[intensifies], Andrea Crespo’s video installation, which opened at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler during Berlin Art Week, runs for one hour. It has a linear plotline, with silent dialogue written over the image. The aesthetics are sparse; the film flickers through still shots of institutional interiors, revealing an interrogation in which the minds and bodies of people with autism are charted and managed by the State. In the gallery, the artist emphasizes this bodily control with clinical and military sensibilities, installing a site-specific graph of a five-step anxiety scale,... [more]

ArtSlant is an open Arts community with over 200,000 free, user-generated artist profiles. The support of our community is an essential part of our mission — from our magazine to our residency and prize. Every week our editors select the best artist profiles from under the radar. Follow your favorite artists to see new work and exhibitions by adding them to your watchlist. Aimee Gilmore –... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Dain Mergenthaler.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I think that my cartoony, frilly, animated work is a ploy to coax viewers into looking at the world around them with fresh, queer eyes: to look under rocks and into subway grates and at lamp posts and between train cars and find a new, alien world that is dangerous and sexy and scary at the same exact time... [more]

On the 8th of September, 1985, Cuban-American performance and multi-media artist Ana Mendieta fell naked from the window of her 34th floor apartment. The fatal fall occurred in the presence of her then husband, minimalist sculptor Carl Andre, who was subsequently charged with her murder. Despite evidence, including Mendieta’s acute fear of heights, which would have presumably kept her at a distance from the apartment’s large sliding glass windows, and witness statements claiming they heard an audible struggle, Andre was acquitted by a judge three years later on grounds of... [more]

At the heart of the exhibition Sin Máscaras (Without Masks), currently at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, is the inherent contradiction between socialism’s ideals of equality and the lived experiences of racism for Cuban artists of African descent. Centering the Afro-Cuban experience, its complex social and political history, and the censorship of voices seeking to expose inequalities, Sin Máscaras is described as the largest and most comprehensive exhibition dedicated to contemporary Afro-Cuban art to date. It features some 150 artworks by 40 Cuban artists... [more]

Last February, at St+art India’s open-air street art festival in Delhi’s Tughlakabad area, a work by prominent Indian street artist Daku caught my eye: the word “BREATHE” stretched in simple black letters across the length of a white wall. It was a nod to the fact that the noxious Delhi air makes it one of the most polluted cities in the world, but “breathe” also had more hopeful allusions: the work’s ink was abstracted from PM2.5 (particulate matter, a type of atmospheric pollution), the heavy presence of which makes the city’s air so dangerous... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Christopher Squier.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I create darkly humorous cultural artifacts, reflecting on contemporary infrastructures and how dislocation and wreckage are embedded within modern political geographies. What is an artist’s responsibility? Artists have the opportunity to work outside of the velocity and hyperactivity of other... [more]

Carrie Gates is digital artist and VJ (video jockey) based in Saskatoon, Canada. She has been creating live video magic since the early 2000s. In her own words, she makes “sound-reactive 3D processing and unusual rhythmic juxtapositions to create throbbing, psychedelic, responsive compositions that add a new dimension of interaction and intrigue to any environment.” Gate’s wildly exciting visual performances are formed from eclectic video assets she creates using a variety of techniques. The source material could take the form of digitally created, futuristic 3D... [more]

New York-based painter Scooter LaForge eschews the rites of passage predestined by the art world machinery of graduate programs, sanctioned residencies, and gallery hierarchy, in favor of an intuitive, exploratory approach. His decades-long career spans art, fashion and architecture—his ideas applied to canvas, clothing, buildings, and objects—and despite developing supportive networks and collaborations with ideological compatriots across these creative fields, he remains unattached to any one group. LaForge, then, offers a refreshing note to artists determined to make it among... [more]

It’s a pastime amongst art nerds: comparing favorites of past Documentas. Johan Grimonprez’s 9/11-foreshadowing video essay Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y pops up almost immediately as one of Documenta X’s highlights. Thinking of the eleventh edition of Kassel’s mega-show brings to mind Raymond Pettibon’s overwhelming installation of drawings and Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s appealingly awkward video works. The barque Romuald Hazoumé constructed out of jerrycans for Documenta 12, entitled Dream, had an immense impact—and the international refugee crisis... [more]

“Printing Paris” is the blog of ArtSlant’s Georgia Fee Artist-in-Residence, Shoshana Kessler. Kessler is undertaking a contemporary resetting and retracing of Hope Mirrlees’ experimental poem, Paris: a Poem (1919), employing a combination of traditional and modern printing techniques. The blog will feature small essays following her research on the poem and Mirrlees as she resets this forgotten masterwork. This essay is Part 3 of “Printing Paris: The Route.” You can find the first and second parts of the route plus an introduction to Hope... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Jonathan Monaghan.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I think my films, sculptures, and prints offer an experience in which a range of familiar imagery interact in unexpected ways. The imagery I use comes from mass consumerism and pop culture, but also the history of western power and wealth. The absurd conflations I make with this imagery, like a unicorn in... [more]

The contemporary political and social hive mind of the Western World is preoccupied with issues of race and gender. The recent White Nationalist rally at the University of Virginia, the physical violence involved (mostly perpetrated on students protesting Neo-Nazism), and lukewarm statements from the White House encapsulate the struggle to break with patterns of a troubled past to fix the ails of a troubled present, and possibly escape a troubled future. We are indeed grappling with contemporary questions provoked by the poltergeists of our past: how do we as nations spurred by an economy of... [more]

This photo portrait was originally published as a longer interview feature on Freunde von Freunden. Think you know your colors? Red, orange, yellow, Yves Klein blue, even VantaBlack, perhaps? But how about Stuart Semple’s Pinkest Pink? Or the lost, forgotten, and rediscovered 17th-century lead-tin-antimony yellow? These are just a couple of examples from thousands of rare color pigments Narayan Khandekar works with in his role as Director of the Straus Center at Harvard Art Museums. When Khandekar isn’t digging up golden ochre from Australia’s Arnhem Land coast, he can... [more]

The title of Kunsthaus Zürich’s recent exhibition Action! alluded to both its topic, performance art, but also to the institution’s framing the exhibition as a political statement in and of itself, taking an action of protest against the current ills affecting our society. Curator Mirjam Varadinis positioned the exhibition in contrast to other museums’ recent performance art exhibitions by arguing that, “Action! strikes out on its own by focusing on the moment of action not only formally but also politically.” Performance art indeed has a history of... [more]

“Printing Paris” is the blog of ArtSlant’s Georgia Fee Artist-in-Residence, Shoshana Kessler. Kessler is undertaking a contemporary resetting and retracing of Hope Mirrlees’ experimental poem, Paris: a Poem (1919), employing a combination of traditional and modern printing techniques. The blog will feature small essays following her research on the poem and Mirrlees as she resets this forgotten masterwork. This essay is Part 2 of “Printing Paris: The Route.” You can find the first part of the route here, and an introduction to Hope... [more]

This is 5 Questions. Each week, we send five questions to an artist featured in Under the Radar, our weekly email highlighting the best art on the ArtSlant network. This week we seek answers from Sophie Kahn.   What are you trying to communicate with your work? I'm interested in the unintended emotional resonance created by new imaging technology: the idea of ghostliness or haunting, a lack of life that is present in (specifically) 3D renderings that attempt to capture life.  What is an artist’s responsibility? While I have tremendous respect for... [more]