This review was first published in the July 2025 issue of The Critic. A decade into the culture wars, the argument for the decolonisation of the museum has run out of steam. Nowhere is its critical dead end more evident than in Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Will Fall, a bewildering moralistic call for guilt and hatred…
The Biennale marks the completion of art’s total ‘decolonisation’ after which no particular aesthetics or politics can take precedence over any other.
Who are biennials for? Recent examples suggest that these events put the intellectual and political desires of their organisers ahead of those of their audiences or host cities.
“The decolonisation hordes have taken over institutions.” Obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, they are attacking their own cause and harming scholarship on and in Africa.
What are the productive limits of art practice as critique? Renzo Martens’ ‘Enjoy Poverty’ is as relevant and as challenging as it was on its release.
Kader Attia’s Still Present!, the 12th Berlin Biennale is an attempt to unpick the centuries-long threads of imperialism one by one in the hope that they can reconstitute a universe capable of averting its demise. But this is a vain hope.
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