Now in its 40th year, the EVA International, in Limerick, Ireland, is more transient than other biennials like it. Rather than opening all at once, its exhibitions, events, and interventions are taking place gradually, at different points throughout the show’s run, through late October. This removes the need to see it all at once—and also enables the show to more thoroughly dialogue with the city and its history.

Guest curator Sebastian Cichocki has themed his program, “The Gleaners Society,” around the notion of citizenship. It focuses on the practice of gleaning, a term that traditionally refers to the act of collecting surplus crops following a harvest and redistributing them to people in need. Gleaning was declared illegal by the British courts in 1788, and yet, as Cichocki writes in an accompanying text, it remained a strategy of survival and resourcefulness essential to those marginalized by the emerging forces of capitalism.

Cichocki did not train as a traditional curator, although he now serves as chief curator of Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Instead, his background is in sociology and it is this experience that has clearly informed his EVA program, which looks at art’s relationship to society, bringing ideas about farming, feeding, and nurturing to the fore. The shows suggests that art can aid in supporting political opposition and can also expand ideas of alternate methods of queer survival, specifically by holding up rural ways of living as a form of protesting societal oppression. Below, a look at a few of the best works on view at this edition of the EVA International.

After a call for a ceasefire in Gaza signed by thousands of artists appeared on its website, Artforum has fired its top editor, David Velasco, claiming that the publication of the letter did not meet its editorial standards. His firing was first reported by the New York Times.

The letter, which went live on October 19, also appeared in e-flux and Hyperallergic, and had circulated as a Google document before it was published on those websites and Artforum. Velasco, along with several other members of Artforum’s staff, signed the letter.

“We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes,” the letter reads.

In a statement posted to the publication’s website, Artforum publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza wrote, “On Thursday, October 19, an open letter regarding the crisis in the Middle East was shared on Artforum’s website and social platforms without our, or the requisite senior members of the editorial team’s, prior knowledge. This was not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process. Had the appropriate members of the editorial team been consulted, the letter would have been presented as a news item with the relevant context.”

They noted their dismay over both the Hamas attack and the resultant “destruction and suffering” in Gaza, and said that the letter had put some members of the Artforum team in the “untenable position of being represented by a statement that was not uniformly theirs.” (Not all of the Artforum editorial masthead signed the letter.)

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. closed in August 2021 for renovations and an expansion, and has now reopened to a very different country. In that two-year interval, abortion rights were severely curtailed, murder rates for trans women have shot up, and fears of a Handmaid’s Tale–like future have become pervasive. Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor got right to the point when she wrote, in the New Yorker, “Without the ability to control when, where, how, and if one chooses to become pregnant or give birth, no other freedom can be achieved.”

I thought of this remark while looking at Niki de Saint Phalle’s Pregnant Nana (1995), the work that greets viewers in the newly enlarged permanent collection galleries of this museum. The sculpture depicts a buoyant female figure, her bared nipples replaced with a heart and an asterisk. She seems to be enjoying the moment, her hands held above her head—but her tumescent belly features a multicolored target, hinting that she is also the object of someone else’s violent gaze.

“I’m not the person who can change society, except through showing some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women,” de Saint Phalle once said. “That’s all I can do.” The curators of the National Museum of Women in the Arts seem to have resigned themselves to something similar.

Across this museum’s galleries, there are reminders of the dour situation that has long faced women across history. There are stark Guerrilla Girls prints reminding viewers of how under-represented women have been in art institutions throughout history—something that also becomes a refrain in the wall text for works by Old Masters just starting to get their due, like Rachel Ruysch and Lavinia Fontana. There are pieces that allude to centuries of racism and colonialism, and plenty of artworks that deal with loss and sickness, too.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts’s new permanent collection galleries are presented non-chronologically.

But the focus is instead mostly on freedom, with few works explicitly alluding to the danger of being a woman in the US today. Generally, the mood is celebratory and light.

“A great victory for me and a great victory for justice!” No, that’s not one of us after this week’s Jack’s Encyclopaedia - that’s literally the president of FIFA.

Marcus, Vish, Jim and Andy are here as Gianni Infantino strikes again, the Premier League’s scheduling genius’ strike again, and Harry Maguire gets ready to dominate Erling Haaland in the Manchester derby… again? Plus, we wonder if Olympiacos’ tifo from last night is true: can you dine in hell? Is hell catered?

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This week’s release of Police State was especially well-timed. The new pseudo-documentary film by conspiracy theorist and far-right influencer Dinesh D’Souza opened in theaters this week just as Jenna Ellis, one of Donald Trump’s election lawyers, pleaded guilty to a felony charge for her role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election in Georgia. She is the fourth of his lawyers in the case to do so, a trend that for a certain audience, is evidence that the police state D’Souza’s film warns of is already here.

With a screening planned at Trump’s Florida resort Mar-a-Lago next month, Police State is an extended riff on the mantra Trump has adopted since being indicted for an extensive variety of crimes: If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.

Telling this horror story are right-wing luminaries such as former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, former Trump administration official Kash Patel, and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who explain how ordinary people could, at any time, be just like the “nonviolent protesters” who sacked the US Capitol, and have jack-booted FBI thugs kick down their door, ransack their homes, scare their children, and haul them away to jail. Once there, they’ll be forced to plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit simply for being conservatives exercising their free speech rights.

