Spoiler alert: the source of all this noise is nothing quite so dramatic. Rather than an explosive weapon or an apocalyptic countdown, the ticking comes from a set of jerry-rigged devices that have been cut in two, then reassembled, courtesy of Josh Kline, who is currently the subject of his first US museum survey at the Whitney.

One of these works, titled Alternative Facts (2017), features a Samsung flip phone and an iPhone attached to each other by red duct tape. Primly shown on a chintzy display, the piece evokes gadgetry repurposed for warfare. The sculpture’s title implies that the conflict in question has been necessitated, and possibly even exacerbated, by the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election.

There’s a tendency in mainstream media to catastrophize recent events, like that election or the current pandemic, and claim that they signal a grand finale to life as we know it. But the world already ended a long time ago for the many who face climate change, racism, and economic freefall daily. Kline seems to agree with that line of thinking. For him, the apocalypse is now.

His Whitney survey, “Project for a New American Century,” attests to his foreboding vision, filled as it is with dismembered limbs and late-capitalist junk. It’s dark stuff—you don’t exactly leave a Kline exhibition feeling good about the state of things. But oh, how intoxicating it all is. This terrific show is further proof that Kline is one of our great living artists, a true master at spinning nightmarish visions of worlds to come.

Ugly as it may be from a conceptual standpoint, Kline’s art is quite beautiful to look at, which is no small part due to the way he installs it. Kline treats art spaces the way film directors approach sets, stylizing every imaginable element so that his fictions feel real and lived-in. Accordingly, there are no white cubes in this exhibition, which is arranged non-chronologically and into environments related to an ongoing saga about where we’re headed.

In this exhibition, in lieu of the Whitney’s smooth floorboards, there are now flattened Amazon boxes and raw balsa wood. One gallery is lit gleaming white like an Apple Store, while most others are cast in varying degrees of darkness. It’s all immersive, creepy, and totally unlike the traditional mid-career survey.

The most notable intervention in the Whitney’s architecture is The look, the feel, of Patagonia Nano Puff® (2012/23), which covers a pristine wall facing the Hudson River. It’s a long stretch of black polyester fabric and insulation that was originally produced by Kline in collaboration with the titular outerwear company. With its rows of black rectangles and its recurring Patagonia logos, the piece offers a curious breed of Minimalism and luxury fetishism.

Familiar logos proliferate in Kline’s art. Walking through the show, I amassed a long list of the products invoked: Lays, Jarritos, FedEx, Eastsport, Barbour, Lysol, Walmart, Purina, Levi’s, Gold Medal, Rubbermaid, Advil, Amazon Prime, and many more. There’s a seductive comfort in discovering each label—and an ambient fear in knowing that the act of brand recognition is now a condition of life as we know it.

The earliest pieces in the show, from the late 2000s and early 2010s, attest to this. A looped animation from 2013, titled Forever 21, features digital pills raining down on text spelling out the retail chain’s name. The capsules are red, white, and blue: the colors of the American flag. It is presented alongside refrigerated coolers containing pouches of blood doped with drugs like Wellbutrin and IV bags filled with cocktails of Vitamin C, Red Bull, Ritalin, and more—creepy reminders of how we pump ourselves with trademarked substances in order to work harder, better, faster, stronger.

Nearby, there are two videos whose titles, Forever 27 and Forever 48 (both 2013), imply a bond with that animation. They depict actors playing the musicians Kurt Cobain and Whitney Houston, respectively, as though they had never died young. These stars’ faces are crudely superimposed via open-source AI technology, and periodically, their eyes, mouths, and noses stutter, offering glimpses at the real people beneath the computer-generated masks. Underneath, there are living, breathing beings who are getting squeezed out under the weight of a celebrity’s identity—a brand of a different sort.

When humans do show up in Kline’s sculptures, they are made to seem like refuse. Six brutally effective sculptures from 2016 feature people in business casual garb. These office workers look oddly organic as they lie in a permanent slumber, but their 3D-printed plaster forms, with their waxy, pallid coating, betray any signs of life. Curled up in the fetal position, they have been spat out by the capitalistic companies that once employed them and returned to their embryonic state. Now, their amniotic sacs have been replaced with knotted plastic bags, causing them to appear like yesterday’s trash.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say like last week’s recycling, since Kline’s sculpted bodies are often exhibited in parts intended for reuse. Some assembly may be required.

Severed heads, arms, and hands can be found in the janitor’s cart enlisted for Cost of Living (Aleyda), 2014. They’ve been 3D-printed based on the likeness of a real housekeeper who worked at a Manhattan hotel; she allowed herself to be scanned by Kline’s team. After Aleyda was turned into a data file, she became an object whose pieces now lie alongside plaster renditions of her toilet brushes and spray bottles. She has been literally objectified—she is turned into the tools of her labor, perhaps to represent the perspective of her employer—but Kline does not entirely deprive her of personhood. Nearby, the real-life housekeeper can be seen in a confessional-style video in which she discusses her ambitions and the conditions of her work.

Kline’s freakish surrealism is unsubtle in a way that can be jarring. It is unsparing; it cuts through the politesse that typically abounds in conceptual art. It seems directed less at the art-world elite, who may regard its lack of subtlety with a circumspect eye, than it does at the general public, which will find much to gawk at in this show.

Its curator, Christopher Y. Lew, has created an experience that likewise feels accessible. He isn’t keen to position Kline with respect to recent art-historical developments, skirting entirely the issue of post-internet art, a movement of the 2010s whose purveyors glibly ported the look of Web 2.0 into galleries, as Kline did in early works that assume the guise of stock photography. And, unless you read the catalogue, you wouldn’t know that works like Cost of Living (Aleyda) are intentionally paying homage to the tapes of video art collectives like TVTV and Videofreex. Instead, Lew mainly connects Kline’s art not to his peers but to ChatGPT, DALL-E, and deepfakes, which he claims Kline foresaw.

These are sloppy comparisons—Kline’s art doesn’t really have much in common with any of them. It is true, though, that Kline has pointed the way forward for many who came up after him. A case in point: a recent sculpture by Andrew Roberts from 2022’s Whitney Biennial that featured a lopped-off silicone arm with the Amazon logo on it. This isn’t all that dissimilar to Kline’s 15% Service (Applebee’s Waitress’s Head), 2018, in which a server’s 3D-printed neck contains, on its hollow inside, the eatery chain’s apple icon.

