Diego Marcon

Dolle

★★★☆☆

On until 16 December 2023

Mr Mole is working from home. His mole children are home too, off sick from school in this wintry weather. Mrs Mole holds everything together. The fire is burning, cups of tea all round. Mole is tucked up in bed himself, a pile of paper on his lap. He has some stuff to catch up on, so he enlisted the help of his wife with copying out the Book of Numbers. That would have been fun but these numbers are 21, 19, 3, 9, and 18, and a whole lot more. In the thirty minutes of Marcon’s endlessly looped film, the Moles spend an infinity batting these figures from one page to another, interrupted only by the odd cough. Not even the mammals know why.

This is half cutesy, half absurd until one realises that little separates the animatronic moles from half of the world’s human population for whom rearranging numbers in a table is synonymous with survival. Idle work became indistinguishable from leisure, vegetative time-passing from family life. No wonder, then, that even the Moles seek meaning in the figures. The key, according to Marcon, is 566. But that number works only for him.


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

Hannah Tilson, Soft Cut at Cedric Bardawil ★★☆☆☆

Hannah Tilson

Soft Cut

★★☆☆☆

Tilson’s styled self-portraits are an affectation that will take many years of practice to pay off.

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward, the Bolivian pavilion in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

looking to the futurepast, we are treading forward

★☆☆☆☆

The contemporary is of no interest to a nation whose future is yet to be dug out from the ground.

Aleksandar Denić, The Serbian pavilion in Venice ★★★☆☆

Aleksandar Denić

Exposition Coloniale

★★★☆☆

Denić took the Biennale’s theme literally, as though he was not in on the art world joke.

Alexis Kyle Mitchell: The Goal of Our Health at Peer ★★☆☆☆

Alexis Kyle Mitchell

The Goal of Our Health

★★☆☆☆

When Adam Curtis stopped narrating his ‘documentaries’, some stories are wasted breath.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

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

Firelei Báez

A Midnight's Dream

★☆☆☆☆

Such kitsch might have been fine in a spinster auntie’s bedroom. In the gallery, it is a cruel trick.

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