Art We Saw This Spring

New York Times
April 6, 2022

“Two years into the pandemic, much art about it that I’ve seen has felt somewhat small and introspective. What makes Adelita Husni Bey’s ‘These Conditions,’ organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, refreshing is that her inquiry into Covid-19 steered her outward. She looked to previous pandemics and invited others to tell their stories.

Husni Bey is interested in the possibilities of collectivity, which she explores in workshops where she prompts people to share and interpret their experiences. Part of ‘These Conditions’ is an installation of three rooms that forms a set for sessions she’s conducting with participants who’ve had to work in person through the pandemic. The spaces contain references to a plague-inspired rebellion by Italian gravediggers and the AIDS crisis that serve as educational and inspirational material.

Husni Bey will record parts of the workshops to make a film debuting this fall. The two artworks in the show, both from 2021, help illuminate her approach: ‘On Necessary Work, a film featuring Danish and U.S. nurses who discuss their jobs and going on strike, and ‘Cronaca del Tempo Ripetuto’ (‘A Chronicle of Histories Repeating’), a sound work made with a collaborative chamber orchestra. They represent contrasting ways to process Covid-19: one political, one poetic; one contemporary, one historical; one more literal, the other more abstract. But both cast it as a collective phenomenon as much as a personal one. They insist on Covid as a social experience—a reminder that we are responsible to others and we’re not enduring it alone.”

—Jillian Steinhauer