Grandmamauntsistercat

Grandmamauntsistercat (2024) 

Directed by Zuzanna Banasinska

Grandmamauntsistercat, is a short 23 minute film which was constructed with found footage originally produced from Poland's Educational Film Studio during its communist era. The film repurposes educational and propagandistic materials to speak on family, identity, and collective trauma as a woman during this era.  The film additionally introduces and reimagines the Slavic folklore figure Baba Yaga, who historically was a goddess associated with matriarchal power, and now traditionally is demonized in folklore as a witch who eats children. 

    With a young girl narrating, the film begins with her story of how her mother accidentally became pregnant with her, and was forced to conceive by the matriarch of their family (her grandmother), as the same had happened to her. This immediately sets the theme of generational trauma throughout the film, and how women help to reinforce patriarchal standards. Within this, there was a strong theme of comparing the female condition within patriarchy to machines, animals, and other smaller organisms, most notably the comparison of a parasitic organism to childbirth. 

    Using real medical found footage, and videos of examinations or animal experimentation, with sound effects alongside the child’s narration, the film creates an uncomfortable atmosphere. Many of the animals shown are in medical contexts, being experimented on alongside footage of women in medical contexts.

In this comparison of women to animals or machines, Grandmamauntsistercat makes a point to show how a woman's identity within the patriarchy is erased. Women as a class become one monotonous thing; hence the name, Grandmamauntsistercat, which is combining all levels of the family into one taxonomical name.

  -Yves Kroner

Exhibition Review - Arthur Jafa: I Am Tony

William Henningsson

Group B

Arthur Jafa’s I Am Tony is an exhibition currently on view at the New Museum which shows his video and photographic work confronting black life in the contemporary United States. While the amount of work shown in this collection is overwhelmingly large, its standout pieces mirror the complexity and friction of American life.

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, 2021

The animated video scored to abstractions of R&B music, AGHDRA (2021), is one of the highlights in this exhibition. While this piece is more abstract compared to the broader theme of the show, the sensations felt in viewing this work communicates the attitude of the whole exhibit. The animation of black waves threatening to swallow you, and the heavy bass that vibrates directly into the chest, transforms the gallery into an almost religious space. In combination with the enormous scale of the piece, you feel the heightened tension between dread and survival which become a thematic through line.

Arthur Jafa, The White Album (2018)

In contrast to AGHDRA (2021), Jafa’s compilation of viral video clips named The White Album (2018), reframes surreal internet moments into a mix of statements. From race to power dynamics, the absurdity of these clips is hard to look past when compiled as a collection, but it really shows how much of culture on the internet is built on black and white American life clashing. 

Throughout this exhibition, Jafa flexes his ability to punch through the gloss of contemporary life in modern America, and show us the reality in its rawest form.

Asher Liftin’s Recent Work

Asher Liftin: Recent Work, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026, 125 Newbury, New York

Asher Liftin’s Recent Work turns ordinary scenes from daily life into images that ask viewers to slow down and look more carefully. The subjects in the exhibition are very familiar, including flowers, windows, parking lots, and city buildings. After Liftin’s process, these images begin to feel like a mix of photography and painting. From a distance, many of the works look like enlarged photographs or printed images. They appear complete and very precise. When viewers move closer, the images slowly break apart into dense lines, grids, and small areas of color.

He works from his own photographs and builds each image with layers of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. His process feels similar to weaving, because different colored lines and dots cross over each other and slowly form a complete image. In Lilies, the flower petals look soft and realistic from far away, but up close, many small layers of color become visible. In New York Window, the window frame, glass, interior space, and street reflections are also broken into small lines and colors, making an ordinary city window feel much more complex.

Asher Liftin: Recent Work, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026, 125 Newbury, New York

One of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the way it changes how viewers look at painting. At first, viewers see a complete image that feels close to photography or print. Then they naturally move closer to understand how the image is built. As the viewing distance changes, the image shifts between a complete scene and scattered areas of color.

---Rita Chen

Exhibition review on Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued

- Personal take

The exhibition Gaetano Pesce Studio: Continued, featuring the workshop of Italian artist Gaetano Pesce, is on view at Salon 94 Design in New York. The exhibition mainly presents furniture created by Gaetano Pesce’s studio. These works move away from the standardized appearance of industrially produced furniture. Using materials such as resin and pigments, the studio creates furniture with transparency, fluidity, and irregular forms.

- Personal take

While maintaining their practical functions, the furniture pieces are full of creativity and artistic ideas, particularly the contrast between standardization and individuality. One example is the Nobody’s Perfect Chair S94D series. From a distance, these chairs look like individual characters, each with its own personality. Two irregular circular holes on the backrest are outlined in black, creating the impression of eyes. Between these two holes, there is a long, narrow curved groove that reminds me of a character’s nose or mouth. Each chair is colored with different pigments. These anthropomorphic forms and vivid colors seem to give each chair a distinct personality, allowing every piece to express its own identity.

