I first came to New York City in 2003 and remember seeing the work of Gary Simmons at Metro Pictures. It was a formative experience. There were so many incredible artists exhibiting in the early aughts; it felt special to have been part of that moment. It’s been many years between that moment and seeing Simmons’s newest exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, but the artwork had the same impact, the same mesmerizing immediacy. In the conversation that follows, we discuss the artist’s educational formation, the way collective memory forms around certain images, and the importance of artwork that poses questions.

Curator Natasha Becker speaks with Tschabalala Self about her relationship to mythology, discovering her aesthetic language, and how she depicts Blackness throughout her body of work.

McCallum’s pictures can be felt as singling the viewer out, implicating the viewer in the movement of its testimony to Foley’s experiences and to the people whose lives are caught in the conflict. The force of this testimony is felt as an encounter between the image and the viewer with indeterminate, yet potentially significant resonances.

I am fascinated by the lives of different generations South Africans: what are their hopes? how are they thinking about freedom? in the afterlife of apartheid, how have different people’s lives changed? what kinds of lives are they trying to live now that they are “free”?