Iris Touliatou

Outfits

★★★☆☆

On until 16 December 2023

The popularity of Institutional Critique – the artistic practice which takes the management of museums and galleries as its subject – has waxed and waned since artists like Michael Asher in the 1970s began to rearrange gallery walls and floors as though the fabric of the exhibition space was more interesting than the artefacts. Touliatou’s intervention at PEER – stripping a section of drywall, moving a door, and altering the gallery’s location on Google Maps – returns to this tradition as though nothing had changed in the meantime.

She has a point: the very purpose of art institutions is once again in question. But can Institutional Critiques’ failed experiments produce different results today? Touliatou’s twist takes her to the museum store where she assembled a collection of dozens of ceramic figurines of Jennings Dogs, the ornamental canine guardians found in the gardens of suburban homes whose 2nd-century Roman predecessor belongs to the British Museum. These gestures remind the gallery that it is a social space in which the vernacular should be at home. Unfortunately, they also inadvertently point to the gallery’s sorry end: art-free but dog-friendly.


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

TJ Wilcox, Hiding in Plain Sight at Sadie Coles HQ ★★☆☆☆

TJ Wilcox

Hiding in Plain Sight

★★☆☆☆

Vanity proceeds in circles.

New Contemporaries at South London Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

New Contemporaries

★☆☆☆☆

This edition spells ‘stasis’ more than most, and the selectors are to blame.

Alex Katz, Spring at Timothy Taylor ★★☆☆☆

Alex Katz

Spring

★★☆☆☆

The emperor’s clothes have moth holes.

Mohammad Ghazali, Trilogy: Then… at Ab-Anbar ★★★★☆

Mohammad Ghazali

Trilogy: Then…

★★★★☆

Repetition and framing are photography’s greatest tricks.

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

HelenA Pritchard

The Homeless Mind

★★★☆☆

Death by debris falling from building façades is an artist’s occupational hazard.

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.

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