Art
In Conversation
Ahmed Alsoudani with Ann C. Collins
Ahmed Alsoudani’s work carries memories of trauma and the loneliness of exile. His distinctive vocabulary throws viewers into spaces roiling with the complications of being as shapes and colors struggle to co-exist. Settling in to look at his work, I find that the initial shock of his imagery softens as the familiarity of his forms elicits a feeling I can only describe as a deep empathy, a recognition of our collective state.
In Conversation
Ashley Bickerton with Dan Cameron
Ever since bursting onto the scene during the East Village’s so-called Neo-Geo wave during the last half of the 1980s, Ashley Bickerton has tended to be the odd man out relative to the generation with which he is invariably compared. Although his early works were eye-popping and futuristically slick, Bickerton wasn’t especially interested in theories of appropriation or simulation, nor was he seduced by the doctrine of banality.
In Conversation
Baseera Khan with Lee Ann Norman
Baseera Khan works across media from painting and photography to installation, performance, and sculpture to explore the tensions inherent in living in a capitalist society. Through explorations of material—including their own body—Khan makes plain how notions of economy, labor, goods and services, and art itself often serve as rich sites for exploring our accumulated histories, experiences, and individual and collective traumas. Their current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum invites us to imagine alternate sites that allow us to refuse empire and resist domination, so we might discover a feeling of liberation instead of exploitation.
In Conversation
Jeff Wall with Barry Schwabsky
Since the late 1970s, Jeff Wall has become renowned for his staged photographs—sometimes fantastical, sometimes so factually convincing as to be what he’s called “near documentary.” He currently has two exhibitions on view, one of them being a survey—his largest US show since his 2007 MoMA survey—at Glenstone Museum, in Potomac, MD; the other at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. Having written an essay for the catalogue of the show at Glenstone, I realized I’d ended up with more questions than I started with, so I asked a few of them in a Zoom conversation with the artist ahead of his show in California.
