A new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London takes a closer look at something that surrounds us but that we are often reluctant to confront. ‘Dirt’ travels across centuries and continents to explore our ambivalent relationship with filth, waste, grime, impurity and soil
Category Archive: art in London
Laid to Rest was inspired by the commercialisation of waste in Victorian London. A few months ago, Serena Korda asked the public to collect and donate dust. The artwork consists of hundreds of commemorative bricks. Each brick contains the specific dust of its contributor (quite literally since much household dust is made of skin and hair particles) and is imprinted with information describing its origins
Currently on view at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, Out of Place features four artists who explore the relationship between dominant political forces and personal and collective histories by looking at urban space, architectural structures and the condition of displacement
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Apologies for updating this blog only once in a blue moon. I’ve been spending the past few days on a quest for the perfect flat. Now that mission is accomplished, i can announce that normal service will resume on Friday (tomorrow i’ll be visiting a couple of shows in Florence.) In the meantime, here’s some of the most stunning images i saw this afternoon at The Museum of London which is running a London Street Photography show until September 4, 2011
Combining the intricate techniques of food photography with the anthropomorphic tendencies of manga, Utsu has an affinity for kitsch. But instead of taking a strictly documentary approach to the Japanese relationship with food and the natural world, she uses fruit, vegetables, and seafood to construct surreal fantasies populated by kittens with octopus eyes, pineapples full of owls, and phallic carrots
Just back from London where i managed to catch up with up to 7 exhibitions in a day. Btw, there’s only a few more days to enjoy Parreno’s magnificent videos at the Serpentine and i urge you to run there if you haven’t seen the show yet. Another exhibition i liked a lot is Matthias Schaller’s series of Disportraits at Ben Brown Fine Arts
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The film observes the method and practice of the Modernist architects who rebuilt London after World War Two. It shows how they revolutionised life in the city in the wake of destruction from war and the poor living conditions inherited from the Industrial Revolution. This film is their story. Utopia London travels through the recent history of the city where the film maker grew up. He finds the architects who designed it and reunites them with the buildings they created
Techniques to insert genes into plants are within reach of the amateur, and the criminal. Policing Genes speculates that genetic engineering will also find a use outside the law, with innocent-looking garden plants modified to produce narcotics and unlicensed pharmaceuticals. The genetics of the plants in your garden or allotment could become a police matter…
The exhibition showcase the work of young photographers, gifted amateurs, alongside that of established professionals. This year’s selection is as heavy as ever with its documentation of prostitution, childhood obesity, prison and hunting
Each day in September, Damián Ortega took inspiration from a newspaper and translated it into a physical interpretation, be it a sculpture, installation, proposition or prototype for a future project. The works made over this period have become both a sculptural chronicle of this period of time – and a dynamic reinterpretation of the notion of an art commission
From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ explores the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture
I tend to avoid blogging about the most well-known galleries. I doubt they need my posts to attract the crowds. On Thursday however, i went to Tate Britain to see Fiona Banner’s sculptures and realized i would not be able to keep the excitement out of my website
The crushed vehicle does not only serve as an entry point to a discussion about the Iraq conflict, it also comments on the increasingly harsh impact of war on civilian and cultural life. A display at the museum states that at the start of the 20th century, 10 % of war casualties were civilians. Today, they make up 90%
The series that put me in a merry mood for the rest of the day is Tony Hayward’s ‘Loving Couples’ porcelain figurines. The artist found damaged porcelain lovers on a flea market and ‘restored’ them by adding a replacement head that belong to today’s pop culture. The lovely shepherdess shows her legs to a green monster and a love-struck squire courts a girl with a playmobil head
Justin’s work is a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set. Blooming mechanical flowers are used as pixels in a grid formation responding to movement. It draws on the balletic tradition of a choreographic poem combining narrative, choreography and score
The graduate project, set in a 16th century hunting castle, uses drawing and modelling to inquire into the spatial possibilities of reinterpreting the artefact as a field of events
In London of the seventies, a dynamic counterculture blossomed against a backdrop of unemployment, racism, and IRA bombings. This volume, a collage of texts and images, provides an overview of the radical political and cultural developments of the decade
Meiselas was 26 when she joined Magnum. One of the few women at the agency, she is probably better known for her work covering political upheavals in Central America in the 1970s and 1980s than for her coverage of the sex scene in the US. I saw both facets of her portfolio in London a few weeks ago
