Leah Clements

Apophenia

★★☆☆☆

On until 2 May 2026

“Not everybody can be admitted to the temple”, begins Clements’s video essay. Her heroine, clad in a robe fashioned on a hospital gown, struts around a sixteenth-century Catholic shrine. The sight of her peering into the healing waters of a holy well, as she complains of infirmity and delusion, sets up a poignant contradiction. In it, faith and health might meet. Yet the words that follow do little to resolve it, turning the piece into a shallow tirade against human irrationality.

It takes a lot to pull off an essay film, granted, and Clements is no essayist. Her self-referential audio descriptions and access bumph in place of content point only to instrumental introversion. Yet the project is dully predicable in PEER’s programme under Ellen Grieg. Her exhibitions dwell in the banal purgatory of the old hat ‘systemic disadvantage’ grift. With Clements, that system could have been otherworldly, but the critique is merely opaque.


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

Yuki Nakayama, After the Rain at A.I. Gallery ★☆☆☆☆

Yuki Nakayama

After the Rain

★☆☆☆☆

Can an installation be too site-specific?

Linder, Danger Came Smiling at Hayward Gallery ★★★★☆

Linder

Danger Came Smiling

★★★★☆

Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Bad Luck Rock at Josh Lilley ★★☆☆☆

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Bad Luck Rock

★★☆☆☆

This is a poor man’s version of history or a philistine collector’s absolution.

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Trackie McLeod, FRUIT II at The Bomb Factory ★★☆☆☆

Trackie McLeod

FRUIT II

★★☆☆☆

“Working-class” and “queer” appear in the collateral as obligatory. What doesn’t is “white”.

Saccharine Symbols at Rose Easton ★★★☆☆

Marisa Krangwiwat Holmes, Shamiran Istifan, Tasneem Sarkez

Saccharine Symbols

★★★☆☆

Meaning parts with the image in this exhibition, never to return. Post-structuralism triumphs.

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