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, Tate Britain
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.