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:

Sophie Huckfield: Lady Ludd at Outpost, Norwich ★★☆☆☆

Sophie Huckfield

Lady Ludd

★★☆☆☆

Huckfield crowbars made-up heroes into past revolutions to pose as the saviour in the next one.

Aziza Kadyri, the Uzbekistan pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Aziza Kadyri

Don't Miss the Cue

★★★★☆

This dissonance might be intentional. If it isn’t, so much for the better.

Miranda Forrester, Arrival at Tiwani Contemporary ★★★☆☆

Miranda Forrester

Arrival

★★★☆☆

Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.

Eddie Ruscha, Seeing Frequencies at Cedric Bardawil ★☆☆☆☆

Eddie Ruscha

Seeing Frequencies

★☆☆☆☆

But either the curator or the artist should have known better.

Anish Kapoor at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

Anish Kapoor

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Pity the artist looking for the abyss IRL.

Amanda Wall, Femcel at Almine Rech ★★★☆☆

Amanda Wall

Femcel

★★★☆☆

There’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.

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