Reflex
News
Franck Leibovici on The Ecology of Art and his ...
When a museum like Centre Pompidou closes for five years and begins to pack away thousands of works, it might look like a simple logistical operation. But as Franck Leibovici...
Franck Leibovici on The Ecology of Art and his Centre Pompidou commission
When a museum like Centre Pompidou closes for five years and begins to pack away thousands of works, it might look like a simple logistical operation. But as Franck Leibovici enlightens us, each pause, label, and gesture is a quiet, precise choreography that reveals how meaning is shaped by what we see and by the invisible systems that hold it together. In this conversation, Leibovici unfolds the 'life of artworks' beyond the public moment: how they become “instructed objects” through missing steps and improvised decisions that end up shaping their future, by entering into unexpected micro-political negotiations. Artworks therefore are proposals for micro-societies. "...according to me, the knowledge of the restorer, the registrar, the handlers should be circulating for students in university because you learn from them about the work as much as from philosophy or art history."
Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde: Structures for Je...
Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde’s Structures for Jet Lag, shown at PAUSE/FRAME, London, from 4 April to 2 May 2025, and curated by Art Haxhijakupi, is unpacked in Haxhijakupi’s essay, which looks at...
Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde: Structures for Jet Lag
Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde’s Structures for Jet Lag, shown at PAUSE/FRAME, London, from 4 April to 2 May 2025, and curated by Art Haxhijakupi, is unpacked in Haxhijakupi’s essay, which looks at themes of identity, and the queer migrant experience. The essay describes a three-metre concrete sculpture of England’s coastline, seen as a changing border inspired by José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), which talks about queerness as a hopeful future, and a video of the crumbling Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas, connecting to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) about mixed cultures and broken belonging. Artworks like Insomnia (2024-25), a pencil drawing, and Mpox Drawings I+II (2022-23), made on Washi paper during quarantine, evoke Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974) by showing imagined buildings and Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013) to discuss control and fighting back. Further drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (2012), Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993), Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), and Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994), the essay shows how Greenfield-Campoverde’s practice presents belonging as an ongoing, open process in personal and political spaces.
Theaster Gates and the Afro-Mingei: Revolution ...
While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare." Malcolm X’s declaration in 1964 reverberates through the cultural debris of 2025, where Hollywood’s Black...
Theaster Gates and the Afro-Mingei: Revolution Rebranded from Wakanda to White Cube
While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare." Malcolm X’s declaration in 1964 reverberates through the cultural debris of 2025, where Hollywood’s Black Captain America struggles under the weight of symbolic contradiction, and Theaster Gates’s Malcolm in Winter reanimates guerrilla archives into a living political aesthetics. From Wakandan technofutures to Edo-period sake flasks, Jiujian Zeng traces the global afterlives of Black radicalism, refusing sanitised redemption arcs in favour of transhistorical mourning, ritual, and revolt. At the heart of this inquiry is a question Gates poses within his exhibition at White Cube: “How do you translate political values into aesthetic values?” What follows is an excavation through architecture, libation, sonic protest, and the hauntology of materials, toward a decolonial commons that has yet to arrive...
Safe Conduct, Dangerous Desires: Love, Lust, an...
In this radical essay, Anastasia Chugunova analyses how Ed Atkins’ phantasmagoric works, "Ribbons" and "Safe Conduct," interrogate the tearing of digital avatars in expressing human vulnerability and mortality. Drawing on theoretical frameworks...
Safe Conduct, Dangerous Desires: Love, Lust, and the Digital Abyss
In this radical essay, Anastasia Chugunova analyses how Ed Atkins’ phantasmagoric works, "Ribbons" and "Safe Conduct," interrogate the tearing of digital avatars in expressing human vulnerability and mortality. Drawing on theoretical frameworks such as Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Freud’s uncanny, Chugunova unravels the intricate structures and multivalent interpretations within Atkins’ video works.
Dogged Shame
Aston Myatt's (@billyastonmyattbeard) article, 'Dogged Shame,' draws parallels between the training of scent hounds, which involves navigating through fragrances to follow a trail, and the elusive nature of shame. It reflects...
Dogged Shame
Aston Myatt's (@billyastonmyattbeard) article, 'Dogged Shame,' draws parallels between the training of scent hounds, which involves navigating through fragrances to follow a trail, and the elusive nature of shame. It reflects on the author's childhood, where understanding shame and discipline was a challenge. As Myatt compares the experiences of scent hounds and sighthounds, the narrative unfolds with a desire to be free-spirited like the latter. The text concludes with reflections on desire and the shame associated with its boundless nature.