Tag: London
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Of Shadows
One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Effigies, pentacles, masks and charms. Robes and blades, crosses and cauldrons. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall, is a treasure trove of magical objects and books dedicated to the history of British folk magic and other forms of popular spiritual belief. Photographer…
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Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth category: unknown knowns – the things we don’t realise we know; the unconscious beliefs and prejudices that determine our perceptions and actions. Unknown Knowns continues…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it is to technology that the business of authentication must increasingly turn. The studied perusal of the expert is no longer enough; now it is the…
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Great and Small Mythologies
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes a mural painted by Daedalus, the mythological artist, which fails in its attempts to represent the death of his son, Icarus. In Heaney’s translation: ……………………………………………………………….Twice…
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Sparrow Come Back Home
Sparrow Come Back Home, Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris’ exhibition at the ICA, examines a reflective side of the display of archive as monument. Taking place in the Fox Reading Room, a space where archival materials are at the heart of each show, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a visual library, a silent record…
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Unrelated
A young woman slams her naked body furiously against a wall, again, again, and again, so brutally that I have to remind myself to breathe. Only moments before, I’d carefully sidestepped her as she lay on the floor, unclothed, motionless, and with her eyes shut. I filed into the studio along with the rest of…
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Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet twittering turned stand-in for nature, poetry and sex all at once, becomes a ghost of its living and mythical self, haunting us with questions of…
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Chroma Hunt
From cave drawings to medieval tapestry, classical pottery to Rubens or Rembrandt, the hunt has provided artists with powerful subject matter for thousands of years. Much of this power has to do with power: the physical prowess of early humanity, the great gods of Graeco-Roman mythology, or the wealth of the landed aristocracy of the…
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Lives, Loves and Loss at Fenton House
The silvery tinkling of servants’ bells welcomes me into the house of merchant Joshua Gee. There’s a fire in the grate and sweet treats on offer in the Still Room where I’m handed a candle to illuminate the winter afternoon, a parchment inventory of household goods and a quill pen so that I may note…
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Traces – Lives, Loves and Loss
“Every story, however hidden, leaves a trace…” A company specialising in site-specific, immersive experiences, Traces brings together contemporary art, theatre and design with old and disused buildings in order to reimagine the long-lost stories of the past. A collaboration between furniture and spatial designer Donna Walker and Talulah Mason, whose expertise is in sets…
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Archipelagos of Rest
The God of Genesis had no use for islands; land rose from sea all at once, assured with purpose. Like cognition, the divine continent is quantifiably useful, brokering communal exchange and the consolidation of cultural routines, yet still – unapologetically – islands persist. These archipelagos, connected to and detached from the whole, seem emblematic of…