Best 2024 Art
Power Ekroth
The year 2024 has been characterised by global political conflicts and public spending cuts. In particular, the genocide in Gaza has left its mark, not only in artistic content but also in the way art has been presented and received by audiences.
One of the biggest art events of the year was of course the Venice Biennale. The commitment to Gaza was evident everywhere here - but was conspicuous by its absence in Swedish minister of culture Parisa Liljestrand's opening speech for the Nordic Pavilion. Her speech did touch on warfare, but with a focus instead on the war in Ukraine and with the aim of strengthening support for Sweden's NATO membership.
One great art experience from Venice have made it to this list.
Wael Shawky, Egyptian Pavilion, Venice Biennial
Wael Shawky often uses historical material and retells it in surprising ways - sometimes through the eyes of children, sometimes as puppet theatre, and now as opera. He wrote the script and score in record time and managed to bring together a large group of amateurs to create a kind of gesamtkunstwerk. The work depicts the Urabi Revolution (1879-1882) against the backdrop of imperialism in all its nastiness, starting with a fight in a café and culminating in the full-scale bombing of Alexandria by British forces and the decisive battle of Tel El Kebir.
The 45-minute film was shown alongside sculptures and created such a buzz on the opening days that the queue for the pavilion exceeded a two-hour wait. Shawky may not have won the Golden Lion, but he certainly won the hearts of the audience. See conversation with Shawky from the opening days.
YOU CAN’T GET WHAT YOU WANT BUT YOU CAN GET ME (2024)
Samira Elagoz & Z Walch
KIASMA, Helsinki
The slideshow actually documents something quite banal: two individuals' first meeting, first kiss, and a long-distance love that grows into celebrating holidays and meeting each other's parents over the course of a year. In its aesthetic and form, the slideshow is reminiscent of Nan Goldin's The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, where intimacy and perceived sex become only a small component of a larger narrative, with love and life itself at the center.
Elagoz and Walch happen to be trans men. One of them undergoes top surgery, but that is only part of the story - not the “thing” itself. Here we are completely freed from the cis-heteronormative gaze because it is not about educating or normalizing trans people. No elaborate explanations about gender identity are required, it is about individuals falling in love with each other at the end.
The slideshow speaks about our times, where we meet via apps, share our lives on social media and may not live in the same city or even on the same continent. Total acceptance and love takes central stage. The love for someone else. The love for oneself. And the love for a chosen family concept.
It is pure, non-apologetic autofiction at its best.
Nan Goldin's opening speech, Neue Nationalgalerie
The most affecting and intense art event of 2024 was undoubtedly Nan Goldin's opening speech for her travelling exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in November. The drama between the artist and the director Klaus Biesenbach, which preceded the opening of the exhibition, had leaked out into the art world, leaving everyone wondering whether Goldin would choose to cancel, be forced to do so, or be gagged.
In an interview in Frankfurter Rundschau, she answered the question “What made you decide not to cancel?” with “The exhibition is beautiful, but for me it is of secondary importance”.
One has to agree, the exhibition is undoubtedly good, but Goldin's speech was simply brilliant. Goldin's speech was a rare manifestation of intellectual and emotional clarity, and redemptive in a way that only someone who has lived through a long year of frustrating restrictions on free speech can understand. No one else could have said what Goldin said in Berlin without being called an antisemite and cancelled. That she was allowed to take that space - and to do so with such confidence and authority - not only created hope, but also reinforced the conviction of many that public opinion, which according to official surveys is already shifting, may be eroding the rock that is Germany's government line. See the full speech.