If Kline’s art has proven predictive, we probably ought to expect a lot of tech-minded artists to go analog soon. The most recent works in the show, a new group of installations from the series “Personal Responsibility,” list 3D-printed elements among their materials, though I must admit I had trouble spotting them. They mainly consist of freestanding cloistered spaces—a vehicle redolent of the #vanlife trend, a bunker-like cell—that each contain a screen. These screens play videos of fictional characters offering testimonials about leaving society and starting anew; they’re interspersed with hypnotic shorts showing reversed footage of denim, sugar, and more going up in flames.

The “Personal Responsibility” pieces, which lure in issues related to land rights and systemic racism, are unusually knotty for Kline—perhaps too much so for an artist who is best when diagnosing one symptom of societal collapse at a time. But there is something compelling about how stridently un-digital they are, at least compared to the early works on view not far away.

I much preferred the three-channel video installation Another America Is Possible (2017), which envisions a July 4 celebration held in 2043, the year that the US is slated to become a minority-majority country. Across the three screens, Black men and women are shown ceremonially burning a Confederate flag as children run freely. Shot on 16mm film, it reclaims the aesthetic of Levi’s commercials, peddling leftist politics instead of straight-cut jeans.

Kline’s sour worldview and any notion of optimism seem opposed, but this work suggests that the two can be squared. So too does Adaptation (2019–22), in which a group of climate-change seafarers navigate waterlogged Manhattan by boat. The Doomsday clock has already struck midnight; disaster arrived a while ago. But the tone is not all so dour. As the actors in it look out at the deluged landscape they traverse, their gazes seem to express something unexpected: hope.

In choices of material, mass, and form, Leigh gestures to a wealth of historical periods, locations, and artistic traditions that center Black female experiences. Some of her references are implicit; most are layered and oblique. Leigh liberated herself long ago from having to educate the ignorant—an obligation surely familiar to most people of color. The sculptures here nod to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the nimba headdresses made by women of the Guinea coast, and South Carolina pottery, among much more.

The poise and power of these works is immediate, but it takes time to decode Leigh’s art. That’s the point, though: she is thinking through lineages that span centuries but have been largely denied a proper place in the historical record.

Leigh, 56, is among the most famous contemporary sculptors working today—she was given the Hugo Boss Prize in 2018, participated in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and did the United States Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as the Biennale’s main exhibition, which won her the Golden Lion. Those are tough acts to follow up, but her ICA show lives up to the hype.

Many of the bronzes and ceramics on display will be familiar to anyone who visited her Venice Biennale pavilion, which made her the first Black woman to represent the US. The curator of the ICA Boston show—Eva Respini, with assistance from Anni Pullagura—has paired these works with older sculptures and installations to demonstrate how experience refined Leigh’s argument and technique.

“This exhibition really makes the argument for an artist working at the height of her powers,” Respini, deputy director of curatorial affairs and chief curator at the ICA, said during the press preview. 

One work that made the trip from Venice to Boston, Cupboard (2022), consists of a soaring raffia hut topped with a stoneware cowrie shell. Speaking about the piece, Leigh said it invokes traditional dwellings in Cameroon and Zimbabwe, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion. It also alludes to Mammy’s Cupboard, a Mississippi restaurant in the shape of the titular stereotype. Since she started making art in the 1990s, Leigh has been concerned with non-Western, Black female stories and celebrates, sometimes through surreal means, their cultural intersections. Histories don’t happen in a vacuum, Leigh suggests. They flow and crash into one another.

Leigh said she drew on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman for her Venice presentation. In her influential writings, Hartman rejects what she calls the colonial archive, which illuminates little of their interiority of enslaved people, queer people, and Black women. Given the gaps in records on these people, Hartman has made leaps of imagination to paint a fuller picture.

Leigh, in her more biting pieces, similarly conjures characters who stand in for the silenced. The bronze sculpture Last Garment (2022), installed toward the end of the show, is inspired by a nineteenth century souvenir photograph of a Jamaican laundress living in the colonized British West Indies. In Last Garment, the water is crisp as a clean mirror and reflects Boston Harbor, which is visible from a large window. The woman looks at the water, not us—she hides her thoughts.

“It’s one of these things that happens a lot in my research where it involves you having to look at your own debasement via anthropology, or via a lot of different media made in America,” Leigh said. “That’s both beautiful and involves a kind of racism that I don’t want to perpetuate [in my practice].”

This is heavy art, symbolically but also materially. You can even see Leigh’s works balloon in size as her practice matures. It’s like observing conviction take root and blossom.

Her recent works, made in her Brooklyn studio with the help of assistants, share a certain pristine quality. The surfaces are sleek, and the colors mostly unfussy (black, white, gray). Anger and sorrow are streamlined.

In contrast, the early works from the 2000s have the unvarnished energy of a demo tape, and I mean that as a compliment. There are small-scale ceramics glazed and fired in blinding yellow and blue. One resplendent face jug, Head with Cobalt, testifies to her mastery of the firing techniques developed by potters in South Carolina. She added salt to the kiln, creating a tactile, glossy coating. 

The oldest piece in the show is White Teeth (for Ota Benga), 2004, comprising rows of porcelain “teeth” that jut from a metal case. The impression is of stalactites or an alligator’s jaws. The work was “made on the kitchen table when I had a really young child, and when I realized that I wasn’t going to stop making these things and I had to declare myself an artist,” Leigh explained.

White Teeth was inspired by the life of Ota Benga, an enslaved man remembered for being displayed at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904 and then the Bronx Zoo. His teeth had been unwillingly sharpened like an animal’s. Shortly after being freed, he died by suicide.

The work represents “my very fraught relationship to anthropology, the World’s Fair, [and] the display of the Black body which oftentimes, in the case of Ota Benga … led to his demise,” Leigh said.

Leigh sounded tired talking about Benga. Like she said, this is toxic anthropology. Given that she has decades of art-making ahead (barring the unexpected), she’s had to learn how to exorcise the evil. For example, she worked for months on a ceramic series based on an 1882 staged photograph taken by a white photographer in South Carolina who made the sort of degrading postcards also referenced in Last Garment.

It depicts a woman seated near a face jug that is growing sunflowers and is a bit elaborate, conceptually: the image is based on a caricature of Oscar Wilde created after he visited the United States that year. Wilde is depicted as a monkey, then as a Black woman in a miasmic mix of homophobia, misogyny, and racism. Leigh reinterpreted the tableaux in two works, a face jug whose features are abstracted into cowrie shells and a bell-shaped female figure titled Anonymous. She’s reaching as if to shield her face from voyeurs. But the inhumanity, even in this abstracted fashion, weighed on Leigh.

