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:

Pavel Brăila: On the Thousand and Second Night, Moldova in Venice ★★★★☆

Pavel Brăila

On the Thousand and Second Night

★★★★☆

Temporal collapse manifests in magic.

Lara Favaretto at Biblioteca Marciana in Venice ★☆☆☆☆

Lara Favaretto

★☆☆☆☆

Burning the art student’s undergraduate essays won’t solve the problem.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Sadie Coles ★★★☆☆

Wilhelm Sasnal

★★★☆☆

Only in flights of anger does this vision come close to becoming believable.

Dream Stream, the Chinese pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Dream Stream

★★☆☆☆

What if appropriation and regurgitation led to domination?

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

Rheim Alkadhi

Templates for Liberation

★★☆☆☆

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

Yannis Maniatakos, Four Paintings at Sylvia Kouvali ★★★☆☆

Estate of Yiannis Maniatakos

Four Paintings

★★★☆☆

Examining the paintings in the gallery’s bright lights doesn’t lift their mystery.

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