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Body Politics: Sara de Chiara on Joanna Piotrowska’s ‘Stable Vices’
Body Politics: Sara de Chiara on Joanna Piotrowska’s ‘Stable Vices’
Women’s bodies break the repetitive motives of fabrics, curtains, tablecloths, and wallpaper as well as the regular geometric patterns of tiles, parquet, wooden slats that envelope the domestic spaces in which the photographs were taken, apparently cosy and homely environments that emphasise even more the strangeness of their behaviour.
Time’s Registration: Helen Molesworth on Two Portraits of Hilton Als
Time’s Registration: Helen Molesworth on Two Portraits of Hilton Als
To hold together Catherine Opie and Brigitte Lacombe’s works is to revel in the similarities between them. They each take pictures that telegraph a highly ethical interaction between the sitter and the photographer.
Home Truths: Sally Stein on Gail Rebhan’s Family Sequences
Home Truths: Sally Stein on Gail Rebhan’s Family Sequences
Gail Rebhan grew up in a household with one parent a rising trade union organizer and the other a contented housewife. That relationship seemed quite complementary for its time. Yet the daughter, coming of age in a period of second-wave feminism, intended for her art to question the prevailing gender norms in the domestic patterns of her own generation. 
Sight Unseen: Mohsen Mostafavi on Manfredo Tafuri’s ‘Modern Architecture in Japan’
Sight Unseen: Mohsen Mostafavi on Manfredo Tafuri’s ‘Modern Architecture in Japan’

Manfredo Tafuri’s guide to modern architecture in Japan was published in 1964, when he was twenty-nine years old. He wrote the book during a period of transition, from being a young architect and writer in Rome to becoming a historian of architecture in Venice, where he would eventually assume the chair of architectural history at IUAV, the university’s institute for architecture. 
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’
Hysterical Fugue: Jamieson Webster on Roe Ethridge’s ‘AMERICAN POLYCHRONIC’

Photography has changed memory, forming a double to the storehouse of the mind. It is hard to remember anything in the day and age of the personal digital archive, which holds on to everything, as if we had all become hoarders. We keep things in order to more easily forget them, assured that they are tucked away in our basement or in the cloud. But if psychoanalysis is right, this only serves the purposes of resistance, giving repression more mojo.
Nature Machines: Daniel Birnbaum on the Work of Doug Aitken
Nature Machines: Daniel Birnbaum on the Work of Doug Aitken

Doug Aitken seems to be anticipating some sort of technology not yet invented. He looks ahead to a radical rethinking of what “technology” means and what its relationship to nature could be.