Taja Cheek—currently artistic director at Performance Space New York, and an artist in her own right as L’Rain—has long advocated for the inclusion of sound artists and musicians in the gallery space, as central figures rather than an entertainment vehicle to lure crowds. This year’s Whitney Biennial featured a five-part performance program, curated by Cheek, featuring an array of performances deeply rooted in sound. 

Paul’s work across diverse media and disciplines calls to mind Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of an “unusual archive,” proposed as a solution to the un-representability of trauma and related emotions of love, rage, grief, and shame. Cvetkovich conceives of this archive as ephemeral, consisting of oral and video testimonies, memoirs, letters, journals, and more, just as Paul’s work over the past decade draws on both individual and collective memories. The artist’s choice to record and present people’s daily lives negotiates alternative approaches to documentation, media, and the political yet unseen acts we all perform.

Ours is the generation of the fragment, the snapshot, the caption, the info-bite: dulled post-digital distortions of the pictorial and literary chop-ups that appeared in the interwar years, via George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, and Walter Benjamin. “brecht: fragments” provides a masterclass for understanding how cropped photographs and scraps of text might amount to more than social media gruel and instead, artfully combined, result in riotous dramatic forms, crisp counterpropaganda, and pertinent anti-capitalist critique.

Medalla’s first comprehensive survey in the United States also focuses on the queer, erotic sensibility that permeates his work; an aspect of Medalla’s art which, the exhibition’s interpretative materials note, most evaluations have “repressed.” Entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by one of Medalla’s exuberant, early self-portraits of 1956–57, which he signed “Gaybriel,” along with ink drawings: muscular men in courtly poses; boys in symmetrical embrace.

The past few years have seen more disability-themed art exhibitions staged worldwide. The majority of these exhibitions, most notably “Crip Time” (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main), included both disabled and non-disabled artists and were curated by non-disabled curators, resulting in a medicalized focus with a lack of historical context. It seems a recent emphasis on exhibits focusing on “the body,” first prompted by an academic interest in transhumanism, and then perhaps primed by Covid-19, have led to a co-opting, of sorts, of disability for disability or disability-adjacent exhibitions.

Farocki’s lifelong project was one of pedagogical clarity by way of a methodology of comparison in which the viewer is able to understand the relation between images and between those images and the actual world. Each of the works in this show invites us to understand this relation […] To understand how we become inured to atrocity, how we become blind to the ways in which we are complicit in violence, and how violence and destruction are intertwined with our own labor and production—yes, even that of artists, filmmakers, academics, and art galleries.