Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

I will try to clarify, in eight points, why it is important—today—to look at images of destroyed human bodies like those I have used and integrated in different works.

The established tale of mid-century abstract painting in this country relies on two parallel narratives, each originating from either side of Canada’s two solitudes. In Montreal, it was the story of the Automatistes, of Borduas and Riopelle, Barbeau and Françoise Sullivan.

The rise of a woman photographer with the advent of photography and of women’s emancipation presents an irresistible moment of reflection.

The last room of the exhibition gathers together portraits of friends and exiles done in Bordeaux, and puts at the centre the masterpiece Goya painted in 1820, Self-Portrait with Doctor Arrieta. It is the show’s most daunting moment.

Parsed from the Greek, necronym literally translates as “death name.” It usually means a name shared with a dead sibling.

Why do artists make stuff if the familiar criteria of success or failure in the domain of manufacture are not dispositive when it comes to art? Why are artists so bent on making stuff? To what end?

Patwardhan both captures and manifests this wavering time of modern India: history exists in his films not as a static object for reflection, nostalgia or mourning, but as something which constantly returns, flashing up, animating politics and inflecting horizons of possibility in the present.

Museums and galleries weren’t always the grand institutions we experience today. Formerly private collections, visible only to the ruling classes, were projected into the lower echelons of society in grand acts of philanthropy.

The cross-dressing Qiu Jin was emblematic of a revolutionary feminist current at the end of the Qing era, writing urgently on women’s emancipation: “While the men of China are entering a civilized new world, China’s women still remain in the dark.”

We are getting close to the 100 year anniversary of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and I dedicate my post to Tzara while reading the recent biography about him.

In 1998, Isa Genzken produced some two dozen paint-slashed and spray-painted garments – shirts and jackets, mainly, but also a lone dress.

Martin Luther King’s not just a political martyr and the Civil Rights Movement is not just some political phenomenon. Nope. Instead: Ta-dah! Martin Luther King’s the Greatest Artist of the Twentieth Century and the Civil Rights Movement is the greatest exhibition of performance art ever...

Every day after that, I stood outside The Italian Restaurant on Fourteenth Street until it closed. I didn’t even smoke. The guy from The Korean Market often came out to talk to me. I must have looked pathetic, staring into the cracked glass of an empty restaurant. I did...