Raven Row’s ‘impenetrability as a service’ is becoming tiresome. After Christine Kozlov’s conceptualism left audiences rudderless in a history that’s accounted for with clarity elsewhere, this new salvo proposes that ‘making art while black’ needs theory beyond, but somehow still rooted in the racial strife of the past decade.
This isn’t untrue, perhaps, but nothing on show is this theory or capable of giving rise to it even together. Kellard-Jones’s hanging mattress with heirloom medallion is tender, as are Kilfa’s photographs of the blackness of coffee becoming the blackness of the world. But Kirubo’s multimedia hangings are chaos, obscured further by her Vaseline-smeared windows. Sudipo’s ritual-fetishist leather and Holman’s pulled teeth spread geographic confusion. Hassinger’s Duchampian “love” hanging is full of hot air, while Muholi’s outsize retro telephone is no more than a bad joke. What stories might one need to hear down this line to make sense of these pairings?
Only silence answers. Too often, curating in these galleries foregoes the artefact only to fall back on glossy printed verbiage and high install specs. That is not, however, how good ideas spread.
