Chronoplasticity

★☆☆☆☆

Curated by Lars Bang Larsen
On until 8 December 2024

It would take a visitor unfamiliar with Raven Row’s fetish for the 1970s until the heat death of the universe to understand what this exhibition is for. It assembles dozens of supposedly anti-temporal works that barely share a time zone, let alone partisan concerns, folding them into the present as though that could do some magic. Falhström’s 50-year-old study of globalism thus sits next to a strand of ‘mental health’ works by Podolski and Daučíková. An unimpressive archive of transhumanism dug up by Knauf has little echo. Next, some solidarity banners stitched by Zapatera Negra and a climate change corner with bits of glass by Schmidt.

The exhibition guide calls all this “radical”: if time were a social construct, things might have well been different. Proving the subjunctive useless, however, the gallery’s time-capsule top-floor flat hosts an exhibition-in-exhibition called “How to Eat a Rolex”. It may have been a good joke but it’s just too exhausting to look at.

The curator seems unfatigued. The show’s time-blindness peaks in Agirregoikoa’s idiotic pencil animation which poses Swan Lake as a Nazi anthem. This is “how culture is turned into an ideology”. Good to know that’s settled.


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

Carla Åhlander, Aaron Amar Bhamra, Holding Places at Belmacz ★★★☆☆

Carla Åhlander, Aaron Amar Bhamr

Holding Places

★★★☆☆

The illusion is as good as complete.

Michael Andrew Page, Claustrum at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Michael Andrew Page

Claustrum

★★★★☆

Page’s tent, brain, and the cathedral take the same form for a pretty good reason.

Tamara Henderson, Green in the Grooves at Camden Art Centre ★★★★☆

Tamara Henderson

Green in the Grooves

★★★★☆

The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome.

Amilia Graham, The Crust at Scatological Rites of All Nations ★★☆☆☆

Amilia Graham

The Crust

★★☆☆☆

Each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze.

Florian Meisenberg, What does the smoke know of the fire? at Kate MacGarry, ★★★★☆

Florian Meisenberg

What does the smoke know of the fire?

★★★★☆

Meisenberg’s paintings are either the product of a conspiracy or documents of a conspiracy theory.

Justin Caguiat, Dreampop at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Justin Caguiat

Dreampop

★★★★☆

This is the sort of exhibition that makes a critic question the quality of their judgment.

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