Exhibition Review: Krista Beinstein and Tarik Kentouche’s Urbanite

Urbanite, Installation view, 2025. Image courtesy Krista Beinstein, Tarik Kentouche, and Weatherproof Gallery.

By ANNETTE LEPIQUE October 10th, 2025

 In Johnathan Littell’s 2006 novel The Kindly Ones, a fictional SS officer living under an assumed identity in France recounts his time in the Third Reich and his experiences in WWII on the Eastern Front. Besides the book’s transgressive violence, the “Divine Comedy” of cruelties that fascism visits upon all that fall under its sway, there’s something to be said about Littell’s illustration of the movement’s intimate afterlives: how fascism can live on in the flesh, the body and its rhythms. The officer is constantly beset by erratic bursts of vomit and diarrhea—stand-ins for an inarticulable excess of feeling that the Nazi Party aimed to expel —as he navigates living within his new city, a frontier of a new modernity, that he not too long ago threatened but ultimately, albeit discordantly and dangerously, helped birth.

 Littell’s depiction of the officer shows that there is an undeniable precariousness, a tension, inherent to urban spaces; the history of a city is contradictory, built by encounters with the “Other” through friction-filled encounters with others that are bubbling with potential for sex, for violence, for camaraderie, or frankly for nothing at all. A city, in other words, is indeterminable, and it’s this indeterminacy, this ambivalence, that is on display at Krista Beinstein and Tarik Kentouche’s show Urbanite at Chicago’s Weatherproof Gallery. What the two artists explore together is the timely and uneasy, sometimes difficult, intimacy of living in close proximity to those different from oneself and what such difference means in encounters with others where one's own self is changed and reshaped, the moments where the solid lines of the self are made indeterminable and hazy in equal turn.

Urbanite, Installation view, 2025. Image courtesy the artists and Weatherproof Gallery

In the prologue to the exhibition’s text, writer Anaïs Morales cites Albrecht Becker’s staged nudes as a reference point for both artists prior to their collaboration in Urbanite. Becker was an early 20th century German production designer and photographer who was arrested by the Nazis under Paragraph 175: a longstanding law in the German Criminal Code that outlawed sexual acts between men. The law was summarily expanded and enforced by the Nazis after the 1934 Night of the Long Knives. Several years after his arrest—after facing social ostracism, danger, and loneliness—Becker volunteered for the German armed forces and was sent to the war’s Eastern Front. It was at this time he began to tattoo his body and photograph himself with an increasing aura of sovereignty; he was an artist made and remade in this makeshift city of men, of pain, of pleasures both known and unknown. 

When Morales shares the artists' triangulation with Becker in the last line of the prologue, the point-of-view, the writer's “I" changes to third-person narration: I "becomes" artist, I becomes “Krista Beinstein.” It’s an intriguing rhetorical flourish for a show invested in the making and unmaking of the self in urban space; sites where codes of conduct are bound by prohibitions and excesses, where you become something of the Other, your face forever changing, with each and every friction-filled encounter.

The idea of such a mutable dichotomy, of troubling the spaces between limits and their transgression, attracts me as a critical lens from which to understand Beinstein and Kentouche’s work. At first glance, the juxtaposition of Kentouche’s Civilian series and Beinstein’s charged images of female sexuality is stark. “Civilians” here are vibrantly colored plush monkeys enshrined in shards of stained glass similar to miniature suits of armor. Each of the monkey’s eyes stare passively into the distance, a benzo gaze, empty and forever smiling. In contrast, the models captured in Beinstein’s images, all taken during the 1990s and early 2000s, present viewers with a matter-of-fact joie de vivre. Beinstein’s camera gently but unabashedly seizes this literal lust for life within every piercing, every glory hole, every slippery mouth, and every head thrown back in pleasure.

Yet like the Freudian stages of development and the sublimation of drives necessary to live in society mentioned in Urbanite’s exhibition text “Urban” as Withheld in Urban-ism (also by Morales), naiveté rests uneasy, innocence sits unsettled upon those who work to forget. Like Morales mentions in the text, nostalgia is a potent narcotic, there is a forever shared desire for a time when things appeared simple, wholesome, when it was no big deal that Winnie-the-Pooh didn’t own pants, regardless of our own pants wearing proclivities.

Tarik Kentouche's Civilian 019, 2025, Plush Monkey, Stained Glass, Ceramic Bowl, 9" x 8" x 8"4, and Civilian Sunnyside, 2025, Plush Monkeys, Stained Glass, 8" x 8" x 16". Image courtesy of the artist and Weatherproof Gallery.

 Take Kentouche’s Civilians as examples of the repressed anxiety, the barely sublimated tension, that occurs when faced with the unknown carried within others. Look to the artist’s 2024 piece Civilian Diderot, and ask yourself as the stained-glass shards ensheathe Diderot’s trunk and limbs, as the glass forms as a shield against the plush’s electric lime fur: what is Diderot armoring himself against? What is it that skitters behind his big-eyed, baby-doll stare? I am taken by the idea of each Civilian’s glass casing as a type of shield, as from the ages of eighteen to twenty-three, I would walk around my own city imagining my own body encased in a veil of stained glass. No one could touch me, I was whole, complete, solid, an inviolable self. To wear such clothes of glass, to become like Kentouche’s Civilians, you must commit to the art of forgetting, commit to burying, commit to letting the unknown of others skitter to the empty places behind your own big eyes. 

Tarik Kentouche's Civilian Diderot, 2024, Plush Monkey, Stained Glass 8.5" x 4" x 17", and Krista Beinstein's Identity, 2016, Latex Print, Plexiglass, Board, 36" x 44.5". Image courtesy of the artists and Weatherproof Gallery. 

Rubbing up against the Civilians are three of Beinstein's photos, one taken in 1992 and the other two in 2016. Urbanite is the first time Beinstein’s work has been shown in America and the exhibit’s three images center the concerns central to Beinstein’s longstanding career: women and their pleasures. The images are titled Momente 2, Magic, and Identity. In each of the images a woman is filled by something like the Immanence, taken by pleasure and frozen ecstatically in the moment. From Magic’s surreal scene of masturbation and glamour (a model frozen mid-caress, framed by her stiletto sharp nails) to Identity's exploration of bodily pleasure and play (another model's breasts and semi-erect cock are positioned by what appears to be a glory hole) Beinstein's photos illuminate the frictions of modern closeness, what it means to encounter the Other in nameless rooms, dance floors, and back alleys.  

Krista Beinstein's Momente 2, 2016, Latex Print, Plexiglass, Board, 41.5" x 32.25". Image courtesy of the artist and Weatherproof Gallery.

For an exhibition that is about cities, the messy, mysterious, and intractable intimacy of their urban spaces, what does it mean for Urbanite to be shown now, this moment, in Chicago? I ask this question for Chicago is not just an American city, but is a city under siege by the federal government. At the time of this writing ICE agents have occupied the city for several weeks. These same agents have terrorized civilians by throwing tear gas outside grocery stores and launching Black Hawk helicopter-led raids on apartments, all while hundreds of National Guard troops are being being deployed to “protect” them. Urbanite offers thoughtful reflection for this perilous moment. The frictions inherent to city life, the sheer variety of people that one comes in contact with are a threat to a status-quo built upon violent conformity. Urbanite then would have us remember that we are both ourselves and other, we are the excess, the superfluous, the friction-filled. We are the difference that can never be erased.

Urbanite is up at Weatherproof Gallery, 3336 W Lawrence Ave, #303, Chicago IL through November 2nd