art blog since 2009
It would be difficult to deliver a spoiler for Continuity. Omer Fast’s looping 40 minute film has no clear narrative arc and offers few clues about the mystery at its core. All we know is that the same middle-aged German couple pick up three different servicemen from a rural rail station, and take him home …
November 5, 2014
The real underwater world has already exercised its independence from the work of Simon Faithfull. REEF was fully working for six days, after which he lost transmission. But there is no going back. The artist did manage to burn and sink a 32-tonne ship. He did manage to salvage nearly a week’s video feed from …
November 3, 2014
The years of lead (or anni di piombo for you Italian speakers) lasted from the late 60s to the early 80s. Thanks to festivals in Venice and the anni di amore are still in full effect. As a result this is one of the only exhibitions where you can reasonably expect to find photos of …
October 31, 2014
Hard not to like an artist who is unafraid to quote his dad in an interview (as you can see Kjartansson does in the footage above): “It’s sad and beautiful to be a human beingâ€. There’s also an honesty about his subject matter in The Visitors. It’s not about poverty, war or global pandemic. He’s …
October 29, 2014
The fifty donkeys were cute and the labels were amusing. But it was the third element in this piece which packed a real punch. A photo of a real donkey behind barbed wire in a town square. It was a scene was staged by Nazi authorities in 1933 as a warning not to be stubborn and …
October 28, 2014
It is a quirk of perception that we read this as a city. On the face of it, most of Navarro’s work is comprised of regimented obelisks. So it’s not like any city you or I might live in. There’s no chaos, no movement and no colour. The columns are as grave as tombstones in a …
October 27, 2014
Where you might expect to find a detail such as ‘oil on canvas’, or ‘cast bronze’, or even ‘car engine’, Vo gives us the full scoop on his indecorous found object. A wall plaque opens the bonnet. Indeed. This contemporary sculpture is comprised of “The engine of the artist’s father Phung Vo’s Mercedes Benz.†Provenance is all: …
October 26, 2014
It hangs like a chandelier designed to throw shade. You cannot walk beneath it without speculating on your own death. And it’s made of iron, technology of another age. The view’s not so great from this angle, but the form echoes a swastika. And that would be a treacherous swastika with a half yard long …
October 24, 2014
In the event of a submarine attack, the safest place to be in Liverpool right now is on board the Dazzle Ship by Carlos Cruz-Diez. It presents a ‘moving’ target even when moored up. Clashing colours and disruptive patterns were hit upon during World War One as a way of confusing German U-Boats who, after …
October 19, 2014
Athens: cradle of Western civilisation, and in more recent times the canary in Europe’s coal mine. On the face of it, the perfect setting for Simon Senn’s dionysian artwork. Just Let Go is (so far) a single video loop in which three angry locals rampage the length and breadth of a concrete wall, starting fires …
October 15, 2014