Year in Review: 2025

One of the things that most moved me in 2025 is a book I haven’t read, in a language that I can’t speak. Or, more accurately, a book of which I have only read the first twenty-five pages (of about 200), in a language—German—that I am trying to learn. I read the book in the mornings with someone I was in a relationship with. I would read a sentence aloud, and she would correct my pronunciation. Then I would try to translate it, and she would help me when I couldn’t.

Özlü, a writer and translator, wrote Suche nach den Spuren eines Selbstmordes (Search for the Traces of a Suicide) in German on a DAAD fellowship in Berlin in the early 1980s. Another version in her native Turkish was published in 1984. The first German manuscript remained unpublished for 40 years despite winning a literary prize in Germany in 1982, which Özlü had entered under a pseudonym. The Turkish novel, Yaşamın Ucuna Yolculuk (Journey to the Edge of Life), was published in English translation recently too, by Transit Books.

The words on the back cover of the Suhrkamp edition situate it in a “diminished world with West, East, and Turkey in between” (Dieser verkleinerten Welt mit West, Ost und der Türkei dazwischen). I assume “Turkey” here refers to Kreuzberg, an area of Berlin neighboring the one in which I live, home to many Turkish immigrants in the 1980s and now. More associatively, I connect the “between” to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s play with this word in her writing in the same decade, where she writes that “‘between’ can be endless,” that “death strolls between images” (between words?), that in “the interval between apertures” “meaning can be neither imposed nor denied.” Between languages, between one original and another, between Suche’s narrator and Cesare Pavese, whose suicide is the one most obviously alluded to in the title, between past(s) and present(s), between reading and understanding, between two readers. I’m not sure whether the peculiar syntax of Özlü’s novel makes it the most helpful for learning “correct” German sentence construction, but this pedagogy of the interval, where meaning can be neither imposed nor denied, has a different value.

—Nicolas Helm-Grovas

Chloe Dzubilo was an artist, poet, punk musician, performer, and activist whose work responded to the blows of systemic violence. Her first posthumous exhibition, at Participant Inc., testified to the singularity of her artistic strategy and underscored the enduring relevance of her activism for trans liberation and HIV/AIDS prevention and care, especially in the face of renewed political hardships in the US and elsewhere.

Curated by Alex Fleming and Nia Nottage, the exhibition brought together a selection of works created between 2008 and 2011, paying special attention to her experience at the Prince George, an affordable housing building in New York for low-income and formerly homeless adults and people living with HIV/AIDS. Dzubilo was initially excited to be an active part of the community there, but the conditions began to worsen soon after she moved in, and the reality of structural violence and impassivity became inescapable. Many of her drawings address this situation as well as her experience as a long-term HIV survivor navigating a transphobic medical industrial complex. Her vignette-drawings deploy an artistic strategy that moves beyond mere portrayal, instead directing attention to the active entanglement between personal experience and social systems (specifically, housing and medical care) whose harmful operations often seem difficult to fully grasp.

Dzubilo’s drawings of everyday scenes produce a theatrical catalog of the situations in which the violence of systems crystallizes and hits. The drawings are reminiscent of theater in their capacity to generate the setting for an action and focus attention on everything that occurs there. They deliver a complexity that less theatrical representations, lacking a precise dramaturgy of space, figures, and dialogue, wouldn’t be able to hold. Yet, the props and scenographic elements that Dzubilo used are minimal. In Untitled (Private Room) (2008) the set is barely the outline of a window; in Untitled (Emergency Care) (2008) it is a sketched tent; in Bed Bug Advocacy (2008), a series of garbage bags. There is never a profusely detailed scenographic background, just a few elements quickly outlined, but the scene nevertheless unfolds and is registered. Dzubilo’s concise dramaturgy emphasizes theater’s capacity to ephemerally produce an environment and direct attention toward it. Through this strategy, Dzubilo incisively indicts the systems and structures of social violence by “catching them in the act.”

—Bea Ortega Botas

I spent the summer researching Rome and New York in the 1950s. Amid postwar reconstruction and Cold War tensions, a transatlantic network of galleries and cultural programs shaped the Italian and American art scenes. My research focused on Via Margutta, the Roman street where many Italian and American artists had their studios. The street’s reputation expanded internationally at this time, as the allure of la dolce vita—promoted in the US through films like Roman Holiday (1953)—drew many artists to Rome.

The research led me to a 1968 oral history by the artist Nicolas Carone, in which he reflects on the Via Margutta artists. One anecdote whose dramatics carry the weight of the moment involved Roberto Matta. When Matta arrived in Rome, he was in a terrible state, as Carone describes: “You see, Matta and [Arshile] Gorky had a very close relationship. And Matta got involved with Gorky's wife [Agnes Magruder]. Then of course you know about Gorky's suicide. A lot of people blamed Matta for it, and he was excommunicated from the Surrealist movement. He left New York, you see. And that’s when I met him, during that period. He was in Rome for about a year. I used to see him every day. I used to let him use my studio. We worked together. And that was really one of the very important periods.” When I’ve shared this story, my friends are relieved to hear that Gorky’s wife was not blamed for his suicide. Yet this extract reveals how the personal shapes art history, and how punitive forces within art movements can gave rise to new flows of ideas.

