Bhenji Ra

Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon

★☆☆☆☆

On until 17 March 2024

Seeing the proliferation in galleries of long, sparse, indulgent, and hookless video installations that obliquely refer to the ancestral practices of unspecified, distant peoples, one might suspect that this trend in ‘radical’ filmmaking is the work of a conspiracy. Ra’s thirty-minute montage of washed-out wide shots lacks as much in action as it does in structure. Landscapes from a Philippine village wash over the screen and occasionally play host to livestock and human figures performing yogic-like dance movements. A colour-field sequence with designer subtitles relays fragments of a conversation between a grandmother and grandchild, the sense of which is ungraspable in the cut. The sign-reader’s desire is only obliquely rewarded by a prolonged scene, shot through a lens smeared thickly with Vaseline, in which a group of people allegorically adore a trans beauty queen.

Generously, one could compare such work to meditation. It might, at a push, be a piece of instructional diplomacy. But the gallery’s deployment of “a pedagogy of decolonial choreography” and branding the artist’s hometown of Sidney “Gadigal land, Eora Nation” break the spell. Such work was once a mere grift. But when it is this boring and has so deeply captured even the most cynical of art institutions, it is an outright stitch-up.


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

Freudian Typo at Delfina Foundation ★★☆☆☆

Freudian Typo

Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh

★★☆☆☆

The problem of artists who confuse graphic design with art is that they also mistake sloganeering for critique.

Abel Auer, The shadow of tomorrow draws an ancient silhouette at Corvi-Mora ★★★☆☆

Abel Auer

The shadow of tomorrow draws an ancient silhouette

★★★☆☆

Auer is more interested in the fate of painting than humanity and thus stands apart from the army of zealots who make eco art today.

Nicola Singh: Sincere Seeker at Cubitt ★★☆☆☆

Nicola Singh

Sincere Seeker

★★☆☆☆

What would it take for art to look like something, anything once more?

Özgür Kar, Heavy Ground at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Özgür Kar

Heavy Ground

★★★☆☆

Kar’s insight a fly’s life – or, to have it his way, the whole universe – is fleeting.

James White: Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon at Anthony Wilkinson ★★★★☆

James White

Every Corner Abandoned Too Soon

★★★★☆

Paint that does this to a pile of plastic coat hangers contends with any reality.

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias at David Zwirner ★★★☆☆

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias

★★★☆☆

These images are perfectly charming even to a viewer possessed of a cold anthropological eye. The troubling part is in realising just how far ‘outside’ the ideas are.

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