Tarek Atoui, Ian Cheng, Allison Katz, and Jumana Manna reflect on how their work changed over the past year

Chris Fite-Wassilak

Art now: four artists on experimenting, slowing down, and tapping into the subconscious

When London’s galleries briefly emerged from lockdown in fall 2020, art suddenly became small and serial. From&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7098/Richard-Tuttle">Richard Tuttle</a>’s delicate miniature wire-and-paper sculptures to&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8543/Gillian-Wearing">Gillian Wearing</a>’s haunted watercolor self-portraits, I saw countless rows of drawings, paintings, small pots, and sculptures, often perched along long shelves. These were repetitive acts of daily activity in confinement, but they also marked a return to standard exhibition formats of neatly hung paintings and well-lit sculptures on display for a few weeks.A year later, this tendency towards the small and serial has all but disappeared; the pandemic's longer-term impact on making and exhibiting art is still unfolding, chiefly because it isn't over. But as the art world tentatively returns to staging events and exhibitions, it may be worth asking: What do we want to return to?Speaking to artists about the past year's impact on their work reveals that the slower pace and stillness proved challenging but has been ultimately beneficial. For Canadian, London-based painter&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10566/Allison-Katz">Allison Katz</a>, several delayed exhibitions gave a focus to work toward, while at the same time studio immersion and remote installations meant such public outcomes felt even more distant: ‘The relationship to exhibiting actually became more abstract as the intensity of painting increased.’ The pandemic became part of her work, ‘both as subtext: working on things closely, continuously, without distraction or air, and as motif: “2020” the number as a visual hieroglyph, voids, more compressed space.’ The resulting paintings on view in her current exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary embody a tentative emergence, a set of enclosed spaces depicted from within caves, under archways, and even inside mouths, as if the audience were on the tip of the tongue, waiting to be spat out.

For artists with studio and desk-based practices, the space and time afforded by the pandemic proved an ambivalent gift: a chance to get on with work with fewer distractions. ‘I don’t think my work has structurally changed,’ says Berlin-based Palestinian artist&nbsp;<a href="https://artbasel.com/catalog/artist/13210/Jumana-Manna">Jumana Manna</a>, whose ceramic sculptures are currently on view at M KHA Antwerp. ‘What’s changed more,’ she says, ‘is my relationship to external expectations, invitations, and movement. I’m more careful in accepting invitations and less afraid to cancel work or travel obligations that don’t make sense to me.’‘I'm lucky that my work is primarily software-based, so not much changed for me,’ admits New York City-based artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/22909/Ian-Cheng">Ian Cheng</a>. He spent 2020 working on the anime series Life After BOB (2021), a sprawling narrative where AI entities begin to take over human hosts, made live within a video-game platform with a large, completely remote team. ‘It made me realize a lot more can get done remotely than I previously thought,’ he adds. But accompanying that productivity was a realization of the limits of what could be achieved from a distance: ‘some work, like working with actors, the composer, the editor, needs the embodied energy of being in the same room.’

For artists working in-person and performatively, the pandemic posed entirely different challenges. ‘In Paris, you couldn’t move further than a radius of 1km or go out for more than one or two hours a day,’ explains Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui, who creates interactive installations incorporating sound. ‘For an improviser, the limitations imposed by the pandemic became the rules to work from. This is how I came to kindergartens: kids under age seven were still in classrooms. My son is four-and-a-half, so I just volunteered at his school and started working with kids.’ With this new, younger audience, Atoui created a series of sound workshops encouraging play with everyday objects and materials, which has fundamentally shifted the way he works. ‘Now I’ve started working on instruments for listening, not instruments for performing – a very important change in the practice. You’re not necessarily using speakers or conventional ways of putting sound in space anymore; this has lots of potential I’ll be exploring in the coming years.’More shifts to exhibition formats and conventions might yet emerge from such a challenging year. For the moment, artists are figuring out ways to return to tactile experiences and physical proximity in shared spaces. ‘Despite the proliferation of jpeg art circulation,’ Manna explains, ‘sculptures need to be experienced in physical space; films should ultimately be watched in the cinema or conditions similar to it; and openings, readings, social gatherings, drinks are all crucial rituals for our well-being.’