Chris Steele-Perkins unflinchingly records the absurdities, the pleasures and the tragedies of English life, invariably with wit and humour. There is a certain pathos in the image of a crowded beach, complete with donkeys, in which an unobserved dog pisses upon a windbreak: the English are unbelievably stoical holidaymakers
A group show at Gagosian London aiming to analyze how JG Ballard was influenced by art and how in he turn influenced a whole generation of artists and the public imagination as a whole…
Or how an exhibition i disliked gave me the opportunity to interview an artist whose work i’ve been admiring ever since i started the blog
Michael Rakowitz explores the influence of science fiction genre imagery on the design of Iraqi monuments, military uniforms and weaponry under Saddam Hussein, while illuminating aspects of the US-Iraq conflict over the past few decades
The exhibition showcase the work of young photographers, gifted amateurs, alongside that of established professionals. This year’s selection is as heavy as ever with its documentation of prostitution, childhood obesity, prison and hunting
In the 19th century, despite the best efforts of body snatchers, the demand from medical schools for fresh cadavers far outstripped the supply. One solution to this gruesome problem came in the form of lifelike wax models. These models often took the form of alluring female figures that could be stripped and split into different sections. Other models were more macabre, showing the body ravaged by ‘social diseases’ such as venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcohol and drug addiction
Filmed during more than three years on location in Hebron in the West Bank, Terje Carlsson’s documentary shows the impact of the occupation on everyday life in Palestine
I discovered the work of Edward S. Curtis while i was visiting the Medicine Man exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curtis documented the American West as well as the rites and lives of Native American peoples
Medals are supposed to celebrate important figures or heroic deeds, but the stars of this exhibition are medals that condemn their subjects. The last section of the show features medals commissioned from contemporary artists. The most thought-provoking is the Olympic gold-style medal that Michael Landy created to honour English hooligan Dean Rowbotham “for breaking his ASBO on more than 20 occasions”
In what has come to be called Gravity Art by some, there is actually a couple of artists who have chosen to use gravity it as their medium, often in somewhat beautiful yet futile actions, heroic failures.
As part of the exhibition Radical Nature, an urban mill designed by architects EXYZT and the re-staging of Agnes Denes’ 1982 Wheatfield form a temporary functional ensemble in the North-East London district of Dalston .
When Norwegian artist Kjersti Andvig initiated a collaboration with someone called Carlton A. Turner, who at the time was on death row in Texas, she aimed to expose a system which she perceived as a unjust mix-up of right wing politics, strange religious beliefs and cruelty. After their artistic work had ended, they fell in love.
How can 300 cheapo copies of the same profile of a fourth century Christian saint originally painted by an artist most of us have never heard about be interesting? I don’t really know the answer to that but i know that the magic is there. Seen from afar, the effect of these paintings is stunning. Seen from up close, the portraits are equally fascinating
Radical Nature draws on ideas that have emerged out of Land Art, environmental activism, experimental architecture and utopianism. The exhibition is designed as one fantastical landscape, with each piece introducing into the gallery space a dramatic portion of nature
Danish artist and environmentalist Tue Greenfort’s photo series, Daimlerstrasse 38 lured foxes living in the industrial area in eastern Frankfurt with frankfurter sausages towards a hidden camera
As humankind has developed increasingly sophisticated weaponry with which to harm its enemies, medicine has had to adapt to cope with the volume and the changing nature of resulting casualties.
Concentrating on the modern era, the exhibition ‘War and Medicine’ considered the constantly evolving relationship between warfare and medicine, beginning with the disasters of the Crimean War and continuing through to today’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq
‘World War One, France: a radiographer wearing protective clothing and headpiece’, a photo seen at the remarkable exhibition ‘War and Medicine’ at the Wellcome Trust in London
Postmodernism is dead and a new form of art is taking over. Nicolas Bourriaud christens it Altermodern! This ‘alternative modern’ is the product on non-stop communication, globalization and new forces that shape the way artists operate today
The work is both intensely dramatic and irresistibly funny. Flooded McDonald’s hints at the consumer-driven power and influence, but also ‘impotence, of large multinationals in the face of climate change.’ Unlike some documentaries on the same subject, the movie doesn’t point an angry finger, it doesn’t give lessons and make you feel guilty as sin, it elegantly and comically allows you to draw your own conclusions
Pylypchuk populates his work with a menagerie of dysfunctional furry creatures composed in various tableaux through which the artist examines the human condition. The mini dramas Pylypchuk stages always have wider philosophical implications for our ideas of love, rejection and pain
Not only the title of a song by the The Beach Boys, but also the title of an exhibition about wishful thinking in art and design. Ten artists and designers offer their take on other possibilities
Brendan Walker is a thrill researcher. Originally trained as an aircraft engineer, he now specializes in death-defying experiences, screams and cold sweat, using performance art to find out what people feel on fairground rides and crashing planes.