installation
Sarah Kent
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work.The video, Measures of Distance, 1988 (pictured below right) is a moving reflection on the love she feels for her mother, far away in war-torn Beirut. The screen is covered in a veil of arabic writing (her mother’s letters) Read more ...
Clem Hitchcock
Artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah’s multi-screen film installation Vertigo Sea is an epic meditation on mankind’s relationship with the watery world. Exploring themes of migration, environmental destruction and slavery, it was one of the most talked about works at last year’s Venice Biennale. Now at Bristol’s Arnolfini, the location couldn’t be more fitting. Housed in an old warehouse, the gallery is just a stone’s throw from the city’s floating harbour, near where, three centuries ago, ships arrived laden with human cargo.Akomfrah took his cue from a radio interview with young Nigerian Read more ...
David Nice
To liberate traffic-choked city streets for pedestrians, to suspend phantasmagorical, literally high art above their heads and give a sense that London belongs to them: that’s an admirable vision, surely. Artichoke has been wowing the crowds since it brought Royal de Luxe’s The Sultan’s Elephant to town in 2006. Its festivals of light have drawn crowds and prestige to Durham in three alternate years, and to Derry-Londonderry. Could Lumiere work in as diffuse a city as London?That would depend on what you saw and how crowded it was where you were. Last night I gave up on the installations from Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Following his inclusion in this year’s Venice and Istanbul biennials, Italian artist Fabio Mauri has leapt into the limelight. He is from the same generation as Mario Merz; but whereas Merz and his Arte Povera colleagues have long since enjoyed an international reputation for work which features non-art materials in a raw state (hence the name "Poor Art"), Mauri has languished in relative obscurity – until now, that is.Oscuramento, his first solo show in London for 20 years, provides the chance to catch up; but there is a problem – how to contextualise work which feels dated, because it was Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The first thing you encounter is a ballot box bolted to the lid of a school desk; what or whom you might be voting for – apart from the hope of change – is not specified. In the eyes of Jimmie Durham, change is badly needed; in fact, most of the premises on which western society is built could do with a radical rethink. Judging by the state of the box, though – the lid looks as if it has been prized open and bolted down many times – fair and free elections seem unlikely. Mostly probably, the outcome would be rigged.Nearby is a revolving door that returns you (rather like a rigged election) to Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Thanks to its international festival and a thriving catalogue of fringe events, May brings a great deal of noise to Brighton. Putting artwork into this saturated landscape can never be easy. But Nathan Coley has managed to inject some critical thinking and reflectivity.HIs best-known works, quotations in illuminated text, blazon themselves on the mind. They occupy a tidy niche and reproduce well in books, magazines and social media updates. So when you first see his work here on the south coast, in an 11th-century church no less, you might for a moment get a sense that, were this not a cosy Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Anselm Kiefer reminds me a bit of someone I once worked for. Totally unpredictable, and possessed of a formidable intelligence and creativity, his mental leaps can be bewilderingly hard to follow, leading occasionally to truly breathtaking results, but crashing and burning just as often. Everyone else, like me, or in Kiefer’s case his long-suffering assistant Tony, not to mention poor old Alan Yentob, has to trot along behind, barely able to keep up with the barrage of ideas, questions and orders, let alone judge whether any of it is any good.Early on, Yentob was struggling to keep abreast of Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Her name sounds like a brand of cigarettes, and an aura of corporate anonymity seems remarkably apt for this American artist who specialises in replicating other people’s work and sampling clips from online video libraries. Borrowed from the BBC’s Motion Gallery, the ingredients for Rock & Rap Act 3 Simulacra (2012) include a hooting owl (pictured below right), a bright green tree frog, a predatory spider, buds unfurling into gorgeous blooms, gurgling water, and a sprinter, diver and weight lifter – the kind of feel-good images often found on glossy birthday cards. They are intercut into Read more ...
fisun.guner
How long will it take for the penny to finally drop and to know we’ve been had all along? Months? Years? Ten years? Twenty? Will it really take that long before we come to our senses, and to wonder at our own gullibility? I’m talking not of Damien Hirst, who some now imagine has been conning us all for years, but of the execrable Lady Gaga. Yes, Gaga must be “exposed”! For is pap in pop really any lesser crime than art pap? You might think it is, even though, through the Nineties, both Britpop and Britart bobbed along on the crest of a Cool Britannia wave. They woz soulmates.We don’t expect Read more ...
fisun.guner
Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.Showing just how adept she was at garnering publicity, in 1968 Kusama wrote and distributed Open Letter to My Hero Richard M Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The Serpentine’s north gallery has been transformed into a magical space (main picture). Strung from floor to ceiling of the darkened room, shafts of copper wire glimmer in subdued lighting like sunbeams, or the searchlights that scanned the night sky for enemy aircraft during World War Two.As you walk around them, the threads visually overlap to produce shimmering moiré patterns. The structure is extremely simple, but rather than diminishing its impact, figuring out how it is done only enhances its mesmeric effect. The installation is titled Web and weaving threads of light through Read more ...