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Border Farm at the South London Gallery

dje — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 13:30:53 +0000

On January 28th, the South London Gallery screened Border Farm (2010), a 30 minute film by South African artist Thenjiwe Nkosi. It was the fourth event of Contemporary Africa On Screen, a year-long programme of screenings, discussions and workshops centred on film and video by African artists.

Two excerpts of Thenjiwe Nkosi’s previous work, the Elephant King and Journey to Darfur, a project where the artist recorded views of Darfurian refugees on issues of peace, justice and reconciliation, introduced Nkosi’s new film. It put into context her main concerns revolving around the idea of belonging.

Border Farm is a docudrama about a group of Zimbabwean ‘border jumpers’ who make their way across the Limpopo River to seek work on farms in the far north of South Africa. Nkosi worked with twenty five ‘volunteer’ migrant farm workers living on the border. The movie is part of a larger multimedia project conceived and coordinated by Nkosi, which offered the group the opportunity to speak about their experiences of border jumping through photography, writing, performance and film.

The movie raises interesting questions : are these people crossing the river for economic, political reasons? What will they find on the other side? How are they going to integrate and find their place across the border? The movie revisits a place, much talked about recently with the contested reelection of President Mugabe, from another perspective. In that respect, it answers what is for me the artist’s role in society : interrogate, give a slightly different view on current issues and surroundings.

However, my two main concerns are about the genre chosen for the movie and the targeted audience. Border Farm is a docudrama. The participants wrote the script, played the parts while Nkosi had the final word in the editing process. It shows in the somewhat amateur scenes. The crossing of the river did not convey a real sense of danger. The stories played and told by the group lose some of their power as they do not refer to a more direct personal experience. As regards the audience, Nkosi answered, in a Q&A session at the end of the screening, that it was mainly done for them. It has now been shown on South African TV and screened in a gallery space. I believe the film would have been stronger if the team involved had more clearly defined what they wanted to show and to whom.

The movie is nonetheless well worth seeing and more info on the project can be found on their blog here.

Mothers at Hauser & Wirth

dje — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 16:46:48 +0000

Conceptual artist Martin Creed continues to confound expectations with his latest exhibition of new work currently on show at Hauser & Wirth, Saville Row. Gathering small scale canvases, geometric wall paintings, canine photographs and a cheeky film all under one roof, it’s fair to say that the exhibition’s title ‘Mothers’, is perhaps more than misleading. Aside of course from the absolutely enormous and typographically stunning neon sculpture, spelling out ‘MOTHERS’ in the south gallery.

But still, with dogs, modular shapes and a film of a woman’s breast comprising the majority of Creed’s new multidisciplinary work, one could find an alternative and perhaps more fitting tagline in the title of the artist’s new single/video work ‘Thinking/Not Thinking’, conveniently released alongside the exhibition and available to purchase from the front desk.

The criteria for ‘Not Thinking’ is evident in Creed’s numerous roughly painted and formally simplistic paintings that hang at eye level across the gallery’s walls. Rendered in a palette of pastel pink, brown, yellow and green acrylic paint and repeating basic modular forms, Creed’s mini geometric abstractions are entirely mystifying.

Thick, linear brush strokes that outline rectangular bricks, squares, crosses, horizontal and angled lines reveal more about the impact of colour and expressive quality of hasty painting than any meaningful abstract idea. Elsewhere other poorly executed painterly exercises recur in a series black stripes, crosses and squares, all directly applied to the gallery walls and decreasing in size in an unfinished yet decorative fashion.

Whilst Creed’s paintings occupy the realm of the immediate and unconscious, alternative aspects of ‘Thinking’ are provided by the artist’s lens-based work on show. A black and white film dating from 2007 depicts a female ‘nipple-erection’ in slow motion. In the context of Creed’s title ‘Mothers’, this titillating massaging of breast and nipple seems more aligned to notions of maternal subjectivity than any eroticised sexual desire.

Large format photographic film stills from Creed’s music video additionally extend allusions to the maternal via the unlikely companionship of a Chihuahua and Irish Wolfhound. Standing, running and general posing side by side, Creed seems to comically capture the dichotomy of the mother and child relationship as embodied by the incongruous dogs.

