MONICA BONVICINI: Hot Like Hell Cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Monica Bonvicini has created a multi-layered, internationally acclaimed oeuvre of installations, sculptures, and drawings, for which she was ­awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and, just recently in 2020, the Oskar-­Kokoschka-Prize in Vienna. This volume now ­presents two current series of drawings: one ­continues the series "Hurricanes and Other ­Catastrophes," begun in 2006 on the occasion of the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, and expands the scope, initially focused on the sudden devastation following the hurricane in New Orleans, to include views of homes that ­exhibit damage due to ongoing changes in ­climate. The second series—developed during the lockdown—leads into gray and rose-­coloured landscapes defined by fences, chains, and lines of text. The latter are contrasted with smooth backgrounds and appear amazingly real and present. The words that Monica Bonvicini sprayed on are originally by Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Natalie Diaz, Soraya Chemaly, as well as by Andrea Dworkin, yet twisted, shortened, or otherwise changed, resulting in a completely new, poetic dimension: "Weep Me Crude," "Power Joy Humor & Widerstand."

Colin Lang is a critic and art historian; he made his PhD at Yale University in 2010, was lecturer at Princeton University from 2010 to 2011, and is a assistant professor at Virginia Commenwealth University from 2011. After being editor-in-chief for two years of Texte zur Kunst, he is now since 2020 a senior-editor of Spike Art Magazine in Berlin. Christina Végh (born 1970) is a Swiss art historian and curator; she studied art history at the University of Zurich at the University of California in Santa Cruz. She completed her studies, with minors in ethnology and philosophy, with a thesis on the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo. In 2005, Christina Végh took over as director of the Bonn Kunstverein. Succeeding Veit Görner, she became the 11th director of the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover 2015 and was the first woman to do so. In February 2020, she succeeded Friedrich Meschede as director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld.