The Fifer

★★☆☆☆

On until 18 February 2024

What connects mystical runes, sublime sounds, hypernatural birds, and the very middle of Europe? Wrong answers only, as the meme goes, because “nothing” is obvious. Narkevičius’ constellation of sculpture, photography, and sound installation, topped for good measure with a 3D film gimmick, pulls in too many directions. 

This luck-of-the-draw curating is unsatisfying and disruptively confusing. It forces the eye to find comfort in the Lithuanian’s already familiar and predictable 1997 video on “the post-Soviet era”. This modest work, lightly twitching the Iron Curtain, inadvertently becomes a centrepiece. In the age of the decolonial, this is as quaint as it is outmoded, and the contextual vacuum of this cutting room floor helps no one.


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

Jan Gatewood, Group Relations at Rose Easton ★☆☆☆☆

Group Relations

★☆☆☆☆

Such thin metaphors could only have come from LA.

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

Prejudice and Belonging

★★★★★

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

C. Rose Smith, Talking Back to Power at Autograph ★★☆☆☆

Talking Back to Power

★★☆☆☆

There’s no conversation, no challenge, no win.

Erick Meyenberg, Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre, the Mexican pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

Nos marchábamos, regresábamos siempre

★☆☆☆☆

Whatever the purpose of this confusion, it’s not to be found in the gallery.

What Is It Like? at Arebyte ★★☆☆☆

What Is It Like?

★★☆☆☆

What does it feel like for an intelligence to be artificial?

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

Green in the Grooves

★★★★☆

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

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