Yet all the irreverence and temporal nature of these works is subsequently counterbalanced by the sheer physical presence and conceptual power of Creed’s monumental sculpture installed a few doors down. ‘MOTHERS’, an 18 ft tall sculpture comprising neon lights balanced on a rotating girder that skims the tops of heads and the edges of gallery walls, is simply breathtaking. In terms of scale, the room can barely contain it, whilst the enormity of the word and all the emotions it implies overwhelms the senses. Illuminated in white neon light, the power of all our ‘MOTHERS’ becomes the poetic centrepiece of Creed’s multifaceted show.

Mothers runs until March 5th at Hauser & Wirth on Savile Row. For more information on Creed’s accompanying music video, see the artist’s website here.

Told at Cole Contemporary

dje — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 15:25:55 +0000

Despite the small scale of Cole Contemporary’s Fitzrovia Gallery space the works in Told do not feel particularly cramped or mashed together. Indeed, despite the exhibition’s overtures towards ideas of narrative, the individual works feel weirdly isolated; hinting at storylines without ever really fulfilling that promise, not exactly talking to each other, rather casting furtive glances across the room at their counterparts or staring blankly at the viewer.

I do not say this is a weakness, however - in this instance it helps make the individual works all the more interesting on their own terms, although perhaps condemning them if seen alone to the general fug of painting and sculpture that quotes from film and news media.

Virginia Phongsathorn’s series of small paintings reference film in perhaps the most obvious way, especially her painting of a Mogwai from the film Gremlins. Her other works hover between near-recognisable imagery and a kind of flattened abstraction, laden with cinematic atmosphere and a feeling of the uncanny without ever fully revealing themselves. Overall, despite being hung as part of a series, the paintings feel like individual mumbled quotes, on the edge of familiarity.

Melissa Jordan’s three floor based sculptures, Crimp, Slipper, and Spread are still less easy to read. Resembling the crumpled remains of once recognisable objects, they crawl and loll somewhat pathetically on the floor whilst somehow retaining the bruised pride of malformed animals or weird lopsided designer commodities. Perhaps stronger is her lightbox piece Hide, whose oddly asymmetrical symmetry of colour and form appears to show two pairs of joined handless sleeves and hints at the psychological and formal depths of the negative.

For me the strongest work in the show was Eve Ackroyd’s series of subdued, washed out paintings, in particular Sad Man, whose intimate scale made it’s bare image all the more uneasy in feel. The paintings show individuals or groups apparently unseeing and isolated from each other and their pared down surroundings; engaged in strange acts or going about their business together in a unsettling, ritualistic manner. With a small town on a Sunday night feel, the works suggest a strange world that is unsettlingly close to our own.

So perhaps the lack of communication in the show is a good thing, helping create a kind of overall non-dialogue that rescues work that may otherwise get lost amongst the mass of art with similar approaches and concerns.

Unheralded Stories at Purdy Hicks

dje — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:32:03 +0000

“Hunter’s photography seems to refer to social policy as much as art history.” This line, pulled from an essay by Tom Birch on Hunter’s website, seems a good encapsulation of the artist’s portfolio. Apt especially because the allegation requires further explanation to understand the underlying truths much like Hunter’s photographs, which when peeled back, reveal several strata of symbolism.

I first came across Hunter’s work when I saw his clever and sensitive commission for the Museum of London, Flashback (2009). So, while I was late coming to the perspective of his enchanting vision, it meant I had such delights to discover.

Unheralded Stories, the second exhibition of Tom Hunter’s work to grace to walls at the Purdy Hicks Gallery is a rich sampling of several favoured subjects. It is well curated: no two photographs are juxtaposed that do not resonate with each other, either by means of subject or compositional nature.

Hunter’s attention is occupied with the local. He is a resident of Hackney, East London, a vibrant and diverse neighbourhood. His portfolio archives the people and places of this unique community.

Each photograph is very considered, offering studied glimpses of Hunter’s vision. He takes great care staging his compositions: akin to a mise en scene, everything is intentional. He sketches his pieces using polaroids and works with the subject in order to tell a story rather than just a moment. These are the narratives of everyday life in his community.

The pieces that resonate most with me in this show are those of empty halls and rooms of community centres. Assembly Hall, by extending the exposure time, suggests the phantoms of a vibrant gathering place. Mildmay, London Fields and Clapton Park capture empty spaces in a similar way: stages, trodden dance floors, audience seating - all these things are present, but the animators, the community are absent. From these pieces I get the sense of how precarious time can be. How things change so quickly, and traditional routines of community become threatened by urban and social pressure.

