Browsing Tag: david blandy

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    Commons – a film by David Blandy

    November 6, 2025

    Can an artist activate items in a museum collection, or do those items activate the artist in turn? 

    At the Amelia Scott Civic Centre in Tunbridge Wells, a rook, a fox, a kingfisher, a crystalline rock and a dinosaur bone have all triggered a new work by David Blandy. Each of these artefacts has been removed from a vitrine, filmed in a studio, and given a thought-provoking script and VO. In this way, you might say, they have also given the artist a voice, certainly a vision.

    Taxidermy animals have an unusual status. They retain a preserved appearance, but they are dead. They let you get really close as a result, and they have those glassy eyes, which you will never look into in the wild. As they rotate, up close, against a cosmically-black background, in a black box viewing space here at the Amelia, they are, dare I say it, even a little bit comic. But are we not the funny ones for having once gutted these beautiful creatures and sewn stuffing into their feathers and fur?

    There’s quite a lot of talk these days about objects having agency, stones having consciousness, rooms having memories and so forth. But if talking immobile, unbreathing, non-reproductive entities as having being, then a museum is a great place to test that. (A film such as Night at the Museum is an exaggerated narrative sure, but it does illustrate an imaginative truth for theories about artefacts and their souls.)

    Blandy might be pulling in allusions to the Canterbury Tales, that local epic, and this genteel town’s grazing lands in common ownership, as if the rook, the fox, the kingfisher, the rock and the bone have travelled here though space and time to carry one of the artist’s stories of post-apocalyptic recuperation. Except that this story could not have been told in this place without a very living collection of natural history and prehistory.

    Shared commons, shared pasture, shared nature and, as the film puts it, ‘common knowledge’ and ‘common wealth’ are the ideas we need right now, as the climate collapses and the chickens of private ownership are coming home to roost.

    Museums like the Amelia, with their impulse to share collections with then widest possible audience, are an enduring part of that ideal dynamic. I think that might be true to the extent that in this case a museum has operated as a medium for several characters, animal and mineral, to call out for an artist to tell their tale.

    Commons illustrates how the holdings of a museum have a certain grip on the institution, and any artists invited to work with them, in turn.

    David Blandy’s work can be seen at the Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells until 11 January 2026.

    performance art, video

    Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Finding Fanon 2 (2015)

    July 3, 2017

    If you play Grand Theft Auto you may be closer to understanding this piece than me. So far as I gather, both artists have had to play their way into all the footage which accompanies this film.

    There’s not a stolen car in sight, mind you. The duo wear suits, rather than gang attire. They walk and run through lonely citycapes, some Romantic with a capital ‘r’, some apocalyptic with a small ‘a’.

    Finding Fanon 2 grabs you from the opening set up as avatars for both artists fall to earth from a clear blue sky. They pedal limbs like upturned beetles, pick themselves up again like gods.

    If this film were nothing more than a travelogue about virtual cities to be found in the GTA game franchise, it would already have a certain novel, uncanny appeal for non-gamers.

    But there’s much more to it; the quest here  is not to become a crime lord, but to get closer to an understanding of philosopher Frantz Fanon, who advocated armed resistance to power.

    As a former resident of Martinique and a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front, Fanon was most interested in fighting back against colonial powers. Britain is no longer one of these.

    So where might Fanon, who died in 1961, be found now? Nigel Farage might have said he would don khaki and pick up a rifle in order to fight for Brexit. But the UK left is using ballots rather than bullets.

    The battlefield is the media, both mainstream and social. Dark money and big data are the dangers. So where indeed is Fanon today? He would doubtless be on a terror watchlist.

    But the artists remain optimistic. “Perhaps he’s waiting here,” says the VO, as they stride through the ghost town, “behind the polygons, behind the texture maps, through the fields of algorithms”.

    Fanon might be found in one of GTA’s beautiful sunsets. Achiampong and Blandy watch our fiery star sink below the horizon. If the sun has sunk on Fanon’s day, we know it will come again.

    Finding Fanon Trilogy was screened at Lighthouse in Brighton on 29 June 2017. More information about the artists can be found on the websites of David and Larry.