As a practical response, in recent exhibitions Atoui restricted audience numbers: his institutional performances were shorter but repeated more often. ‘The quality of listening was totally different. Maybe less is better,’ he explains. ‘I started to see institutions and museums like incubators and laboratories: You don’t need to aim for high audience numbers, but for a better time inside the institution. Where people feel they get a hold of the work, they understand it, which is something that takes time.’Which is to say, art post-pandemic is – or should be – slower, sparser, more affective, and attuned to smaller, and more localized, contexts, and concerns. This means keeping one eye on history, and another on long-term nurturing and outcomes. ‘With more austerity and catastrophes of all kinds,’ Manna says, ‘spaces feel like they are shrinking, which is why the spaces we create together are even more crucial than before.’ This suggests those situations both literal and metaphorical, from park benches and trains, to the headspace and room for thoughtful exchange, deserve to be considered before we stumble back to pre-pandemic values and timetables.

Cheng, whose AI work deftly reflects on trying to navigate living alongside nonhuman organisms, is more expansive on what post-pandemic art should be: a guide into the unknown. ‘Artists have to re-prioritize making art that talks to the viewer's unconscious,’ he claims. ‘During the pandemic it became clear that there’s a spiritual vacuum that needs renewal. But we must learn to ride the weird tides and live within them. This will be an important individual skill and an important cultural value in the 21st century, as the world becomes even more complex. It starts with artists getting back in touch with the part of ourselves most evolved to deal with unsystematized realities: our unconscious minds.’ Not everyone can respond to such a call, but as we approach uncharted horizons, these artists remind us that we can be deliberate about the new rituals, standards, and structures we want for the future.

Tarek Atoui is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1458/Vitamin-Creative-Space">Vitamin Creative Space</a>,&nbsp;Guangzhou;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1098/Galerie-Chantal-Crousel">Galerie Chantal Crousel</a>,&nbsp;Paris; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1182/kurimanzutto">kurimanzutto</a>,&nbsp;Mexico City and New York City.&nbsp;Ian Cheng is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1424/Pilar-Corrias">Pilar Corrias</a>,&nbsp;London; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1141/Gladstone-Gallery" target="_blank">Gladstone Gallery</a>,&nbsp;New York City and Brussels.&nbsp;Allison Katz is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1064/The-Approach">The Approach</a>, London;&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1563/Gi%C3%B3-Marconi">Giò Marconi</a>, Milan; and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2002/Antenna-Space">Antenna Space</a>, Shanghai. Jumana Manna is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2726/Hollybush-Gardens">Hollybush Gardens</a>, London.Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and critic based in London, and the author of The Artist in Time (Herbert Press, 2020).Additional captions, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Allison Katz,&nbsp;2020 (Femoral) (detail), 2021. 2. Ian Cheng,&nbsp;Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (detail), 2021.&nbsp;&copy; Marc Domage. 3. Jumana Manna,&nbsp;Corniche (detail), 2020.&nbsp;&copy; Jumana Manna. Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens,&nbsp;London. Photo by&nbsp;Andy Keate.&nbsp; Portraits, from left to right: Tarek Atoui.&nbsp;&copy; Garage Museum, Moscow. Ian Cheng:&nbsp;Ian Cheng, Portrait at Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and&nbsp;Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich. Photo by Christian Kain. Allison Katz: The artist in her studio, London, 2020. Photo by&nbsp;Philip Coulter. Jumana Manna: Courtesy of the artist.

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Tarek Atoui, Ian Cheng, Allison Katz, and Jumana Manna reflect on how their work changed over the past year

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