Another hasty post as i’m trying to emerge from an intense marathon of moving house, giving talks, crying over irregular German verbs and generally wasting far too much time reading crime books. So here! A quick list of exhibitions i’ve seen recently but hadn’t found time to write about:
My number one recommendation would be to go and check out the black inflatable castle at the Copperfield gallery. Tom Dale‘s ‘Department of the Interior‘ is a 6.5m high black castle that echoes the towers and crenellations of Parliament with an absurdity that mocks its claim for authority.
The show is up and bouncy until 14 November.
Rustam Dokhtukaev sits inside his house in Kurchaloy, Chechnya. In 2008, Dokhtukaev participated in an anti-terrorist operation in the village of Dargo, in the mountainous area of the Vedensky region
Security forces stand guard as people celebrate in the streets on the 10th anniversary of Constitution Day. In the background gleaming, new tower buildings symbolize the city’s recovery and regeneration following the destruction wrought at the beginning of the millennium.
Last year, Davide Monteleone went on a search for the current Chechen identity. Above all he wanted to know which of them, Chechnya or Russia, had emerged victorious from the conflict. The answer is undeniably Russia. But if you look at it from a different angle, the answer is perhaps not so clear-cut.
Spasibo is at the Saatchi gallery until tomorrow.
Arkady Bronnikov collected photographs of Russian prisoners tattoos between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. A senior expert in criminalistics at the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs for over thirty years, part of Bronnikov’s duties involved visiting correctional institutions of the Ural and Siberia regions. It was here that he interviewed, gathered information and photographed of convicts and their tattoos, building one of the most comprehensive archives of this phenomenon.
FUEL present: Russian Criminal Tattoo Police Files is on at Grimaldi Gavin until 21 November.
Mr and Mrs Gallagher lived with their four children in a ground floor tenement flat. Their bedroom was covered in pools of rainwater. At night they sleep with the light on to keep the rats away. One night they counted 16 rats in the room. Glasgow Maryhill, October 1970
Make Life Worth Living at the Science Museum Media Space presents some of the photos commissioned to Nick Hedges by the housing and homelessness charity Shelter.
Exhibited for the first time, following a 40 year restriction to protect the anonymity of the subjects, the images reveal the deplorable housing conditions and poverty endured by people across Britain in the 1970s. Not that the situation is much rosier nowadays.
Pen Dalton, Free Castration on Demand, A Woman’s Right to Choose, ca. 1974
A World to Win. Posters of Protest and Revolution at the V&A closes tomorrow. A fairly small but energizing exhibition.
Believe it or not, the Imperial War Museum is my favourite museum in London. There’s the Jeremy Deller bombed out car from Baghdad, one of the V-2 rockets my grand-mother used to tell me about and occasionally there’s even some exciting temporary exhibition. The IWM has recently been revamped and it feels very crammed and airless in there but the collections are as stunning as ever. Here’s a couple of artefacts i discovered during my last visit:
Apparently local people asked British soldiers to take down from a wall the tiled mosaic of Saddam Hussein at the port of Umm Qsar.
I was very taken by this pair of woven straw over-boots worn by German soldiers to cover their leather boots on the Eastern front and in particular in Russia where temperatures fell below -30 degree Celsius.
Right, i’m off to Carroll/Fletcher. They’ve just opened Unoriginal Genius, a show curated by Domenico Quaranta. Should be a good one.