Mit der Ausstellung „You Again“, die 2018 zeitgleich in sechs verschiedenen Galerien in Nordamerika und Europa stattfand, machte Rochelle Feinstein einen Witz auf eigene Kosten: Wie so oft in ihrem Werk zitierte sie Formen und Stile aus der Malereigeschichte und aus ihren eigenen Arbeiten der letzten 40 Jahre. Auch der Titel von Feinsteins aktueller Ausstellung, „The Today Show“, die nach Stationen in Wien und Glarus nun in Aachen zu sehen ist, spielt mit der Erwartung und der Erfahrung der Betrachter*innen. In seiner Rezension der Ausstellung argumentiert Thorsten Schneider, dass sich Feinsteins Wiederholung der Formkrise der Malerei als eine Darstellungsform für heutige Krisen begreifen lässt, die nicht in Abstraktion oder Repräsentation aufgeht.

When Alissa Bennett told us that, for the next edition of her column Fiction/Nonfiction, she would write about the relationship between celebrity death, mass-market merchandising, and the Werther Effect, we didn’t expect her to explore a scopophilic obsession she fostered with a friend a few years back. But in the end, everything is interwoven, even with the pea-colored mohair fibers of Kurt Cobain’s famous cardigan, which was auctioned for $334,000 some time ago. The scientific validity of the Werther effect, which goes back to the numerous copycat suicides that followed the publication of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s classic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), is controversial: Can heroes with suicidal tendencies, or by extension, the fan items worshipped in their memory, potentially turn daily troubles into deadly tragedies? In any case, the objects of our columnist’s online obsession remind us that many roads lead to Wahlheim (young Werther’s fictional hometown). Last but not least, they enter into an eerie correspondence with the prematurely deceased celebrities from Bennett’s iconic Dead Is Better zines.

The British painter Jenny Saville came to prominence in the early 1990s as a member of the so-called YBA generation and has subsequently devoted herself to exploring one of the most classic genres in the history of art: the female nude. Her monumental early canvases stretch women’s bodies to the point of near unrecognizability, creating vast landscapes of flesh with a hyperreal approach to texture and color. At times, their effect is overwhelming, even disturbing. While Saville’s work is often discussed in terms of its feminist connotations, its focus on distortion and disfigurement also imbues it with a sense of ambiguity: If violence has been enacted on these women, then why and by whom? In his review of Saville’s current retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Daniel Culpan examines the evolution of Saville’s painterly style, questioning whether the powerful presence of her early works has been sustained over the decades.

When conceptualizing our current issue on “Sports,” we substantiated the joint consideration of athletic and artistic disciplines under the notion of ambivalence training: “Located between fulfillment and disillusionment, between recovery and exertion, between the performance principle and the sense of community, sport trains our ambiguity tolerance,” we argued, adding that this was one of many things sport has in common with art. According to Maximiliane Leuschner’s review of Ima-Abasi Okon’s recent exhibition in Eindhoven, the latter serves as a case in point. Taking us through three methodological laps – from orientation to evaluation – Leuschner explains how Okon’s installations both compel and frustrate contemplation, practicing an exercise of withdrawal. In doing so, they also present themselves as the complex set of problems that most good art (much like many sports) fundamentally is.

Fast drei Jahrzehnte ist es her, dass Günther Uecker die 26. Ausgabe von TEXTE ZUR KUNST mit einem Nagel durchbohrte. Mithilfe seines künstlerischen Markenzeichens spielte die so entstandene Edition auf die Tendenz von Kunstkritik und -geschichte an, ihre Protagonist*innen auf markante Charakteristika festzunageln. In Andenken an den im Juni verstorbenen Künstler haben wir Heinz Mack – Mitbegründer der Gruppe ZERO, welcher Uecker 1961 beitrat – gebeten, ein paar Zeilen für seinen langjährigen Mitstreiter und Freund zu verfassen. Dem schmerzhaften Verlust setzt Mack hier einen Fokus auf die optimistische, mitunter tragikomische Komponente von Ueckers Arbeit entgegen, an die auch wir uns sehr gerne erinnern.

One focus of last year’s “Country” issue was the growing attraction of rural areas for cultural workers who seek the quiet of country life while also critically engaging with conditions outside urban centers. In Saxony-Anhalt, the federal state exhibition “Gerechtigkeyt 1525” commemorates the Peasants’ War on its quincentenary and serves as a reminder that the countryside has been the site not only of reactionary uprisings but also of emancipatory struggles. As part of this larger project, the exhibition “Planetary Peasants” brings together 30 artistic positions, including many newly commissioned works, and outlines the speculative figure of the planetary peasant primarily through spatial arrangement. In his review, Nikolay Smirnov asks how the anti-hegemonic dimension of a planetary worldview can be articulated while also acknowledging the ambivalent nature of identification with the land.

Using the form of a book to explore the omnipresence and circularity of self-optimization discourse nowadays may seem anachronistic at first. In his third show with Final Hot Desert – which is no longer located at Utah’s Great Basin Desert but in a London apartment gallery – Graham Wiebe presents a selection of his book works. The source material, dating from the 1970s to 1990s, refers to a moment when countercultural ideals became intertwined with literature advising readers on how to adapt to a system increasingly defined by self-improvement and productivity. These assemblages, made from the covers of self-help books, push the rhetoric of the genre to extremes and reveal its persistence in the digital age, even as nonsense, as Sophie Barshall argues in her review.

Bereits in den 1990er Jahren protestierte May Ayim gegen den rassistischen Namen einer Straße in Berlin-Mitte, die im August dieses Jahres endlich in Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße umbenannt wurde. Erst 2020 wurde das Berliner Straßengesetz angepasst, um die Umbenennung von Straßennamen mit kolonialem Bezug zu erleichtern. Mit ihrer Ausstellung „U22 – Adijatu Straße“, deren Titel Toyin Ojih Odutolas muslimischen, zur Haltestelle umformatierten Namen in der westafrikanischen Sprache Yoruba trägt, knüpft die Künstlerin an entsprechende Entwicklungen sowie die Geschichte des Hamburger Bahnhofs an. Wie Mounira Zennia in ihrer Rezension hervorhebt, entwirft die Schau mit ihrer installativen Gesamtkomposition aus großformatigen Porträts im Bahnhofsetting jedoch vor allem alternative Erzählungen von Blackness und lädt dazu ein, imperiale Konzepte von Zeitlichkeit zu hinterfragen.