Vincenzo de Bellis

“Imagine for a moment this is not an exhibition and these are not works of art,” writes Mario García Torres of his Walker solo exhibition, “but rather objects that appear, randomly, out of negotiations between interests and desires,” Curator Vincenzo de Bellis reflects on Illusion Brought Me Here and the negotiations and collaborations that brought it into reality.

For an artwork to bear witness to turbulent times and uneasy politics, does it need to be overtly explicit? Can questions of identity be engaged through abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism? How can art of the past help us come to terms with an uncertain present? In a virtual tour, the curators of I am you, you are too address these questions through works by Yto Barrada, Alfredo Jaar, Yoko Ono, Postcommodity, Danh Vo, and others.

“Baghramian is the kind of artist that you can only trust and support. She is fully confident in her ideas, and the reality is that she is, for the most part, right.” Vincenzo de Bellis writes on working with Nairy Baghramian on her exhibition, Déformation Professionelle, which engages with the format of the retrospective in a novel way, using the past two decades of her oeuvre as a site to be continually mined for exploration and idea generation.

Jimmie Durham has called many places home—from New York to Pine Ridge, Cuernavaca to Rome. In a new interview, Durham goes around the world, and around the gallery, offering commentary on works in the exhibition—from a piece made in 1985 from underpants owned by an NYC exotic dancer to a piranha/shark hybrid created from Italian glass found in 2015.

“I’m not yet old, but I’m beginning to get old. And I’ve noticed that traveling around, half the world is in front of me and half of it is in back,” says artist Jimmie Durham. “Therefore, I must be at the center of the world.”