Best 2025: Art
Power Ekroth
Selma Selman, Motherboards, 18th Istanbul Biennnial
Motherboards, Selma Selman’s performance, presented during the opening days of the Istanbul Biennial, The Three-Legged Cat, curated by Christine Thomé, channelled tremendous anger with pitch-perfect confidence. The force of her presence, paired with the power of her voice, felt capable of moving mountains, allowing the audience to project their own frustrations with the state of the world into the work. As Selman and her fellow performers wielded axes to extract metal from discarded computer motherboards, the scene evoked a deeply satisfying image of David dismantling Goliath. Standing in the front row, my legs seemed to root themselves into the concrete beneath my feet; my body froze, while my middle fingers tasted the morning air. It is time to rise!
Documentation from Selma Selman’s performance Motherboards at the opening of the 18th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Modern. Camera: Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena
See further filmed documentation here.
SHAME
Art film festival founded by Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg
Lotte Andersen, Cory Arcangel, Alex Da Corte, Raf Fellner, Abdulnasser Gharem, Julian Knoxx, Paul McCarthy, Pipilotti Rist, Ryan Trecartin, Kara Walker, and Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg.
Curated by Silvana Lagos
The exhibition—more accurately, the video art festival—carried the title SHAME, prompting reflections on the shame many of us experience today over humanity’s inability to prevent genocide, or over the failure to generate solidarity even with the next generation. The exhibition stead addressed many other forms of shame, and the cringe factor peaked with Paul McCarthy’s shit-sex-Nazi nightmare, a work that instantly triggered a kind of “two girls one cup” PTSD.
But it is not the individual works by internationally active artists that earn the exhibition its place on the list. Rather, it is the relief of finding oneself outside the Stockholm mould of unearned, privileged entitlement. Less uptight, simply put—generous and fun, delivered with ease and elegance.
Hala Eid Alnaji, Displaced
Gaza Biennial, Istanbul and Berlin
Hala Eid Alnaji’s work Displaced is an ongoing social, cultural, and political art project that emerged in response to the events of October 7 and their aftermath. The work is not a fixed exhibition but transforms with each location it reaches. It began in Cairo in 2023 as a linguistic project, collecting the words, stories, and maps of displaced people as a way of articulating memory and loss.
In Istanbul, the work underwent a material and bodily transformation. Through collective workshops, Gaza was “sewn” anew in fabric and thread—path by path, wound by wound—and the exhibition became animated through the participants’ voices, hands, and actions. The work was presented in video and across wall and floor.
In Berlin, Displaced assumed a new form: a large-scale wooden map installed on the floor, speaking to and for both the recently displaced in Cairo and Palestinians in the German diaspora who remember Gaza before its destruction. Here, time, nostalgia, and geography intertwine in a work that moves through places without settling, transforming in step with the conditions of exile.