The work of far-right fringe characters who populate Rumble and Truth Social, Police State may nonetheless help shape the GOP narrative that will dominate the 2024 presidential election next year. “If politics is downstream from culture, what is more upstream from politics than going to AMC to see a movie?” says Danielle Tomson, paraphrasing the late conservative journalist Andrew Breitbart. A researcher working on a book about conservative influencers, Tomson sees the film as a preemptive strike on an inevitable Trump conviction ahead of his presidential campaign. “They think like Hollywood screenwriters,” she notes.

Unless you lurk inside a particular right-wing media bubble, you may have forgotten all about D’Souza, a wunderkind of the second Reagan administration whose star has fallen considerably since then. You certainly wouldn’t have heard about his newest movie in the mainstream press. Police State was publicized almost entirely through D’Souza’s extensive social media channels, where he has millions of followers. The film premiered in dozens of traditional AMC movie theaters across the country this week as if it were as mainstream as the Exorcist remake. But D’Souza paid to rent out the theaters, before moving his film to online streaming on October 27. I was curious to see how many conservatives would actually get off the couch to see a film by a B-list influencer with the delivery of a bank teller. So, on Monday night, I plodded across the Beltway to an AMC multiplex in Alexandria, Virginia, to catch the first showing.

Why 1970s mystery The Enfield Poltergeist continues to disturb, decades on

Newly minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson thinks it’s too easy to get divorced, and he’d like to change that. 

“In my generation, all we’ve ever known is the no-fault scheme, and any deviation from that seems like a radical move,” Johnson said more than two decades ago. No-fault divorce, the “scheme” Johnson has long admonished, allows one party to unilaterally file to end a marriage—without having to prove things like adultery, imprisonment, or domestic abuse. These laws, mostly passed in the 1960s and 70s, were monumental in furthering women’s financial, social, and professional independence, as well as their safety. 

Johnson, though, believes that such laws are partly to blame for our “completely amoral society” that causes a young person to go “into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates.”

And Johnson isn’t alone in his ire. Lately there’s been a push by conservatives to end no-fault divorce—in podcast studios and in the halls of government. Right-wing activist and influencer Steven Crowder, Daily Wire and PragerU host Michael Knowles, and conservative podcaster Tim Pool, among others, have all decried the nationwide standard as being too lax, granting women divorces on a whim. The official GOP party platforms in Texas and Nebraska call for ending no-fault divorce. And in Louisiana, Johnson’s home state, the Republican party is considering the elimination of no-fault divorce.

Johnson’s opposition to no-fault divorce dates back decades. In 1997, Louisiana became the first state in the country to pass a “covenant marriage” law, offering newlyweds a religion-based contract that makes it significantly harder to get divorced. The law was backed by the Louisiana Family Forum, “a voice for traditional families,” where Johnson had been a volunteer. (The organization has received money from powerful groups like the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom; Johnson has been an attorney and spokesperson for the latter.) Two years later, Johnson and his new wife, Kelly, opted for a covenant marriage. They were some of the few who did. Between 2000 and 2010, about 1 percent of Louisiana couples opted for a covenant marriage.

It wasn’t the night that Newcastle fans wanted, but who cares, at least St James’ Park has some fantastic drainage.

Pete and Vish appreciate that on Ramble Reacts and they also take a moment to compliment Nick Pope for his short sleeve shirt. Plus they answer the important question… Is Kevin De Bruyne really a cake?

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Each summer, when they couldn’t stand the city anymore, when the heat was unbearable, and they had a brief reprieve, they drove for three days to the middle of the country to stay at a log cabin on a lake that her grandfather had built now a century ago and where she had spent summers during her childhood. Her father, her children’s grandfather, and his sister, her aunt, would drive up the eight hours from Chicago and spend a week with them so that they could be around her two small children.

The previous summer, in the week before her father and her aunt arrived, she was able to relax into the lassitude that overtook her from being there, and possibly as the result of the long series of days in the car, with two children to monitor and soothe and attempt to entertain. That summer, after having just finished a period of work, she spent most of the time on the bed in the newer room that the four of them stayed in. She would sit, on the old gray-green sheets, the dog curled up next to her, watching the two children and their father through the window, making notes in her notebook. She sat there amidst the green light of the lake and the surrounding green and sketched out the familiar geometry of the trees surrounding the lake, the fallen trunk the ducks often slept on. She attempted to sketch in pen the white pine tree directly outside her window, the surging upwards of the boughs, like a series of prickly mustaches.

The mother showed the drawings to her oldest in the morning, who became jealous of her notebooks scattered across the bed and demanded her own small notebook, which they later purchased in town, one for both of the small children. She wondered, then and now, if they would remember the sound of their mother’s pen, her illegible scratching that probably looked to them like the branches on a tree.

On their daily morning walk, they picked raspberries by the road, the littlest in wet overalls. Never in these woods growing up had she seen raspberries. She wondered whether it had something to do with the heat and heavy rains of the past years.

Same podcast? Same podcast. Yes! Marcus, Luke, Jim and Pete celebrate the return of England’s sunflower Hazza Maguazza to goalscoring form as Manchester United bagged a huge win in the Champions League last night.

We also ask who did it best – Gabriel Jesus or Hal-Robson Kanu? – and look ahead to the collapse of the PIF Posse following Kevin Keegan’s meeting with Edward Howe.

Plus, Luke gets extraordinarily excited about Gary O’Neil.

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