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May 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Noemi Smolik
Saudi Arabia’s young people—63 percent of the population is under thirty—sense change in the air. That makes “After Rain,” the title of the second Diriyah Biennale, held in a suburb of Riyadh, an apt metaphor.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Noemi Smolik
The very moniker Pakui Hardware is programmatic. Artist duo Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda, who have worked together since 2014, put some thought into the brand name: Pakui is an attendant of a Hawaiian goddess who circled the island six times in a day; his name is a byword for everything archaic and mythological, and for a movement that never departs from its orbit. “Hardware,” meanwhile, is a nod to everyday technology, the emblem of progress, which is to say, linear ascent.
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Mar 4, 2024 | 
frieze.com | Noemi Smolik
What is art’s role in a country that finds itself at war? It’s a question that Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova was forced to ask herself on 24 February 2022, after she was woken by bombs falling on her hometown of Kyiv. Relocating to Berezovo, a village in the Carpathian Mountains, she came across stones in the local river that resembled loaves and had the idea of cutting them into slices and offering them for sale to aid the war effort.
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Oct 20, 2023 | 
spikeartmagazine.com | Noemi Smolik
Playing a Forty-Year Game of Chess: An Interview with Peter Halley While modern abstract painting aspired to pure, self-referential forms, Peter Halley began in the early 1980s to combine the pure geometries of the square and the line to critique the impulse toward rationalization and social control.
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Sep 1, 2023 | 
artforum.com | Noemi Smolik
Not only was Ulrike Rosenbach a pioneer of video art, integrating it into her installations and performances, but she was also one of the first artists—on the German and international scenes—to embrace the feminist cause in her work in the late 1960s. Unlike so many women artists of her generation, however, she did not let herself get bogged down in an often exhausting and lopsided struggle to assert feminist ideas.
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Jul 13, 2023 | 
frieze.com | Noemi Smolik
Bohemia, the original enfant terrible, is now an object of nostalgia. That, at least, is how curator Russell Ferguson tells the story in ‘Bohemia: History of an Idea 1950–2000’. The fact that this show is being staged in Prague is no coincidence: the term bohemian comes from the Latin name for the area now known as the Czech Republic, where the wandering, music-playing Roma – whose lifestyle anticipated that of the bohemians – originated.
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Jul 7, 2023 | 
tagesspiegel.de | Noemi Smolik
Am Sonntag geht im koreanischen Gwangju die 14. Biennale zu Ende. Es war eine ungewöhnliche Biennale, die vielleicht einen Wendepunkt in der internationalen Ausstellungspraxis andeutet. Ungewöhnlich, weil sie statt wie so viele zeitgenössische Ausstellungen auf radikale Kritik der Folgen des Kolonialismus, auf Versöhnung und auf Gemeinsamkeit gesetzt hat. Die Tagesspiegel-App Aktuelle Nachrichten, Hintergründe und Analysen direkt auf Ihr Smartphone. Dazu die digitale Zeitung.
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Jun 1, 2023 | 
artforum.com | Noemi Smolik
“Why is homemaking not a subject fit for art?” When Margaret Raspé raised this question in the early 1970s, she was ridiculed by her colleagues, and not only the male ones. Women, too, shook their heads. Domesticity and children, they thought, were just impediments to a successful artist’s career. Raspé was born in 1933 in what was then the German city of Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). She studied art in Munich and Berlin but also trained as a seamstress.
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Apr 10, 2023 | 
tagesspiegel.de | Noemi Smolik
Mit Erstaunen und auch ein wenig Spott wurde in Europa über das Vorhaben berichtet, in Abu Dhabi, der Hauptstadt der Arabischen Emirate, eine Dependance des Pariser Museums „Louvre“ zu errichten. Mittlerweile steht das von Jean Nouvel entworfene Museum auf einer der Inseln der Stadt. Es bietet mit seinen zum Wasser hin offenen Räumen unter einer riesigen Kuppel eine ungewöhnliche Raumerfahrung. In einem Labyrinth der Räume und Blickwinkel wird Kunst präsentiert.
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Feb 1, 2023 | 
artforum.com | Noemi Smolik
This unusual exhibition posed an inconvenient challenge to the mounting skepticism toward pictorial representation in contemporary art. How can one narrate in pictures without replicating models of male heroism cultural history that brought such revolutionary changes as the transformation of women’s role in society? French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster grappled with this question, selecting what might seem an obsolete format—the panoramic painting, a legacy of the nineteenth century.
