Linder

Danger Came Smiling

★★★★☆

On until 5 May 2025

It’s been a long time since Linder was sexy. That’s not because her incisive bust-ups of bodies and ideas are any less compelling than the still circulating visions of, say, Barbara Kruger, but because Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded by another set of objects.

Take the iconic 1976 photomontage of a nude woman with an iron for a head which Linder made for a Buzzcocks album cover. This modest yet outrageous image, now in the Tate collection, serves as the exhibition’s key marketing asset. That the artist remade it in 2015 as a larger-than-life lightbox says as much about her fight as the fact that this new work remains available for purchase.

Linder just about survived the demise of the print pictorial magazine. Her costume and sculptural works from the last decade are intriguing but understandably limited in number at the very end of the stuffily hung show that gets only a small part of the Hayward’s otherwise cavernous spaces. They make the diminishing returns of Linder’s and her peer’s demands poignantly evident. 


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

transfeminisms Chapter IV at Mimosa House ★☆☆☆☆

transfeminisms Chapter IV: Care and Kinship

★☆☆☆☆

Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.

Terry Winters: Along the River at Modern Art ★★★★★

Terry Winters

Along the River

★★★★★

A creationist science born out of oil.

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely at Gianni Manhattan and P21 at Project Native Informant ★★★☆☆

Teewon Ahn and Ibrahim Meïté Sikely

★★★☆☆

These works are as garish as they are fun to look at.

Onyeka Igwe, history is a living weapon in yr hand at PEER ★★☆☆☆

Onyeka Igwe

history is a living weapon in yr hand

★★☆☆☆

The Mavericks wanted a weapon, Igwe leaves them a toy.

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.

Divine Southgate-Smith, Navigator at Nicoletti ★☆☆☆☆

Divine Southgate-Smith

Navigator

★☆☆☆☆

It is too late to save the regime, yet too early to mourn it.

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