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:

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.

Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

Stephen Willats

Time Tumbler

★★★★☆

Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Sosa Joseph, Pennungal at David Zwirner ★★★★★

Sosa Joseph

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

★★★★★

The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”

Harmony Korine, Aggressive Dr1fter Part II at Hauser & Wirth ★★☆☆☆

Harmony Korine

Aggressive Dr1fter Part II

★★☆☆☆

The garish colours which may have carried the story in cinema here are unfitting of their new medium.

Rheim Alkadhi, Templates for Liberation at ICA ★★☆☆☆

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

When truth and artifice are so bluntly opposed, what use is aesthetics?

×