention, bringing together competing and sometimes contradictory theories from different disciplines under a single banner – a supposedly distinct school of thought that artists in the Anglosphere have often treated as a reserve of ideas to be drawn upon rather than interrogated. A new exhibition in Paris aims to trace the influence of Francophone theorists on artists in the US, raising the question of whether the artworks on display have anything meaningful to say about the concepts that inspired them in return. As Arnaud Esquerre argues, while the critical potential of such theories in artistic contexts is fittingly suggested by an absence, the show as a whole serves to demonstrate that even the most complex ideas are not immune to capitalism’s processes of commodification and spectacularization.

Annette Weisser’s response to Bruce Hainley’s November letter was written in winterly Berlin, where she recently had a snow-induced “out-of-body experience in reverse” that makes Marcel Proust’s madeleine episode seem faint in comparison. Revisiting this moment in a still frozen but now slowly thawing city, Weisser speculates how an increasingly unambiguous image economy and our screen-based lives may affect memory formation. Following up on Hainley’s reflections on Catherine Breillat’s films (and her male protagonists in particular), she also addresses the director’s self-proclaimed inability to fully understand men, as well as Hainley’s incomprehension of what it is like to raise a teenage son – for Weisser, as a feminist, and today, in times of masculinist posers and politics. As she notes, the experience is puzzling and imbued with contradictions – something it has in common with Breillat’s films.

Dass Helena Hunekes Arbeiten immer wieder um die Herausforderung kreisen, in der Kunstökonomie den eigenen Platz zu finden, konstatierte Isabelle Graw bereits 2002 in ihrer Rezension von Hunekes Ausstellung „Neiß Drap“ im Projektraum Maschenmode der Galerie Guido W. Baudach in Berlin. Der jüngste Einblick in Hunekes Werk, den die Kölner Galerie Drei mit dem familiär verwalteten Nachlass der 2012 verstorbenen Künstlerin ermöglichte, bestätigt deren Hang zu entsprechenden Auseinandersetzungen auf vielfache Weise. Ellen Wagner beleuchtet dies mit Blick auf das wiederkehrende, mitunter recht ramponierte und unrunde Kreismotiv in der Schau, das sich als Verweis auf soziale Zirkel lesen lässt – vermutlich nicht zuletzt auf jenen, in dem Huneke seit den Neunzigerjahren in Hamburg agierte – und betont zudem die Ambivalenz, mit der Hunekes Kunst Betrachter*innen in den Bann zieht, um sie dann gleich wieder ins gefühlte Abseits zu katapultieren.