Not everything I see sticks. I write about what I just can’t shake off.
Life in Manhattan is one big art feast: concerts, exhibitions, festivals—something’s always opening, playing, or premiering. Sometimes I wait for a show like it’s a letter from Hogwarts. Sometimes I wander into a gallery just because it’s Thursday in Chelsea and, well… that’s what we do. Some events I’ve dreamed about my whole life. Others sneak up and explode in my head out of nowhere.
But let’s be honest—not everything sticks. This isn’t a diary of everything I see. It’s a collection of aftershocks. What stays with me. What I can’t unsee. What keeps whispering after I’ve already walked out the door.
Maybe my aftertaste will become your anticipation. Who knows?
What: Exhibition
Martha Rosler — Truth is/is not
Martha Rosler is a Brooklyn-based artist who dissects bourgeois consciousness not with a scalpel but with scissors—precise, practiced, and sharp, backed by half a century of a museum-level international career.
The sharp edge of truth and propaganda hides behind the show’s short title. If you’re ready to dive into boiling water, take her essay in The Brooklyn Rail’s Critics Page with you.
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Where: Galerie Lelong & Co., Chelsea, New York
A Paris-born gallery from the early nineties that, true to its sharp political program and museum-grade standards, has once again made the right artist choice for a solo show.
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When: April 10
Opening night, naturally, was on a Thursday. Those two magic hours when Chelsea turns into a social experiment: some with wine glasses, some with cameras, some arriving late, some standing in full internal silence.
If you’re lucky, you can still catch the show through May 10, 2025.
The Artist’s Message
Martha Rosler explores political consciousness shaped by media-fed cliches and affirmations. She collides war with gloss, shattering illusions of safety. Her photomontages reveal how conflict threads itself into daily life, how imperialist thinking hides inside the image of “home,” and how destruction takes root in bourgeois aesthetics.
Glossy marketing aimed at women becomes a weapon, while local protests are drowned out by the hum of mainstream narratives.
Aftershock
At this show, I got an answer to a question that’s haunted me for nearly three years: how did war become my reality, my daily life? The surreal simultaneity of events blows my mind. Martha Rosler visualizes this cognitive dissonance in her collages.
To enter the main gallery, you had to pass through a narrow turnstile for 25 cents. A symbolic fee, of course—you could grab a quarter nearby if, like me, you panicked for a second realizing no coins live in your pocket anymore.
Right at the entrance, I got stuck in front of the first diptych: a war zone in both images, a fully geared soldier on one side looking through binoculars at a fashionably dressed woman on the other, red purse in hand, echoing the red flashes of explosion behind her.
House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series shows domestic interiors with giant windows overlooking worlds at war. We nudged each other with elbows, absorbed in our phones, trying to capture something to take home. Images swallowed us whole. Groups dissolved into individuals drifting between collages and tall panels printed with Hannah Arendt’s writings on transparent film. Texts, people, images blurred into one field.
On another wall, a large-scale digital collage featured full-color Trump beside black-and-white frogs leaping out of boiling water into chaos. Then I got lost for a while in The Colonies (1969–72), examining colonization through the idea of home, and The Rewards of Money (1987–88/2022)—a brutal take on bourgeois comfort as a facade for destruction.
Rosler’s use of color against grayscale heightens the emotional contrast across all her series.
I was incredibly lucky—I got to thank the artist in person. And froze when she, almost without an accent, said: “Slava Ukraini.”
Only when leaving did I notice the Xbox and Dance Central at the exit. One dollar to dance, if you like. Another deliberate contrast. Behind the screen: video footage of NYC protests from 2012 to 2025.
Later that evening, scrolling my phone, I realized: the collages had moved into my newsfeed. And the only difference now was how close the scene outside the window feels to each of us.
Can I have a mind and heart as clear as Martha Rosler’s? One that holds all wars, the whole world, and all of us—without division?
Despite the raw sting of what’s happening back home and the unbearable sense of repetition, I left the show in a strangely elevated state. I didn’t want to go anywhere else or speak to anyone. I just wanted to sit with what I’d received and let it keep unfolding.
