Liam Gillick

The Sleepwalkers

★★★☆☆

On until 1 March 2025

It it weren’t for a line of text likely picked at random from a pulp fiction novel and printed across the gallery’s walls, one might struggle to understand how a box full of ribbons, the paraphernalia of airport security, and a vase half-full of vodka modulate one another’s significance. Having read it, one is fooled briefly into believing that language holds the key. In the next room, however, a video screen forces together interior shots of a traditional Korean house and Italian opera. These elements meet in neither’s geography. A shelter made from coloured acrylic partly overhangs the installation, as though to egg on the film’s undramatic edit.

Gillick’s practice lacks obviously consistent character, save for it is sparseness of means and the ungraspability of its referents. Decades spent by the artist lightly underlining their arbitrary connections, however, have etched the outlines of a functional map. Gillick wants his audience to commit fragments of it to their memory. On this page of the atlas, his plea is unpersuasive.


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

Eva Kot’átková, The Czech pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Eva Kot’átková

The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter

★★☆☆☆

The giraffe’s taxidermied corpse is host to an ideological stunt.

Phung-Tien Pham, doesn’t work at Project Native Informant

Phung-Tien Pham

doesn't work

★★☆☆☆

Fad aesthetics for fad ideas.

Donna Huddleston, Company at White Cube ★★★★☆

Donna Huddleston

Company

★★★★☆

A palpably stubborn nature unites Huddleston’s women

Karrabing Film Collective, Night Fishing with Ancestors at Goldsmiths CCA ★☆☆☆☆

Karrabing Film Collective

Night Fishing with Ancestors

★☆☆☆☆

Little separates this display from a human zoo complete with curators who occasionally kettle-prod the once noble savage into a spectacular rage.

Mike Kelley, Ghost and Sprit at Tate Modern ★★★☆☆

Mike Kelley

Ghost and Spirit

★★★☆☆

The challenge of curating a retrospective of a career as rich as Kelley’s is to build a narrative that both lay audiences and art historians can believe. Wood packs the show and pleases neither fully.  It’s remarkable that any artist’s…

Amilia Graham, The Crust at Scatological Rites of All Nations ★★☆☆☆

Amilia Graham

The Crust

★★☆☆☆

Each show lasts no more than three hours, and it’s bring-your-own booze.

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