The Art Newspaper

Malinowska's washing machine at Nada

Although the Whitney Museum hasn’t released the list for its biennial, which opens in March, names have been leaking out for a few weeks. One is Joanna Malinowska, an artist who shows with the New York gallery Canada. Malinowska’s work was a conversation starter at the Nada fair yesterday, as it is a standard washing machine, plugged into the wall and set to the spin cycle. Spinning around inside it—you have to trust the artist on this one, because she discourages opening the lid—is, says a label: “a tiny piece of ceramics from Cahuachi piramides… reindeer moss, a handful of nothing collected in darkness (after 1973 performance ‘10 Minutes’ by Zbigniew Werpachowski), water from lake Titicaca, Cartesian doubt, dead hare that knows a lot about art, chopped hemlock, Gottfried Leibniz’s Discours de métaphysique, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society.” And we’ve learned that she’s is taking just as unexpected an approach to the biennial, by donating her page of the catalogue to Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), who has been imprisoned since the late 70s on the charge of shooting two FBI agents, and who makes paintings. Peltier (from his cell) and his lawyers have been in frequent touch with Canada; he has not yet determined precisely how he will use the page.

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