We are often asked: Where is STIR based? Everywhere, we like to say. Our writers and editors work across six continents, using the elasticity of time and place to their advantage. At STIR this year, we’ve increasingly focused on sustained and insightful storytelling, privileging long-term engagements with practice and place. This grounding in the here and now, alongside an attention to historical, political and stylistic undercurrents, informs many of our favourite 2024 pieces. From in-depth coverage of hot ticket arts events like the Venice Biennale and a study of Frieze London, to slow unpackings of standalone exhibitions and a look at the wider socio-political factors that shape art and define trends, we’ve attempted it all. STIR’s editorial team put their heads together to share a curated list.

India's complex and changing landscape undergirds the Barbican's latest show

This rigorous review of The Imaginary Institution of India at the Barbican (on view until January 05, 2025) highlights a tempestuous period in postcolonial India: 1975 –1998, starting with the declaration of Emergency rule and ending with the Pokhran nuclear tests. In focusing on this period, it departs from the year 1947 as a standard chronological marker in histories of the subcontinent—denoting the partition of British India into the newly independent nation-states of India and Pakistan. Along the way, it encompasses a key 23 years of Indian modernity, including its overnight transformation into a market economy in 1991, rapid, untrammelled development and urbanisation and the lengthening shadows of communal violence as political and ideological groups catered to increasingly sectarian identities. With works by Vivan Sundaram, MF Husain, Sheela Gowda and Nilima Sheikh, as the review notes, the exhibition "anticipates the radical experiments in installation, cross-media and performance that dramatically reshaped the landscape of Indian art by the late 20th century".

Taking the pulse of Singapore's burgeoning art scene in 2024

While Singapore’s art scene is optimistically pegged to its economic success, STIR took a closer look at what that actually means for local practitioners and regional creative industries. Timed to the second edition of Art SG, this piece highlighted the absence of social and political engagement in local arts practice, questioning the role of the state and the perceived risk of censorship in shaping directions for practice, especially given the state’s massive role in supporting the arts. In doing so, it also investigated Singapore’s impressive visual arts ecosystem, noting the National Gallery Singapore’s large collection of Southeast Asian modern art, the Singapore Biennale and newer art institutions.

Fair's fair – or is it?

In the run-up to Frieze London 2024, STIR went back in time to trace the fair’s role in making London an art market hub. In the early 2000s, several shifts facilitated London’s cultural renewal: a burgeoning contemporary scene, reflected in arts practice and across new galleries, the opening of the Tate Modern in 2000 and the UK’s access to the EU market. Being at an art fair allows galleries to engage with thousands of collectors in a single day, offering networking opportunities galore, but it also comes at a cost, at least for gallerists – the bill for a booth at a major fair can easily go north of $100,000. Meanwhile, for artists, the art fair model seems to imply mechanical productivity, pushing them to churn out marketable works at regular intervals. But fairs may also be places of wonder, allowing practitioners to meet a range of players in the ecosystem and find new possibilities for their practice.

Foreigners Everywhere: Venice Biennale becomes a cradle of fraught purpose

STIR’s extensive coverage of the 2024 Venice Biennale included this candid take on its defining motto: Foreigners Everywhere. In trying to encompass a range of practices, as this review suggests, the biennale’s main exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, “perhaps becomes a victim of its own ambition—the sheer breadth of works and approaches rendering real depth impossible”. Artists from South America, where Pedrosa works, were amply represented, reflecting on migration, exile and estrangement. In a way, the exhibition reflexively questions its own existence, the review suggests, drawing attention to the absence of Global South representation among the biennale’s national pavilions.

Art Mill Museum’s ‘MANZAR’ offers a complex view of modernity in Pakistan

STIR takes a detailed look at the entangled history of the South Asian subcontinent through this ongoing exhibition in Qatar, which offers a bird’s eye view of art and architecture in Pakistan since the 1940s. Presented by the future Art Mill Museum at the National Museum of Qatar, MANZAR is curated by a team of museum staff and independent curators based in Qatar and Pakistan. The show takes an in-depth look at the country’s arts ecosystem, acknowledging the critical role of educational institutions in nurturing contemporary practice. It also chronicles the nation’s growing pains, mapping the development of new cities and infrastructural projects and more recently, temporary structures for climate refugees who were unhoused by repeated floods in Pakistan. This piece also offers an overview of new arts institutions and public art projects in Qatar.

Cindy Sherman’s ‘Anti-Fashion’ gains new meaning amidst Antwerp’s Ensor Year

Cindy Sherman’s decades-long dalliance with fashion sparks surprising connections to Belgian artist James Ensor’s practice in an exhibition timed to institutional celebrations of his legacy, as museums across Belgium mark ‘Ensor Year’. “Works in ‘Anti-Fashion’ trace the fine line between fashion as high art and fashion as farce,” STIR notes, describing Sherman’s early fashion photography assignments from the 1980s, often rejected for being too provocative and out of joint. Yet, forms of representation that were once viewed as rebellious were eventually co-opted into the mainstream as avant-garde designers highlighted fashion’s excess and artifice: “What was once a critique becomes a commodity”.

Art and fandom

Fandoms shape artistic creation and consumption, this STIR column notes, drawing from examples in popular culture and climate activism to reflect on modes of engagement in contemporary art. In an internet-fuelled landscape, there are multiple points at which artists interact with their audiences, encouraging their participation and ownership. This piece cites the public art projects supported by the famous K-pop band BTS and the role that their fans – the BTS Army – played in popularising those projects. In other instances, institutions draw from trending themes in popular culture as they launch new exhibitions, responding to what audiences might want to see.

"What I thought was a tree was a forest": Sohrab Hura on his experimental practice

Speaking with STIR ahead of his ongoing MOMA PS1 exhibition, Mother, Sohrab Hura reflects on the poetic and durational nature of his artmaking. Hura primarily works in photography, though the exhibition also showcases recent brushes with more ‘vulnerable’ mediums, including pastels and gouache. In his practice, works may grow out of other works, accruing detail and layers with the passing of time. This interview takes a close look at Hura’s relationship with storytelling, which can be fluid. As he puts it, “Meanings are constantly fixed and I think it’s important to loosen them up a bit, or sometimes, vice versa.”

Artist Shahzia Sikander on creating artworks that inspire discourse

On the heels of her retrospective exhibition Collective Behavior, a collateral event of the 2024 Venice Biennale, STIR interviewed artist Shahzia Sikander, going back to her beginnings as a student of miniature painting at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, and soon after, a pioneer of neo-miniaturism, where contemporary scenes found their way into the miniature aesthetic. Focused on female protagonists or what Sikander terms the “feminine spirit”, her works are part of key institutional collections and in prominent public spaces, including a 2023 commission for Madison Square Park in New York. An expanded version of Collective Behavior will be on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art starting in February 2025.

STIRred 2024 wraps up the year with curated compilations of our expansive art, architecture and design coverage at STIR this year. Did your favourites make the list? Tell us in the comments!