‘Oh’, she said. I looked down and saw the lady. She looked confused. ‘I thought those legs were part of the artwork, but they’re yours’. The legs in question were mine. They were stood on a ladder while the upper half of my body had disappeared into the attic. It had been watching a fairly horrendous film in which two men were making something unidentifiable[…..]
Geraldine Javier’s show Museum of Many Things at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery presents an amalgamation of vintage mementos, framed animal skeletons, stuffed birds and elaborate needlework in a contemporary take of a Victorian-styled cabinet of curiosities. While Javier’s assembly of curios appears to be a whimsical indulgence of the macabre, it is as much a nostalgic take on death’s inevitability as it is[…..]
Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit[…..]
Vincent Vulsma’s exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam explores the use of appropriation through the history of Dutch colonial expansion. He presents a contemporary artistic perspective on our relationship with colonialism beyond imperial history. Using and re-working a number of works originally seen in the ‘African Negro Art’ exhibition in New York’s MOMA in 1935, Vulsma displays the historic artifacts along with modern designs,[…..]
Anna Nazzari’s exhibition Horse Play at Turner Galleries presents the losing game, and the dogged impulse to try again, as an inescapable aspect of the human condition. With a nod to the absurdist existentialism of Albert Camus, Nazzari’s games, which are impossible to win, allude to the futile quest for meaning in an inherently meaningless world. For Nazzari, this nightmarish scenario provides the ground to[…..]
The idea is of an artist being a/n (insert nationality here) artist is becoming a thing of the past. This isn’t politically correct posturing, it’s reality now that the smartest artists today work locally and show globally. Conceptually it’s not a viable option to sit still in one environment understanding only what you consider native, and economically it’s not possible for a single city to[…..]
The work of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg is defined by duality. A partnership between artist and musician, their stop-motion animation videos and haunting audio tracks precariously balance horror and humour, immersing child-like puppets in a world where perversion, violence, aggression, and power dominate. In their latest exhibition in London, the artists explore the medium of glass and its materiality – fragility becomes threatening and[…..]
