Death Work in Venice: In memoriam Khadija Saye

Mignon Nixon reflects on the Manchester Arena bombing, London Bridge and Borough Market attack, and Grenfell Tower fire in London, as well as the 2017 Venice Biennial, via J-B Pontalis's writings on the psychoanalytic notion of death-work. Nixon argues that the defining problem of Christina Macel's exhibition Viva Art Viva in Venice, an exhibition so insistently art- and artist-positive—“designed with artists, by artists, and for artists” as the press release notes—is that its aesthetics of redemption is predicated on a negation of life, and thereby a negation of art.