Aziza Kadyri

Don't Miss the Cue

★★★★☆

Curated by Centre for Contemporary Art Tashkent
On until 24 November 2024

This exhibition whose Venice-wide marketing barely mentions the artist is inexplicably seductive despite the studied amateurishness of the cultural diplomacy that gave rise to it. The whole thing is backwards. The theatre designer Kadyri turned a cavernous Arsenale warehouse into the backstage area of some unspecified celebratory event. She prepped stacks of embroidered cloth and craft wares for a folklore display dance like those put on when a dignitary visits town. 

But everyone’s a VIP at the world’s largest drop-in cultural centre. Even Kadyri’s independent young artists’ collective boasts an “executive director”. The whole project thus reads like a self-referential press release maliciously corrupted by the AI which the artist used to design some of her nostalgia-trap patterns. This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers ★★★★☆

Peter Fischli and David Weiss

★★★★☆

A police procedural turns into a drinking game of Foucauldian power analysis.

Anna Barriball at Frith Street Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Anna Barriball

New Drawings

★★☆☆☆

The eyes may be the windows of the soul. To make an aphorism of the reverse needs more than shadow-play.

Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

Stephen Willats

Time Tumbler

★★★★☆

Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.

Deimantas Narkevičus, The Fifer at Maureen Paley ★★☆☆☆

Deimantas Narkevičus

The Fifer

★★☆☆☆

In the age of the decolonial, this is as quaint as it is outmoded

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett, >anticorpo< at Galerie Neu and Emalin ★★★★☆

Manfred Pernice, Megan Plunknett

>anticorpo<

★★★★☆

Such ‘80s nostalgia for meaning before history’s end is a comfort blanket.

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