Authoritarian leaders are ruling global headlines. Viktor Orbán is back in the bad news with his attempt to ban the Budapest Pride March, which is scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday, June 28th. While it is still uncertain under which circumstances the rally will take place after the city’s liberal mayor, Gergely Karácsony, did his best to save it by using a legal loophole and declaring it a city council festivity, recent events make it abundantly clear that the 10th iteration of the OFF-Biennale in Budapest was direly needed as a manifestation of collective resilience and resistance against anti-democratic rule. Here, Fionn Meade reviews the event, exploring a variety of artistic statements that range from political slogans on aprons and other textiles to installations echoing the sounds of war.

Nearly all reports on this year’s Cannes Film Festival included anecdotes about the sudden power outage that hit the festival and its host city. The collective responsible for the blackout targeted the Cannes-based military technology company Thales Alenia Space, but also France’s government for financing global warfare. Taking advantage of the public’s attention during the festival week, the action also put a critical spotlight on economic structures that cannot be untangled from the film industry – let alone from the luxury lifestyle on the French Riviera. George MacBeth begins his text with pithy statements from the activists and draws a connection to the festival’s anti-fascist origins. However, as he goes on to review four selected films, MacBeth contrasts the collective’s explicit agitprop with the power of more indirect artistic messages that require intellectual decoding. With regard to the new films by Julia Ducournau and Christian Petzold, for example, he emphasizes the allegorical elements that make them relevant without explicitly relating them to current discourses and debates.

New works by Rosemarie Trockel are currently on show at New York’s Gladstone Gallery. As Isabelle Graw observes, their spatial mise-en-scène and reduced color-scheme echo our bleak present. Adèle Yon has penned a book that, via the splicing of genres (dissertation and memoir!), recounts the life of her great-grandmother, who underwent a misogynistically motivated lobotomy. And at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, “Matisse et Marguerite – Le regard d’un père” explores a complex father-daughter relationship with a great number of portraits that, as our publisher shows, bear the potential of leading viewers far beyond the titular perspective of a famous father’s gaze.

Während sich der politische Diskurs um Migration kontinuierlich radikal nach rechts verschiebt und ein gesellschaftlicher Konsens über ein postmigratisches Selbstverständnis in immer weitere Ferne gerückt ist, fordern Akteur*innen im Kulturbetrieb weiterhin die Sichtbarkeit einer pluralistischen Gesellschaft ein. Zu den zahlreichen Ausstellungsprojekten, die an Repräsentationspolitik festhielten, zählte auch die für November 2023 geplant Schau von Raphael Malik. Was als künstlerische Auseinandersetzung mit der Berliner Gegenwart angelegt war, wurde nach dem 7. Oktober von den Veranstalter*innen selbst jedoch als explizit muslimisches Projekt gedeutet – und aufgrund vermeintlicher „Einseitigkeit“ abgesagt. Im Zusammenhang mit unserer aktuellen Ausgabe „Exhibition Politics“ spricht der Fotograf mit der Kuratorin Tasnim Baghdadi über seinen Umgang mit solchen Zuschreibungen und das Verhältnis seiner eigenen Bild- und Sprachpolitiken zu diesen.

The Hudson River Museum is one of many US institutions affected by the Trump administration’s anti-DEIA actions. In April, the museum’s director, Masha Turchinsky, announced that a federal grant dedicated to the digitization of a collection of historical images of local artists and marginalized communities in the Hudson Valley had been “abruptly terminated.” In such circumstances, the importance of exhibition projects such as “Smoke in Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time,” curated by Sháńdíín Brown (Diné), cannot be emphasized enough. Moreover, the show, reviewed here by Mitchell Herrmann, focuses on Indigenous, non-linear concepts of time that take on new significance in an era when raising awareness for the historical component of structural oppression has gained urgency.

Etwa ein Jahr ist es her, dass Merlin Carpenter im Kunstraum Schwaz gewaltige Kokslines legte, doch nicht nur die kommen uns mit Blick auf seine jüngste Kölner Ausstellung bekannt vor. Von der Monochromie über das Prinzip der Rotation bis hin zur Appropriation bekannter Schriftzüge erinnert die Schau „Polite“, die bis vor wenigen Tagen bei JUBG zu sehen war, an „Police“, die Carpenter vor gut zehn Jahren in Brüssel zeigte. Während die beiden Titel sich lediglich durch einen Buchstaben unterscheiden, dominierte in Köln kein amtliches Blau, sondern alarmierendes Rot die Ausstellungsräume. Dass es auch dort wieder um eine Auseinandersetzung mit Staatsgewalt ging – wenn auch in gänzlich anderer Form – legt Raphaela Vogels assoziativ angelegte Besprechung nahe. Anstelle gemeinsamer Nasen werden hier nicht zuletzt Verbindungen zwischen zwei künstlerischen Praktiken gezogen, die bei entsprechender Auslegung Parallelen aufweisen, wie Punkt und Linie zur Fläche.

As Helmut Draxler demonstrated in his contribution to our current issue, the Freudian death drive “entices us to summarize the social miseries of the present day, in all their crisis-ridden or catastrophic proportions, under its rubric.” This idea of a death drive functioning like a passe-partout explanation also serves as the starting point for psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou in this final piece published alongside our issue on “Death Drive and Sublimation.” But while Draxler’s text and our issue as a whole defend the epistemological potential of Sigmund Freud’s concept for allowing us to understand the aggressive and violent impulses that are currently causing so much destruction, Saketopoulou is more skeptical. In her view, the Freudian differentiation between destructive and libidinal forces in our psyche hinders the development of political action and thus prevents what she considers necessary: a “revolutionary impulse” that does not remain stuck in theory.

In the year 2000, the late Christoph Schlingensief set up a shipping container in the heart of Vienna during the Wiener Festwochen for a reality-TV-inspired performance involving asylum seekers. Twenty-five years later, that project has lost none of its disruptive potential. Drawing on the voting system from the then-new format of Big Brother and its lure of spectacle, Schlingensief’s container confronted audiences with the rise of nationalism and mechanisms of exclusion. Now, as right-wing politics are gaining a foothold in governments throughout Europe and the left struggles to counter the appeal of the right’s exclusionary rhetoric, the piece remains a point of reference and reckoning. Paul Poet, who was one of Schlingensief’s key collaborators at the time of the performance, later made a feature-length film about it: “Ausländer Raus! Schlingensiefs Container” (2002). In this conversation with Franziska Aigner, Poet recalls the controversy the project stirred in an atmosphere of rising xenophobia and right-wing politics that feels all too familiar today.