The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City

Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai is hailed as a communist hero in modern-day Vietnam, but little is known about the young revolutionary of the 1930s beyond her propagandized mythos. In “Lost from View,” multidisciplinary artist Hương Ngô re-examined her legacy. Gesturing to the deliberate sidelining of women in historical narratives, Ngô copied a letter by Minh Khai in invisible ink, presenting the pages with a bottle of the iodine solution needed to render the text visible but not permitting its use. The show also included a blown-up pamphlet from 1940 by female members of the Indochina Anti-Imperialist United Front, and vintage Western book covers of exoticized Asian beauties, situating Minh Khai’s story within a wider study of 20th-century depictions of Vietnamese women. OL

Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku

Is it possible to buy one’s way into heaven? Probably not, but that doesn’t stop people from trying, as Farid Rasulov conveys in his oddly satirical exhibition “Qurban Olum.” Centered on the Islamic festival of sacrifice, during which millions of animals are killed annually, Rasulov’s film Yuxuların Yuxusu (Dream of Dreams) (2020) visualizes two outlandish scenarios: two surgeons in ceremonial hats fill a sheep’s abdomen with jewelry, which later pours out of the disemboweled carcass to the amazement of three office workers. At Yarat Contemporary Art Space, the film was accompanied by an installation of the absurd operating theater and candy-colored paintings of people enthralled by the ritual slaughter, illustrating the grotesquerie of a festival that, for the artist, has become a competitive display of secular excess. OL

Gropius Bau, Berlin

Referencing the Chinese concept of li—variously defined as “courtesy,” “gift,” or “ceremony”—Lee Mingwei’s retrospective at Gropius Bau demonstrated the universal importance of respect, reciprocity, and intimacy through installations and performances from the past three decades. Restaged projects included Lee’s poetic Guernica in Sand (2006/20), a monumental recreation of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war painting designed to be swept away, and Sonic Blossom (2013/20), in which gallerygoers are treated to an impromptu performance by an opera singer. The show included new adaptations, such as an offshoot of The Letter-Writing Project (1998/20) titled Letter to Oneself (2020), featuring notes sourced via an open call that express the contributors’ pandemic-era hopes and fears. Lee’s practice poignantly invokes gratitude and grace in a time of tragic uncertainty. OL

Yeo Workshop, Singapore

Visitors to Citra Sasmita’s exhibition were enveloped in an earthy turmeric aroma. The artist had laid a circular stratum of the spice on the floor and scrawled into it verses from an epic Javanese kakawin poem, which was blurred as wafts of air dispersed the golden powder. In the surrounding traditional Balinese Kamasan-style paintings, Sasmita further effaces the kakawin’s portrayals of females as desired sexual objects or domestic tools. Instead, she depicts women as rulers of their own universes: trees grow from their wombs and flames cover their loins, symbolizing their might as creators and destroyers, while disfigured creatures with raven locks toy with stereotypes of forceful women as frightening. Unabashedly reckoning with the male-centrism of Indonesian culture, Sasmita foregrounds the powers that all women possess.  CC

Para Site, Hong Kong

“Garden of Six Seasons” brought together maps and depictions of the world by more than 50 artists who span Indigenous and traditional cultures as well as the high-tech, postcolonial world. Mary Dhapalany’s woven pandanus mat of four interconnected circular shapes, for instance, was paired with Liu Kuo-Sung’s 1973 painting of the atmosphere inspired by “The Blue Marble” image of the Earth taken by Apollo 17. Representations of paradise were woven into tapestries from Central Asia to Morocco, while Liang Hao’s scroll painting Fire and Water (2013–14) portrays the epic battle of kan and li from the I-Ching. Vvzela Kook’s animated video installation Columbus of Horticulture (2019) looked at the human impact of colonialism on ecology as it followed a plant hunter through a vivid land of exotic plants. HGM

Experimenter, Kolkata

As rural communities of the global south face environmental and economic catastrophe, farmers in the Indian state of Maharashtra have gained attention for their long-distance protest marches. Prabhakar Pachpute has been channeling their fighting spirit into his drawings, paintings, and sculptures of post-industrial landscapes and hybrid human-machines that are rising up in protest. In “Beneath the Palpable,” the massive painting The Relic of Our Time (2020) depicts a vulture lording over a barren valley despoiled by factories, while A march against the lie (IA) (2020) features a mountaintop monument of a raised first. Mirroring the zombie-mutant figures often seen in Pachpute’s murals, and straddling the line between animal and machines with human limbs, monstrous-looking sculptures emerge from the earth in anger and defiance. HGM

Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo

During World War II, the Japanese army experimented with developing aviation fuel using pine roots. Intrigued by this, Asako Iwama created Pinocchio (2020)—comprising resin blocks, distillation apparatus, and archival materials about European and Japanese pine industries—for “Things Entangling” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Produced in collaboration with Kadist, the exhibition materialized “fleeting affinities” between objects, cultures, and eras through works by 12 international artists. Exemplifying the show’s archival bent, Tom Nicholson’s crates of mosaics imagined the repatriation of an artifact looted by Australian soldiers in Gaza in 1917. Hikaru Fujii’s The Anatomy Classroom (2020) presents objects salvaged from a museum in the Fukushima nuclear contamination zone. Poised between excavation and speculation, the show projected a future in which the lost may be found. OL

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