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Anna Boghiguian’s art has always been about a kind of looming: the hover of histories, their asphyxiating weft Throughout her forty-year practice, the Cairo-born artist has consistently traced the struggles of civilisations by researching colonialism, labour, and philosophical thought to produce shambolic works that suggest a restlessness, a need to pick up and go Boghiguian’s nomadic existence is integral to her artmaking, which is decidedly site-specific (Critics like to point out the ‘portability’ of her work, as though her oeuvre were a sort of luggage) She roams from country to country, often staging exhibitions that consider issues relating to the region she finds herself in In ‘The Loom of History’ –bewilderingly her first major solo show in the US – she sticks with this approach, overwhelming visitors to the New Museum with cutouts, drawings, paintings, collages, and installations that chart the brutal evictions and exploitations of the cotton industry, to which we owe no less than the global capitalism of today   In lieu of traditional wall text, Boghiguian has scrawled meditations and informative passages in yellow paint on black walls that resemble schoolroom chalkboards They tell the origins of American slavery, of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to the US and his vision of democracy, of the Dutch West India Trade These passages bear established interpretations, and so run the risk of appearing intellectually rote (‘The history of the modern world changed completely with age of exploration,’ begins one paragraph) But their blatancy is indicative of a deeper malaise that permeates Boghiguian’s work More damnable than history, she suggests, is a willed deafness to it Hence this exhibition’s auricular motif, the human ear, which features in visceral paintings, collages, and sculpture as an instruction to listen   The neatness of these narratives and lessons is contrasted by the troupes of paper cutouts – not-quite-lifesize and scruffily painted with encaustic – that huddle in the centre of the gallery Held in place by wooden sticks, these ancient Romans, rightwing protestors, enslaved cotton pickers, soldiers, and arriving immigrants bristle with aching life – the rhythms of harvesting cotton, the drudgery of factory toil, an