He continues, describing the not-so-talked-about but highly popular skin-bleaching regimen that many Filipinx-American individuals undergo. "A lot of us who have a fucked up history with colonization/being colonized are still trapped in the boxes and rules that our colonizers put us in," he says. "Papaya is an example. Skin bleaching is a large market for Filipinx people not just in America but really around the world."
Watch the short film below.
On the walls of his studio, relics of past works intermingle with ideas-in-progress and reminders for the future. A print of his performance Late October (2020) at Galleria Continua, on the outskirts of Paris, hangs above a leather sofa; to its right are an assortment of pinned-up sketches, notes, and images. A floor to ceiling mirror across the room lists Greenberg’s 2024 exhibitions and performances written in dry erase marker; the stacked calendar includes the Venice Biennale in Italy and the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, as well as a solo show at Buro Stedelijk in the Netherlands.
Greenberg can approximately be described as a performance artist, though as he explains to me later in our conversation, he finds the term “artist” alone more accurate. His work can also be understood as a form of sculpture, shaping moments and scenes with human bodies in site-specific durational works that often stretch across hours and hours. Born in Montreal and raised by his mother, who was an actress in a Russian absurdist theater troupe in his early life, Greenberg was exposed to a wide range of art and artists from a young age. At 17, he dropped out of school and began experimenting with different forms of performance; by 20, he was invited to study with prolific Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović. Now 26, he has completed residencies and shows at prestigious institutions all over the world, including Palais de Tokyo in Paris, France and the Watermill Center in New York. Last year, he was invited to stage and record his work Étude Pour Sébastien (2023) at the Louvre.
One oft-discussed element of Greenberg’s practice is the rigorous physical training and diet required to condition his body for the strain of durational works, and the particularly strict physical regimen that he undergoes as a ritual in the two weeks before a performance. Given the supernatural themes of office Issue 21, I ask if he has any corresponding spiritual rituals for preparation ahead of performance. A grin spreads across his face. “I do, but I don't want to tell you about it.” I ask him if he believes in ghosts (he does, though he declines to say more) or the afterlife (he passes on that question.)
“What about God?”
when i speak to myself i use the kindest language i can summon, i am allowed the same grace i give others
and once i gave myself permission i was radiant
The Jamaican-born, New-York based artist has long been fascinated by objects. His best-known work, Amazing Grace (1993), featured over three-hundred baby strollers that the artist scavenged from the streets of Manhattan and then installed in the walkway of an abandoned Harlem fire-station. A statement on the AIDS crisis and drug epidemic ongoing in New York at the time (the strollers were often used by the city’s homeless population), the piece foregrounded Ward’s focus on utilizing found materials to tell stories that their human counterparts could not. Over the next three decades, the artist continued to work with such materials — shopping carts, bottles, doors, television sets, cash registers, and shoelaces included — and translate their silent language into a more readily accessible dialogue. The resulting practice is one filled with intimate links to the world around it: it sings of previously undiscovered connections, alerting us to the unspoken ties between us and our possessions.
Nari Ward: Ground Break (28 March- 28 July 2024), a retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, offers an up-close look at this practice through a number of Ward’s sculptural installations and video works. Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Lucia Aspesi, the show begins with Hunger Cradle (1996-2024), one of the first large scale installations that the artist created in the 90's as part of the “3 Legged Race” exhibition in New York. A complex network of interlaced threads, Hunger Cradle unveils found objects — car parts, fire horses, a piano — that Ward collected from around the original show’s building and then embedded in the piece’s structure. Here, the work has been further enriched by new materials sourced from around the Pirelli HangarBicocca, including bricks used in the exhibition’s titular piece, Ground Break (2024), a sprawling floor installation made of over 4,000 concrete bricks and topped with decorative spiral motifs that resemble celestial bodies.
Although not the exhibition’s center piece, it is Hunger Cradle (1996) and its implied sense of support that best serve as a metaphor for what Ward, or so the viewer might be led to believe, is trying to express. From the dead fish whose carefully skinned flesh line the floor of Super Stud (1994/2024), a small house propped up on metal studs in the exhibition’s main room, to the tangle of stray shoelaces that make up Tumblehood (2015), a spherical sculpture that mimics a tumbleweed, what emerges above all is the artist’s desire for preservation amidst the never-ending flux of life. There is a dash of the mad collector here, or perhaps something of the old Proustian goal: to regain what is lost. Still, Ward goes beyond merely accruing disparate materials or using objects to recount past experience; instead, he takes things in, provides shelter, then suffuses them with his particular magic, which is also his art.
The show, on view at the Pirelli HangarBicocca’s cavernous space north of Milan’s city center until the end of July, affords us a previously undisclosed peek into the minds of one of America’s most compelling contemporary artists. It —and its many oddities and beauties— is not to be missed.
