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02/11/2025 Knock Down, the Life and Times of John Tabernacle, Corpsing Theatre Company, (Middleton Maddocks) SET 91

The grey floors of the former shop front are scattered with straw and we take our seats on wooden boxes facing the window. One of the first things that happens is john tabernacle's corpse is revealed to have been under our seats, and he is dragged out from underneath us.
Pina bausch and tanztheater were references for Middleton and their crew, the performance format shifted between mockumentary video, street performance and immersive theatre.
I was reminded of Graciela Carnevale’s art action called Acción del encierro (1968), where she locked patrons inside an art gallery and covered up the window with posters, people were freed when a passerby smashed the glass door to the gallery. Acción del encierro took place under the dictatorship of the franco-esque Juan Carlos Onganía.
When the shutters came up we could see out onto tabernacle street, but we were also on display, and passersby began watching us as they passed the building on their way home. I think it's similar to how I imagine the people trapped in that gallery became a sort of spectacle rather than the viewers of art.
The play moved so deftly between media it was easy to forget the tv was sometimes showing a live stream of a performance happening on the pavement in front of us, which made these realisations more energised.
Temporality was a theme which was interrogated again and again in the play. We began in a dickensian bell ringing scene, then we seem to be watching a 90s art documentary on radio 4, and the final scene has 2000s twee hipster overtones. In the text we were given at the door the show was described as a bildungsroman, which would track this moving forward in time while experiencing a person's life from start to finish.
I am still confused about the chronology of the play right now because of the way recorded video, live video and actual performance were woven together. This work was genuinely inspiring and creatively nourishing.

18/09/2025 Emily Kam Kngwarray, Te M**n

Went to the imperialist behemoth in Southwark to see a solo show of Emily Kam Kngwarray, a First Nations artist. Kngwarray started painting 8 years before she passed away in 1996, in that time she had like 4 distinct periods of engagement with paint and its ability to express Country, Dreamings, and specific plants such as the Pencil Yam. Her use of colour was so perfect I actually like the fact that the show was entirely against white walls. They didn’t go full magiciens de la terre and cover the walls in mud (although they did do this in the gift shop).
The paintings have this effect where from a distance dots begin to join up and resemble the spindly leaves of a Pencil Yam. Close up, the individual colours have their own luminosity, but they also have a dullness which means you can keep looking and don’t get tired.

There was no glorp on the wall about how the industry sanctions unnecessary air travel or about how the royal family colonised the country we know as Australia and make the land uninhabitable but we did see these views expressed in the gift shop.
It’s okay to have post colonial theory if it’s written in a book published by a different company.

Maybe Kam Kngwarray wanted the work to be seen in a clean white cube with no context... The Tate did a good job of making the artist seem like she never felt sadness and sustained a deep joy for paint. And this allowed me to lock in on the formal qualities of the work.

01/05/25 The Echo of Protest is Distant to the Protest, Nazanin Noori, Auto Italia

The Echo of Protest is Distant to the Protest is the most interesting, nuanced and beautiful exhibition I have seen this year. Nazanin Noori’s sound piece carefully and fluently combines a poem by TS Elliot and a Shia ritual chant, not attempting any overarching message about good and evil. The garden chairs force me to sit with this ambiguity. I am told that the plastic chairs reference “groups of protesters and religious followers sitting in such seats, defiantly and communally occupying public space”. This and the red light, which changed Flows and my eyes colour temperature, making everything white look blue and our skin look yellow. This change in colour temperature was like a paradigm shift in our perception of the world, which is what revolutionary change might feel like, like Hezbollah issuing an apology, as the artist imagines in the sculpture at the door of the gallery: the word ‘sorry’ in Farsi against a green plastic curtain.

14/04/25 Ed Atkins, Te B***n

Ed atkins’ show started well, with the first video filling me with energy. It had this lassez faire expermintal attitude; short videos looking like the artists’ early forays into after effects were on a loop with a scratchy textured soundtrack. There was repitition and humor and this build up of tension and catharsis at it’s release.
The second room was a video I had first seen at Strange Days: Memories of the Future at 180 the Strand, which was a spectacular and influential exhibition for me and a lot of my friends. The video being projected onto three stacked screens was not at all interesting to me. The small red handdrawn self portraits offered no insight into the artist or the narrative of the show, and should have been excluded. Old Food, the UK Venice Biennale commission was impressive, and acted as a threshold to seperate the work that I liked from the work I didn’t like. As I crossed through the high shelves of coats and uniforms I was reminded of the Kabakov’s retrospective at Tate Modern in 2018.
On the other side, there was a general feeling of laziness and the need to fill the gallery.
The post-it note drawings the artist had made for his daughter during the pandemic were interesting because they commented on labour and an artists value in society. The TV screen showing live muted news didnt feel devolped or part of th exhibition. There were seperate rooms dedicated to the artists Father, Mother and Daughter, which could have been a nice thematic link but was not mentioned.
Overall Ed Atkins is making interesting and important work, but this show felt lazy and rushed. It barely succeded to sumarise the themes and threads of interest in Atkin’s work and failed to explain the cultural context and theory behind the oeuvre.

