picks December 06, 2017

Stan Douglas

The digital image file can be an object of a newly assembled and complex truth, an artifact prone to faults and error: Beyond conventional reportage, the postdocumentary photographies of artists have increasingly addressed how a picture might contain a more sophisticated notion of testimony or even verification, while acknowledging the limits and programming of the very same processes.

Stan Douglas’s four-work exhibition provides a two-step take on the image and its relationship to the event. One pair of works present long-term responses to the 2011 London riots, which were quickly characterized

picks October 31, 2017

“Everything we see could also be otherwise (My sweet little lamb)”

The exterior of this gallery is covered in scaffolding with large, dark sheets of canvas hanging from the bars. But the space is not under renovation—this is a work by Oscar Murillo called The Institute of Reconciliation, 2017. On the scaffold’s frame sits a Július Koller photograph, Universal Physical Cultural Operation - Defense (U.F.O.), 1970, which shows the artist hiding behind a table-tennis paddle. By the entrance, a text piece by Mladen Stilinović, Nothing Gained With Dice (P. Celan), 1994, reads, “We have seen, we have realized—the more zeroes the less value. One zero, we know, is

picks July 11, 2017

“We have the weights, we have the measures”

The daily maintenance of territory is symbolic, and it is perpetuated through distinct tools: from defensive structures and emblems of protection, including spiked fences and nationalistic monuments, to bureaucratic and ritualistic systems with obscure planning laws and expensive conditions of compliance. These practices surrounding domain prohibit most from staking claims to place. This exhibition shows how artists Ewa Axelrad, Daniel de Paula, Marco Godoy, Ella Littwitz, and Oscar Santillan manipulate these symbols of power to subtly weaken them.

Axelrad brings London’s defense mechanisms into

picks April 13, 2017

Vincenzo Agnetti

London has been reevaluating what it knows about the Italian neo-avant-garde of late: Exhibitions of Claudio Parmiggiani, Irma Blank, Emilio Isgró, and Vincenzo Agnetti at this space have revealed the depth of postwar Italian art histories. Agnetti had a significant role alongside Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani in the early life of the journal and gallery Azimut/h. In his writings, Agnetti searched for new languages of expression, favoring work in novel materials and with a relationship to language, philosophy, and information.

Agnetti demonstrates how his own work echoed this experimentation.

picks April 11, 2017

Christopher Williams

Christopher Williams’s recent exhibitions have been prefaced by open letters. Sometimes addressed to the models participating in his images, the letters act as a strategy that cuts across intimate dialogues and public debate, unveiling constructions of the self and the institutions of everyday life. He opens up the deep complexity of institutional structures while putting human detail into the frame.

Williams’s newest images reveal objects of domestic consumer desire: designer cooking pots here, stalks of wholesome wheat there, or the back window of a car with happy children performing for the

picks March 08, 2017

Nathan Coley

Nathan Coley has a long-developed interest in value systems and how they shape the logics of space. Design, belief, and culture are addressed in his current show here, where he brings together the ascetic and soon-to-be-extinct Shakers, Islam, and the apocalyptic proposition of a burning Tate Modern.

Such an incongruous trio of subjects tempts an inflammatory topicality, which Coley productively and quietly turns toward belief and value. Attention is shifted from the spectacles of mass culture and the popularized alterity of Islam by foregrounding the Shakers: The Same For Everyone, 2017, is an

Duncan Wooldridge