Founded in 1955, the annual DOK Leipzig documentary film festival has been accompanied by a retrospective program since 1960. This year’s edition presented a selection of films by US filmmakers and collectives, all of which were originally screened at the festival during the GDR period. The program threw light on the erstwhile socialist state’s ambivalent stance toward the United States: strongly opposed to US hegemony and imperialism while at the same time standing in solidarity with the country’s own marginalized and oppressed citizens. As this year’s retrospective demonstrated, the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements loomed particularly large in the festival’s history. Arindam Sen was in attendance and found an imperfect but hopeful gesture in the reconstruction of old solidarities.

Having studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the early 1980s, Andreas Gursky subsequently became one of the most prominent artists associated with the so-called Düsseldorf School of Photography. The Bechers’ influence on Gursky is clear in their shared interest in objectivism and industrial forms. But whereas the duo’s work was bound up with the cultural and political priorities of postwar Germany, Gursky’s work reaches into the present in depicting the increasing effects of technologization and globalization, often combining fascination with a looming sense of dread. Now, at a time when the political and ecological aftereffects of rapid industrial expansion and subsequent decline are explicitly threatening the relative stability of the postwar order in Germany as elsewhere, Gursky has created an exhibition with an oblique focus on his home state, the former industrial powerhouse of North Rhine-Westphalia. Freya Field-Donovan visited the show and found herself staring into the technological void.

Bekannt ist Sarah Schumann vor allem für ihre Rolle in der westdeutschen Frauenbewegung der 1970er Jahre. Ihre künstlerische Arbeit trat deshalb in den Hintergrund oder wurde lange Zeit im Sinne einer biografischen Lektüre des Œuvres der Autodidaktin Schumann in ein illustratives Verhältnis zu deren Leben gesetzt. Ihre sogenannten Schockcollagen und informellen Gemälde wurden jüngst in großer Zahl und mit einem begleitenden Katalog bei Meyer Riegger in Berlin gezeigt. Schumanns frühe künstlerische Arbeiten lassen bereits den kritischen Blick und die radikale Haltung erkennen, die sie später in Schrift und Aktivismus gegenüber der patriarchalen Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit einnehmen sollte, wie Astrid Mania in ihrer Rezension der Schau argumentiert.

Der Abgesang auf Berlin als angesagter Kunst- und Kulturmetropole wird in letzter Zeit immer lauter. Doch statt jene Strukturen und Akteur*innen zu stärken, die die Stadt für Kreativschaffende einst so attraktiv gemacht haben – zum Beispiel durch neue Förderprogramme und bezahlbare Räume, die hier in der jüngeren Vergangenheit noch so üppig vorhanden waren – setzt die Kulturpolitik auf einen Konservativismus, mit dem sich die alte „Strahlkraft“ wohl kaum zurückgewinnen lässt. Die Neuausrichtung des Preises der Nationalgalerie, mit der auf Nummer sicher und größtmögliche Publikumsdichte gesetzt wird, steht vor diesem Hintergrund zurecht in der Kritik. Hanna Magauer beleuchtet die fragwürdige Strategie unter Einbezug des kulturpolitischen Kontexts und der rückwärtsgerichteten Haltung, die sie unter anderem im Berlin-Bezug der von der Jury auserkorenen Position von Maurizio Cattelan ausmacht.

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.