Joanne Burke

Oes with works like Esses

★★★★☆

On until 1 March 2025

The risk of working with hot metal is that, like water, it spills away from the mould. Burke’s materials – silver, bronze, and aluminium – which she has worked into arcane ritual objects that one would more readily expect to find in the dimly-lit rooms of ethnographic museums than East London galleries have minds of their own. Some betray their decorative intent without revealing the occasion. Others are miniature charts that would lead the bearer to undisclosed treasure. A couple, resembling musical instruments, invite the staging of a performance whose score was never written.

These forms are exquisite and the little they lack in antique opulence they make up for in austerity. A nod to 17th-century hydromancy in the gallery text already charges the pieces with too much utility, however. Burke’s next demand that they affirm “posthuman feminist phenomenology” fails entirely. This, perversely, only confirms Quicksilver’s independence from artistic thought.


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

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

Sosa Joseph

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

★★★★★

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

Klara Lidén, Square Moon at Sadie Coles ★★☆☆☆

Klara Lidén

Square Moon

★★☆☆☆

This isn’t Times Square in a blackout.

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.

Adriano Costa, ax-d. us. t at Emalin ★★★☆☆

Adriano Costa

ax-d. us. t

★★★☆☆

Form triumphs over detritus.

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

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

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

Michael Simpson at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Michael Simpson

★★★★☆

In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.

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