Bow Scansions (2014) is a conversation, in car and by foot, with the filmmaker William Raban. Proceeding from Bow, where he has lived for over forty years, Raban shares his Tower Hamlets: Gentrified docks, BNP Wards, Balfron Tower, and Kray Twins nostalgia — among many motifs in his films. It was commissioned as part ofread more
Month: March 2017
Camille Henrot: Chisenhale
When Heinrich Wölfflin makes concluding observations on the nature of history in Principles of Art History (1932), in spite of himself, he cannot help reaching for images of complexity. How do we account for cessation and recommencement of art historical periods? ‘Only a spiral would meet the facts,’ he writes. How do we speak ofread more
Contemporary Photography Theory: The Photographers’ Gallery
Contemporary Photography Theory: The Photographers’ Gallery Monday evenings, 30 January – 20 March 2017 ABOUT Recent voices of dissent within higher education have argued that photography theory has not developed its scope of subject matter or its theoretical horizons sufficiently to account for the many processes, often digital and networked, it finds itself ingrained within.read more
Christodoulos Panayiotou: RODEO
Almost exactly a decade before Christodoulos Panayiotou opened his recent show “False Form,” the Cypriot artist convened a roundtable at the University of Oxford among an astrophysicist, a historian of antiquity, a philosopher, and an artist, Jem Finer, on the theme of absence. The antiquarian introduced negative theology as a way to think beyond reason;read more
The Moving Museum: Şişhane Otopark, Istanbul
Contemporary art is often what occupies spaces after commerce has departed, or is yet to arrive. The Moving Museum’s Istanbul exhibition found temporary residence in Şişhane Otopark, a soon-to-be-open underground multi-storey carpark. Its street-level carapace, Şişhane Park, incorporates ‘sunset decks’ east-facing across the Bosporous and an outdoor ‘theatric room’. The park’s still incomplete mezzanine levelread more
The Infinite Mix: The Hayward Gallery at 180 The Strand
I arrived at ‘The Infinite Mix’, a Hayward offsite exhibition, organized in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory while the gallery’s Southbank home is being refurbished, some time after the other critics had been and gone. ‘The Infinite Mix’, Ben Luke wrote in London’s Evening Standard, is ‘a contender for the show of the year’; ‘Wonderful,’read more
Alien Formalism: Actuality and Abstraction
‘[Form] prolongs and diffuses itself throughout our dreams and fancies: we regard it, as it were, as a kind of fissure through which crowds of images aspiring to birth may be introduced into some indefinite realm…’ – Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 1934 Annette Kelm’s constructed photographs of ordinary things offer usread more
S, s, s, s sommme P, p,p,p,proxim, im, im, ity
‘No one who uses money is unchanged by that. No one who uses money can easily get a look at their own practice.’ – Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost Simultaneously I move with, and have been moved by, Adam Linder’s work Some Proximity, the second in an ongoing series of ‘choreographic services’ that haveread more
Put Me On: #Accumulator_plus
This is the tang in the air: tough love, zero tolerance, ever-growing inequality, CCTVs, ASBOs, and an ‘intensely relaxed’ attitude to what was fuelling the economic boom they said would never bust.– Dan Hancox, Stand up Tall: Dizzee Rascal and the Birth of Grime Shearsmith House in Stepney Green is one of a triumvirate ofread more
Malcolm Le Grice: Richard Saltoun
As a filmmaker who, like many others of his generation, rented rather than sold work through the London Filmmakers’ Co-operative, Malcolm Le Grice’s first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery raises questions about the display, distribution and, finally, perhaps, displacement of such work. While the exhibition’s playful title – ‘No Idea’ – might inadvertently reflectread more