Takis: White Cube Bermondsey, London

until 27 Jun 2021

There is a certain respect artists that put a large amount of physical effort in their work earn by default.

My knowledge of Takis’s work was mostly confined to the large scale kinetic sculptures that are often displayed outside museums in a sense as public art.

The beauty of this White Cube exhibition is that it is focused on smaller scale works instead.

Enormous scale often creates awe by its nature. Yet here, these smaller objects and the perfectly fitting puritan curation concentrate even stronger energies in the periphery of each one of these sculptures and into a mysticism that possibly no photo can do justice to.

First encounter, the plant-like creations, lonely, standing and swaying strong in their desertion, reminding me of Jarman’s garden, feeling me with love. How can metallic structures like these give out such warmth.

Amongst them, lights, nautical, warm even more warm, fill me instantly with calm; beacons that suddenly appear when you are lost; a comforting embrace.

Following, a room with works referencing Greece, his birthplace. Cycladic figurines reimagined, perfect torsos now golden on each end. The cycladic figure,standing, is actually representing a corpse. The golden torso, is broken. Reference maybe to the conflicting, confusing and complicated relationship emigres by choice have with their heritage or burdens.

Then, spheres. Worlds. Planets. Attracted to each other by magnets, forces, universes, geometrically beautiful, perfect.

And then, then you realise when you move to the next room, where the background sound you were hearing throughout, assumed soundtrack, eerie nonetheless, came from.

My heart skipped. The room with the sound machines. The room with the sound of the spheres. ‘Raw Music’. Recreating a cretan lyra maybe, the single string magnetic musical instruments create the soundtrack of the universe, of the afterlife, the underworld, the soul itself.

By manipulating plectrums made of metal that look like found on a field, a score repeats itself complimenting, discerning?? hypnotising.

This is the music I want to hear when I die. Ancient music, touching our core.

I wish he was accompanied by the beautiful otherworldly tunes from his magnetic sounds in his last journey. A last chord, physical sweetly embracing goodbye.



more info:
whitecube.com/exhibitions/exhibition/takis_bermondsey_2021
www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/takis-2019
www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jul/03/takis-review-magnetic-display-of-curiosity

Lucy Jones: Awkward Beauty, Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester

until 06 Oct 19

Striking strokes and expressionistic colours, a red ectoplasmic self, coloured-in, a golden body, ageless, ageing, unexpected.

‘How did you get on this canvas?’

Backward mirror quotes, direct and intimate like the portraits, not cerebral like on many pop-art-inspired word paintings.

If there is a ‘condition’ it remains unnamed magnificently as everyone’s experience of life is their own and demanding its rightful, unbiased merit.

Then come the deceivingly simple landscapes, they come to take us momentarily outward from the emotional inner chamber occupied by the portraits and into a blazing sunshine.

But the gaze, her husband’s, her father’s, her sitters’, is imprinted, green, blue, yellow, present; defiant heads, defiant bodies, held high;

in a venue that is a gem, defiant itself and proud, filled with beautiful, joyful voices of kids, carers, visitors, art students, hi-brows; cause here, exactly here,
everyone is welcome.



more info:
www.visitleicester.info/whats-on/lucy-jones-awkward-beauty-p778451"
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/jun/21/lucy-jones-paintings-exhibitions-flowers-gallery

MAGIC REALISM: ART IN WEIMAR GERMANY 1919-33, Tate Modern

until 14 Jul 19

Though not as rich and brutal as the Tate Liverpool exhibition last year, this is still a most interesting free exhibit of German interwar troublesome paintings accompanied by coherent contextually rich captions. Though, also preserved in a safe bottle of family viewing and political self righteousness. Images that would had been shaking are now by default accepted as ‘the right side of history’. Perhaps a comment on contemporary fascist narratives, contemporary wording and contemporary conflicts inter-state and intra-state might be interesting and fundamental in waking us up from our historical soporific view of the past.

We are still blind to the current shellshocked soldier, the current widow, the current prostitute out of destitution, the abducted raped bride, the 5p on the pavement that we never thought we’d bother pick up and now we excitedly do. We do not see the man following young mothers out of trams shouting ‘you are in England, you should speak fucking English’ as happened to my friend last week. Cause these are paintings safely pinned on walls and safely protected by their captions and preserved by time. You leave the exhibition upset, maybe; but definitely feeling you are not one of them. The ones from the past we spit on now. Not one of them. But no-one ever thinks they are.

more info:
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/magic-realism

John Akomfrah: Mimesis: African Soldier, Imperial War Museum

until 31 Mar 19

Mesmerising as all his triptychs;

A direct, mystical comment on the participation and sacrifice of Commonwealth ‘subjects’ during European conflict. A sacrifice mostly forgotten.