The exhibition is held in a space filled with natural sunlight. As the sunlight meets the translucent and colorful works, it creates a wonderful and joyful visual experience. The light not only makes the pieces appear more transparent and delicate, but also

gives the relatively heavy furniture a lighter and more playful feeling. Here, the visitors’ experience of viewing the works is shaped by the artist’s creativity, the materials, and the sunlight working together.

HAD-472-02 - Group B - Jiaru Jin

The Poetic Jump at Arts and Letters

Is there a circumstance that allows us to escape death?, is the eternal question of avant-garde artist duo Arakawa and Madeline Gins, surveyed in The Poetic Jump showing at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The exhibit clearly examines the humor and genius central to the question of “reversible destiny” from Arakawa’s early philosophical text-and-diagram works to the interactive spaces he developed alongside his wife and collaborator, Madeline Gins. 

Instead of addressing immortality with reincarnation, Arakawa and Gins create a space that renders us eternal in Ubiquitous Site X (1987-91, 2026). As the central prop of the exhibition, it provides visitors a space of the disorientation and derealization necessary for one to transcend their bodily decay. The curtain of pink robes envelops viewers in disorienting darkness, and the uneven terrain breaks their inherent balance and sense of scale.

Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Ubiquitous Site X, 1987–91/2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

The exhibition also examines the visual philosophy to arrive at an architecture of “reversible destiny.” The early work by Arakawa, NO! Says the Room (1972), examines the conditioning of the body by rigid and conventional spaces. Defined room plans paired with orienting language (“focus here,” “NO!") question how spaces condition us to be complacent in a conventional life, and thus a conventional death.

Arakawa, NO! Says the Room, 1972. Installation view, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2026. Photo: Steven Probert Studio 

 The Poetic Jump addresses our essential fears: what happens after death, and in life,  what changes that death, all without taking itself too seriously. It calls on viewers to break from the limitations of their earthly bodies and enter a reality of endlessness, an increasingly exciting prospect in a world that feels ever more destined for an end. 

- William Spadoni, Group B

 

The New Museum: Arrivederci, Piggies! 

   Diego Marcon’s exhibit, Arrivederci, Piggies!, is announced by the lack of light, the glass doors to this space a disturbing blood-red. The room inside is consumed by maroon, the floors padded by a crushed velvet carpet of the same color. Four large screens stand in the middle of the show while viewers take their seats in the director’s chair. Four films play in a sequence, one active panel while the others remain in a quiescent state, “waiting their turn” so to speak. The show consisted of these four films, which act together as a theatrical fable, utilizing spotlights and decorative entrances reminiscent of a stage set. The films are narratively gruesome, depicting childhood memories of domestic violence in the medium of CGI animation and live-action film. The work retains a refreshing stylization in For The Parent’s Room (2021), depicting extreme flesh disfigurement on the actors’ faces.

The exhibit serenades its audience, suddenly bursting out into musical fits, overwhelming the room chorus and a haunting Americana orchestra. For instance when viewing Fritz (2024), as the hung boy sang I found myself turning my head, being guided by foley; a flicker of a lighter, a bird’s song, and the strain of a fabric noose. I give credit to Marcon for his seamless integration of animation, live action, and sound design for this specific space. The singular failing of this exhibit is the literal lyrics, “I took the life of my little son” feels incredibly on the nose, which ruins the work the enigmatic visuals provide.

Taryn Simon: Father Country I Do Love You

     Tayrn Simon's photo exhibit is an interactive rotunda installation featuring photos, videos, text, and sculpture tracing the life and career of an FBI agent. One of the strongest parts of this exhibit was its location in the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim's ascending rotunda shaped heavily aided the exhibit's storytelling. As you enter up the ramp you turn and are faced with a large print of a babies head crowning during labor. This incredibly intimate moment displayed on such a large impending scale is the perfect introduction for this exhibit. I am saying that because one of the key elements to this exhibit is its intimacy with its subjects and the stories they tell. Many of the photographs are of miscellaneous and commonly found objects that develop a deeper context when you read the accompanying text. A clear example of this was the Hallmark Cards on display. The photographs Simon took were arranged in a heart shape and the accompanying text detailed a secret agent using these cards to send classified communications in order to commit espionage. Paring them next to Hallmark Cards created thoughts of hidden truths or deceptive uses of inanimate objects. This is a central theme in this photography exhibit presenting the view a important questions; how well do we know the people around us? what truths do our personal belongings hide about ourselves?