Last year, she made a paper-mâché and raffia version of Anonymous and set it ablaze on the Red Hook waterfront. The scene was inspired by the burning of an effigy known as Vaval during Carnival as it is celebrated in Martinique, and it is the climax of Conspiracy (2022), a short film by Leigh and Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich. It wasn’t a lonely scene; the artist Lorraine O’Grady served as a witness.

Leigh said she felt relief as the figure was consumed and ruined by fire. A charred scent likely lingered in the air, but the monument was reduced to dust and dismissed by the wind. Then she walked back to her studio.

No one wanted to let the rain win. This celebration had been a long time coming. The previous edition of Asia’s most important biennial, in 2021, was a painfully low-key affair. It ran for only a little over a month, after two Covid delays, and because of South Korea’s strict travel quarantine, almost none of the selected artists got to see it. (They missed a smart, dreamy show.) Only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands that typically attend came.

This year, the Gwangju Biennale’s artistic director—Sook-Kyung Lee, a curator at Tate Modern in London—has clearly prepared for big numbers. Her show, which opens today and runs through July 9, is airy and judiciously paced, giving each of her 79 artists room to breathe. Will the public flock to it? Let us hope. This is a crowd-pleasing and crisply coherent affair. Even as it broaches thorny topics, it is unafraid of a good time, teeming with visual, conceptual, and even tactile delights.

You can grab a crayon and trace the glide of your arm along paper stuck to a wall, a “Bodyscape” by the South Korean living legend Lee Kun-Yong, then stroke a life-size sculpture of an elephant, slightly abstracted and covered with white wool, by Oum Jeongsoon, also of South Korea. Next, revel beneath the 16-foot freestanding tower of a painting that Thailand’s Thasnai Sethaseree has contributed, with garish blobs of color atop images of Bangkok, a metropolis overflowing with energy. No, sorry, you cannot mount the tall, evil-looking metal chairs that Seoul’s Chang Jia has arrayed in a circle, but you can at least imagine the sensations they impart. Each seat rests above an old-timey wheel adorned with foot pegs and feathers—a carnival ride, an industrial machine, and a medieval torture device all in one.

All this crackling ambition and easy accessibility are a relief. First reading the show’s focus—“to imagine our shared planet as a site of resistance, coexistence, solidarity and care,” per an introductory text—I blanched. It sounded like a well-worn approach, repeating longstanding fixations of the curatorial class. Its title, “Soft and Weak Like Water,” also sounded familiar, echoing the New Museum’s 2021 triennial, “Soft Water Hard Stone.” (It alludes to the Tao Te Ching’s assertion that “there is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.”)

In fact, “Soft and Weak Like Water” is a stirring and original show, surpassing its stated aims. It shows artists fighting to keep traditions alive, passing on knowledge via art and ritual, and digging through wreckage to try to make something new. Fairly often, they succeed.

Scenes of catastrophe and trauma pile up. A camera glides over the skeletal remains of architecture standing in water, in Larry Achiampong’s Reliquary 2 (2020), as a father speaks in a voiceover to his children about being separated from them during a Covid lockdown. The Seoul-based collective IkkibawiKrrr screens footage of the World War II-era military ruins on Pacific islands, as war again looms in the region. In a serene, elegiac, and somewhat ponderous hour-long film by Naeem Mohaiemen, a man and a woman are alone in an abandoned hospital in Kolkata, and she is dying.

As an old world decays and crumbles, artists are directing discarded materials toward new ends. Outside the Gwangju National Museum (one of the biennale’s four satellite locations beyond its central exhibition hall on that rain-soaked plaza), the Cambodian sculptor Sopheap Pich has planted silver trees that he hammered together from slices of recycled aluminum. They are bewitchingly realistic, and almost appear to dance.

At the rustic Horanggasy Artpolygon art space, tucked away on a sylvan hill, there are humble hanging pieces that the late Jeoung Jae Choul made by stringing together castoff objects (fishing floats, anonymous plastic bits) that he found along the coastline of his native South Korea. They seem slight until you see the detailed maps that he painted on paper to record his discoveries with tender attention. And in the main hall, the Polish-Roma artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas has rendered lucid scenes of everyday life with clothes donated by family and friends.

Children—our only real hope—are stars in this show. They conceive a play in a theater workshop that Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi recorded in a spectral five-channel video, they discuss being bullied as they hug in a film by the Dutch artist and “cuddle workshop facilitator” melanie bonajo, and in a potent video installation by South Korean Soun-Gui Kim, girls read poems by women writers from the Joseon Dynasty as fearsome waves crash alongside.

Water is everywhere in “Soft and Weak Like Water,” to a degree that some works feel redundant. Robert Zhao Renhui investigates the history of an unnamed stream in his hometown of Singapore in an intricate constellation of video and sculpture, while Taiki Sakpisit trains his video camera on a section of the Mekong River with a violent history. Alan Michelson cruises New York waterways to shoot footage that he projects atop oyster shells, and Emilija Škarnulytė crafts a lush video that that captures an unidentifiable being from overhead as it glides along the surface of water. Individually, these are sharp works; together, their effects are blunted. (Ditto for the surfeit of mediocre painting on view.)

But just when the situation is becoming too controlled and predictable, you find an artist engaged in the kind of freewheeling, genre-busting action that too rarely finds a place in these august showcases. Anne Duk Hee Jordan has bathed the tiny basement rooms of Horanggasy Artpolygon in black light and installed kinetic sculptures—goofball underwater robot animals that start moving when you enter. One is a long phallic form (a sea cucumber?), slowly rising. Over at the Mugaksa temple, Hong Lee Hyun Sook is climbing a nearby mountain in a short video that follows her hands as she finds her way. (Touch and hands recur in the biennial: hugging, experiencing elephants, or communicating the nuances of American Sign Language in a characteristically crystalline piece by Christine Sun Kim.)

One of the most exhilarating pieces was being brought to life at the main hall on Thursday afternoon. As onlookers filmed, the New York–based Guadalupe Maravilla used padded mallets on the gongs that hang in his inimitable sculptures, which suggest thrones or sacrificial altars, made of wood, steel, and objects that he collected while retracing his path as a child in the 1980s, migrating from El Salvador to the U.S. border. He was unleashing torrents of sound. He views these works as “healing machines,” and as his sonorous tones wash through you, you believe it.