I am very interested in how Hunter combines his stories of space and people. In my mind, he is leading a kind of ‘portraiture of place’ with these works, and previous series including Prayer Places and the Empty Tower Block series. Sometimes removing the presence of inhabitants allows the space to speak more clearly, showing us the traces of how we live and how we chose to be in the world.

This week

dje — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:52:39 +0000

WEDNESDAY

Join writer and critic Richard Cork this evening at Camden Art Centre as he gives an introductory tour of Never The Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts) with Simon Starling, artist and curator of the exhibition. The exhibition itself is the latest in a series of artist-selected shows at Camden Art Centre and brings together works by 30 artists and designers, revisiting the rich history of the Centre by showing fragments of exhibitions from the past 50 years.

This time from north to south, visit Resonating Surfaces / Attica at the South London Gallery. In parallel to Manon de Boer’s exhibition, this series of screenings presents the works in her trilogy on the 1970s and her film Attica. Resonating Surfaces presents Suely Rolnik, Brazilian art historian and psychoanalyst, talking about her years in Brazil under the military regime and the time she spent in Paris, including her involvement with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Shots of her recounting her story alternate with views of the city of São Paulo.

SATURDAY

Today sees three exhibitions all closing this weekend. Starting with More Pricks Than Kicks, Curated by Vincent Honoré and Patrizio Di Massimo at the David Roberts Foundation. With works from Paul Chan, Nathaniel Mellors and Laure Prouvost (to name a few), the exhibition explores motifs such as the dissolution of language, the theatricalised body and the “breakdown” of an image the exhibition questions how a notion such as “exhaustion” can be formally enacted.

Now for a double bill at the Hauser & Wirth, firstly with Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works at 23 Savile Row. Marking the inauguration of their new space, Bourgeois’s solo exhibition features over seventy fabric drawings made between 2002 and 2008, as well as four large-scale sculptures.

‘I always had the fear of being separated and abandoned. The sewing is my attempt to keep things together and make things whole’. Louise Bourgeois

Over to Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly for Jason Rhoades 1:12 Perfect World. The exhibition is the gallery’s first posthumous show of Jason Rhoades’ work and the artist’s first European solo exhibition since his death in 2006. The exhibition features ’1:12 Perfect World’, Rhoades’ scale model of his groundbreaking 1999 exhibition, ‘Perfect World’ at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. Originally existing as four quarters, the sterling silver model will be brought together in its entirety for the first time.

Shows this week

dje — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:44:41 +0000

MONDAY

Start the week at the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project space. The Centre for Possible Studies is home to screenings, events and an ongoing project archive. Opening this evening Edgware Road Project artists-in-residence no.w.here and Susan Hefuna show a series of exchanges between the Centre for Possible Studies, London and Townhouse Gallery, Cairo. Vice Versa Exchanges Between Cairo and London will show videos made in Cairo whilst simultaneously showing new film work in Cairo made on London’s Edgware Road.

THURSDAY

Thursday night sees at evening of experimental sound at the Whitechapel Gallery. Working in association with the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, artist Kevin Quigley invites avant-garde drummer and percussionist Charles Hayward (This Heat), jazz experimentalist and vibes player Orphy Robinson and artist / performer Marc Vaulbert De Chantilly to devise and produce a series of performances exploring the properties of bells.

Also on Thursday is the No Room to Move book launch at Slade Research Centre, Woburn Square. The book reflects upon the recent era of highly instrumentalised public art making in the UK. Focusing on artists and consultants who have engaged critically with the exclusionary politics of urban regeneration. The main feature of the evening will be a panel discussion (7-8.30pm) with the book’s subjects: Roman Vasseur, Harlow New Town Lead Artist, Alberto Duman, Alberto Duman, Laura Oldfield Ford, Savage Messiah and Dave Beech, FREEE. Together with co-editors Anthony Iles and Josephine Berry Slater they will discuss the aesthetic politics of art making in the context of regeneration.

FRIDAY

For the last chance to see his first exhibition at Gagosian Gallery visit James Turrell’s exhibition composed of new installations, light works, sculptures and prints.

