17 Apr Must-See Exhibitions in London Spring 2024 | Feature
Source Credit: Content and images from Ocula Magazine. Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/must-see-exhibitions-in-london-spring-2024/
As spring arrives in London, we share seven must-see exhibitions this April, including Jeremy Hutchison’s critique of global textile trade at Pi Artworks, Yto Barrada’s politics of dye at Pace Gallery, and Tammy Nguyen’s bright purgatory at Lehmann Maupin.
Jeremy Hutchison, Dead White Man (2023). Exhibition view: British Textile Biennial, Lancashire (29 September–29 October 2023). Courtesy the artist and Pi Artworks.
Jeremy Hutchison: Dead White Man: Effigies
Pi Artworks, 55 Eastcastle Street
25 April–8 June 2024
Expect: an informative critique of the trade of secondhand clothing to West Africa across meticulous sculptures, video, and performance.
In Ghana, secondhand clothing donated from first-world countries, some sold in markets, with a significant percentage dropped in landfills, total a staggering 24 billion garments each year. To locals, they are known as obroni wawu (dead white man’s clothes).
Since his 2017 residency at Raw Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, Hutchison has worked on a series addressing such vestiges of global textile trade, noting that rather than charity, the secondhand clothing industry functions more like a kind of ‘zombie imperialism’.
Works on view include effigies made of West African fabrics and modelled after the ‘dead white man’, a video of the artist wearing his sculptures wandering Dakar’s markets and ports, followed by the U.K.’s shopping malls, textile recycling plants, and fashion brand HQs.
A performance will see the artist wearing his creations to embody the dead white man. With this, Hutchison suggests that any form of re-use underlying claims of sustainability in shipping unwanted goods to the African continent is not unlike his theatrical display. The artist’s sculptures, however, stand their ground even without the metaphor.
— Elaine YJ Zheng
Exhibition view: Yto Barrada, Bite The Hand, Pace Gallery, London (22 March–11 May 2024). Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Yto Barrada. Photo: Damian Griffiths
Yto Barrada: Bite the Hand
Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square
22 March–11 May 2024
Expect: an exhibition that prompts a rethinking of our assumptions about time and its entanglement with labour, at once speeding and slowing things down.
When she isn’t in New York, Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada spends much of the year at The Mothership—her garden and artist residency in Tangier dedicated to the politics of dye. There, she creates textiles using recalcitrantly slow and unreliable processes that challenge our era’s sick obsession with productivity.
Bite the Hand provides insight into the artist’s work with dyes. The exhibition includes Barrada’s new textile series representing The Mothership’s layout (‘How to Plan a Garden’, 2024), dye samplers, and a series of sculptural abstractions of plants (‘Doorstop (Afrofuturism)’, 2024).
By contrast, the film installation A Day is Not a Day (2022) peeks into the surreal, time-warped world of accelerated weathering, used in the garment industry to test the durability of colours. New metal sculptures, ‘Holes in the Moon’ (2024), look beyond our planet at ‘unweathered’ lunar marks.
— Tom Denman
Courtesy Pilar Corrias.
Hayv Kahraman: She Has No Name
Pilar Corrias, 2 Savile Row
12 April–25 May 2024
Expect: new works on linen where uprooted plant life entangle with the artist’s subversive bodies, serving a timely metaphor for architectures of refuge and resilience.
Fleeing war-torn Iraq with her family in 1992, Hayv Kahraman watched asylum denied to her mother in Stockholm due to lack of documentation. A question central to her practice took shape: ‘I think about it all the time—why is one life worth more than another?’
In Kahraman’s portraits, Middle Eastern women confront not only war at home but exoticisation and othering under the white gaze. Given strong brows and soft parchment skin, they adopt assuming postures, untangling their nude bodies from pale organs or cascades of raven hair.
Foliage and anatomical forms serve as a metaphor for alienation, displacement, and the erasure of cultural heritage in the artist’s latest body of work. Inspired by colonial practices in the field of botany in Sweden, they call for greater attention to events of the past that parallel the constraints subjugating fragile bodies at present.
Anne Hardy, Being (Immaterial) (2023–2024). Artists clothes, rusted wire, shells, welded steel, jesmonite, jewellery, cast concrete, bronze, pewter, white metal, dried plant, earth. 82 x 116 x 130 cm. © Anne Hardy. Courtesy Maureen Paley.
Anne Hardy: Survival Spell
Maureen Paley, 60 Three Colts Lane
6 April–19 May 2024
Expect: an alchemical world of partial bodies and organic structures hinting at spritual rebirth.