This idea—that artworks can be conduits for healing, or at least point the way toward repair—is a central premise of “Soft and Weak Like Water.” Betty Muffler, an Aboriginal Australian artist, has provided richly patterned paintings, white acrylic on dark linen, that refer to her work as a ngangkari (traditional healer), and Buhlebezwe Siwani has built a sprawling multimedia installation that draws on her efforts as a spiritual healer in South Africa, with song, dirt, and ropes that allude to the belts worn by Zion church members, tying them to their ancestors. Like so much of the art in this year’s exhibition, Siwani’s display is about how culture can create communities, and how it can help those communities connect to their pasts. Those are goals that carry special resonance in Gwangju, whose biennial was established as a memorial to the citizens who rose up in 1980 against the South Korean military dictatorship and were killed.

The danger in positioning any artwork as means of remembrance, or activism, or healing is that it gets reduced to that, a mere tool with a confined function. But wandering through this year’s show, taking in its calls to preserve the natural world, enjoy our bodies, and redress history’s wrong, what I sensed, more than any single message, were heartening dashes of hope, the result of artists gamely meeting their moment, channeling the thrill and dread of being alive today.

That feeling was especially present in Arthur Jafa’s video LOML (2022), a compact masterpiece that is a tribute to the late writer Greg Tate. As at least two overlapping songs play (they are hard to make out), the screen is largely black, but a fragment of amorphous light keeps flickering about, undergoing quicksilver changes: a portrait of something that is refusing to be pinned down. Hope was in the air on Thursday night, too, as two artists stood on a stage, unspooling strange new music—sounds that few had ever heard before—as the rain kept falling.

Ross became a sensation during his lifetime, and his fame has continued on after death, with a recent Twitch marathon of his Joy of Painting TV series attracting more than 5 million viewers. Nargle, in this film’s world, never achieved that level of success.

Instead, Nargle languishes as a figure of local popularity in Burlington, Vermont. The women who work with him swoon over his groovy van—all except one. From the very beginning, we note that Katherine (Michaela Watkins) feels cold toward him. They were once lovers, years ago, but no longer. Small-town renown changed Nargle for the worse, apparently.

Here comes strike one against this flaw-filled film. Perhaps in some allusion to Ross’s purported sensual charisma, of the sort that could titillate female viewers through their screens, Nargle has some kind of vague effect on women, one that seems purposefully obfuscated.

In the film, women like Nargle. He dates them; sometimes he has sex with them, but often, he doesn’t. We never see him pursue women, however. They come to him, and he is disinterested.

Yet the local paper describes him as a washed-up “sexist” and his foil, a young upstart painter named Ambrosia (Ciara Renée), tells him, “You used your brush to seduce and destroy the people who loved you.”

The film’s insistence on avoiding any transgressions comes off as an effort to steer clear of legal trouble with the Ross estate. It wouldn’t do if this Ross lookalike was running around the film pantomiming serious wrongdoings that the real-life painter was never accused of.

Paint may at times recall a certain Best Picture nominee from this year that also featured off-screen sexual manipulation by an artsy type, but TÁR, this is not. Nargle’s crimes are that he broke up with someone by walkie-talkie, that he fed a young vegan some cheese, and that, after his girlfriend cheated on him, he cheated back. But even this revenge is laced with Nargle’s dopey innocence and hurt, leaving viewers to balance his petty actions against what looks like a hyperbolic response from the women in his life. It’s an underhanded move that would leave Nargle looking like a victim if the whole plot wasn’t so unconvincing.

Nargle’s fall from grace begins when Ambrosia is hired by PBS Burlington to also do a painting show. She’s young, mixed-race, gay, and can do two paintings in the allotted time. Unlike Nargle, she doesn’t depict the same conifers or mountains, but she has a flair for another kind of kitsch, depicting UFOs, lightsabers, and dinosaurs. Supposedly this is evidence of her abundant originality and true artist’s spirit.

Ambrosia’s mere presence stirs up female dissent. They forget to do little tasks for Nargle. It’s a sign of the times. Even Katherine falls under her spell.

It’s a narrative dynamic that has sprouted in the wake of #MeToo: pit the old, antiquated white guy against a fresher, female, non-white competitor, forming a soft “great replacement” story. Except, of course, the white dude is never quite replaced.

In this case, the old dog learns new tricks. Nargle’s painting improves, he gets the girl, and all is right with the world.

To me, the change is surprisingly subtle; the refinished lobby features a larger, more centrally located information desk, but otherwise feels like the same airy rectangular architecture of recent memory. During the unveiling, however, Hammer director Ann Philbin disagreed.

“It’s not subtle. It’s huge,” she told ARTnews. “To have that opening onto the street, and to have the transparency of those beautiful windows that look in at the art—to me, it’s a total gamechanger.”

The museum is now in the final phase of a gradual transformation that began more than 20 years ago, when Philbin commissioned a then-emerging Maltzan to rework the entirety of its home from the inside out. These latest renovations look at the space from the outside in, foregrounding opportunities for dramatic, large-scale works to really say to the surrounding Westwood neighborhood, Hey! We’ve got art in here. From the new sculpture terrace, Sanford Biggers’s monumental Oracle, 2021, a wise, seated figure cast in seven tons of bronze, will greet passing traffic on Wilshire and Glendon Avenue through 2024. And through late August, pedestrians can peer into the lobby windows to see Chiharu Shiota’s grand staircase installation, a meticulously woven network of 800 pounds of red yarn that feels simultaneously womb-like, cancerous, and riveting.

It’s been Philbin’s longtime goal to raise the Hammer’s profile, not just within the art world but among the museum’s neighbors. Shortly after her arrival in 1999, an early informal audit showed that most pedestrians had no idea where the Hammer was, despite standing just outside its entrance. “The truth of the matter is that we used to be almost invisible,” she said. “People thought we were part of an office building.”

The Hammer is, in fact, an extension of what was Occidental Petroleum’s 16-story corporate tower, where oil magnate Armand Hammer once presided as chair. In 1990, to house Hammer’s collection of Impressionism and Old Masters, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes designed a nearly windowless block of black and white marble, accessible to this day through the tower’s ground floor. His architecture followed the centuries-old approach of treating museums as “temples,” according to Philbin—that is, rarified spaces for the contemplation of art. “It never said, museum, it never said welcome. It never said come in,” she said, also lamenting Larrabee Barnes’ cramped galleries of “bad ceilings” and “terrible lighting.”

In 1994, four years after Hammer’s death, the University of California, Los Angeles assumed care of his collection. In 2000, Maltzan drafted a master plan that reinvisioned the building as the “city’s living room,” which in short order included the addition of a theater and cafe in 2006, the completion of a sunny outdoor courtyard in 2012, and a 60-percent increase in total exhibition space. The process unfolded incrementally as fundraising would allow, with other external factors. The $10-million, 2017 overhaul of the third-floor exhibition spaces, for example, might never have happened if an unnamed artist, invited to mount a retrospective, hadn’t point blank told Philbin, “I don’t like your galleries.”

