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:

Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History at ICA

Elisa Giardina Papa

She Flickered In and Out of History

★★☆☆☆

Giardina Papa renders transhumanist dreams sharply. Their promise, alas, is imaginable only in uninhabitable abstract.

Celia Hempton, Transplant at Phillida Reid ★★★☆☆

Celia Hempton

Transplant

★★★☆☆

Sense finally returns only outside the gallery.

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations at Whitechapel Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Veronica Ryan

Multiple Conversations

★★☆☆☆

The impulse at play is that repetition makes up for an idea by sheer volume. It doesn’t.

Patricia Ferguson, Each Little Scar at FILET ★★★★☆

Patricia Ferguson

Each Little Scar

★★★★☆

No medium is better suited to anxiety and dread.

Alia Farid, Elsewhere at Chisenhale ★★★☆☆

Alia Farid

Elsewhere

★★★☆☆

There is no answer in the work. Its cause and the object become enmeshed in a bland, exoticized mess. 

Richard Hunt, Metamorphosis at White Cube ★★★★★

Richard Hunt

Metamorphosis

★★★★★

A dictionary for self-determination written in phrases as they were being invented.

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