Annie Quinn In America by Mical Schneider

This sensitivity to exhibition environment carries through a thoughtful, slow-moving show that allows ample space for each work to be considered on its own terms.

Instead of constructing new white walls to conceal the building’s decline, Lee and her team have largely left the space as it stands, with the exception of a few partitions of uncut boards and natural-fiber panels. These vast spaces have vexed curators from Okwui Enwezor to Maria Lind, yet this year’s artistic director, Sook-Kyung Lee, has embraced the rickety structure. Walking through the same structure-comprising four mega halls connected by ramps, and still in use by the biennale-feels like exploring an abandoned world expo site. The cavernous exhibition hall of the Gwangju Biennale was built in 1994 and intended to host only one exhibition. Much like a painted or sculpted frieze, there is no distinguishing one vignette from the next, no firm contours to scenes that bleed across. It’s a tumultuous and relentlessly dynamic experience, with no single focal point. Each short segment repeats its own brief narrative in frenzied, arhythmic patterns, and is accompanied by a musical score that ranges from soaring and dramatic to cacophonous to (sometimes) barely audible. Given that this is the Karachi-born Indian artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada, it’s a curiously small sampling of projects, but nonetheless encompasses the conceptual approaches for which she is best known: strong feminist and activist perspectives on issues related to gender, race, bodily autonomy, and democratic rights highly charged source material drawn from current or historic events diverse literary references combined with shadowy, impressionistic figuration to produce immersive video environments and an ongoing concern with erasure as both aesthetic device and political gesture.Ĭan You Hear Me? (2018–20) is the centerpiece here, a nine-channel installation comprised of eighty-eight individual iPad animations projected across three walls. After more than fifty years as a pioneering video and installation artist, Nalini Malani maintains a rigor, criticality, and joy that transcends her work’s challenging subject matter.

Annie Quinn In America by Mical Schneider