Billed as “the completion of two decades of transformation,” the Hammer’s street-level reinvention might be better described as the beginning of the end. There still remains the conversion of a former City National Bank location into a new gallery, an expansion made possible by UCLA’s $92.5-million purchase of the entire building in 2015. During the pandemic, funds to finish and connect the space to the Hammer’s lobby were diverted to the prevention of layoffs, leaving the staff intact, but the former bank in a state of patchy terrazzo flooring with missing ceiling tiles. According to Philbin, artist Rita McBride saw this as the ideal “corporate ruin” for her Particulates installation, a vertical ring of green laser beams evocative of a bank heist, on view through November. While additional fundraising for construction is underway, visitors can view the piece by exiting the museum, then taking a bit of a wander before finding the entrance to the bank.

The transparent lobby has become the prevailing trend of museum makeovers in the last decade, presented as a major feature in the overhauls of Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2016, and many more. As institutions evolved to embrace a culture of inclusivity, the idea emerged that a bright, spacious entryway is less intimidating to the general public—and therefore gets more bodies through the door. Facades, however, don’t always do all that they say they will.

Despite the museum’s announcement of a new “dramatic presence across a full city block,” passing pedestrians and motorists are unlikely to detect much of a difference. Biggers’ sculpture, which debuted in the corporate enclave of Rockefeller Center in 2021, is only visible from the north side of Glendon, while the new bank gallery is hidden from the street behind black reflective windows. The sign above the door still does not say “museum,” but rather “Lynda and Stewart Resnick Cultural Center. (The entire building is now named after the owners of brands including Fiji Water and POM Wonderful, whose $30-million 2018 donation really helped jumpstart construction.)

All of this is to say that the museum still very much looks like part of an office building—there’s no hiding the 15 floors of glass and marble rising above it—but following the goals they set for the museum 20 years ago, Philbin and Maltzan have largely already achieved what they set out to do. The Hammer today is a pillar in LA’s artistic community, having platformed countless careers since the 2010 creation of the Made in L.A. biennial, and since 2005, assembled a robust collection of contemporary works that have long since departed from Armand Hammer’s narrow vision.

(The exhibition tied to the unveiling, “Together in Time,” presents a tightly packed cross-section of the museum’s contemporary holdings, not quite chronologically or thematically, but through the lens of recent market forces; think a grid painting by Charles Gaines from 2019, the year after the 79-year-old artist joined the roster of Hauser & Wirth, or a 2019 portrait by Amoako Boafo, gifted by his local gallerists, Julie and Bennett Roberts.)

The real game changer was not the reorientation of the Hammer’s entrance, but its elimination of admission fees in 2014, which led to a 25 percent jump in attendance. Now, on any given day, the museum is full of people, often gathered in Maltzan’s airy courtyard as if it were indeed a living room. Some come to enjoy the exhibitions, while others are there for the free Wi-Fi or an idyllic place to have lunch—all of which is fine, according to Philbin. For potential museum-goers, it seems the most compelling factor is being able to afford the entrance, rather than what it looks like.

What might you call Moth Collection (2010): a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or some combination of the three? It’s a piece comprising pairs of small porcelain legs affixed to the wall, each with oversize wings for a body. Some are arranged in uneven grids; others drift apart from those grids to float freely in space. The wall itself is thinly painted in cerulean that’s left to drip down toward the floor.

And what might you say is depicted in Sleeping Serpent (2014), the 78-foot-long work that currently traverses much of the New Museum’s third floor? As you walk along the snake-like form, following its curlicuing body, passing by its pregnant belly, you may be shocked to see the creature culminate in a sculpted human head that rests peacefully on a plush pillow.

Countless other objects in Mutu’s show attest to an artist who, in the past two decades, has built a universe that’s all her own, replete with her own set of artistic rules.

Her excellent New Museum show, curated by Margot Norton and Vivian Crockett with Ian Wallace, arrives at a time when many younger artists are envisioning realms far removed from our own, populated by hybrid humans and bewitching animals. Few can hold a candle to the epic project that Mutu has undertaken, however. She is the rare artist whose work has grown only more convincing as it’s become increasingly surreal over the years.

Things start off in style on the first floor, with In Two Canoe (2022), the newest work in the show. Here, a pair of giant creatures, each with cabbage-like forms for faces, crouch in a low boat filled with water. Their arms split outward like the roots of mangrove trees, a plant that has “moved everywhere, has made journeys like those who were kidnapped from Africa and taken to the Americas,” as Mutu once noted.

This is not just a foray into fantasy. A Kenyan who studied art in the United States, Mutu is now based between New York and Nairobi. Her work, with its mashed-together mediums and cultural intermingling, is born of the same diasporic sensibility that has guided her life. Drawing on unreality is, for Mutu, a means of processing her reality.

The earliest works in the show evince that. Her 1997 “Bottle People” series, made while Mutu was still a student at New York’s Cooper Union art school and had few resources, features discarded beer bottles that she painted black and turned corporeal by way of cowrie shells that look like eyes. That Mutu could summon alien beings with such an economy of means is a testament to her talent from a young age. That she could incorporate references to so much history using so little—cowrie shells were employed as currency between Africans who traded enslaved people, and the bottles look back to the altered found objects culled from urban detritus of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg—is nothing short of astounding.

But it’s the collages of the mid-2000s that made Mutu famous, and it’s the collages many viewers will be here to see.

Some of the most provocative ones feature pornographic images of Black women. Her “MUD” works (2003) turn these sexualized pictures, in which little is left to the imagination, into something a lot more mysterious, with splotches of dried brown grime covering the more revealing bits. In one, a mass of filth appears to pour forth from one woman’s genitals, hiding nearly all but one leg with a strappy high-heeled shoe on its foot.

The “MUD” works prove so striking because they undermine the piercing male gaze that has historically been cast upon models like these. Later collages grew in scale and ambition, and furthered that theme, similarly enlisting grotesquerie as a means of empowerment.

There’s the more-than-7-foot-wide Non, je ne regrette rien (2007), in which a busty woman kisses a snake, her head spraying red-brown blood as she does so; even grander ones feature beings with skin composed of blooms of yellow-green that look like pustules.

Mutu’s beautiful body horror reaches its climax with Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2006), a quiet shocker that features 12 images of Black faces comprising anatomical diagrams and pornography. Implicitly, the work alludes to the long history of medical experimentation performed on Black women, while also subverting it.

