Life-size toy penguins take over Kunstraum Schwaz in Merlin Carpenter’s allegedly stress-busting exhibition. Placed between uniformly broomed lines of white powder, the plush birds stare at large black-and-white grid paintings reminiscent of crossword puzzles. For David Homewood, this repetitive arrangement is not only a stand-in for common distraction objects but also part of Carpenter’s artistic strategy to inflate audience expectations only to then deliberately disappoint them as part of his performative examination of artistic production under late capitalism.

For his short essayistic documentary You Hide Me (1970), Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo conducted a cinematic inventory of the African artifacts tucked away in the basement of the British Museum. As a graduate of the London Film School, he was granted access to the institution’s depot for one single day. As Oliver Hardt emphasizes in a contribution to our current issue, the questions Owoo asked back then – for example, questions about expertise, access, and equity – sound familiar today. Whereas Hardt writes about Owoo’s film in the context of other pioneering cinematic contributions to the restitution debate, the following interview by Jeanne-Ange Wagne focuses on the development of Owoo’s artistic practice and its roots in Ghana’s struggle for independence from British colonial power.

Diese Woche steht „Seen & Read“ ganz im Zeichen gegenseitiger künstlerischer Durchdringung. René Polleschs letztes Stück „ja nichts ist ok“ ist, so Isabelle Graw, in besonderer Weise von der Aufführung Fabian Hinrichs geprägt und die Gegenüberstellung von Hanne Darboven und Rosemarie Trockel in der Galerie Crone hebt produktiv die unterschiedlichen und doch verwandten, tagebuchähnlichen Praktiken der beiden Künstlerinnen hervor. Dass die aktuelle Käthe Kollwitz-Ausstellung im Städelmuseum so explizit den Vergleich zu ihrem (männlichen) Mentoren sucht ist hingegen weniger zielführend, wie Graw hier betont.

Eine zunehmende Hinfälligkeit von Urteilen und Kriterien wird in der Kunstkritik seit Jahrzehnten beobachtet. Seit TEXTE ZUR KUNST-Mitbegründer Stefan Germer 1994 in einem Essay die gleichzeitige „Notwendigkeit und Unmöglichkeit“ solider Parameter zur Beurteilung zeitgenössischer Kunst konstatierte, haben sich letztere scheinbar kontinuierlich weiter verflüchtigt. Gunter Reski sieht diese Entwicklung in der gemeinsamen Ausstellung von Jill Mulleady und Henry Taylor bestätigt, die kürzlich in Berlin gezeigt wurde. Angesichts einer Vielzahl an kanonischen Referenzen und Fragmenten teils bewusst gebrochener Traditionslinien betont er, dass die Beurteilung von Kunst heute mehr denn je, wie Germer es einst ausdrückte, „eine zutiefst fragwürdige und zweifelhafte Angelegenheit ist“.

Just before the turn of the millennium, Santiago Sierra’s career – which began with urban interventions characterized by minimalism – turned into a prime example of what Claire Bishop once dubbed “delegated performance.” While critics initially complained above all that Sierra’s projects denounced the ills of globalized capitalism while he himself often “outsourced” those same ills to Central and South Americans at the disadvantaged end of globalization, thus repeating the very injustices his work addressed, Sierra has since also been criticized for repeating a program that has long become a sort of brand itself. Our columnist María Minera, who observed the artist’s development in the 1990s when he lived and worked in her hometown of Mexico City, believes that it was precisely this local context, witnessing the abuses in the low-wage sector, that politicized Sierra and motivated him to create the controversial projects that made him famous. Thus she was disappointed when he recently returned to Mexico City with – of all things – an exhibition documenting his collaboration with the brand Balenciaga.

One might, admittedly, be tempted to dismiss Michelangelo Pistoletto as an eccentric or as a precursor of the new age industrial complex that took shape in the 1970s. But this proves to be too reductive, as Max L. Feldman lays out in his review of the artist’s recent retrospective “Molti di uno” (Many of one). Reading the exhibited works against the background of both Pistoletto’s own esoteric manifestos and writings by Gilles Deleuze, they become explicable in terms of metaphysics and higher mathematics.

Nachdem René Polleschs Stück Entertaining Mr. S. – Rip Off vor gut 30 Jahren auf der Probebühne des TAT Frankfurt am Main uraufgeführt wurde, rezensierte es sein einstiger Kommilitone – der Tanzjournalist Arnd Wesemann – für die taz. Zwar ist es ein trauriger Anlass, aus dem Wesemann sich nun nochmal an das Stück und an weitere frühe Werke Polleschs erinnert. Aber seine Anekdoten und anschaulichen Charakterisierungen machen den ein oder anderen Theaterabend in der eigenen Erinnerung wieder lebendig.

For her recent exhibition “A Structure” at Charim in Vienna, Dorit Margreiter Choy combined her recent film about the Bata tower in the Czech city of Zlín with (re)assembled pieces stemming from two previous, site-specific artistic interventions. All three projects emerged out of Margreiter Choy’s involvement with specific architectural sites, yet each work is, as the architecture historian Nika Grabar lays out, inscribed with movement, which becomes a structuring element in this exhibition.