We visited the Whitechapel Open exhibition this week which we have mixed feelings about. The show is a paid open call which feels weird for a publicly funded gallery but maybe that’s just us… The show itself was pretty great, our favourite work being Larry Achiampong’s Relic Traveler 1 which features an individual roaming across desolate sites uncovering fragments of audible data presenting clue-like testimonies to a forgotten Empire. They then find themselves in an atmosphere that simultaneously delivers poetic moments of the sublime met with increasingly harrowing claustrophobia and tales of trauma. It results in a familiar feeling of otherness, we are invited on a journey that embodies hysteria.
Was excellent to see Richard Healy’s film again from his show at Tenderpixel which was all about magic and the tension between stasis and transformation. If you haven’t seen it we would highly recommend you seek it out; it shows a succession of interconnected architectural spaces, whilst following the path of a fictional narrator – half architect, half shaman – who explores his self-erected environment through a series of sexual encounters.
