View of Taus Makhacheva's performance Super Taus, 2015; at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
As part of the Annual Guide to Galleries, Museums, and Artists (A.i.A.’s August issue), we preview the 2017–18 season of museum exhibitions worldwide. In addition to offering their own top picks, our editors asked select artists, curators, and other experts to identify the shows they are looking forward to. Here, Yuko Hasegawa talks about Taus Makhacheva.
“Taus Makhacheva is a very young artist to be having a retrospective, but I think it’s great that a young woman—especially from the Republic of Dagestan, a part of Russia not far from Turkey—is getting this kind of attention. I included her in the Sharjah Biennale when I curated it in 2013, and she presented videos about masculinity and traditions in her homeland, with men performing very macho exercises in the mountains. At the opening of the 2017 Venice Biennale, where her work is featured in the Arsenale, she served a meal that evoked her memories of Soviet times and the transition into the present. Makhacheva has a very sophisticated, subtle way of opening up the history of everyday life. I’m interested to see her work presented in its full range.”
“Taus Makhacheva: Retrospective,” Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Dec. 18, 2017–Feb. 1, 2018.
YUKO HASEGAWA is chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the curator of the Seventh Moscow Biennale (Moscow Manege, Sept. 15–Oct. 28, 2017).