This week, Zoë Hopkins makes her debut at the Critics’ Table with a visit to Torkwase Dyson’s Public Art Fund commission, Paige K. Bradley tours the first-ever solo show of the late poet N.H. Pritchard, and Johanna Fateman is hypnotized by the work of identical twin artists Jane and Louise Wilson.
Torkwase Dyson
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, Bridge View Lawn
Through March 8, 2026
My timing is misaligned: I visit Torkwase Dyson’s Public Art Fund commission Akua on a Monday, even though the sculpture takes its name from the Akan word meaning “born on a Wednesday.” But I’m afforded another form of synchronicity: a rhyming between the artwork and the atmosphere. It’s raining; water saturates the air around me, dampens my breath. Accordingly, inside the sculpture—which is adjacent to the East River—the sound of water circles a ring of eight speakers, cascading from one to the next. I find myself surrounded by whirling, gurgling, frothing sonorities, as though set adrift or submerged in water. Akua beckons us to swim with—and battle against—the current of history: Its aqueous sounds are stitched into an assemblage that also includes voices such as those of Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand, who read on the ecstatic possibilities of black life and the impossible terror that begets black death. Cradled in Dyson’s sculpture, I feel a high register of affective intensity harmonize with low sonic frequency. The water vibrates like a bass, rumbling and roiling underfoot.
Rainwater slickens the structure, an oval pavilion surrounded by thin, black metal beams, assembled in a towering rib-cage-like formation. The top is open, and on the floor, a platform-like sculpture is assembled from three rectangles. Like much of Dyson’s work, Akua adheres to a minimal and meticulously conceived geometric configuration: The powder-coated steel-and-aluminum structure is elliptical, its rectangular planks are arranged at an oblique angle, and the entrances at both ends are triangular. Dyson’s attention to shape recruits the formal schemas of abstraction to forge a compositional language of black survival within a spatial, architectural, and geographic order that works against this aim. The artist brings us to this knife edge between loss and life, submerging us in water’s sound, and then summoning us up to breathe through Akua’s openings.—Zoë Hopkins
N.H. Pritchard
Peter Freeman, Inc. | 140 Grand Street
Through August 1, 2025
N.H. Pritchard (1939–1996) was a New York poet associated with the Black Arts Movement, whose work segued from a fragmented lyric mode to expansive yet exactingly concrete poetry. His first compendium, The Matrix Poems: 1960–1970, initially published in 1970, has only recently garnered recognition after its reissue in 2021 by Primary Information. A trained art historian and a mystic guided by his own philosophy of “transrealism”—which he represented symbolically with the letter “O”—the poet’s work focuses on typographic detail, recalling Marcel Broodthaers’s 1969 erasure homage to Stéphane Mallarmé, or the minimalism of Aram Saroyan and Carl Andre. Following the inclusion of a number of Pritchard’s letter-size sheets in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, “Boom!”—an exhibition of more than 30 visual poems at Peter Freeman Inc.—is his first-ever solo show.
White A4 pages ring the gallery walls, all of them distinguished by wryly playful experiments of phrase and form, as in Untitled (Answers / Many Blessings), no date, where aligning the word “ANSWERS”—four times—before “GOD” and “offers” generates an oddly timed, eternally looping recitation rather than a single declarative sentence. Nearly all works are undated, but their style resembles that of poems from “OBJECTS: 1968–1970,” the third section of Matrix. It’s apropos, since Pritchard’s treatment of the page as material means the reader inevitably has to think of the poet’s words spatially, as objects. Writing was a ground from which infinite variations could be imagined. With hardly more than white correction fluid and black typewriter ink, he constructed an enveloping world of language that took inspiration from, thrived on, the most common things—multiple poems are simply extraordinary rearrangements of “the.” To return to “O”—as Pritchard did, again and again—two sheets in the exhibition resound the theme. One features a small-type, all-caps “WREATH” hovering above a larger collaged “O”—another version of Matrix’s first poem. It’s positioned roughly diagonally to the show’s very first page, where another pasted-on instance of the consequential letter floats over a Fraktur font quotation: “And God said, Let there be light.”—Paige K. Bradley
Jane and Louise Wilson
303 Gallery | 555 West 21st Street
Through July 11, 2025
The blurry 10-minute video Routes 1 & 9 North, 1994, shows the British artists Jane and Louise Wilson, identical twin sisters, seated side by side in a sad, spartan motel room, somewhere just off the work’s eponymous New Jersey highway. Deep in a hypnotic trance, moving sloth-like and slightly out of sync, obeying the instructions of an out-of-frame male voice, the duo cedes directorial control, confronting viewers with their staged—but apparently authentic—suggestibility. Their vulnerable state is alarming. The piece is among the earliest on view in the career-spanning cross-section of works in “Altogether” at 303 Gallery, grounding the exhibition in the sisters’ sincere or skeptical invocation of the supernatural (telepathic twindom, the mythic good-and-evil sibling dyad, the murdered girls of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, and the artist-as-spirit medium, for example).
It’s also a scrappy, lo-res foil to the sleek, unpeopled, large-scale photographic works here (along with Performance of Entrapment II, 2025, a hallucinatory new film of collaged and refracted imagery shot in South Korea and Japan) that, in sum, represent the scope of the Wilsons’ overarching project—what they’ve called “psychic architecture.” Best known for their breakout installation Stasi City, 1997, for which they gained access to the former headquarters of the East German secret police, the artists have sought out further sites of trauma, catastrophe, and politically fraught dereliction over the last three decades or so. The pair of levitating figures in the image Cosmonaut Suits, Mir, 2000, evoke the former Soviet space station—and the stranding of scientist Sergei Krikalev there when the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, during his mission. Radioactive contamination is pictured as a form of haunting in the artists’ bleakly elegant photos of the abandoned, damaged structures of Orford Ness, a British military bomb-testing site. And a WWI-era sanatorium in New Zealand associated with eugenics is the hidden subject of a stark, misty landscape.
There’s no question that “Altogether” skims the surface, with major bodies of work receiving brief treatment. It is, regardless, a timely demonstration of the twins’ uncanny ability to use tropes of horror in service of nonfiction, and the camera as spectral witness to destruction, decay, regime change, and war.—Johanna Fateman