Fast forward to September, the last days of winter at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago, where I encountered Matta again. Under the title Abrir la mirada (open the gaze), the museum presented eight of his works, including those made in his native Chile following Salvador Allende’s inauguration in 1970. He composed paintings on arpilleras, a local textile, combining their rough texture with earth, straw, and plaster. These works reflect Matta’s vision of artists as agents of collective change, and themes of revolutionary struggle appear on their surfaces. In El ojo del alma es una estrella roja (The eye of the soul is a red star, 1970), five figures are captured in motion. One holds a guitar representing the soul, whose sound hole is the red star of leftist revolution. Matta transforms the familiar phrase “the eye of the mind” into “the eye of the soul,” suggesting that the true vision of leftist ideology is rooted in the soul.

For Matta, artistic practice was inseparable from revolutionary ideals, closely aligned with anti-imperialist politics that prevailed in Latin America. Following Augusto Pinochet’s rise to power in 1973, his right-wing dictatorship forced many Chileans into exile and banned them from returning. Seen through this context, the exhibition Abrir la mirada preserves bittersweet moments, recording a renowned artist’s return home under circumstances that would make it his last visit.

—Erëmirë Krasniqi

March 29, 2025, a Saturday. Giorno Poetry Systems was hosting the Kinsey Institute, which had recently acquired a never-before-publicly-shown Robert Mapplethorpe portfolio and was presenting it for the first time for just a few days at GPS.

The portfolio consists of eleven unfinished test prints of photographs Mapplethorpe took in 1979. The photographs show two men, Dominick and Elliot, engaging in sadomasochism: Dominick, naked except for a jockstrap, hangs from his bound ankles and wrists above a latex mattress. Elliott, shirtless but with his Levi’s and leather boots still on, pisses into Dominick’s mouth. Elliot, jeans now pulled down, squats over Dominick’s mouth. Later, Elliot cradles Dominick’s head; Dominick looks obediently up at Elliot, his mouth open with feces. In others, Dominick hangs from his ankles, his arms outstretched and chained to the floor, like Saint Peter at his crucifixion.

Mapplethorpe gifted Dominick and Elliot the test prints in 1979, something he rarely did. Maybe he felt compelled to formalize his gratitude for being allowed to witness and record these intensely intimate, vulnerable scenes. While the pictures depict acts of giving and receiving pain and humiliation, they foreground the trust and tenderness involved. At GPS, this was heightened by the scenography. The prints were collected in plastic sleeves in a four-ring archival box that sat open, accompanied by a pair of white cotton gloves, on a large wooden table. The box was illuminated from above by a single, warm spotlight; the rest of the homey, low-ceilinged space was dark. The Kinsey Institute had stipulated that the photographs could only be viewed one group of five at a time. When I arrived with Hannah, Sahar, Alex, and Giovi, there was a backlog of visitors. We waited our turn like the other groups of friends, chatting quietly over the drinks and snacks GPS provided. Eventually we gathered around the table and looked at the prints together. The experience had something sacred and ritualistic about it. And, just weeks into Trump’s second term, the public debut of work by one of the culture wars’ darlings felt defiant, too.

Afterward, I went with Hannah and Sahar to a reading nearby (“poetic practices to resist and denounce politics of total destruction”) that, unexpectedly, included a live performance of needle play, before crossing the East River to Spectacle to see Sick! The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. I was struck by the coincidence of these events, and grateful for the spaces that hosted them—increasingly rare independent havens, strongholds against New York’s total corporatization.

—Genevieve Lipinsky de Orlov

The tail end of 2025 brought me three unexpected encounters with art that genuinely moved me. The first two were, surprisingly, films: Meriem Bennani’s animated feature Bouchra, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in September, traces the eponymous protagonist’s emotional journey of coming out to her parents in Morocco while navigating heartbreak, creative block, hooking up with an ex, and grief in New York. It is tender, hilarious, sexy, and deeply affecting. The second film, Cutting Through Rocks, is a documentary that follows Sara Shahverdi, the first woman elected to city council in a rural village in the northwest of Iran. Filmed over the span of eight years, it offers an inspiring, intimate account of the only motorbike-riding woman in the village who refuses to be quieted by patriarchy—and the daily costs of that refusal. The third encounter that struck me was Nazareth Hassan’s play Practice, currently on view at Playwrights Horizons. There is almost nothing I can say about this that won’t ruin the experience except that I spent all three hours (including an intermission during which the play actually continues) gripping my seat, bracing for whatever might unfold next. It is as brilliant as it is uncomfortable, and I will surely be thinking about it for months to come.

