RACHEL ROSE

whose description of life in and after zero gravity crackles over trippy, disorienting visuals filmed through liquid in a buoyancy-training laboratory for astronauts. In the luscious animation Lake Valley (2016), a drooping pet, part rabbit, part fox, part dog, escapes a suburban home for a fantastical forest collaged from illustrations in 19th-century children’s books. In Wil–o–wisp (2018), co-commissioned by Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rose takes another turn: filmed at Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, it evokes 16th-century England, a time when the balance of power was shifting in agrarian societies, and traditional healers were persecuted for practices considered out of step with a modernizing society. Brancusi’s Endless Column as a sharpened spike in kinky rubber; climbing walls ascended using dick-shaped grips; a basketball machine converted into a rock catapult; a portrait of the artist, crushed by lovers’ semen... New York-based Andra Ursuta’s sculptures broadcast her dark, fuck-you humour and a real sense of physical vulnerability. Her work maintains a connection to Romania, her mother country, both in atmospherics and the evisceration of national (and nationalist) myths. Vanilla Isis, as she’s titled her Turin piece, suggests a bland mainstream wing of Islamic State. Crisis, threat and migration are frequent and keenly felt concerns in her work: her 2015 exhibition The South Will Rise Again, staged during the rise of rightwing populism in Europe, was prescient in its depiction of aggressively masculine emblems made cartoonish and ridiculous, ergo dangerously easy to dismiss.