Category: Review
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For the brilliantly bizarre AUTOPSY group show, Seventeen repositions contemporary issues of AI, post-truth and conspiratorial paranoia into good old-fashioned cult and science fiction. Science fiction is a paradoxical genre. In the heyday of B-movies, legacy television and cultural responses to conspiracy politics, visions of what technology could provide (or destroy) in the future were…
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With Good Night, Asako Ujita presents a beautiful, intimate exploration of culture, place and memory at the margins of light, image and sound. Stretching the bounds of meaning and understanding, Good Night operates entirely in the realm of memory; arguably a landscape work above all else, Ujita’s practice of understanding the past relies on listening through silence,…
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Marking the end of three years of research, Patent 3306x is Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s pithy exploration of repetition, categorisation, and ephemera through the ages—from biological taxonomy to sex-driven songwriting. Running concurrently with a show at Modern Art Oxford that includes sound recordings on historic instruments, Boakye-Yiadom’s NıCOLETTı show is as much a presentation of research…
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Kulpreet Singh’s short statement on climate change and agricultural crisis, Indelible Black Marks, leaves much unsaid—an ongoing problem with climate justice art. Nonetheless, the Hayward Gallery show could not have come at a better time. For his first solo show in the UK, Kulpreet Singh plays with ideas of trace, action and immediacy to bring…
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The experimental-filmmaking duo dmstfctn (pronounced demystification) adopt an irreverent approach to technologies of the future. In 2022, they transformed a replica of a supermarket AI training ground into an interactive video game. In 2024, they set a live film simulation in a purgatory for AIs who cheat during training, and an on-chain text game in…
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Presented for the first time in the UK, Tate Modern’s Ana Mendieta retrospective manages to be expansive while also zeroing in on the artist’s core themes and symbols—if at the expense of their broader meaning in contemporary society. It is hard to pinpoint along which lines Tate has organised this enormous retrospective. The sections somewhat…
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Several fairies adorn the expansive windows of Josh Lilley Gallery, hovering in the sun. Their small figures are suspended before various gaudy shades of sateen curtains within the alcoves. Some hold tiny lanterns and bulbs that flicker against the sheen of the glass and drape of the fabric, others are swathed in elaborate adornments. Under…
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As night falls on Manchester, Valentin Noujaïm and Space Afrika audio-visual hellscape The Dark Wood comes to life, confronting social and political collapse to fight for a brighter daybreak. For an installation concerned with architectural ruin, The Dark Wood presents its case with a deft symmetry. In the ICA’s Upper Gallery, each contribution by Noujaïm…
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Moyra Davey’s short history of four famous artists and their Ukrainian roots is a quiet contemplation on cultural memory, preservation and identity. Much of what drives cultural displacement, invasion and colonisation today is a future based in the past. It’s long been a quality of the postmodern world that the beliefs that fuelled conflicts and…
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By virtue of its process, we arrive at Seth Price’s ever-evolving video work, Redistribution, in the middle—a reminder that “everybody does, always.” First conceived as a slide lecture delivered by the artist at the Guggenheim in 2007 and subsequently reconfigured as a long-form video work, the current exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ Kingly Street gallery…