There was a fourth encounter, which perhaps was the most important. In the past few months, I have been touched by my dear friend Adi Blaustein Rejto and collaborator Helen Wilson’s “riding the earth’s spine,” a collaborative travel project unfolding via a WhatsApp group chat to a large group of friends and interlocutors. The duo documented their travels across Europe and their journey navigating love in time of grief. The work is everchanging and shapeshifting, taking the form of films, drawings, music, voice recordings, and candid texts/images. One video-collage in particular stitched together voice messages from friends responding to the question: “what does being moved mean to you?” The responses were wide-ranging. One person shared: “I don't even know the definition of divinity and I don’t believe in good and bad timing, because I experience the divine, I experience it in everything, so, what is time, nothing and everything, divinely timed.” The project has been a perpetual reminder that “being moved” is not only emotional but also physical—a move toward different geographies, perhaps even a move toward something we may call the divine—and that grief can also be a gift.

—Sahar Khraibani

I saw Vijay Masharani’s first solo institutional exhibition, Big Casino, at Kunsthalle Zürich in February and it made a big impression on me. The exhibition was curated by Otto Bonnen and primarily comprised graphite drawings and videos. The drawings generate unusual frictions between representation and abstraction. Fleeting moments and details proliferate, and there is a cartoonish velocity in them, where different forces push and pulsate. The artist’s commitment to repetition and its potential to reveal how structures can evolve and change is present not only in his drawings—which frequently emerge as successive variations on an initial motif (such as the star)—but also in his moving-image works. Taking inspiration from non-narrative cinema, such as Lutz Bacher’s, Masharani avoids rigid planning and typically creates videos through single shots, highlighting the role of the contingent. He layers hand-drawn and digitally rendered elements into the recorded material and employs visual effects and techniques linked to experimental music production.

A significant element in several of Masharani’s video works is his use of custom helmet rigs, which allow the camera to move from his face to whatever he is looking at and back again. In Facade Rotary Sequence (2025), he walks around San Francisco’s billionaires’ row in Pacific Heights wearing one of these rigs. As he moves, the outlines of the mansions dissolve eerily, breaking with documentary logic and generating a dreamlike atmosphere that intensifies the exhausting, intoxicating, and uncanny presence of these lavish facades and the ways they materialize networks of power.

Filmed in the Bay Area, the video Grazers (2025) focuses on the sheep and goats introduced into the artist’s neighborhood in San Francisco to clear dry brush, a practice gaining traction in California to prevent wildfires. Masharani connects this small, local gesture with the image of a rotating Earth, placed between the animals’ horns, echoing the graphics seen in airplane entertainment systems. The artist also superimposes onto this Earth other semi-opaque, moving elements, including his own drawings. Masharani began drawing the Earth after Paul Gilroy, his MA advisor, gave him a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The World and Africa (1945), written amid the first waves of African independence movements. Du Bois insisted on placing a view of the Earth specifically showing Africa on the cover, tying the continent’s liberation to that of Black people worldwide. But the recurring planetary motif also recalls its historic role in movements from Soviet communist propaganda to peace and climate activism, and the complex unity and finitude it suggests make it a continuing focal point for diverse hopes and fears within emancipatory politics.

—Leto Ybarra

200 Years of the Present was the title of the 2025 annual program at the Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) in Stuttgart. There, the year 2025 represented the culmination of the rise of the European bourgeoisie and its formative influence on politics and culture. Directors Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ divided the year into three “constellations,” each a specially arranged exhibition in which archival material, contemporary art, and cultural history came together. The Kunstverein thus anticipated its 200th anniversary in 2027 by engaging in a self-examination of its own institutional history.

Beginning from the model of the Kunstverein as a form of bourgeois art patronage, Dressler and Christ made use of the institution’s membership-based structure to explore the basic principles of democratic participation and resistance. The first constellation introduced starting points for further exploration in a selection of wall-sized clusters. These conveyed site-specific details about the Kunstverein’s locations and founding members, which referred to broader social issues of class and distinction, such as when, in 1843, members criticized the WKV for its location on a “dusty street” far from the city center. These marginal historical details were woven into a larger narrative constellation that could take on new forms depending on how it was read, while always insisting on the fictions of sovereignty, freedom, and nation.

Historical and contemporary artistic contributions provided relevant commentary: Luise Duttenhofer’s early-nineteenth-century silhouettes illustrated bitingly ironic scenes of Stuttgart’s upper middle class, while John Hillard’s 1999 iris print Off Screen (No. 5) showed an empty white screen interrupting a scene of smoking and drinking high society, exposing it as an empty projection. Vika Kirchenbauer’s video Compassion and Inconvenience (2024) broadened the focus to include the founding of European art institutions and their intertwining with liberalism and colonialism. Together, these varied works questioned one another, creating an exhibition rife with generative tensions. The exhibition was at once factually pointed, consistently self-critical, and aesthetically versatile. It juxtaposed local histories of a nascent urban bourgeoisie and its mechanisms of exclusion, colonial and imperial ideologies—such as fascism, racism, and sexism—and current calls for protest amid the drastic cultural budget cuts that also affect the WKV. In other words, it set constellations in motion.

—Agnieszka Roguski