Lucy Frost, the narrator of Lisa Robertson’s brilliant new novel Riverwork, is a woman in her sixties: she’s a self-professed “failed poet,” “a hag.” She’s a “scoffer and a scrawler,” “a fibber, and a snipper, a doubter, and a haunter of shame.” She spends her mornings slowly reading the memoirs of Chateaubriand, just ten pages at a time, such that she may experience “the sensation of personally containing the duration of the book.” She spends her afternoons cleaning the homes of Paris’s professoriate class, and her long, sleepless nights reading, sifting thru, and transcribing the notebooks and bundles of paper, the scraps and envelopes and jottings, the lists and scribbles and annotations, the files, copies, and folders left behind by her great-aunt Em, who also lived and wrote, just like her, and then, one day, mysteriously disappeared. 

An auctioneer wearing the black gown of a judge sits stern-faced, between an international currency conversion table suspended in midair and a large abstract painting for sale. Above him, a foreboding night sky appears where one expects a ceiling. This is the scene of Nicole Eisenman’s The Auction (2025), where a painter is also present, clutching a similar looking canvas at his side. Positioned within the composition as if he had been called to testify, he’s rendered in flat Cubist color blocks, which make him gobsmacked—if not by the fact that he might be on trial than by the sight of an eager bidder before him whose hand is reaching way too high for anyone’s comfort, Sieg Heil style. That sharp discomfiture you feel in your gut when facing total contradiction was at the heart of Eisenman’s STY, her most recent solo exhibition at New York’s 52 Walker. Comprised of paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and videos made between 2024 and 2025—after the start of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and throughout the first year of Donald Trump’s presidential re-election—the exhibition depicted the artist and her milieu amid a battered social and civic landscape.

The book I’m holding is sturdy like a rock, but appears as vibrant gradation, like a spear of light in a prism or the memory of a peacock in flight. I thumb open the tome guided by one of three ribbons, each a different shade of red, to mark the start of something, or an eager return. Inside I find lines of instruction, but also many other kinds of lines, some that give itinerary (“Journey inward toward new exteriors”) or produce questions (“What are the heroics of a lack of heroic qualities?”). Other lines are drawn to simply stretch open the mind. I’m describing here the physical properties of Lucy Ives’s newest volume, three six five prompts, acts, divinations (an inexhaustible compendium for writing), out this spring on Siglio, which is an abundance of things, depending on how you choose to use it, including a marvel to behold.

In the dim blue hue of an office light, we see a pair of eyes gloss over a floor strewn with dead, bloodied bodies. The eyes shudder and look out somewhere, into the middle distance; not at the walls of the conference room that enclose them, not directly at the glow of a computer screen. Below, a pair of hands continues to maniacally hit a keyboard. These furtive movements belong to Claire, played by the inimitable Kayije Kagame, the protagonist of filmmaker and artist Valentin Noujaïm’s chilling 2024 short film, 'To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion' (2024), who we watch, sit alone, but not alone, become like stone, or statuary, in her dark, corporate chamber. What does she see? For nearly a decade, Valentin Noujaïm, who grew up in France as the child of Lebanese and Egyptian emigres, has been making films about the erasure of peoples and histories by the construct of empire and the bleak façades of “progress” erected in their stead. Le Défense, the looming business district to the west of Paris, built on razed shantytowns, gives the name to a trilogy of short films by Noujaïm (2022-25), each of which fuses documentary technique with mythic narrative to mine and undermine the monument’s rotting foundations.

There is no vacancy in this world, no void, no vacuum. This is one thing I learn when I encounter the artwork and read the essays by Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa. Every moment in life is durational, and every image we happen to see within it, an unfolding reel through which the social world is rehearsed, or composed, or erased, or betrayed, or determined. What do we desire from images? Whose lives are risked? In his installations and exhibitions, as in his precise, angular writing about art and photography, Wolukau-Wanambwa guides his viewers and readers into the darkly layered logics of idolatry, difficulty, and exposure that undergird photography’s capacity to represent black and gendered bodies, and the violent regimes of white supremacy and patriarchy that produce them.  I first saw Wolukau-Wanambwa’s work in person as part of the 2021 iteration of Greater New York at MoMA’s PS1, where a suite of images and objects were displayed against an entirely black background. Vivisecting the space was AMWMA (2021), a free-standing wall on either side of which was hung two, nearly identical life-size photos of the actor Anna May Wong.