Don’t expect Attia’s “post-colonial” art to fixate on power politics. He is more interested in the emotional differences between cultures. One of his preoccupations is with what it means to repair. The Western ideal is to erase all signs of injury whereas traditional cultures make no attempt at concealment. “One acknowledges the passing of time, and the other one aims to deny the effects of time.”
Is Arbus’s photography sympathetic or voyeuristic? Her friends thought her “hugely empathetic”, an impression also conveyed by a show of her early work. Sentimental, though, she was not. Just like her celebrated later work, her early images support the view that Arbus is among the greatest of twentieth century photographers, “prescient [for her] acceptance of difference.”
Mehretu has travelled far – Addis Ababa born but now New York based. Urban imagery has inspired her paintings, “story maps of no location”. Some find her abstract expressionist style frenzied, a criticism also directed at Jackson Pollock. He insisted his works were planned and a reviewer of Mehretu’s show likewise finds structure in her work, describing it as “impressive and authentic”.