Through light, space can be formed without physical material like concrete or steel. We can actually stop the penetration of vision with where light is and where it isn’t. Like the atmosphere, we can’t see through it to the stars that are there during the day. But as soon as that light is dimmed around the self, then this penetration of vision goes out. So I’m very interested in this feeling, using the eyes to penetrate the space.
–James Turrell

SUNDAY

Lastly for this week make sure to see the solo show by British artist Toby Ziegler at the Zabludowicz Collection before it closes today. The centrepiece of Ziegler‘s exhibition is a vast installation featuring a new body of aluminium sculptures displayed alongside a series of readymades, including a weather balloon and a mechanical bull. Following on from context‐specific projects by artists such as Graham Hudson, Matt Stokes and Florian Slotawa, Ziegler’s installation occupies the main chapel space in the 19th century Methodist chapel at 176 Prince of Wales Road.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2010 at ICA

dje — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:38:01 +0000

Most often described as a showcase for emerging artists, New Contemporaries is as much an indicator of the new work galleries are interested in showing as it of the work new artists are making.

This years crop struck me as particularly diverse, with a wide variety of mediums from drawing and painting to video performance, animation, photography and print. So broad were the range of forms infact that it reads almost as an exercise in demonstrating the possibilities of artistic production, though of course limited to that which is deemed viable in a gallery.

Selectors Gabriel Kuri, Mark Leckey and Dawn Mellor have clearly made a worthy attempt at representing new art in Britain but I must admit I remain unconvinced of their curatorial remit.

With the work of 49 artists featured in the show, there is a lot to pack in to the ICA’s limited space and issues such as sound spillage from the video and sound works and overcrowded sculpture quickly become obvious. There is, however a good number of works well worth spending time with, among them Ed Atkins’ video work A Thousand Centuries of Death.

As if blinking back at the viewer, the serene fields of corn and flares of light switch back and forth hypnotically with the instrumental music and a peephole-like panel at the bottom of the video allows a view through into new images. With Sam Knowles’ stellar drawings on book pages and Jessica Harris’ Rain Translation also in mind, there is a cryptic, somewhat mystical quality drawn through these works.

Other highlights include sculptural toy assemblages by Murray O’Grady and Emma Hart’s playful Dice, a video in which the artist employs a dice to play a game of best of five with the sea. Also keeping with the comical are Kristian de la Riva’s simple yet mildly gruesome animation and the video performance Terracotta Warrior, which features the artist, Pablo Wendal, costumed-up and stood among the ancient sculpted soldiers as if a living statue in a museum display.

Leaving aside the want of space, there is much to appreciate, particularly the moving image works. Yet I remain sceptical of the assurance the show is either thorough representation of new art or an unprecedented platform for emerging artists. With New Contemporaries 2010 artists, such as Laure Provost, already enjoying a degree of success, perhaps there now comes a necessity to nurture a little earlier or rethink ‘emergent’ as a prescription for showing new work.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries continues at the ICA until 23rd January 2011.

Zigelbaum + Coelho at Riflemaker

dje — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:03:24 +0000

Downstairs at Riflemaker, Zigelbaum + Coelho’s installation of pulsating lights resembles the chill out space of an upmarket club. But the piece is more than just a nice piece of lighting or interior design, more than just a passive arrangement of abstract form. The work is interactive, consisting of luminescent blocks, reminiscent of pixels become 3-D tangible form. Visitors are free to move these blocks across two magnetic panels, changing colour and composition by touch as they do, and the block’s rhythmic pulsing by remote control.

Maybe it’s because they come from a design/technology background, but there’s little of your typical London art-world cynicism evident here. In thrall to the possibilities of technology rather than unimpressed by innovative gadgetry or wary about it’s dangers, the work allows visitors to explore digital and physical worlds through very human interaction.

Critics of the digital often concentrate on how our constant immersion in digital worlds cuts out the possibilities of real human interaction, suggesting that the online and hi-tech are somehow replacing our existence in the ‘real’ world. However, Zigelbaum and Coelho’s blocks side step this accusation to a degree by relying so much on physical human presence, on touch and play.

It was illuminating to visit an exhibition and be encouraged to touch; to see gallery visitors lose their inhibitions and play with the space. Visitors can hold hands to complete a circuit of blocks, helping encourage physical communication as well. Here technology opens up a space for social relations, like a touch screen come to life. It is is worth considering, however, how much a visitor’s decisions are controlled by themselves, and to what degree they are influenced in their choices by the technology and form of the work.

The history of technology reveals a tendency towards greater automation, but there has been an interesting turn in the digital recently towards a more human involvement. Much that exists in computer technology still relies on manual interfaces, from touch screens on phones to a simple mouse. This maybe simply because we like to keep it that way, like to keep some semblance of the physical world. Maybe it is through this very human touch that digital technology comes to life for us, seems real. To what degree it is real and how much we control it may depend much on what direction we choose take it, or what direction it takes us.

