Welcome to Artvehicle 33. This month I am happy to introduce artists’ pages by Siôn Parkinson and Alastair Levy. We have postcards from Oxford and Dubai and we review Mat Collishaw’s new exhibition at Spring Projects. Artist Hilary Powell discusses her short film ‘The Games’, recently shown as part of the East End Film Festival, and our series of ‘Asides’ continues with a meditation on Funny Games.
If you are going to be in Istanbul there are several good exhibitions to be seen. Alti Aylik presents ‘On Produceability’ (26 April to 17 May), curated with Nüans, Dusseldorf at IMC 5533, a space in a modernist shopping complex, surrounded by Islamic dress shops. For the show a group of international artists were invited to work with local Istanbul manufacturers to produce artworks. Artists include Adrian Lee, who in collaboration with a local costume-maker created a character to promote the show to a new audience, alongside Allen Grubesic, Elmas Deniz and Reinaart Vanhoe. The show is touring to Amsterdam as part of the Turkish presentation at Kunstvlaai, Amsterdam’s ‘fair for new flavours in art’ (10-18 May). Also in Istanbul, Sylvia Kouvali’s Rodeo Gallery develops apace with a thoughtful show ‘A Principle of Assumptions’. Co-curated with Krist Gruijthuijsen, the works included play with notions of authorship, information systems, the archive and narrative. The YAMA programme on the giant screen atop the Marmara Pera Hotel continues with young Turkish artist Emre Hüner’s animated landscapes from fantastical retro-future worlds.
If you are in Paris check out ‘Traces de Sacré’ at the Centre Pompidou (until 11 August). The show explores the fertile strain of modern art that has found its roots in the turmoil attendant upon the loss of conventional religious belief and featuresTobias Collier in the illustrious company of Malevich and Duchamp.
Closer to home, in the East End First Thursdays celebrated their first anniversary on 1 May. The event had a festive feel to it, despite the rain. At Daniel Shand, Martina Mullaney starts her residency and invites us to look at photographs taken by children in an orphanage in Tbilisi. At FormContent under a railway arch on Beck Road, there was an intriguing performance, conceived by Patrizio Di Massimo, where a mysterious man rode around the streets on a beautiful black horse. It is so rare to see a horse in London other than police horses or occasional funeral corteges.
Also Eastwards, there is a fascinating and informative show at Rivington Place of photographs and film documenting the Bangladeshi battle for independence in 1971. The Edgar Allan Poe-themed show ‘You Dig the Tunnel, I’ll Hide the Soil’ at White Cube, Hoxton Square is worth a look for the Mike Nelson installation and several works which work affectively in the spooky basement of neighbouring Shoreditch Town Hall. At Seventeen on Kingsland Road a group show ‘We Like What You Eat’, curated anonymously, shows some good works by emerging artists, including Alexander Heim, within a Christoph Büchelesque construction of cardboard and junk. The Dark Show at the Wallis Gallery, Hackney Wick, takes place in the dark with the artworks providing the only source of light, artists include Ed Atkins.
In South London don’t miss the excellent ‘Institute of Psychoplasmics’ curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv at the Pump House Gallery. It examines cultic social groupings and the way they challenge the integrity of the social body by producing another within it. In Peckham see boyleANDshaw ‘Paul Rest in Peace (Part 2)’ at the Sassoon Gallery. At Tate Modern, catch the last few weeks of ‘Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia’. In Central London there’s ‘Cranach’, Renaissance court painter and friend of Martin Luther at the Royal Academy and contemporary Colombian photographers, including Juan Manuel Echavarria’s moving video works, at the Photographers’ Gallery in ‘Once more, with feeling’.
At the cinema, there’s three films to see. Marjane Satrapi’s poignant animated tale of her childhood in Iran during the Revolution, ‘Persepolis’. Catherine Breillat’s ‘The Last Mistress’, an elegant and passionate hybrid of de Laclos and Angela Carter, is a tale of a bloody and doomed love affair. Swedish auteur Roy Andersson‘s ‘You, The Living’ continues where his powerful ‘Songs from the Second Floor’ left off, in a bleached out town of permanent traffic jams and banal encounters.
Ali MacGilp