Bad Contemporaneity
Cultural theorist Sianne Ngai explains why art needs to embrace error in a world that is wrong.
Matthew Rana
All articles by Matthew Rana
Diffuse Autobiography
Returning to her childhood home town, Fatima Moallim’s exhibition at Växjö Konsthall invites us to reflect on today’s appetite for identity and difference.
Mudbound
In Lytle Shaw’s New Grounds for Dutch Landscape the materialist turn is transformed into an art historical account of everyday ongoingness and the ground beneath our feet.
The Language of Shamans
The exhibition Worst-Case Scenario: Four Artists From Greenland at Lund’s Konsthall puts notions of authenticity and identity under ironic and questioning stress.
Okwui Enwezor’s Last Exhibition
Will Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America be as formative as Documenta 11 was at the start of the millennium? A report from a panel debate in New York.
The Devouring
At Malmö Konsthall, Ceija Stojka renders the horrors of the Roma Holocaust, the Porajmos, in which as much as half of Europe’s Roma population was killed.
‘It’s fact. It’s rooted. It’s standing.’
The Norwegian artist Hanni Kamaly talks about mourning and remembrance, the physicality and presence of sculpture, and the Nordic art world’s reluctance to acknowledge the legacy of colonialism.
An Imagination Battle
Cultural ownership, decolonial listening, and Pablo Picasso were up for debate at Malmö Art Museum’s symposium on the mediation of public art collections.
Painting In a Time of Global Warming
Merike Estna’s paintings at Moderna Museet Malmö are inviting, strange, and genuinely convinced of their own vanity.
The Limits of Friendship
Our Friend, Valerie Solanas at Signal in Malmö pays tribute to women artists who find strength in fragility, but forfeits on a broad anti-capitalist feminism.
When Everything Is Poetry, Nothing Is
At Virserum Konsthall, Ane Hjort Guttu reflects on the challenges confronting rural areas in Sweden at a time when individuals are poised to be creative and free.
Riding Out Trends
Malmö Konsthall’s summer exhibition presents the work of three female artists who have spent decades making work on the margins of the art world.