Zigelbaum + Coelho are showing until 31 March 2011 at Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London, W1F 9SU.

Dirty Kunst at Seventeen

dje — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 14:02:35 +0000

Intense and controversial content is, by courtesy and in some cases by law, prefigured with a warning. Other scenarios remove it altogether. Black bars, muted sound, blurred images- these are key motifs that demonstrate you are denied witness to something society deems unsuitable.

Consider yourself warned, therefore, because Dirty Kunst is dirty. But you wouldn’t know it until you already looked. And then it’s too late. Then you glance around to see if someone saw you looking. This show will make you face the temptation to look and the urge to look away.

Dirty Kunst, on show at Seventeen Gallery until the end of December, comprises numerous international artists hailing from America, France, Chile and the UK; ten artists all together, exhibiting in a small space like Seventeen, makes for rich fodder. Art critic Christian Viveros-Faune is the curatorial mind behind the exhibition. Not one to mince his words, I will make this an earnest review in tribute to his style (a gesture he would probably hate).

My first reaction upon seeing this exhibition can only be described as dislike. It was something along the lines of: another exhibition that brutalises sexuality, takes the love out of sex, and puts it on a surface- makes it grotesque. Patrons of yore were accustomed to having their lovers model in the nude (or in significant contortions of undress) for portraits of goddesses, personifications of seasons, or virtues, thus giving them a guise under which to stare at beacons of lust.

Today, we need no such foolery. Nudity is everywhere- photography, pornography, media images, television. We are saturated, and if the full form is not there, a suggestion of it most likely is. So where is the rush- the feeling of shame and elation upon seeing a nude? Well, you can try making it dirty: Dirty Kunst.

I worried over how I might write about this show such that if my mom or future employer Googled me they won’t find me using bad words in a public forum. So I can’t really describe any of the works. However, many people, I noticed, arrived and left within five to ten minutes. Under these circumstances you miss the smaller tensions that operate here.

There is beauty in this show. There is skill in artistic medium, it’s just disguised, I feel. Much like Renaissance patrons, there is another surface to this show. Dirty minds, as is stated in the gallery brief, are at work.

Newspeak part II at The Saatchi Gallery

dje — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 13:03:23 +0000

How to review a show this big in only 400 words? Get on with it I suppose…

As you may expect from a Saatchi show, Newspeak: British Art Now is heavy on painting and sculpture, arranged in what comes across as loosely thematic or stylistically similar rooms.

In the first room Ansel Krut’s playful paintings catch the eye. Bright, cartoony and somehow absurd, Krut’s works seem to explore the formal and art-historical qualities of painting without ever slipping into dull formalism, with Matelot (Jolly Jack Tar) and Napoleon on Elba particularly strong.

More subdued in execution but with a pleasingly quiet wit and lightness of touch are works by Maurizio Anzeri, Alan Brooks and Clarisse d’Arcimoles.

Anzeri’s photographic and embroidered works, such as the sinister Giovanni, overlay quiet portrait images with embroidered abstract form. Appearing like futuristic fashion designs from yesterday, the veiled images are eerie and unsettling yet tender in execution.

Brook’s exquisitely rendered drawings are taken from old photographs of 20th Century artists next to their iconic works. Forming a strange archive of changing artistic personalities, styles and fashions, the works feel like a melancholic homage to the lost heroes of modernism.

Also documentary in feel are d’Arcimole’s witty photographs, where friends and family painstakingly re-enact old childhood snapshots of themselves. Riffing on differences between the snapshot and the posed, d’Arcimole’s photo’s offer a deadpan comment on the formal language of the photographic moment.

Perhaps the most eye-catchingly strong piece in the show is Tessa Farmer’s Swarm. Minute winged figures, appearing like skeletal fairies or microscopic angels, swarm around inside a large vitrine. Malevolent and mischievous in atmosphere, the tiny creatures mob insects, who’s broken forms lie below. Farmer’s vicious beings are repulsive yet fascinating in their museological display case, and are far removed from the gentle fairies of Victorian imaginations; appearing as both the object of study yet a source of threat.

Overall, whilst strong work is exhibited, Newspeak is definitely a Saatchi show, with more traditional practices predominating over experimental approaches. Even artists whose work is generally performative are represented by objects, with several of Spartacus Chetwynd’s awkward performance costumes on display. Whether Saatchi has simply bought these so as not to appear out of touch and whether such a disparate collection of artists can really be claimed to fully represent British art now, rather than simply the more commercial side of it is, however, debatable.