348 FALL 2024 DE-OBJECT

“DE-OBJECT,” Flash Art’s fall issue, focuses on artists who explore acts of recomposition and decomposition, the undoing of objects and their constituent parts, whether organic, kinetic, ephemeral, gustatory, olfactory, or simply in a state of flux that lends itself to a thematic designation.

In this issue Louisa Elderton writes about Mire Lee’s work: “Her abstract installations often evoke the body in its amalgam of form and material: corporeal masses gaping or pierced, leaking or writhing, barely holding themselves together.” On the occasion of her Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, from October 8, 2024, to March 3, 2025, Lee is the subject of the first cover story of this issue. She was photographed in her Berlin home by Hyesoo Chung, wearing outfits by Hyein Seo.

A number of artists seem to be grappling with similar approaches to physically mutable yet ultimetly eternal forms. Anicka Yi’s desire to continue making art from beyond the grave is investigated by Dean Kissick in this issue, while Rirkrit Tiravanija discusses with Hans Ulrich Obrist the idea of activating art collectively. The two long-time friends discuss a redistribution of value, particularly in reference to Tiravanija’s retrospective “A LOT OF PEOPLE” at LUMA Arles, organized in collaboration with New York’s MoMA PS1.

Sara Cwynar was invited to create a special self-portrait for the second cover story of the issue, which also includes a collage of stills from her new video work Baby Blue Benzo (2024), set to be showcased in her solo exhibition of the same name at 52 Walker, New York, from October 4 to December 21, 2024. Author Elijah Jackson posits how Cwynar’s “preoccupations and vocabulary of the image maneuver between discipline, place, and degree of physicality, unsettling any concept of the real.”

The third cover story is dedicated to Sandra Mujinga, whose solo exhibition “Time as a Shield” will be on view at Kunsthalle Basel until November 10, 2024. Mujinga, wearing Kuboraum & Innerraum glasses, was photographed by Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. in her studio at ISCP, New York. Bernardo José de Souza beautifully describes her chimeric, ghostly, elongated otherworldly beings, pondering whether they are “warriors, robots of sorts, rebels, or mercenaries. Are they humans in disguise, or is disguise a humanoid feature? Are they there to look after us humans, or, conversely, to defeat humankind?”

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