Similar works were the main focus of Mutu’s last major New York survey, at the Brooklyn Museum, a decade ago. It’s rare for an artist to have one big New York museum show during their lifetime, and rarer still to have two. One could argue that the second one is premature, given that Mutu only just turned 50 last year. The New Museum show is amply justified, however, because it affords so much space to her work in other mediums.

Hats off to Crockett and Norton for placing such emphasis on Mutu’s videos, a part of her practice that doesn’t get enough attention. Some take the form of private performances done only for her camera. There’s Cleaning Earth (2006), in which Mutu, working on her hands and knees, scrubs away at a patch of land behind her Brooklyn brownstone. In the course of 25 minutes, the ground remains just as dirty as before. We observe Mutu’s labor acutely, but it would go unrecognized by anyone looking at the land. What a shame this video is relegated to the museum’s basement.

At least The End of carrying All (2015), which premiered at the 2015 Venice Biennale, is presented front and center, its sounds allowed to rumble throughout the sizable gallery that houses Sleeping Serpent. The animation follows a woman (Mutu) who ascends a hill. She bends over slightly as she carries a building, a giant wheel, and other objects on her back—the weight of the world. When she finally makes it to the peak, she transmutes into a gelatinous blob that glows red and pink. In the end, this creature slides off the cliffside, leaving behind a slimy trail.

Moving from one place to another and becoming something else in between: this is the central theme that guides many of Mutu’s gorgeous sculptures from the past decade.

Some from recent years underscore the spirituality that has long hung in the background of Mutu’s art. There are large bronze sculptures that feature beings inside oversize Kikapú baskets, smaller versions of which artisans regularly sell in Kenya. One features a serpentine form that would appear threatening were it not so gorgeous; its name is Nyoka (2022), the Swahili word for snake.

The Seated I (2019), a kneeling figure with a plate in its mouth, has traveled downtown from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which commissioned the piece for a niche within its facade. It loses some of its mystique at the New Museum, whose clinical galleries unfortunately seem to tame and diminish it, but even so, the sculpture feels as though it has opened a portal to another world.

For my money, the timeliest series of work in a New York museum right now is one in this exhibition: a grouping of eight sculptures that depict blown-up versions of viruses that have ravaged the global populace. Covid isn’t represented, but pathogens like Zika, named after the Ugandan forest where it was first isolated, are. Some of these sculptures were made before the pandemic, while others—like one depicting the common cold—came along during Covid.

As diseases continue to smash through the immune systems of many, these sculptures hit a nerve. The reason, however, is not that they evoke so much death and destruction, but rather that they are such attractive objects. Covered in an admixture of reddish Kenyan soil and paper pulp that Mutu has termed “porridge,” they exude an aesthetic charm that’s infectious.

Mutu’s work has never provided direct statements, and the virus sculptures place among her most challenging efforts to date. They propose these diseases as something transcendent—something that can bind peoples across the globe. After all, what’s disgusting can be beautiful, and what’s alluring can be abject. It’s never one or the other for Mutu.

The exhibition, titled “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” offers more footage than anyone could ever absorb in a single visit. Individual pieces in the show only seem to reinforce the idea that this is indeed the point.

There’s Dara Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990), an installation featuring four armatures hung from the ceiling, each with a screen attached that plays videotaped images of Chinese students protesting governmental oppression. A surveillance switcher cycles out their feeds on a fifth screen in the center, making it so that a partial view of all this footage is the only possible experience here.

Not far away, there’s Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 2014 installation composed of 24 screens’ worth of material dealing with the history of science fiction in China. Some monitors display footage of fictional Chinese astronauts boarding rockets; others offer news broadcasts about space travel; still others contain text about recent forays into the genre by Cixin Liu, Jia Zhangke, and more. Arranged in a style that recalls displays once used to sell TVs before the era of flatscreens, these monitors demand darting eyes and probing brains, but they never allow viewers to take it all in at once.

No one is expected to watch every single second in “Signals,” a show that rewards fast-paced sampling rather than prolonged, contemplative viewing, and if anything, this is to the show’s credit. Curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo have organized a thrilling experience, one that gets to the heart of what video art is all about: the sense that we need no longer be passive viewers who are force-fed a one-way stream of information.

“Signals” can’t really be called a history of video art. The show, Comer and Kuo write in its catalogue, is “not a survey but a lens, reframing and revealing a history of massive shifts in society up to the present day.” That frees them from having to contend with some classics of the medium and to lure in some unexpected artists.

Notably absent from the show are a number of video art pioneers who appeared in Barbara London’s 1983 survey at MoMA, such as Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Joan Jonas, and Vito Acconci. It would be all too easy to quibble with those omissions, as well as ones of other giants that rose in the intervening years, from Stan Douglas to Hito Steyerl. But doing so would be pointless, since the lineage presented in “Signals” is deliberately idiosyncratic and, in some ways, even more exciting than a traditional canon. (The purview is also limited by what’s in MoMA’s collection—almost everything in the show comes from its holdings.)

The curators seem most interested in video as tool for protest, one that could achieve just as much as a leaflet or a soapbox. Indeed, throughout this show, artists turn their cameras on upheaval, partly in an effort to document political actions and partly to transmit calls for change through screens around the world.

One section is devoted to collectives who welcomed video technology as a means of consciousness-raising. Not Channel Zero, a group of African American artists, toted around their camera at protests held across the US, offering a less polished and more nuanced view of matters than you’d find on the nightly news. Not Channel Zero Goes to War (1992) tackles leftist anger over the Gulf War. At one point, with a camera pushed close to her face, a Black woman attending a demonstration says, “There’s a lot of things we can do peacefully instead of fighting over one white man’s ego!” Producing video art, it would seem, is but one of those activities.

The low-budget look of Not Channel Zero’s work is a feature, not a bug—it differentiates this video from what’s beamed through the airwaves. Many other artists in the show have utilized that look too, with Artur Zmijewski bringing his camera to Israeli uprisings decrying intervention in the Gaza Strip and Tiffany Sia wielding an iPhone to document recent protests in Hong Kong. There’s an immediacy to it all that can’t be found in a CNN report.

Video has made it impossible to separate what’s happening at home from what’s taking place abroad, these artists suggest. That much is made literal in Emily Jacir’s Ramallah/New York (2004–05), in which quotidian-seeming images filmed in the West Bank and Manhattan—bland offices, buzzy bars—are placed side by side. In a tiny gesture of video-based magic, more than 5,000 miles of space is collapsed by way of two monitors set inches apart.

