and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Alvarado paints on canvas without stretchers so that the works can be rolled up and travel with Natural Information Society, and this exhibition is designed to accommodate two performances by the band, including one at the opening. Generally larger than a human body and meant to be walked around, Alvarado’s paintings feature sweeping curves and vaguely biomorphic and geological forms with fabric and fringe sewn into them.
In 1966, a young medical student named François Pain won an internship at the experimental Clinique de La Borde, outside the town of Cour-Cheverny in the Loire Valley. The clinic’s directors, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari, France’s leading “anti-psychiatrists,” invited students from around the country to join La Borde’s nurses, doctors, and patients—referred to as pensionnaires, or boarders—in building an informal lieu de vie on the grounds of an old château.
As its title suggests, this career-spanning survey is heavily invested in the fact that Orozco operates across numerous media. “Politécnico Nacional” is the name of a prestigious public school in Mexico City and also, at least ostensibly, what Orozco currently identifies as: a poly (as in many) technic (as in media), national artist. It is, of course, this “national” part that has caused some aggravation among local critics… But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
These paintings, at once intimate yet slightly detached, capture snapshots of ordinary lives and monumentalize them in his signature dry style. When not drawing directly from quotidian life, Davis turned to mythology and the imagination, and so viewing these paintings is like waking up from a dream and trying to piece it together, to recollect the faces of the people that appeared within it, coming up short, and filling in the gaps with hazy approximations. Yet even here the same preoccupation with history and society is present.
Henrot produces dramatic shifts in scale through oversized sculptures of toys and biomorphic abacuses, encouraging viewers to take the perspective of both adult and child. She covers the gallery with a gridded green safety surface that resembles a “self-healing” cutting mat, a custom floor that unifies the disparate artworks as in a playground or a theater. Yet she has subtly distorted the grid, undermining the structuring order it purports to provide. If Henrot’s installation suggests a playscape, it is—like Wonderland—off-kilter, mysterious, and full of obstacles.
Malik Nejmi’s ambitious retrospective, co-curated with Louise Bras and presented in a deconsecrated twelfth-century church, poses a fundamental question: can architecture be a tool for collective and individual care? At the heart of this exhibition of photographs, videos, sculptures, installations, archival documents, and architectural ephemera is the neighborhood of La Source, on the outskirts of Orléans, where the Franco-Moroccan artist grew up.
As of February 25, 2025, Kingston University management has proposed the closure of the entire Department of Humanities, including the world-renowned Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), from which we, the undersigned, write today.
