and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Johnson reveled in chance, in jokes, in surprise, in disappearance. He evaded personal questions, and preferred his work to be discovered by serendipity than by design: perhaps by bumping into him on the street with a box of collages under one arm, or receiving a grubby envelope through the post, name Sharpied under the line “Please send to.” Ellen Levy’s A Book about Ray—in her words, less a “life story” than an “art story”— takes its cue from Johnson’s intuitive way of working, unfolding through association instead of strict chronology. The approach is ideally fitted to her subject.
Sagarika Sundaram and I both had modest period-marking ceremonies, in India and Sri Lanka respectively, when we first started menstruating. Such rite-of-passage ceremonies are passed on from generation to generation in South Asian communities across the globe. Their regional differences—demonstrated in her Chennai-based ceremony and mine in Colombo—dominated my first conversation with Sundaram, whose art practice draws on such re-evaluations of her South Indian background, among other subjects.
Ho Tzu Nyen has long been preoccupied with the way history repeats in disguise: empire folds into empire, technologies of governance advance, and yet the conditions of control remain eerily familiar. In the Luxembourg iteration of the Singaporean artist and filmmaker’s mid-career retrospective, time is an instrument of power that measures mechanical precision against mythological recurrence: Ho’s work asks what it means to resist its rhythm.
A storm is raging in Singapore. Waves break against park benches and dash against trees. Public housing estates are half-submerged; bobbing on the water surface are abandoned lifeboats and jackets. With Disaster-free (2024), featuring footage generated with the help of AI, artist Ong Kian Peng has created a Singaporean disaster movie, in which rising sea levels have transformed the developed island-state into a gray, glimmering water world that we scan through the eyes of a single survivor paddling around in a kayak.
It’s fair to say that artists aren’t going to save the world. But this exhibition at C3A proceeds from the limited if hopeful assumption that they might be able to make a difference. “Ecologies of Peace” emerged from a series of partnerships between TBA21 and underfunded regional institutions, and at first glance, its title shares a sunny vagueness familiar from biennials in other parts of the world. Curated by Daniela Zyman, it claims to focus on “practices of mourning and forgiveness,” though, for the most part, it illustrates the scale of the devastation that calls for them.
Alongside pioneering abstract art in Indonesia, Ahmad Sadali was an influential scholar and religious thinker, a public muralist who strived to ignite the spirit of liberation during the 1945 war, a national representative at UNESCO, an observer at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and an orator at Jummah prayers. Yet even before his death in 1987, his legacy—like that of the Bandung School with which he was affiliated—was dogged by controversy over its relationship to western art histories.
As the shortlisted artists and curators for the Australian Pavillion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, we are writing in support of the winning team; Khaled Sabsabi (artist) and Michael Dagostino (curator), selected by industry led experts through a rigorous and professionally independent open-call process.