The women in the film, the chorus, disapproving, knowing, abandoned, hurt, widows, mothers without sons, for which, as it is said, no known word exists in any language; all that, for a possibly superfluous cause.

Movements slow, if any. The soldiers are already dead, tired.

Tired.

In waiting.

They are in limbo. They are now all equal and all together.

Tired.

Dead.

Their costumes, outfits, uniforms, immaculate, as I guess you would be in the afterlife. Tired. Dead. Alone, though together, abysmally, alone.

Akomfrah, years now, has created a whole genre of itself. Recognisable, addictive, otherworldly yet skin close political.

The school girl next to me, came in with her class, made to do so, she had a giant swirling lollipop she was enjoying; I thought, do they still make those! Studiously she was involved with her swirling treat while slowly she started watching, the loud sounds she was making, getting all and more less frequent until she was hardly bothered with her treat because she was watching. I felt like smiling. I was so thrilled that this abstract, eternally slow to some, installation would absorb her.

Water. Water running over memories, over objects, a recurring theme in his work, we cannot be cleansed, we can not forget. Memory can be viewed under the haze of time, but a death is still a death. Thousands of deaths. For what?

The cost of a commonwealth person’s grave from the two world wars is C$85 per year. There are proper accounts and budgets for it and an organisation running it that started with decent, I guess, for the circumstances, intentions. And nice signs in the commonwealth cemeteries like the one in Wandsworth. Isn't that nice.

The video installation is, explicitly commenting on the death and absence war creates, especially for people that got involved by proxy. I thought that that was quite admirable of the Imperial War Museum to host this installation at its own accord.

Until I went to the museum’s shop out of curiosity. War itself, and its machines are celebrated more than what I expected, a take on human perseverance during war time. Products targeting kids, spitfires, machines of war. Churchill as a impeccable hero figure. Merchandise accordingly. A man that advocated and administered chemical weapons attacks, sold to kids as a funky merchandised cool guy. Spitfires. You can make your own. It also sells swirling lollipops. British. The IWM shop is trivialising war, trivialising pain, death and undermines the museums own effort to a reflective, modern stance. It is always under query what the museum’s objective is, even its own name still. But it is indisputable that the shop is unforgivably nationalistic, pro-war and insensitive in my view.

C$85, per grave.

Back in the video installation, suddenly, the soldiers, dead, step inside their own memories or limbos or heavens or hells or heads, inside rooms resembling art gallery rooms, in an extremely magnificent, inspired twist in the imagery. Reminding us also how safe we are, us, sitting in a gallery room watching this, from what is depicted in actual footage and current symbolic filming.

And the objects in those rooms and films become fetishised, in the sense of carriers of life and memory. The ghost visitor has no access to them, cannot touch them, cannot feel them. They are exhibits to his former self. A self that war destroyed irrevocably.

C$85

‘’I moored alone with this fable,
if it’s true that it is a fable,
if it’s true that mortals will not again take up
the old deceit of the gods;
if it’s true
that in future years some other Teucer,
or some Ajax or Priam or Hecuba,
or someone unknown and nameless who nevertheless saw
a Scamander overflow with corpses,
isn’t fated to hear
messengers coming to tell him
that so much suffering, so much life,
went into the abyss
all for an empty tunic, all for a Helen.’’

more info:
https://www.iwm.org.uk/events/mimesis-african-soldier
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/oct/01/john-akomfrah-purple-climate-change

An update 01/03/19: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/01/ex-head-of-british-army-backs-compensation-for-african-wwii-veterans

Martin Eder: Parasites, Newport Street Gallery

until 17 Feb 19

Who the parasites are is unclear: is it the fluffy puppies and kittens that look threatening amid their surroundings, is it the naked bodies, the artist themselves, the gallery owner? Is it the teleological backgrounds that intercept other hyperrealistic representations of realities, occupied often by hybrid creatures?

Whoever they are, the results are disturbing and interesting.

Eder’s collage-worlds, seem to be the exact instances when, through a glitch, multiple worlds invade each other while the bodies present seem to just reflect the viewer’s fantasies, likes or fetishes. From teenage girls to older bodies, we find ourselves uncertain whether they are offensive, out of a sense of seeing over sexualised young bodies or the hyper-realistic techniques. Are those bodies emancipated or objectified? Are those offended by the younger naked bodies seeing them as semi-pornographic simply because of their own desires being triggered while seeing the older bodies as ‘sickly’ also reflects their immature experience of beauty?

