Visual arts
Sarah Kent
Dear Earth, Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis is a mixed show of artists who address the parlous plight of our planet. The issue obsesses me, so anyone who braves the pitfalls of exploring this difficult subject has my sympathy.One challenge: how to create work about climate change that doesn’t make your audience suicidally depressed? Another: how to translate anger, despair and activism into good art that can inspire as well as enlighten? The exhibition amply demonstrates how hard this is.One of the most impactful pieces is shown outside. Peter Kennard who, for decades, has made politically Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Standing just inside the door of the Whitechapel’s downstairs gallery is a luggage trolley laden with parcels (pictured below, right). This forlorn object looks as if it’s waiting to be collected, but the owner seems to have gone AWOL.The packages are labelled, not with names and addresses but descriptions of the contents, as if they had come from a museum archive.“Bima curtain,” reads one label. “Large, dark blue velvet cloth with heavy gilt ribbon trim and gilt fringing. Condition: torn in several places, much stained, creased and damp when found.” The items were retrieved from the gutter Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings.By way of introduction, the first room makes no sense, though. Picasso once said – probably as a riposte to anyone criticising his disregard for surface appearances – “photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and even from the Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
A visitor to the city wishes to gain access to the law, but a gatekeeper blocks his entrance. The man petitions this imposing figure, who is only one of a series of legal bouncers. He is told there is gate after gate. He sits, he waits, he lies down, and eventually he expires. But not before making a close study of this implacable representative of the law. He even notes the fleas in the gatekeeper’s collar.Such is the fate of a character in Franz Kafka’s paranoid short story Before the Law. It comes to mind since visitors to the Carey Young show at Modern Art Oxford are invited to spend, if Read more ...
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
It is fitting that I watch Otobong Nkanga’s performance on a stranger’s smartphone screen. Solid Maneuvers, 2015, is about the extraction of precious resources from the Namibian landscape. It is about the long-term devastation humans wreak on the natural world and the equally devastating consequences nature revisits on us. But it is also concerned with the more than symbiotic relationship we have with the land itself – the very soil we depend upon, are made of and to which we will return. Scattering mineral and metallic sands – the exact elements found in our Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Who created the term “electronic superhighway”? First described a system of linked communication that would become the internet? Envisioned a multichannel TV system where viewers chose for themselves what to tune into? Watch Amanda Kim’s excellent documentary Moon Is the Oldest TV and you find that the correct answer to all those questions is Nam June Paik.A diminutive impish South Korean, Paik was born into an eminent wealthy Seoul family, on a par with the Samsungs, and by 17 knew he had to get out. He had become a Marxist, then a communist. His intellectual interests would take him to Read more ...
Sarah Kent
One of the great things about Artangel is the interesting sites which they seek out for the artworks they commission. The latest find is the disused waiting room at Peckham Rye station, a once gracious space with a vaulted ceiling, arched windows and two fireplaces, now ripped out. The space was later converted into a billiard hall, the sign for which is still visible on the staircase wall, but when that closed down in 1962, the room was left to rot.Artangel always works with top notch artists, the latest of whom is the American Sarah Sze. It’s 25 years since she created an installation in Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Isaac Julien was a student at St Martin’s School of Art when the Brixton riots broke out. Black youths took to the streets, frustrated by high rates of unemployment, police harassment, far-right intimidation and media hostility, and all hell was let loose.The following year, 21-year-old Colin Roach was shot at the entrance to Stoke Newington Police Station and this time Julien felt he had to respond. “I was determined,” he said, “to appropriate video art techniques and repurpose them for the street.” Made with Sankofa Film and Video Collective, Who Killed Colin Roach?, 1983 records the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
In this juxtaposition of Piet Mondrian, a world famous modernist, and Hilma af Klint, a little known Swedish painter, guess who knocks your socks off ! This fascinating show is a delight and a revelation, because it declares the spiritualist underpinnings of modernism which many, until now, have sought to hide.The exhibition comes to a climax in the very last room. Ten huge paintings – 10 foot by 8 – enfold you in the world of Hilma af Klint. The theme of this joyous installation is the progression from childhood to old age (pictured below: "Youth", 1907). Gliding across vibrantly coloured Read more ...
mark.kidel
The fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower in London’s North Kensington on 14 June, 2017, with a death toll of 72, is still under investigation. The dead were largely recent immigrants to the UK. The tragedy, it’s clear now, was caused by an unholy mixture of neglect, racism, greed and corruption. There’s been much shameful denial and buck-passing, and the issues around the building’s shockingly inadequate cladding haven’t led to much action elsewhere.Steve McQueen’s film, now showing in a continuous programme at the Serpentine Gallery, addresses these issues with a mixture of anger and Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
In the centre of a Venn diagram linking climate change to the mystic landscape of Dartmoor and the West Country, sits this tightly conceived show about "green" witchcraft in contemporary art. Witches were once very common in this part of the world; the last witch to be executed in Britain was from Exeter. The local museum has invited a selection of artists to contemplate this local history and the result has brought the dark arts into the light of a 21st-century space for art.Of the four artists who have been invited to engage with the collection at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei has created an extremely beautiful installation at the Design Museum in which the disparate elements play their part in creating a powerful overall message. On one level the exhibition is about design, but it also invites you to consider far more serious issues than are normally addressed in this temple to consumerism.A deep sense of loss permeates the exhibition. In fact, the longer I stayed the more I was reminded of the terrible photographs taken at Auschwitz that record the mounds of hair and piles of shoes collected from those killed in the camp’s gas Read more ...