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This month in Artforum:

Techniques of the Observer: Laura Poitras—director of the revelatory Edward Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR—talks with cover artist Hito Steyerl, whose solo exhibition is on view at Artists Space in New York until May 24, about filmmaking, perception, and the promise and peril of the image:

“CITIZENFOUR is the most influential and efficient political work of art of the twenty-first century.”
–Hito Steyerl

Dispatch: Contemporary Art and Culture in Beirut, featuring curator Christine Tohme, architect Hashim Sarkis, critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, and artists Mounira Al Solh, Rayyane Tabet, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri, Marwa Arsanios, and Jalal Toufic:

“Is it possible to speak of a city that has come to embody disaster and division for the world without fixating on disaster and division?”
–Hashim Sarkis

Curator Okwui Enwezor talks to Artforum editor Michelle Kuo about the upcoming 56th Venice Biennale:

“One must rethink what other paths might constitute new versions of the future. What if Beijing does not become like Washington? Is it possible to have multiple ways of looking at social conditions that are not necessarily in alignment with the dominant Western ways of thinking?”
–Okwui Enwezor

Richard Meyer on America Is Hard to See, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s inaugural exhibition in its Renzo Piano–designed building:

“Divided into twenty-three sections, unfolding in loosely chronological fashion throughout the approximately sixty-three thousand square feet of the Whitney’s new interior and exterior galleries, the show provides a more expansive display of the museum’s holdings than ever before possible.”
–Richard Meyer

Mark Godfrey on Melvin Edwards and Frank Bowling:

“While Edwards and Bowling may have created work from their own particular experiences as subjects, they did not make art that was simply about ‘concepts of self.’”
–Mark Godfrey

David Huber on the architecture of Lacaton & Vassal:

“There is a basic tension between Lacaton and Vassal’s immense optimism about the transformative potential of architecture’s materials and their deep apprehension about architecture’s propensity to regulate and control.”
–David Huber

1000 Words: Simon Denny discusses his work for the New Zealand pavilion of the Venice Biennale—Secret Power, 2015, a meditation on visual culture within the contemporary intelligence community:

“Like the Internet, airport architecture distills two seemingly irreconcilable realities: the neoliberal policies that encourage movement, and the security apparatus of the nation-state that seeks to control that movement.”
–Simon Denny

Diedrich Diederichsen on Lynn Hershman Leeson:

“Hershman Leeson’s works present an acutely palpable contrast between the rapid obsolescence of each novel technology she has enthusiastically embraced and the persistent currency of the underlying social and conceptual problems she addresses.”
–Diedrich Diederichsen

Sam Pulitzer on the 2015 New Museum Triennial:

“The surround audience is not a public but an all-encompassing field of consumption.”
–Sam Pulitzer

And: SUMMER PREVIEW: 45 shows from around the world, from Havana to Beijing

Plus: Amy Taubin on The Wolfpack; Melissa Anderson on Saint Laurent; James Quandt on Satyajit Ray‘s newly restored Apu trilogy; Tony Korner interviews Satyajit Ray (Calcutta, 1989); Charlotte Cotton on Barbara Kasten; Brian Dillon on “Pliure: Prologue (La part du feu)“; Joseph Grigely on Conversations with Beethoven; J. Hoberman on Jack Smith; Farah Jasmine Griffin on Bessie; and artist Cally Spooner shares her Top Ten