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Review May 14 2009 « | »
One Hand Clap at Ada Street Gallery Goldsmith graduate collective Dial Zero take over the Ada Street Gallery

Agnieszka Gratza

You wouldn't want to dwell on the chosen theme of 'conversation and its role in art-making' or query its overall relevance for this group show of Goldsmiths' graduates who go by the elusive name of Dial Zero.

The avowed aim of stimulating dialogue and fostering exchange between individual artists has certainly been achieved. As I make my way round the two storeys of Ada Street Gallery, imaginatively used to show to their best advantage works spanning a wide range of media (film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing), everyone is busy chatting away and catching up at what has the feel of a school reunion.

Conversation, such as it is, appears one-sided in the angst-ridden melancholy works displayed on the ground floor of the gallery. A young woman dressed in black vents her anger and consternation (at whom?) in a video projected against the bare brick wall of the gallery. Solitude provides the linking thread between the twin black-and-white photographic prints displayed in the windows, depicting a lone daffodil and a tomb-stone; the structure made of wooden planks roughly nailed together to evoke a capsized boat with

a perfunctory flag sticking out of its hulk; and the film featuring a red-hooded girl that the camera follows around as she gathers pearls amid a snowy forest - one of the most arresting pieces of the show.

This self-consciously sombre mood, which gives way to brighter colours and even a touch of playfulness upstairs, is hardly alleviated by the solo appearance of the self-styled 'Head Gardener of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon', a title that doesn't quite live up to its promise. In one of several performances programmed to accompany the exhibition, he proceeds to narrate his encounter with Death in increasingly whining tones, before an increasingly bemused audience. A living proof of 'the frustrations and the failures of communication'.

'Dial Zero: One Hand Clap' is showing at Ada Street Gallery, 2a Ada Street, E8 4QU, off Broadway Market, from 13th to 17th May. For details of the exhibition, click {here}.

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