Shirin Neshat: Land of Dreams

By Sahar Khraibani

MARCH 2021 | ArtSeen

Comprised of more than 100 photographs and a two-channel video installation, Land of Dreams is the New York premiere of Shirin Neshat’s latest body of work. The show marks a monumental conceptual and visual shift for the artist, whose repertoire has often looked back at her native Iran. Here, her explorations and camera are fixed on her adoptive home in the United States.

Michelle Handelman: LOVER HATER CUNTY INTELLECTUAL

By Alex A. Jones

MAY 2019 | ArtSeen

Michelle Handelman’s body of work Hustlers and Empires, of which a new installment currently appears at Signs & Symbols Gallery in the Lower East Side, is a symbolically-layered, operatic examination of “the hustler.” Here the label encompasses those who transgress society’s norms as a way to survive, and those who must survive in spite of their transgressions, including the sex worker, the pimp, the drug dealer, the addict, the queer outsider. The newest film, LOVER HATER CUNTY INTELLECTUAL, focuses on a character who is in fact a “layering of persons,” portrayed by the queer feminist artist/activist Viva Ruiz, whose performance is partly autobiographical and partly inspired by the libertine 20th-century novelist Marguerite Duras.

Yasi Alipour: As Dreams

By Vered Engelhard

JUNE 2019 | ArtSeen

In the search for an intergenerational and international social mechanism for historical construction, the artist asks us to relate to each other as contemporaries. Encouraging us, specifically, to take these various interpretations from Iranians ‘then’ to the experience of our ‘now’ in the United States.

“My son's dreams were cut short”: protests against police brutality go viral in Mexico, the US, and beyond

By David Schmidt

JUL-AUG 2020 | Field Notes

As soon as COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, the rumors started: it had been prophesied all along! Psychic Sylvia Browne had predicted it in her 2008 book End of Days, writing: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe…” Brazilian author Melissa Tobias described it in her novel A realidade de Madhu: a “global pandemic that would kill more than three billion earthdwellers.” Some even attributed prophetic powers to the end credits scene of the 2001 film Planet of the Apes, depicting how a new disease could quickly spread across the globe through air travel.