Since video can circulate live images in a way film cannot, artists have enlisted it to bring together people distanced by geography. In a touching proto-Zoom gesture, Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz used video to link a department store in Los Angeles with Lincoln Center in New York. The results, recorded in the 1980 video Hole in Space, show smiling people jumping for joy at the realization that they can now wave at strangers across the country.

Some artists have eyed the ease of enacting gestures like Galloway and Rabinowitz’s with suspicion. Julia Scher’s Information America (1995), featuring several cameras that film viewers and play back their images on a group of mounted screens, aims to underscore how surveillance can’t exist without video technology. It succeeds in making its point, albeit ham-fistedly. More successful is Song Dong’s lo-fi Broken Mirror (1999), in which a camera is pointed at pieces of glass that capture confused passersby on the street. Those mirrors are then smashed with a hammer, revealing structures you’d never imagine behind them.

If “Signals” has one pratfall, it’s a problem that plagues almost every video show ever curated: sound bleed. You can hear the shards shattering in Broken Mirror all the way across the room as you stare at a Martine Syms installation. In the next gallery over, a Philip Glass score ends up accompanying more than just a Nam June Paik video, even managing to infiltrate the walls of a domed Stan VanderBeek installation whose ceiling is covered in overlapping projections.

To mitigate the aural crowding, MoMA is supplying headsets that play the videos’ soundtracks when held up to a QR code. These do little to help when there are few partitions and lots of noise. The few works cordoned off in black-box spaces—like a can’t-miss Chto Delat video installation called The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger (2014), in which the Russian collective’s members huff and puff and wax poetics about resistance while moving around balletically—fare somewhat better, but only marginally so.

Then again, some videos in the show explicitly comment on this barrage of sound and image, and even embrace it. Nil Yalter’s striking Tower of Babel (Immigrants), 1974–77/2016, features at its core a ring of outward-facing monitors displaying interviews with Turkish immigrants in France. The mélange of Turkish and French being spoken, only some of which is subtitled, is meant to simulate a community whose individuals cannot be pulled apart from each other. Consider that a metaphor for how the videos in this show ought to function.

The last couple galleries of “Signals” are the most interesting ones, since they present relatively new additions to video history that argue against some of the medium’s long-established core tenets. If Not Channel Zero used video to advocate for visibility, Sandra Mujinga, a young artist born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and now based in Berlin and Oslo, relies upon the medium to move her performers toward states that cannot be perceived. The performer in her hypnotic 2021 video Pervasive Light, Mariama Ndure, appears to disappear, thanks to an array of digital effects that cloak her image in darkness while a thumping score by NaEE RoBErts plays.

New Red Order’s Culture Capture: Crimes Against Reality (2020) provides what may be considered the show’s big finale. Projected at a scale typically reserved for blockbusters played in multiplexes, the work focuses on two sculptures featuring representations of Native Americans—one is the monument to Theodore Roosevelt that once stood outside the American Natural History Museum in New York—that become jelly-like flesh via CGI. As one of the melted-down statues expands and contracts in a glass case, you are reminded of just how far video has come since the days when live-streaming across the country seemed revolutionary.

Exiting the show, visitors encounter a group of banks where a looping playlist of videos is on view. There is simply too much to see here, and it’s difficult to know exactly when a desired tape is going to play. The good news is that MoMA has uploaded most of these works to a dedicated channel on its website, where they will be reabsorbed into the flow of moving imagery uploaded to the internet daily. That’s as fitting a temporary home for these works as I can imagine.

The show’s title is a phrase coined by the late, highly esteemed curator Okwui Enwezor during a conversation about postcolonial scars. Though Enwezor was originally tapped to curate the Biennial, he gave the position to Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, amid his failing health. (Enwezor died in March 2019, at 55.) Her hotly anticipated iteration, postponed by two years, doesn’t insult the viewer by arguing that art will solve these issues. Instead, she, like Enwezor, invited artists across the Global South to probe the effectiveness of how we transmit experience—starting with biennials and art institutions. 

“What are the results of these deliberate and political actions in art?” Al Qasimi asks in her curatorial statement. “The answer,” she continues, “lies in the works presented by the artists of the biennial who engage in the politics of underrepresentation and the auto-archive.”

The Biennial includes some 130 artists, almost all of whom hail from or have family roots in previously colonized countries. Midcareer and emergent stars, such as Cao Fei, Joiri Minaya, Gabriela Golder, Hyesoo Park, and Lee Kai Chung outnumber the long-established, including Kerry James Marshall (represented by an unexpected outdoor ground mosaic), Mona Hatoum, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, David Hammons, John Akomfrah, and Amar Kanwar. Al Qasimi calls Enwezor’s watershed 2003 Documenta her lodestar, and has continued one of its defining innovations, the restructuring of biennials into series of happenings rather than national groupings. The art is spread across 16 venues scattered around Sharjah, including a vegetable and fruit market, the Sharjah Art Museum, and a disused kindergarten.

The show is light on painting (it’s a lot of perfectly fine figuration), photography, and conventional sculpture. The strength of the performances was uneven, with two of the best including Tania El Khoury and Abdulrahim Salem, the latter of whom staged a hypnotic live painting session set to an Emirati sea chantey.

In line with the trends of the last decade or two of international biennials, the emphasis is on installation and video with a documentary base. Erkan Özgen’s video installation Wonderland (2016) features an interview with Muhammed, a 13-year-old Syrian refugee who fled the Islamic State occupation to southeastern Turkey with his family in 2014. Muhammed is hearing-impaired and he gestures the story of their escape, his agitated expression and edged silence cutting something like shame through the viewer. Özgen’s work is in the kindergarten, a drafty, peeling space pointedly aligned with themes of innocence passed. Installed nearby are photographs by Pipo Nguyen-duy in which school children play in what looks like the Vietnam countryside. Some nap on felled trees; it would be sweet save for the assault rifles tucked under their arms. 

One of the more stylish entries is Isaac Julien’s five-channel black-and-white installation Once Again … (Statues Never Die), from 2022, which addresses the debate around decolonizing the museum through an imagined correspondence between the Black queer philosopher and critic Alain Locke and Albert Barnes, an arts educator and influential collector of African art. 

The two men volley erudite observations on the restless relationship between Black art and the institution, with intermissions for archival footage of African artifacts held in the British Museum and the poetry of Langston Hughes. As if that doesn’t sound like a robust enough display, a mock museum of real artifacts and contemporary works indebted to African art tradition accompanies the installation, like a series of resin figurines by Matthew Angelo Harrison. 

