Shows to See in the US This March

‘The Bodywork of Hospitality’

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha

9 December 2021 – 20 March 2022

Sylvie Fortin began curating ‘I Don’t Know You Like That: The Bodywork of Hospitality’ in 2019. Yet, while the show doesn’t directly address the COVID-19 pandemic, its themes of cellular care and social health meld effortlessly with the ongoing crisis. The show uses the term ‘hospitality’ to mean a deeper, wider form of care: a social custom and a generosity extended to other people on a cultural basis that goes beyond individual friendships or favouritism. Hospitality is a kind of obligation – one that the US has frequently abandoned. Here, too, the show goes beyond facile comparisons between COVID-19 and AIDS, implicating the healthcare system and medical science in the sort of racist exploitation of minorities that, to this day, have resulted in vaccine hesitancy in Black populations. – Travis Diehl

Nikita Gale

52 Walker, New York

21 January – 26 March 2022

Dented, damaged and just a little bit dirty, Nikita Gale’s installation of aluminium bleachers sits at the centre of the artist's latest solo exhibition, ‘END OF SUBJECT’, at 52 Walker in New York, David Zwirner’s Tribeca outpost led by Ebony L Haynes. Immortalized in Taylor Swift’s ‘You Belong with Me’ (2008), bleachers exist in popular imagination with or without a stadium full of bodies. Here, the stage may be set but the artist is absent and there’s nowhere for the audience to sit and watch. How does performance occur, Gale asks, when the body is absent? – Róisín Tapponi

Rafael Sánchez and Kathleen White

Martos Gallery, New York

1 February – 19 March 2022

The close working and romantic relationship between Rafael Sánchez and Kathleen White always seemed like one of the greatest love stories. The two artists met each other in the mid 2000s and ended up living together in various apartments in the East Village. It’s special, then, to see their work together in a two-person exhibition, a manifestation of their enduring partnership. With their respective works interspersed in salon-style groupings, their breadth is remarkable, a testament to their prolific art-making. – David Everett Howe

Nora Turato

Museum of Modern Art, New York

5 March – 20 March 2022

Nora Turato was originally scheduled to perform pool4 (2020) two years ago at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, until it was indefinitely postponed due to COVID-19 lockdowns. The performance would have been the fourth in a series that she began in 2017, based on texts lifted from a variety of sources – internet articles, food labels, online videos, conversations with friends, etc. – a selection of which she collates into books made with a graphic designer’s eye. From these collections of phrases, she takes smaller excerpts and transforms them into a script for her performances. The randomness of the sources betrays the long-developed intuition with which she determines what fits in these books and what doesn’t. The collections are supposedly representative of the zeitgeist of the period during which they were collected, as though the internet is exemplary of what’s on anyone’s mind at any time. In the newest edition, pool5 (2022), the words are laid out in the same non-serifed typeface throughout, with no phrase receiving more weight than the next, granting further credence to the arbitrariness of Turato’s selection – a bizarre assemblage of shared mindsets. – Marko Gluhaich

^{Main image: Celina Eceiza, La lengua de los distraídos (The Distracted Language, 2021), site-sensitive installation: chalk on canvas, hand-dyed fabric, felt carpet and soft sculptures, dimensions variable. Courtesy: © the artist and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts; photograph: Colin Conces}