Elegant art installation featuring a draped, peach-coloured fabric backdrop and a matching tablecloth with three whimsical white dog sculptures, creating a sophisticated and playful visual display.

Nicola Singh

Sincere Seeker

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Seán Elder
On until 25 October 2025

The phrase “vocalised gibberish”, which features in this exhibition’s introduction, is a depressing description of contemporary art’s penchant for the exotic evacuated of any aesthetics. Singh casts three toy monkeys – the see/hear/speak no evil line-up – in plaster resin, modelling them after a toy family heirloom. This somehow shows, in the curator’s words, that the artist’s heritage gives her some special relationship to this visual maxim. It doesn’t, of course, but the work’s too dull to invite the consideration of its essentialist claim.

An improvised mezzo-soprano soundtrack half-intently emanates from the sculptures, bringing, as Singh’s practice often does, more claims on cultural signifiers. Those make the fact that the room looks like a wedding cake shop at the end of a busy week more than a little incongruous. White ink prints of the plush toys on black paper, resembling the patterns a half-exhausted roller brush leaves on a bathroom wall, bring no explanation.

Where are the “esoteric rituals” and “emotional pain”? What would it take for art to look like something, anythingonce more?


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Linder’s second-wave feminist propositions were ruthlessly superseded.

Carole Ebtinger, Esther Gatón at South Parade ★★☆☆☆

Carole Ebtinger, Esther Gatón

phosphorescence of my local lore

★★☆☆☆

Rot overpowered this subject and came for the object next. 

Future Relics at Union Pacific ★★★★☆

Future Relics

★★★★☆

“Reskilling” has the same ring in art as “reindustrialisation” does in geopolitics.

Condo: The Ambassadors at Wien at Ginny on Frederick ★☆☆☆☆

Sophie Giraux, Albert Dietrich

Condo: The Ambassadors

★☆☆☆☆

Everything about this show feels lazy.

Siobhan Liddell, Been and Gone at Hollybush Gardens ★★☆☆☆

Siobhan Liddell

Been and Gone

★★☆☆☆

A twee aesthetics native to a grandmother’s mantlepiece collection of tourist souvenirs and devotional figurines.

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