Carla Åhlander, Aaron Amar Bhamr

Holding Places

★★★☆☆

On until 27 September 2024

Despite their formal simplicity, Åhlander’s photographs can build an atmosphere. It’s late summer at the family’s lake holiday cottage. The sun shines through the curtains, the building creaks in the breeze, and lunch will be ready soon. Together with the gallery’s fit-out – of brass trimmings, dark carpet, mirrors – the illusion is as good as complete. 

Then Amar Bhamr’s art handler’s readymade breaks it, hard, revealing the whole scene to be make-believe. But not before this artist, too, litters the floor with traces of the season’s turn, thus showing himself to be as sentimental as the rest of us. 


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

Tesfaye Urgessa, The Ethiopian Pavilion in Venice ★★★★★

Tesfaye Urgessa

Prejudice and Belonging

★★★★★

Urgessa’s figures are contorted in love, death, or merely life.

The last train after the last train at Public ★★★☆☆

The last train after the last train

★★★☆☆

The failed magic tricks in Lyndon Barrois Jr.’s canvases would hang in the final scene of Chinese Roulette in which everyone turns against everyone.

Eva Kot’átková, The Czech pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Eva Kot’átková

The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter

★★☆☆☆

The giraffe’s taxidermied corpse is host to an ideological stunt.

Ignacy Czwartos, Polonia Uncensored, Venice ★★☆☆☆

Ignacy Czwartos

Polonia Uncensored

★★☆☆☆

Czwartos’ painting proves little and his sign-writer’s hand loses art history’s bet.

Siobhan Liddell, Been and Gone at Hollybush Gardens ★★☆☆☆

Siobhan Liddell

Been and Gone

★★☆☆☆

A twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines.

Tacita Dean: Black, Green, Green and White at Frith Street Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Tacita Dean

Black, Green, Green and White

★☆☆☆☆

Film studies lost to mobile video; Dean phones it in.

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