Only later, reconstructing my visit, did I realize SALT Beyoğlu’s elevator had both deposited me into stratified earth and lifted me amid exploding fireworks. This feeling spanned the three floors of Akram Zaatari’s survey exhibition: a tender tryst of inward- and outward-bearing forces, graveness defused by airy affection, and vice-versa. Zaatari has long used archaeologicalread more
Category: Exhibition Review
Bob Cobbing: Exhibition Research Centre
‘Adventure, Aventure, Aventereure, Adventure’ – the iconic opening words of Bob Cobbing’s Sound Poem, 1965, otherwise known as ABC in Sound. Over the duration of 22 minutes, beginning with A and ending with Z, Cobbing recombines letters, words and sounds to effectively rewrite the linguistic institution of the English language. It is a mythic rebeginningread more
Art Sheffield 2016: Various venues
There’s something curiously out of time about Art Sheffield 2016. While this year’s Glasgow International largely sidesteps political engagement – sidelined for a bohemianism of the senses, Art Sheffield addresses big humanist themes: underlying scientific patterns of life, legacies of de-industrialization, utopianism and freedom. Curated by Martin Clark (co-curator of the 2009 Tate touring exhibitionread more
Beatrice Loft Schulz: Arcadia Missa
To enter Beatrice Loft Schulz’s “Living Arrangement #” meant passing through a ten-foot-wide, New Agey, patterned curtain of glass beads laboriously threaded by the artist. In advance of the exhibition’s opening, Arcadia Missa director Rosza Farkas told me, Schulz and her assistant, Ruby Read, performed a magic spell to harness the earth’s energy for theread more
Amanda Beech: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
When Sunderland City Council announced last September the imminent closure of its City Library building, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, which had occupied a floor since opening in 1995, received notice of eviction. Venueless, NGCA negotiated with the Baltic to host Amanda Beech’s upcoming exhibition, ‘Covenant Transport Move or Die’, at short notice. Whileread more
Edward Thomasson: Southard Reid
Unwittingly enacting something central to Edward Thomasson’s exhibition “Other People,” I reflexively supplemented its title to constitute Jean-Paul Sartre’s familiar aphorism “Hell is . . .” Abstracted from its context, the line has become the meme-like slogan of misanthropes. Its separatist ideal, latently theological, envisions withdrawal into the self, the logical consequence of which isread more