Conceived during her residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and exhibiting the same desert-tone palette of an archaeological site, Anne Hardy’s new body of sculptures compile ‘things that were once useful’, scavenged throughout the city and outside her London studio.
‘The works in Survival Spell are made from materials gathered in the unstable and shifting terrains at the edges of our attention,’ Hardy explains. Clothing, wires, metal, or stones are arranged to breathe life into the discarded.
Hardy transforms these elements into material accumulations that hint at living matter—from supple branches resting above an ornate cauldron in Portal (Fallen Branches) (2023–2024) to a mannequin performing a divination seance on the ground [Being (Interloper), 2022–2024].
Chris Huen Sin-kan, Joel (2024). Oil on canvas. 200 x 240 cm. Courtesy the artist and Matt Carey-Williams, London. Photo: Ben Westoby.
Chris Huen Sin-kan: Forwards & Backwards, Back & Forth
Matt Carey-Williams, 12 Porchester Place
11 April–25 May 2024
Expect: an intimate look into the artist’s daily life, starting from a walk in the woods nearby his home in Wimbledon.
Attesting to the depth that illustration can retain, Chris Huen Sin-kan is well known for his singular Chinese ink technique deployed to engage the poetics of everyday life, prompting viewers to look closer at the objects in their surroundings.
Notable for complex compositions painted without plan, Huen equates his practice to painting in plein air—a metaphor that carries into his present exhibition at Matt Carey-Williams.
Works on view begin from the daily walk in the woods the artist took during Covid-19, accompanied by his two dogs. Nature takes centre stage elsewhere, replacing visuals of the artist’s quotidian alongside his wife sighted in his early work. In Joel (2024), the artist’s son appears at the mouth of a clearing, surrounded by a haze of grey. Fragments of bush and lavender frame the boy, soon to step into brighter days.
‘My works depict the process of my understanding of a scene. When we are in a space, we receive information from our senses gradually; we are processing different sources of information, turning those that are consistent into a version of reality,’ the artist told Ocula Magazine in 2020.
Exhibition view: Tammy Nguyen, A Comedy for Mortals: Purgatorio, Lehmann Maupin, London (13 March–20 April 2024). Courtesy Lehmann Maupin. Photo: Eva Herzog.
Tammy Nguyen: A Comedy For Mortals: Purgatorio
Lehmann Maupin, 1 Cromwell Place
13 March–20 April 2024
Expect: a continuation of the artist’s geopolitical investigation into Southeast Asian history across new paintings, works on paper, and an artist’s book.
At Lehmann Maupin is the second part of a trilogy of shows by Connecticut-based multidisciplinary artist Tammy Nguyen. The exhibition follows A Comedy for Mortals: Inferno, presented in Seoul early last year, and will culminate with the artist’s first New York exhibition in 2025.
Nguyen’s A Comedy for Mortals series departs from Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s ‘Divine Comedy’ (c. 1308–1321), a Christian narrative poem envisaging the afterlife. From there, Nguyen draws analogies with the Cold War, the Space Race, Vietnam’s geographies, and American transcendentalism, which she came across through reading Ralph Waldo Emerson.
With her watercolours, Nguyen presents her version of purgatory: an island set in liminal time and space, where distinct characters await and deliver judgement, from angels to Jesus Christ and international leaders from the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.
— Misong Kim
Exhibition view: Vivien McDermid, Burnt Milk and Honey, Blue Shop Gallery (4–21 April 2024). Courtesy Blue Shop Gallery.
Vivien McDermid: Burnt Milk and Honey
Blue Shop Gallery, 72 Brixton Road
4–21 April 2024
Expect: the debut solo show of an Edinburgh-based artist inspired by motherhood, domesticity, and the nature of painting.
Vivien McDermid came to painting after the birth of her first child in 2007, having graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a degree in fashion design. For the artist, painting is akin to ‘an excavation or an unburying of something lost’—a method by which she can untangle the conundrums of daily life and unite internal and external realities.
McDermid’s recent oil paintings are hypnotically textured, hazy like a remembered vision or an image emerging in a dream. Her inspirations are deeply sensual, including smells and tastes, and speak to the relationship between femininity, domesticity, and mundanity.
The works at Blue Shop Gallery were produced between 2023 and early 2024, with Gallery Director Ocki Magill saying the body of work addresses the artist’s ‘manoeuvre into motherhood so sensitively and sweetly’. The paintings glow but not entirely positively—darkness looms in the frame, reminding viewers of the complexities of balancing hope and gentleness with the often-brutal realities of living.
— Verity Babbs
Source Credit: Content and images from Ocula Magazine. Read the original article - https://ocula.com/magazine/features/must-see-exhibitions-in-london-spring-2024/