THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY3, 2020 11
PHOTOGRAPH BY FARAH AL QASIMI / COURTESY THE ARTIST, HELENA ANRATHER, AND THE THIRD LINE
The young Emirati photographer Farah Al Qasimi is best known for her
pictures of life in the Persian Gulf. These balancing acts of pattern, color,
and texture—and of humor and melancholy—subtly critique Orientalist
stereotypes while celebrating the alloy of comfort and strangeness
that a visit home can unearth. In her new project for the Public Art
Fund—seventeen images installed on a hundred bus shelters citywide,
opening on Jan. 29—Qasimi turns a lens on her other home, New York
City, where she moved, in 2018, after earning her M.F.A. at Yale. Like
its title, “Back and Forth Disco,” the series puts a jubilant spin on the
complications of bridging two cultures, the way so many New Yorkers
do. Whether Qasimi discovers a crystal chandelier in a Yemeni-owned
bodega, a cockatoo in a curtain emporium, or the eclectic inventory of
a dollar store (above), she springs an eye-catching surprise, a reminder
that every here is also an elsewhere.—Andrea K. Scott
ONTHESTREETS
1
A RT
Michael Rakowitz
Lombard
CHELSEA This Iraqi-American artist is known
for his newsworthy gestures of conscience—
he was the first to withdraw from last year’s
Whitney Biennial in an ultimately successful
campaign to pressure Warren B. Kanders,
whose company sells tear gas, to resign from
the museum’s board. (More recently, Ra-
kowitz has asked that his video in MOMA
PS1’s exhibition about the Gulf Wars be
paused, to protest the investments of several
of MOMA’s trustees.) This timely show,
which opened just after Trump threatened
to destroy Iranian cultural sites, continues
Rakowitz’s long-standing project re-creating
artifacts that have been looted or destroyed
since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. His
materials are bright scraps of Middle East-
ern packaging. Deceptively festive, these
collaged reproductions of reliefs from the
ninth-century B.C. Assyrian Northwest
Palace of Nimrud—subjected to piecemeal
colonial excavation, and then demolished by
ISIS, in 2015—appear as freestanding panels
arranged in their original configuration.
Although a heartrending label describes its
fate, a large composition of a bird-headed
sage on a background of vibrant pink, framed
by flowers and trees, is nonetheless uplift-
ing.—Johanna Fateman (Through Feb. 22.)
Janet Sobel and Pearl Blauvelt
Edlin
DOWNTOWN These figurative artists—both
born in 1893 and self-taught—fascinate
in very different ways. Sobel, a Ukrainian
immigrant and Brighton Beach housewife,
took up painting at the age of forty-five and
became a sensation of the postwar avant-
garde: her vivacious tangles of dripped paint
predate those of Jackson Pollock by several
years and were an acknowledged influence.
In the dense compositions here, from the
nineteen-forties, faces float above busy areas
marbleized with streaming color or blan-
keted with wildflowers. Blauvelt’s drawings,
which went unnoticed until after her death,
in 1987, have a strangely storybook quality,
faithful to their own rules of proportion and
perspective. The colored-pencil drawings in
this exhibition favor characters in the coun-
tryside; in one dynamic example, a hunter,
his dog, and a flying turkey are all depicted
as being the same size. Sobel died in 1968,
forgotten, but she was briefly at the heart of
the New York art scene; not too far away, in
northeastern Pennsylvania, Blauvelt spent a
quiet life, observing from the sidelines.— J. F.
(Through Feb. 22.)
Issy Wood
JTT
DOWNTOWN Paint becomes a kind of embalm-
ing fluid in the hands of this talented young
artist, who memorializes objects—antique
keys, vintage dolls, a ceramic swan—that
suggest rummage-sale finds. The idiosyn-
cratic works on linen, velvet, and clothing
include a small diptych titled “Barbra dis-
covers she’s married,” from 2018, in which
a young Streisand appears twice in profile:
first, in tight closeup, impassively inspecting
a diamond ring on her manicured finger,
and, again, in another cropped view that in-
cludes a glimpse of her elaborate hair style.
In Wood’s rendering, the image recalls a
photograph discolored with age, in keeping
with the just-out-of-focus feel of the rest
of her show. The mood isn’t melancholic,
or even nostalgic, exactly—but there is no
doubt that it’s eccentric. Wood can also be
1
MOVIES
The Assistant
The mood is heavy with anxiety and fore-
boding at the Tribeca offices of a film-pro-
duction company, where a young woman
named Jane (Julia Garner), a recent college
graduate, puts in extreme hours as an assis-
tant to the boss, a man (whose face is never
shown). He turns out to be a serial sexual
of mind, and the character comes across as
dopey and peevish.—R.R. (Through Feb. 15.)
funny, as a still-life of plastic grapes and a
plaster cast of teeth sporting metal braces
attests.—J.F. (Through Feb. 9.)