12/02/25, Noah Davis, Barbican

Noah freekin Davis was a great show, I loved the inclusion of his weird recreations of Jeff koons and Dan flavin using Craigslist vacuum cleaner and 'terrible' led lights. Truly he was a spirited individual who was always about raising everyone else up and building community. I would love to see teachers and society using someone like Davis as the template for what an artist does rather than some agoraphobic incel such as van gogh or picasso.

07/02/25, Here Today Gone Tomorrow, Melanie Counsell, 47 Bedford St

The sweet turpentine smell of this pine tar bucket Uber minimal show at Wc2e9ha made me think of twin peaks. Like pine trees being cut into timber, petrol licking the sides of the machines and dripping onto the sawdust floor. I went to this opening a bit too early and forgot how to make conversation. So I don’t have a right to criticise anything if I cant even speak to the artist irl. But the past two shows at this gallery on Bedford st were very good, everything executed with an extremely light touch, giving visitors a lot of scope to form their own opinions. Which is nice considering a lot of institutional galleries are quite insane about bonking You over the head with their rationale and how you are supposed to feel. I was given free reign to stare into the bucket void and think about how much explanation we expect from our conceptual artists these days and how insufferable the press release of Galli at the goldsmiths CCA was

19/01/25, New Contemporaries, The ICA

Went to the ica on a date with Elliot, a boy who I met at the UCL bar with Scarlet and Flow. The exhibition was cool, there was a video about meditation we watched which seemed to be about how therapy/wellness exists solely to make people more productive, work harder, question authority less… which was a cool take and sort of an antidote to the wellness experiment. Few things were truly memorable. The chokehold goldsmiths university has on Bloomberg New Contemporaries was strong as ever this year. The pamphlet created by one of the artists as a guide to the show made me want to unalive myself, the section at the back which said if you want to become an artist you should sign up to sebs art list made me genuinely question if it was satire. After the show Elliot showed me Kai Althoff’s 2016 moma show, 'and leave me with the common swifts' where Althoff had created a tent inside the gallery and where none of his world touched the walls of the building. He had a pint of yes and I had a glass of wine, we sat at the bar and read the part of his dissertation where he was writing about sitting in the ica bar with a pint of yes. Then his girlfriend came.

28/10/24, Scratch and Sniff, Urs Fischer, Sadie Coles

There was a photo of a studio floor on the floor of the gallery which was cool, there were paint stains and cigarettes and scuffs and some of the marks were made by visitors to the gallery which created a nice sort of patina. The paintings Fischer showed were impressive in the way the played with scale and text, you look at an assemblage of headlines and found images and think of Rauschenberg or more recently someone like Laura Owens. With someone like Rauschenberg the text and images are to the scale of a real newspaper but Fischer’s text had all been digitally manipulated and twisted which kind of makes you feel like it’s relative scale is changing before your eyes. I would take a Laura Owens or a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition over this thing any day though. It was a bit sterile and tryhard.

16/10/24, Frieze London Art Fair

Frieze art fair hovers 5 feet above the ground, with temperature controlled lighting that means you never know what time of day it is. It has a duty free airport vibe. Everything is bidding for your attention and none of the artworks have space to breathe. The trends this year were warm and luxurious, sumptuous palettes and blurry beautiful shapes. photographs sold well and geopolitics were seldom touched upon. Many people left the tent feeling disoriented and uplifted. People keep their heads down in order to make excesses of money and they need people like us to reconnect them with the feeling that they are part of humanity.

06/10/24, Worlds Still on a Wire, Group show, Canal Boat Contemporary

There was something eerie about the blending of art and life here, plates were stacked into a modular structure in the kitchen, paintings were suspended off the wall on tension wire. There was no real theme that linked the works besides perfect handling of paint and confident balanced compositions. I didn’t feel particularly comfortable invading someone’s living space. The paintings didn’t seem to relate to the environment. Maybe they don’t have to? But that’s why white walls exist, so we don’t have to think about the context. Maybe it’s a middle class neoliberal art world thing that every gallery must shed its context and become a white cube in order to be taken seriously.

28/09/24 Strawberry, France-Lise Mcgurn, Massimo De Carlo

France-Lise McGurn combines a skill for perfect lines with a loose execution which never feels overworked. There was a really nice play between glossy and matte textures on the canvases, and I guess she’s still not done with the whole painting on the wall thing. The depictions of group sex and dancing were subtle, tender and nice. McGurn has avoided making overt statements about queerness that often narrow it’s scope, instead there is a sense of self awareness and unselfish joy.

Rowan Bazley: folio/about/cv/writing/contact