As German artist Cosima von Bonin’s survey at MUDAM, Luxembourg, enters its penultimate month (the exhibition closes March 2),
Artforum revisits its November 2007 issue, where twin essays—by
John Kelsey and
Yilmaz Dziewior—provide alternating takes on the Mombassa, Kenya–born artist’s oeuvre. A veteran of the legendary creative ferment of 1990s Cologne, von Bonin has developed a richly collaborative, darkly deadpan practice that pivots on themes of luxury consumerism, pop culture, and the elusiveness of her own authorship and artistic identity.
Kelsey’s essay, “The Mollusk of Reference,” zeroes in on a transitional late-00s moment in von Bonin’s evolution, mapping the tensions that emerged as the artist departed the intensely local, experimental context of her youth to join the market-driven global art world. “Even though the collective and critical ethic of ’90s Cologne is now performed as an ironically romanticized and melancholic ritual,” Kelsey writes, “it persists nonetheless, acting out the hope of surviving its own perversion in the present.”
—The editors
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