Joanna Seifter

Contemporary filmmaker and photographer Stan Douglas’s project Nu•tka (1996) documents the terrain of Nootka, off the coast of present-day Vancouver Island, of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht Indigenous people. Douglas presents its mountainous horizons, pine tree vistas, and tapering seashores as two near-identical six-minute montages dissolving from one terrain to another. Using an atypical form of superimposition, he overlays and merges these montages as razor-thin horizontal stripes. The shots, inter...

In her celestial 2017 single “It’s Okay to Cry,” producer/songwriter SOPHIE warbles “I never thought I’d see you cry / Just know whatever hurts, it’s all mine,” an acceptance of her friend or lover for exactly who they are, even for the attributes they fear, covet, and despise. Luca Guadagnino’s latest film, Queer (2024), approaches the lyric’s conceit literally. In Queer, the protagonist wants to physically inhabit his lover’s body, mind, and soul...

In his 1938 essay Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, philosopher John Dewey argues that a child’s imagination is not usually divorced from real-world logic or experience. Instead, he posits, children draw subjective, often abstract conclusions from their environments, from which they develop their own ideological frameworks...

Class-conscious black comedy Rotting in the Sun immediately paints a macabre portrait of pervasive societal disparities, opening with houseless people digging through trash cans for scraps, senior citizens relying on N95 masks for safety, and buskers catering to wealthy tourists in a run-down public park in Mexico City...

Neue Deutsche director Wim Wenders and Neue Wilde contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer, fellow West German artists whose works plumb similar themes of agonizing post-war recovery and German denialism, first met and formed their enduring friendship at Kiefer’s 1991 Neue Nationalgalerie exhibition...

Anni Albers’s Six Prayers (1965–66) is a series of six narrow vertical tapestries, each a varying shade of gray or beige, beckoning the viewer with their variegated textures. Their surfaces, shimmering with tightly coiled neutral and luster fibers layered into oblivion, are a thorny sea of sloping Escher-esque Penrose staircases. Each tapestry’s linework is delicate yet disorienting and, though crammed within nearly identical ribbed borders, somehow endless...