e a s t l o n d o n e x h i b i t i o n s

Hit up a few shows this week. The first was Soufiane Ababri at Space Studios. The installation is made up of a series of drawings; a chain of dancing figures painted directly on the wall; a sculptural form functioning as a barrier to restrict movement as well as a football enclosure; an audio piece of boisterously cheering football fans; and a macabre performance by three young men embodying characteristics of Holiday, Fashanu and Malcolm X. The exhibition’s central point are the 6 intimate and erotically explicit drawings entitled Beautiful Fruit, inspired by pornographic films of gay black men engaged in sexual acts with each other. The drawings attempt to dislodge the black body from tropes of blackness and hyper-masculinity, such as athleticism and animalism, which have been deeply inscribed by the Western heterosexual and racialised colonial gaze. 

Next was Cell Project Space with Alan Michael’s Astrology and the City. It’s one of those shows of paintings that are nearly interesting but really the artist is just trying to find a thoughtful context for work they’ve already decided to make. The show is a series of paintings based on photographs of models hired from an agency who are documented wandering through central London, using clichéd formats of classical street-photography and fashion editorials as reference points. 

After that we headed to IMT Gallery for a group show titled Chop Leisure. It’s an exhibition of ideas designed on much the same principles as present-day motorway junctions. Our favourite aspect was the focus on genre fiction and storytelling. As you enter the exhibition go immediately to the photo collage to greet the figure standing in front of it. The press release is very well written too – really takes you on a journey. 

Finally, we had Ryder which felt pretty weird. At certain times during the exhibition, vocalists and performers transform the gallery into an immersive theatre of light and sound. Live voices activate space, producing a chorus that seems to emerge from a primitive instinct, atmospheric resonations that undulate like wind. Natural sounds and chants rise, articulating a transformation from state to state in a sonic ecosystem that is alive and active. 

Actually, quite looking forward to looking round Frieze next week. Even though it’s not always the best place for art it’s quite fun all the same.

m i x e d f e e l i n g s

Lawrence Abu Handman had an opening at Chisenhale this week and we’ve got some seriously mixed feelings about it… 

The idea of sonic memories and how not all things look the way they sound or sound the way they look is very exciting. However, the show itself is a room full of crap. There’s a bin full of plastic tubing and a cricket bat, a stepladder, metal shelves covered with popcorn, teacups and trainers, watermelons on the floor, big bottles of fizzy drink, a paddling pool. Just a bunch of stuff hastily and messily laid out. The display is frustrating; it feels too much like art objects/trendy assemblages. They aren’t random though, the objects all relate to testimonies such as someone who has described gunshots sounding like “the popping of balloons” or the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy like “somebody dropping a rack of trays”. There’s an additional element to the show which is a pitch-black listening room where you sit and listen to interviews the artist did with detainees of the Syrian prison of Saydnaya. This also makes us feel slightly conflicted because he’s profiting off the pain and suffering of the victims of the sound recordings. Overall, it’s a pretty great show and even one that made us slightly jealous; we also had the opportunity to listen to Handman talk more about his ideas which always helps to sell a show.

f r o m r a g s t o r i c h e s

Jenny Holzer has a new artist room at Tate Modern which we took a visit to. Other than showing a great span of her very exciting work, it also shows what happens to certain artists when they are given more money; older artists seem to just do what they’ve always done but in a more expensive way. An example being that she used to print her text works on cheap things just as t-shirts and cups, now it’s marble benches and massive LED light strips. This is in no way a criticism but it does make for a weird and very traceable lineage. The legacy does make for a good show which is definitely something which is valued in the artworld.

Went to an opening at Anka Kutleys by Olga Fedorova. We were mostly excited by the massive USB drives made of granite, almost like gravestones to the analogue era.

s i t e s p e c i f i c a r t c o m e s i n m a n y f o r m s

Holiday time meant we got some reading in. We went for Miwon Kwon’s One Place After Another which is about site-specific art and approaching it as a “problem-idea” (using the authors words) according to its political, cultural and even social dimensions. The author analyses the different reconfigurations of site-specific as a genre within the cultural frame, considering the political and social problematics that accompanied the evolution of site-specific art since the 1960s. 

We always knew we were making work that might blend in to the background or work that is specific to the place but until the last year or so we never thought of it as site specific but reading this book really did cement it in our minds; the work and its context are inseparable. There’s also a great quote by Richard Serra's "to remove the work is to destroy the work". Something which we definitely relate to, we barely keep any of the work we produce because it doesn’t make sense outside of its current situation.