Parkett Vol. 99 - 2017
Cao Fei, Omer Fast, Adrian Ghenie, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Editorial

About the Now: Cao Fei, Adrian Ghenie, Omer Fast, and Lynette Yiadom- Boakye,

Parkett 99 presents four artists who, with their experience of very different backgrounds, take history (and histories), dreams, the inscrutable, and at times even the disasters in contemporary reality and hold them up to our gaze. Their representations and images capture fleeting, ambivalent, and always unstable realities in kaleidoscopic images, fictitious creations, and shimmering visions, without ever diminishing their truth content. Even if Cao Fei’s art paints a gloomy picture of today’s Chinese megacities, it is regularly illuminated by allegorical flashes of fragile life asserting itself among the rubble. Theaters of war, traumas, and shocking stories from the newsroom seem concentrated through a particular burning glass in Omer Fast’s films, whose credo Kaelen Wilson-Goldie describes as “the disaster and the desire to surpass it, all at once” (p. 121). For author Suzanne Hudson (p. 163), Adrian Ghenie “proposes that one order may cancel another.” Mihnea Mircan considers how Ghenie’s images of decay, as poisonous “bestiaries” from 20th-century history, also contaminate our present (p. 144). It is in the dark color spaces of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, that a glimmer of hope can be made out. Here Hilton Als finds the fraternity and closeness that in his view are otherwise lacking in contemporary art, as he shares in his engagingly personal essay (p. 86). All of this is fittingly accompanied by the ghosts that appear as recollections of current events in Rokni Haerizadeh’s Insert a- haunting book-within-a- book.

Table of Content

Aural Traditions: The Art of Jason Moran by Naomi Beckwith

Cao Fei
The Chinese City Between Dream World and Catastrophe by Tom McDonough
Cao Fei’s Avatars and Antiheroes by Hou Hanru
Cao Fei, Performance Without Transcendence by Jiayun Zhuang

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
The Quiet Bohemia of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Paintings by Rizvana Bradley
Levitating Blackness: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Right to Opacity by Adrienne Edwards
The Kiss by Hilton Als

Omer Fast
My Flesh and Blood by Roy Scranton
Conflicts That Alter Our Lives by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Iraqi Whispers by Sven Lütticken

Adrian Ghenie
Rememberment of This Past by Mihnea Mircan,
Paintings Gags by Suzanne Hudson
Adrian Ghenie, Painter of the Twentieth Century by Brigid Doherty

Rokni Haerizadeh, Insert