Haroon Mirza’s exhibition at Ikon, ‘reality is somehow what we expect it to be’, is the artist’s most comprehensive since his 2015 survey at Museum Tinguely in Basel and his largest to date in the UK. Yet, despite featuring 31 works across two floors – including the influential installation Taka Tak (2008) and The Nationalread more
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Hannah Sawtell, #STANDARDISER, Focal Point Gallery
Tilbury Port, 1967: the design critic Reyner Banham noted vast shed-lined landscapes of single, unbroken ten-acre tracts. The shed, ‘a stiff tent’ made of hi-tech materials, corrugated asbestos and ribbed aluminium, found its form around the increased import of containerized goods in standardized steel containers. An early Modernist ideal made manifest, these sheds could beread more
Enthusiasm: Donlon Books
In Norwich, where I moved last winter from London, bookshops are lifestyle centres for upper middle-class priggishness, local batch coffee and inspirational notebooks. ‘You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’ is a vituperous cliché but it teaches something about enthusiasm. Each time I stuck my head into Donlon Books – staying first forread more
Eileen Quinlan Campoli Presti
Whether you call it ‘new photography’, ‘new formalism’ or, as Aaron Schuman opted for in frieze 170, ‘constructed photography’, Eileen Quinlan is exemplary. It’s not that new anymore. Alongside Annette Kelm and Josephine Pryde, with whom she exhibited in MoMA’s ‘New Photography 2013’, as well as Walead Beshty, Lucas Blalock and Mariah Robertson, Quinlan problematizesread more
The House of Fame, Nottingham Contemporary
‘The House of Fame’ consists of four houses ‘convened’ by Linder: ‘The House of the Future’; ‘The House of Rest’; ‘The House of Unrest’; and ‘The Abode of Sound’. Houses within a house housed by – under the roof of – Nottingham Contemporary. Equally mysterious, perhaps, as the institutional processes of an art gallery, ‘houseread more
Postcard from Vietnam
Several days after our arrival in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) – I was travelling with my sister, brother and cousin – the Vietnamese Defence Minister, General Ngô Xuân, received US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis for closed-door talks on a $183m clean-up operation of nearby Biên Hòa airport. A little more than an hour’s driveread more
Creative Workplace Summit, A Postcard from Great Yarmouth
Earlier this year the Great Yarmouth-born filmmaker Greg King introduced me via email to a ‘video content producer’ – we’ll call this person ‘Alex’ – for the Guardian newspaper. (Greg, a former professional skateboarder, directed several influential East Anglian scene films, including Reservoir Skates, 1997-98, and Underground and Overrated, 2002, and taught Lewis ‘Chewy’ Cannon,read more
‘New Order: Art, Product, Image, 1976-1995’, Sprüth Magers Gallery London / BANK: ‘Summa’, Piper Keys London
For the so-called young British artists, 1995 was, according to the writer Michael Bracewell, curator of ‘New Order: Art, Product, Image: 1976-1995’, what 1976 had been for London punk – a mythical Year Zero. Between these zeroes, British self-image and identity – and the ascendant ‘style wars’, as Peter York called them, later brilliantly theorisedread more
Stephan Dillemuth at 3236RLS/LE BOURGEOIS, Eros House
When the French restaurant beneath Eros House in Catford was evicted following complaints of late-night raves-cum-orgies, the new tenants kept its name: Le Bourgeois. It’s an irony not lost on Stephan Dillemuth. Crummy, gleeful, serious, his installations in “Diskodekorationen: From Another Century” literally decorate a disco, or what’d been a sort of disco before theread more
Per Kirkeby Brick Sculpture
Perhaps, we reasoned, Per Kirkeby would allow us to construct a small modular brick column such as those in his solo exhibition ‘Fliegende Blätter’ at Museum Folkwang Essen in 1977. Not a large institution or public-facing commissioning body – the contexts for most, if not all, of Kirkeby’s brick sculptures – but a non-commercial artist-ledread more