The big picture

Another cutting-edge artist showing at Encounters this year is Ukrainian-born, Bosnia-Herzegovina-based Stanislava Pinchuk, who took an apprenticeship with a monumental mason during the pandemic and learned to engrave gravestones. Her work, The Wine Dark Sea, is an arrangement of marble slabs she sourced in Trkiye just before the earthquake earlier this month.

Indonesian artist Mella Jaarsma's The Constructor is a piece of performance art that invites viewers to see artists as buildings. A crew of five construction workers is building a structure around the artist even as you read this.

"This is an accumulative work that won't be completed until the end of the fair," Glass-Kantor comments. "What's really great about performance-specific installations is the way they're working to what's essential and necessary, not performing to the expectations of the market, audience or context, but being generous in sharing their journey."