Forbes : A Year In Review: Art And Design Exhibition Highlights In 2023 (by Nargess Banks)

Carrie Mae Weems, Reflections for Now, Installation view, Barbican Art Gallery, 2023 JEMIMA YONG/BARBICAN

From Steve McQueen’s compelling note on social injustice, Carrie Mae Weems and Isaac Julien's unpacking of race, color and gender, Shirin Neshat’s politically charged film and stills, and Tomás Saraceno’s note to a planet in deep crisis, there was no shortage of hard-hitting art in 2023. And there was so much beauty too, namely Mark Rothko’s utterly gorgeous, unmissable show in Paris.

Oscar-winning director and visual artist Steve McQueen’s Grenfell is a powerful single-take 24-minute film installation that captures the layered sociopolitical meanings behind the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which took 72 lives in a fire that tore through a tower block in west London on June 14, 2017. The building had cheap, combustible, unregulated cladding and inadequate fire extinguishers and sprinklers. The victims were largely the poor, the disadvantaged, migrants, refugees.

That December, on a crisp winter’s day, McQueen boarded a helicopter equipped with a camera filming Grenfell as a single scene of a charred building, burnt to its bare bones. The only sound is that of the helicopter blades. There is no voiceover. There are no credits. The audience exits the screening room to a wall with the names of the 72 victims. Screened at the Serpentine Gallery in London in April, Grenfell is now in the Tate’s permanent collection.

In the summer, Barbican’s brutalist building in London hosted one of the most influential and radical American artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems, with Reflections for Now uncovering a diverse practice spanning decades. Weems questions narratives around race, gender, history, class and their representation systems. Hers is a fascinating, layered and, at times, brave and complex exploration of cultural identity, power structures, desire and social justice.

Particularly punchy is her early cinematic Kitchen Table Series (1990). Through these staged and narrated photographs, Weems questions power dynamics, how they can be articulated in the domestic sphere and the potential of the home as a space for resistance. Meanwhile, in her acclaimed series Roaming (2006) and Museums (2016), she confronts architecture as the materialization of political and cultural power.

Installation view, ‘Once Again… (Statues Never Die)’ Tate Britain, 2023 ISAAC JULIEN/VICTORIA MIRO

Across the city at Tate Britain, Isaac Julien’s What Freedom Is To Me charted the 40-plus-year career of the British artist and filmmaker, one steeped in cultural activism and rooted in experimentation. The video installations in this poetic exhibition remain as profound today as when Julien began making moving images alongside Sankofa Film and Video Collective, who played a crucial role in establishing independent black cinema in Britain.

Cleverly choreographed, the show invited viewers to choose their path and, thus, what they wished to see. Lina Bo Bardi, A Marvelous Entanglement (2019) became a favorite. Meditating on the legacy of the fabulous Italian-Brazilian modernist architect and designer, Julien shoots in Bo Bardi’s extraordinary buildings and points to her social, political and cultural views through reflections from her writings: “Linear time is a Western invention; time is not linear, it is a marvelous entanglement, where at any moment points can be chosen and solutions invented without beginning or end.”

Elsewhere, Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno took over Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park to shake up conversations around the environment. This sensory and performative show spilled out from the confines of the Serpentine gallery onto the park and beyond, with park life encouraged to participate in the exhibition, while the indoor exhibition space was entirely solar-powered.

Exhibitions about the environment can often feel flat and a little too prescriptive. Not Saraceno, who challenges viewers to observe how different life forms, technologies and energy systems are connected in the climate crisis. He is a multidisciplinary artist in its truest sense. His main “collaborators,” as he calls them, are real-life spiders with whom he’s worked for over a decade, observing their ways through creating safe environments for these leggy creatures to weave their architectural delights. He says it’s about investigating ways of coexisting more positively with nature and weaving new threads of connectivity within our lives.

Meanwhile, a stone-throw-away architect, Lina Ghotmeh’s À Table (designed as part of the annual Serpentine Pavilion), celebrated the ritual of sharing food and conversation around a table. The lovely circular timber temporary construction became a perfect shelter to contemplate Collaboration: Web[s] of Life, to which I returned numerous times, on each visit experiencing this multi-faceted show through a new lens

Shirin Neshat Daniela #2, from The Fury series, 2023 SHIRIN NESHAT

Powerful, political, and cinematic is The Fury, the latest body of work by Shirin Neshat, displayed at the Goodman Gallery in London in the fall following its first showing in New York. Since the 1990s, the visual artist has captivated viewers through work that investigates gender and society, time and memory, the individual and the collective, and the complexities and contradictions of Islam, told through a personal and diasporic lens.

Shot in June 2022 near Neshat’s Brooklyn studio, the conscious staging, the casting of local actors, and the music speak of its international charge, a cry against violence against women, on the absurdity of war, intolerance, and tyranny in its broader universal context. In Neshat’s film, there is a constant tension between the screens, an ongoing discourse, each offering a different viewpoint.

In the final scene, the public joins the protagonist in a solidarity dance to note the power of collective action. It is a joyful note, a hopeful one to end the darkness. The Fury is raw; it is full of rage and a sense of urgency at a time when the whole world is wrapped in war, hatred, and tribalism. “I’m not dictating anything,” Neshat told me. “I want the audience not to make fixed statements and to attract them emotionally—move them.”

Peter Doig, Music (2 Trees), 2019, Trinidad PETER DOIG

And there were others making statements about the power of art to move you. Peter Doig through painting, Hiroshi Sugimoto through photography and Marina Abramović through performance art. Peter Doig at the Courtauld Gallery in London was a compact, thoughtful and marvelous exhibition, evidence that painting can be as vibrant a tool for artmaking as any other. Doig is a natural storyteller, and you can really sense this through his latest work created between Trinidad and London. Meanwhile, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery showed how the humble camera can portray such beauty and mystery. Then there was Abramović’s retrospective at London’s Royal Academy—a brilliant, at times terrifying, at others full of humor, but all along a great adventure into the mind of one of our most unique living artists.

But I want to end 2023 with Mark Rothko at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the artist’s paintings generously spread across floor upon floor of Bernard Arnault’s vast Frank Gehry-designed private gallery at the edge of Paris. I was privileged to view the exhibition with only a handful of others before opening hours and with time and space to immerse in Rothko’s sensuous, hypnotic, haunting, and deeply spiritual world. The experience was not only pure luxury, but it highlighted what art can be: its role, perhaps, is to make space for ideas to grow, reveal the possible paths, and help create a sense of wonder.

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