These are paintings of undeniable mastery. The debate on the subject matter should not automatically negate the talent under discussions on morality. After all, maybe our sensibilities are more pronounced because the artist is still alive and the subjects still young, still old, still here. Sketches of even younger naked girls in more explicit postures were exhibited in the latest Klimt/ Schiele exhibition in the Royal Academy, yet hardly any visitors had a moral breakdown. Is it because Eder’s paintings are hyper-realistic or because Schiele, and his early teen prostitutes are long dead and buried, our moral responses masked by the safety of the past and the immortality of Schiele as a master?

A minimum of 1000 young women currently in the UK are reported to be subjected to Breast Ironing, a practise imposed on these young girls by their mothers and female relatives to delay the signs of puberty and in doing so hoping to avoid them being subjected to rape and unwanted male attention. The falseness of all these intentions and connotations is abysmal. When will finally the female teenage body be left alone by all adult preying eyes, a sexual or not being released from the over-sexualised fantasies of the grown-ups?

In this sense, I find Ender’s naked bodies of all ages more honest. They all feel as covered in a film of violence, they are more disturbing than seductive. In this play on classicism and technically perfect, these Parasites are earning their role to disturb rather than to shock in their ambiguity.

more info: https://www.newportstreetgallery.com/exhibition/martin-eder-parasites/
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/sep/25/damien-hirst-newport-gallery-callous-exercises-in-brutal-pornography-martin-eder-parasites-review
https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/martin-eder-parasites-review-newport-street-gallery-london

Rupert Everett: The Happy Prince: Unapologetic love of life

Three girls are talking at the table next to mine, in this cinema bar, where they happened to be coincidentally, tables outside. They talk of how great of a deal she got on her new car. £7500. They are all dressed identically, fake-vintage denim skirts and they are 20.

The sun is exploding. The sun is still. England won the match. Groups of men, topless, pass by, chanting groups that seem one moment joyous, next moment aggressive.

‘ENGLAND!’ he shouts through the open window to the older woman in a parked car, also possibly English.

‘We moved the TV, that’s HD you know’.

The group of topless men kept walking, chanting, shouting, would that be the group of men that hunted down and bullied Oscar Wilde in France?

‘You look so nice, you are so tanned’, she exclaimed to her newly arrived friend.

All, seem trapped in a pre-defined role of gender macho-power, slutty-needy, playing it out on a stage for nobody.

A group of children passing by, one mockingly says ‘let’s go to the cinema, let’s watch a movie’.

PROM TIME. The sign on the florist’s across.

If there is a God, it is the God Oscar Wilde envisaged in his fairy tales. Powerless to the world we have made, but passionate. Fair. Later.

Most narratives of his life are sympathetic but always hold a hue of pity.

Poor Man.

So sad.

The beauty of the Happy Prince is that it is unapologetic.

The author is never presented as sad, pitied, no. He is completely, utterly, passionately in love with life. His addictions are choices. His troubles societal. His traitors small. His friends loyal. His lovers ecstatic. His wife a victim, like him. His crowds adoring, then mobs, then adoring. Different crowds. The high classes, all classes, the underclass, men trapped in class, men depressed, men oppressed, men with lust for life.

The film is sad. Yet at no point do you feel pity. This is the magnificence of it. Any sadness is an attack on the societal norms and a homage to the abysmal pain of unrequited love.

But Love.
Love.
LOVE.
Love of life.
Love of a man.
Love of men.
Love of joy.
Unapologetic love.

‘He is still going out clubbing! so sad, he is 43! at his age!’ a friend told me. A friend that spent all his 20s clubbing.

‘At his age’.

Partying, enjoying, pleasures have to have an expiry date.

After that, oh dear. Loser. Sad.

Not in this film.

And most of all, apart from its subject matter, the direction, to me, was superb. Flawless, with arthouse elements that accentuated the subject, playful tricks, visually and choreographically stunning.

Celebrating Decadence; Beautiful, exquisite Decadence. Feared by all. Because Decadence is a choice against continuation, against the species, against all that is supposed to be.

It is the yellow books; the numberless nights that are a blur; the tortoises painted gold.

And all this, not in contradiction, maybe that’s what life is about. Exactly, those tortoises painted gold. Statues that love so much they give away their emerald eyes to help others. Birds that love so much that choose to die.

