Mark Bradford
Keep Walking

Some exhibitions reinstate hope. They show that art—some art, at least—can truly shake us out of our preconceived ideas and beliefs; that art can be life-changing; and that it can play a key role in the ways we envision our futures.

In an age in which bananas taped to a wall fetch millions at auction, retrospectives like Mark Bradford’s Keep Walking at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin remind us that art has a duty to be much more than a desperate headline-grabbing slapstick joke. It makes it unequivocally clear that to some artists, art is a space for collectively processing life’s wealth, challenges, and complexity: the joys and paradoxes, the traumas and reaffirmations. Bradford’s exhibition does just that: gallery after gallery, it surprises visitors with a multimedia polyphony of approaches and perspectives that cast light into the deepest crevices of the human condition—historically grounded, materially connoted, aesthetically alluring: each piece is a discovery into the realities of Black queerness and its many ramifications, dark and bright.