Must-See: Adrian Piper Confronts Our Subjectivity

This review is part of a series of Must-See shows, in which a writer delivers a snapshot of a current exhibition  

Adrian Piper’s latest show at Portikus, ‘Who, Me?’, offers a compelling extension of the artist’s self-interrogative practice with two new site-specific works: I’m the Tree and I’m the Screen (both 2024). The exhibition sees Piper return to minimalism with installations that combine readymades, such as mirrors and furniture, with large-scale natural objects in a call for collective transformation.

Piper’s installations operate in what she terms the ‘indexical present’, a notion she unpacked in an essay, initially published in Reimagining America: The Arts of Social Change (1990), as a focus on ‘the concrete, immediate here-and-now’. The permanence of her objects confronts the viewer’s subjectivity, urging self-reflection: our experience of the work is shaped by our temporary moods and emotions alongside more firmly rooted behaviours, assumptions and prejudices. In the downstairs gallery, I’m the Screen features rows of chairs, a blank projector screen and an empty podium, surrounded by mirrored panels. The work echoes the exhibition’s title as Piper confirms that this piece is, indeed, about you. The lecture hall set up suggests an upcoming event – albeit one that may never take place – while the mirrors underline the viewer’s accountability and autonomy in scrutinising the work.

I’m the Tree comprises the entire corpus of a spray-washed dead tree suspended mid-air above a mirror. Intact from its branches to its roots, the tree appears ominously exposed. Gazing down at its botanical anatomy from a temporarily erected mezzanine, I become fascinated by its lifeless body; we observe neither leaves nor buds on its branches, soil nor dust on its roots. Only a few marks of discolouration on its bark hint at a life lived outside of the institution. Contemplating these details leads me to questions of extraction and sanitisation within the art world’s rigid institutional structures: Must something be removed from its context, cleansed, deceased even, before it can be exhibited? I am compelled to wonder what would happen if the tree were placed in soil again or, in other words: what if the focus on reflection we practice within the institution were to continue in the world outside?

Adrian Piper’s ‘Who, Me?’ is on view at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, until 9 February 

_{Main image: Adrian Piper, I’m the Screen, 2024, small auditorium with four rows of five seats, facing viewing screen on which is projected empty white square of light, with podium plus reading light at right, wall to wall mirror paneling. Courtesy: © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation​​​​​​; photograph: Wolfgang Günzel}