Why were they all super sexist?

Laura Owens has her first exhibition in NYC in eight years, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is publishing her first novel in over a decade.

At Matthew Marks, first you enter the gallery and are greeted by a desk which thanks to movement censors seems animated, the tape rolls over the desk top, drawers open to reveal handmade cloth bound books. A room is filled with painterly trompe l’oeil of handmade wallpaper that reveals hidden pockets and worlds, a room opening onto another room, opening onto a small hidden closet which contains the video installation of two crows seated at a sun drenched picnic table in Los Angeles. Their beaks are moving, the voice over and subtitles cluing us into their conversation. It appears to be a mother and daughter discussing misogyny and sexism since Antiquity.

‘Why were they all super sexist?’

‘They did not know there was another way to live with women’ says one crow to the other.

The setting in all its intricacies and details offers rooms full of wonder. The echoes of Pompeii evoked in the video and which one cannot help but conflate with the recent wild fires that destroyed parts of Los Angeles seem to call for endurance, beauty and whimsy. Worlds will burn down and a mother will keep trying to comfort her daughter.

In Dream Count, Adichie’s latest novel which just came out in the USA, mother daughter relationships and female friendship are at the heart of the tale and sexism seems inescapable. Adichie is often an astute psychological realist. She is a generous storyteller. I still remember sitting on an Amtrak train and reading her gorgeous novel Americanah and for once wishing that Penn station would not come soon so I could simply keep reading. I loved the polyphony of voices, the assuredness of the tone, the complicated and subtle depictions of race in America. Dream Count falls short. It felt more like the novel was eavesdropping on conversations between friends and relatives rather than fully engaging with the characters’s lives, dilemmas and moral choices. It is a novel about four women, untied by friendship, kinship or simply care. I was most taken by the story of one of the women, Kadiatou, based on the story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean hotel worker, in 2011. Can fiction writer take on the life of victims to tell their stories and ‘write wrong’ in the words of Adichie? I have issues with this because it can be exploitative at worst and simply another story at best but as Adichie writes in the afterword quoting Neruda on the art of the Dutch Masters ‘the world’s reality will not go unremarked’. And that is indeed what Lora Owens’s labyrinth of magical realism and Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie’s world building of psychological realism attempt to accomplish.

So if you are in NYC this weekend, head over Chelsea to Matthew Marks and wherever you are, pick up Dream Count and let me know what you think.