It’s the final week to catch the remainder of the condo shows so we ran around as many as possible. Pilar Corias was first on the list and as you enter you get Ken Okiishi a personal solo show composed by installation, video and photographs concerning the artist’s meditation on his childhood. All their childhood possessions are in boxes that fill the gallery floor. It’s actually a very hard hitting show and made us think about identity and how having such a mixed and complex one might make you feel like you have no true home.
For Condo, the gallery’s basement had a film by artist duo Felix Bernstein & Gabe Rubin all about gender, transgender and queerness. With such over the top costumes it’s impossible not to think about Rachel Maclean.
Sadie Coles has some boring sculptures and some even more boring paintings.
Arcadia Missa’s new space is so incredibly small. The busts are fairly horrible but was fun to have a glittery floor.
Rodeo had a huge, immersive and site-specific exhibition by Adriano Amaral. Reminded us a lot of old sci-fi films which is never bad but the sculptures were a bit too much.
Southard Reid was quite bland but funny to see Bedwyr Williams’ mocking ink drawings that we’ve been seeing on Instagram for so long now.
Finally, we had Cork Street hosting Koppe Astner, Project Native Informant, Mother’s Tankstation and Dan Gunn. The only work which we actually enjoyed in the building was ‘XOXO, Safety Net’ by DIS Collective. The video imagines Serena and Blair embracing a different sort of safety net, namely, socialism, in between checking their gold Motorola phones. It also features an ersatz Gossip Girl cast delivering socialist wisdom like “Workers should benefit from the surplus value they create,” and “Tax income from property, not labour,” and “End inheritance, bring back the death tax.”
And some good news, we got into the next bf film festival which is going to be held in Leeds and again shown at SET in Dalston! We’re going to be showing ‘Story Time with Mr. Orange’ and it’s nice to have the piece show as it was made about a year ago ad since it was before the degree show it kind of got a bit swallowed by the process.