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:

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Bad Luck Rock at Josh Lilley ★★☆☆☆

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

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★★☆☆☆

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HelenA Pritchard, The Homeless Mind at TJ Boulting ★★★☆☆

HelenA Pritchard

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Firelei Báez, A Midnight’s Dream at South London Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Firelei Báez

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★☆☆☆☆

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Francesca DiMattio, Wedgwood at Pippy Houldsworth ★★★☆☆

Francesca DiMattio

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★★★☆☆

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Trevor Yeung, Soft Ground, at Gasworks ★★☆☆☆

Trevor Yeung

Soft Ground

★★☆☆☆

It’s stressful enough to fuck in the forest for fear of passers-by or the police; imagine having to also look out for curators.

Liam Gillick, The Sleepwalkers at Maureen Paley ★★★☆☆

Liam Gillick

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★★★☆☆

Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents.

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