There are some exhibitions you can walk through quickly and be satisfied with the gist. This isn’t one of them. This show rewards long viewing, given both its sprawl (two venues, Khorfakkan and the Kalba Ice Factory, are more than an hour’s drive from Sharjah’s city center) and the generous space afforded each artist. Moza Almatrooshi, an artist interested in agricultural practices and climate consciousness, converted multiple shop spaces at the market into micro-terrariums (there was a live beehive apparently installed nearby too).  

Hajra Waheed, who won the 2023 Sharjah Biennial Prize along with Doris Salcedo and Bouchra Khalili, built a conical sound chamber that plays a polyphony of seven songs popularized at women-led protests. Meaning here is transmitted via the mood. The piece is worth visiting first in a group, then at a late, lonely hour. 

Khalili, meanwhile, occupies a large gallery with the newly commissioned The Circle (2023). It’s a constellation of archival footage, interviews, photography, objects, and text that examines the legacy of the Arab Workers Movement, a radical political organization founded by North African migrants in 1970s France. They formed agitprop theater troupes—they called it “theatrical newspaper”—to teach immigrant communities about their rights. 

The whole thing is an exercise in historiography, the success of which, Khalili notes, relies on the strength of eyewitnesses. You can call it responsible retconning, which originally proposed that history “flows fundamentally from the future into the past.”

These works feel like personal triumphs for the artists, but it is unclear what the victory is for the biennial model, which has attempted to apply itself to the advancement of global modernity since at least the 1970s. The Sharjah Biennial has made this iteration a reflection point, where it takes stock of its efforts, most of which involve better activating its city. Luckily, that task addresses another budding issue: with most biennials of late being preoccupied by post-colonial anxiety and defiance, what saves the art in one show from seeming interchangeable with another?

The Sharjah Biennial’s best venues, like the labyrinth cluster of old medical clinics, makes the experiencing of the art inextricable from the site. You scour the map and open odd doors in case something of value is waiting past the shadows. (“Did you see—?” was overheard, and “Go back, don’t miss—”). It felt invigorating, disorienting, and logical: Ibrahim Mahama, who deals with global trade in relation to his native Ghana, presented two site-specific installations that explore the legacy of the body on the goods it occupies or manufactures. The stirring Parliament of the Ghost (2023) is an assemblage of found objects including reclaimed wheelchairs arranged as an empty audience. 

The clinics are to the east of coastal Sharjah, where the desert cedes to a rocky terrain and the shoreline of Oman eventually comes into sight. You can actually see Oman from the Kalba Ice Factory, like some silent encouragement of cross-cultural solidarity.

History of the sort unfolding day-to-day is already edging toward the inevitable: the end of the biennial as an end-all measure of worth, and the redirection of energy into developing underserved art infrastructures. Is the end nigh? To that question, Al Qasimi quotes Nigerian artist Otobong Nkanga: “With every shell we find in the desert, we bear witness how radical landscapes change in gradual, almost imperceptible ways.”

Serpas has a way with trash, which she plucks from the street and then presents in galleries to maximum effect. I can still recall the first time I encountered Serpas’s refuse-chic sculptures four years ago, at a now-defunct Lower East Side space whose back room she filled with little more than a junked refrigerator propped diagonally against a radiator. From the ceiling’s corner drooped a tattered mattress. It was a haunted, haunting show that left me feeling as though I’d seen a ghost.

Her Swiss Institute show is a much different, and in some ways eerier, affair. It contains few of these objects, although it has a number of pictures of her making them, many produced in collaboration with artist Rafik Greiss. In one image, Serpas is posed so that her long hair cascades over a bathtub turned on its side. We don’t get to see Serpas’s face, so she appears like an apparition, imbuing this tub with a supernatural force.

Despite its rough-hewn conceptualism, Serpas’s art has proven seductive for many. She’s had a slew of solo shows in hot European galleries over the past few years, and she appeared in the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial three years ago; mega-collector François Pinault recently showed her work at his Paris museum. All this has happened before she even turned 30.

Here’s the good news: the Swiss Institute show proves that Serpas is more than just the hype. If anything, the exhibition, her first solo in an institutional setting, suggests that she’s a talent worth watching.

Curated by Daniel Merritt, the show implicitly situates Serpas within the well-trodden lineage of artists working with ready-made material. It’s tempting to lob jargon like “Duchampian” and “Dadaesque” at Serpas’s sculptures, but Greiss’s pictures underscore how lame those comparisons would be. In one photograph, Serpas, wearing a worker’s jumpsuit, can be seen hauling a gigantic tire—a laborious physical task emblematic of her practice writ large. It’s hard to imagine Duchamp ever having broken a sweat as he flipped his famed urinal and called it art.

More recently, artists like Cameron Rowland and Danh Vo have wrung intricate political narratives from seemingly banal objects. Serpas doesn’t seem much interested in doing that either. The strollers, mirrors, and chairs she can be seen handling in Greiss’s images are anonymous—they could have come from anyplace or anyone, and if they do contain hidden stories, those tales are legible only to the artist herself. Even the settings in which these pictures are taken are left only as vague forests or sidewalks.

Do not mistake Greiss and Serpas’s photographs as mere documentation of private performances, for these pictures are far more than that. They tease out unexpected connections between bodies and sculptures, and sometimes even offer up artworks that appear fleshy. There’s one photograph of a mattress folded in half by Serpas; two wooden planks have been laid atop it, causing these objects to appear like a pair of splayed legs.

Serpas has often drawn connections between her assemblages and her writing — she once called her poems “time-sculptures.” Indeed, there’s a good amount of text in the Swiss Institute show. Four vitrines contain a scattering of pages excised from Serpas’s Moleskine notebooks from between 2013 and 2017, doodles and all, and several of her books are available in a sectioned-off library. Her writing, with its tumult of words and coolly written non-sequiturs, is as oblique as her visual art, but it lacks the internal logic that makes her sculptures sing.

Serpas’s paintings move this opacity in a more interesting direction. Done on sizable swaths of unevenly cut jute, they ooze an ominous intensity. One features a chest that has been slathered with what appears to be blood, while another shows a belly button that leaks something like black oil.

One painting is awarded a room of its own: an untitled 2018 work depicting a person who holds a silky negligee to their chest, a strap having fallen down one shoulder. Flecked with nail polish, coffee, and more, it’s propped against a raised pedestal that causes it to seem like a holy relic — something to be admired yet not necessarily understood. Covering up, this painting suggests, can be just as revealing as baring it all.