ld, graphic figures composed of gouache bodies pasted with faces and hands cut from photographs found in magazines or online, the unsettling combinations evoking the precariousness of black childhood in the United States. “If They Come,” Roberts’s show at Stephen Friedman, featured nineteen of these composite portraits alongside a grid of sixty small, more disjointed photomontages (Future Tense, 2018) in which snippets of limbs and facial features are assembled into surreal configurations....

semblies of jagged polyester-resin elements with gaudy metallic surfaces and extravagant palettes that evoke candy shops, exotic bird sanctuaries, and Italian opera costumes. This visitor would no doubt have been shocked to find out that Artist #1 and Artist #2 were one and the same person.Even for better-prepared viewers, this gathering of ten works by Van Buren—four made between 1967 and 1971 and six between 2018 and 2019—presented challenges. How, one wondered, did the artist move from the relatively simple structures of early works like Bykert Goal Post (1968), a freestanding “goal post” built of two-by-fours coated in resin thick enough to mute the color of the wood but clear enough to keep the material’s irregularities visible, to the chromatic fireworks and formal extravagance of his recent pieces? In fact, seeds of Van Buren’s current style are already on display in B...

ervention; and the relationship between labor and technology. Videos by Andrew Norman Wilson and Stephanie Comilang took up this last subject. Wilson’s well-known Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011) concerns Google’s ScanOps workers, who digitize publications for Google Books but are not given the rights and benefits that other Google workers receive. In the exhibition, the video was accompanied by several works from Wilson’s “ScanOps” series (2012–), which comprises prints of Google Books scans in which workers’ hands or fingers can be seen, their usually hidden labor exposed. Comilang’s docufiction Lumapit Sa Akin, Paraiso (Come to Me, Paradise, 2016) attends to the workforce of nearly 400,000 migrant domestic laborers in Hong Kong, who have limited financial and legal rights. Following several Filipina women as they carry out their isolating jobs and embark on social...

both the past and the present, taking stock of the biennial’s history in honor of its twentieth year. New commissions by artists who have never shown at the biennial before stand alongside works that were included in past editions. Saskia Holmkvist bridged this temporal gap by writing a new voice-over for her 2009 video Blind Understanding. In her commentary, she expresses misgivings about the video, which comprises a single rolling shot of a boat gliding along a river lined with lush, wild overgrowth, and uses metaphors such as bird migration and work songs to explore the xenophobia ignited by the economic recession. While a standard director’s commentary is intended to add to the film’s legacy, Holmkvist leans into her doubts about the naïveté of her earlier output with vulnerability and a sense of humor....