That is a life worth living. Even if short. All the rest, a sensible, boring world.


‘When did you lose sight of Him?’ he was asked on his deathbed.

‘In Clapham Junction’



more info:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-happy-prince-review-rupert-everett-delivers-moving-and-surprising-biopic-of-oscar-wilde-a8397086.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Modernity, Croydon and A Journey Through Brutalism, RISE Gallery

Saffron crocus is unknown to the wild.

An island city in between suburbia, built for cars, proud of its multi-storey car parks: Croydon, the space-age city prided itself in a Utopia that never happened.

Post war optimism got its golden child in Croydon. Lunar House, Apollo House, semi-brutalist structures, the sister to the Royal Festival Hall, the Future.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-new-croydon-1963-online

The National Trust backed tour ran by the RISE gallery is a love song to that intention but also to a different future that now might be waiting. It was refreshing to hear people knowledgable about and loving towards where they live.

A place snubbed by many, is now a place changing; old buildings are resurrected, office blocks are turned into housing showered with promises of affordable prices and no foreign investor interference.

The Saffron flowers are sterile. They reproduce only by human intervention.

As with all gentrification-suspect projects, you wonder if changing the built environment is a way to alienate some and make an area unaffordable to even more so there is more space for the wealthier to move in.

BoxPark. A temporary, precarious state of prosperity, while a woman sitting on its steps keeps screaming ‘save me’ in distress. Parallel lines, worlds that will never meet.

There seem to be a ripple effect stemming from, I believe,a genuine wish to improve the everyday life of residents by this entwined group of developers, councils, art patrons.

For instance, the public art endorsed and produced is impressive, intriguing and insightful.

Yet, I wonder if it somehow feels too conceptual and detached from the majority that views it. Like in a way a superficial paint, that doesn’t fix a wall, just makes it more appealing to outsiders.

Is it the middle class ‘Saviour Syndrome’ that is the driving force behind Croydon’s reformation process, even if there is good will? Are these efforts making any of the established population there happier or is the middle class making itself more comfortable thus inviting more middle class people to move in? The tour, we were homogenous. Some had SLR cameras hanging from their neck. Though with no exploitation agenda, still, Tourists.

Sometimes when reality is crushing, those affected are left with no energy. So why not that the ones that can afford it, offer their energy for a positive, as they believe, change. ‘Don’t be ashamed of your privilege. Just use it to help others’.

Croydon allegedly has got its name from the Crocus, the Saffron flower cultivated there. I love thinking of Croydon as the Saffron producing town of the past. And I love to think of it as the post-war optimistic project it was. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all I’d say to those that believe it is a project failed.

The more time I spend in East Croydon, the more I see it as London at its truest; the same embrace that also took me in as well as the immigrants, the destitute, the new middle class families, the kid with his hand inside his pants trying desperately to show off, the screaming woman, so many that try their best, all in pursue of a better life. Many visiting:

South London ICE,
Home Office
Lunar House, 1st Floor
40 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR9 2BY

or

Electric House.
Home Office
UK Border Agency
3 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR0 2AT


An electricity showroom of mid-war years, then an immigration office. With cells. An art deco facade, futurism turned into authoritarianism and, now, to desolation. The building might rot or might get a makeover. People passing by are surprised by our interest, given that its front is covered in garbage. It’s hard to see beyond this. Garbage is the reality now and maybe that should be the future of any Immigration Office.

In a London increasingly gentrified, beautified, streamlined, a Soho where LGBT people and sex workers are edged out by eateries, a Hackney/Shoreditch where artists, minorities and the working class are pushed out by fashion trends, where Elephant and Castle is to be torn down for luxury flats in the sounds of Nine Elms, maybe it is imperative that people like the RISE strive to strike a balance.

Naked of all above sub context, their tours and exhibitions are a unique, excellent opportunity to visit a place that is repeatedly saturated with Modernity. While there, be respectful. To the eye safe from harsh everyday struggle it is a place easy to dismiss or look down upon. And yet it is of the most truthful of realities London is.

Let’s celebrate it and breathe it as it is, before it is irreversibly gone.



Photos by Globbie Dcw.

more info:
https://www.rise-gallery.co.uk/exhibition/a-journey-through-brutalism/
http://jonathanmeades.co.uk/Artwork.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon
https://thecroydoncitizen.com/culture/event-review-launch-journey-brutalism-exhibition-rise-gallery/