notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Belarus Free TheatreOfficial. Unofficial.
★★☆☆☆San Giovanni Evangelista, VeniceCurated by Daniella Kaliada, Natalia KaliadaOn until 22 November 2026It feels heartless to suggest that Belarus Free Theatre’s entry into the Biennale, whose object is explicitly propagandistic, curates with as heavy a hand as Alexander Lukashenko censors. Yet this display belongs more on a commercial stage than a dimly lit Venetian church. On the former, how closely it sticks to its script would be far less jarring.
The installation looks like a bunch of leftovers from past theatrical productions. A wheat field fills a nave, scenic paintings obscure the altars, CCTV cameras survey the confessional, and a giant prop made of banned books takes up an apse. Who made these objects is secondary and why is immediately and painfully obvious.
Save for Stephen Fry’s voice, which didactically whispers harrowing prison diaries, the project lacks any human intent. If there are nods here to a Belarusian culture that’s worth fighting for — some quaint rural traditions, perhaps, and a love for… Western freedoms — they are an afterthought to the propagandist’s own interests. The whole thing is confirmation, as if it were needed, that art matters neither to the dictator nor his opponents.
Bogna Burska and Daniel KotowskiLiquid Tongues
★★☆☆☆Polish pavilion, VeniceCurated by Ewa Chomicka, Jolanta WoszczenkoOn until 22 November 2026Liquid Tongues is a collaboration between two artists and a community choir of deaf and hearing people. Despite drawing on many ideas, the film lands a generic, corporate look. Were Burska and Kotowski not aware of the rich history of linguistic experiment (in the Biennale’s last edition, for example) or social practice (Althamer’s Nowolipie) in Polish art?
Anyone could have made this as a commercial music video years ago. And they wouldn’t today: inclusion aesthetics is absent in the Biennale elsewhere. The artists bring little new to the table and thus resort to a gratuitous hype and installation gimmicks. But forcing audiences to recline to see a screen it does not make up for its inconsequential content.
Is painting better than basketball? Estna’s Estonian pavilion is one of those ‘come back in three months’ dos that have the artist working on site for the duration of the Biennale. Not a bad way to catch an afternoon’s Aperol sun. Less great, however, for the school kids who gave up their sports hall for the painter’s studio.
The glossy tile flooring and gesso-clad walls overlaid on the court do carry a promise of an immersive vista — and Estna is a capable painter. But the whole thing’s a racket, and not one useful for sport.
Abbas AkhavanEntre chien et loup
★★★☆☆Canadian pavilion, VeniceCurated by Kim NguyenOn until 22 November 2026Abbas Akhavan, whose work reflects on the historic uses of plant species, has turned the already glassy Canadian pavilion into a hothouse, or “Crystal Palace”, for Victoria water lilies. The seeds came from Kew Gardens, as though in symbolic repatriation, returning the flower not quite where it once originated.
There’s some poetry to this gesture, granted, but Akhavan’s clinical efficiency of purple LED grow lights would make Monet cry. A pile of mossy (bronze?) sticks and a sizeable boulder, together with the show’s cryptic title, help little.
Is Canada the hot house? Britain the historical master botanist? Akhavan’s puzzle mixes biography with biology. The artist spent much of his career hopping between overseas residencies and uses Canada as a flag of convenience. Yet he became the country’s top cultural export. Some water lily species, meanwhile, are native to Europe. Others — and the list of things, people, and ideas that originated elsewhere is endless — are invasive.
Oriol VilanovaLos restos
★★★★☆Spanish pavilion, VeniceCurated by Carles GuerraOn until 22 November 2026In what at first looks like a gimmick, Vilanova has filled the Spanish pavilion’s walls with many thousands of vintage postcards. The rectangles hung in dizzying geometrical perfection depict European cityscapes and landscapes, cultural artefacts, and landmarks both geographic and historical.
The curator suggests that the arrangement is non-hierarchical, that the images are removed by the collector’s gesture from their vital milieu. But this is nonsense: a postcard still carries its context on verso, and in the exhibition, one is before long overpowered by Villanova’s choice and grouping of his subjects.
Hundreds of the pictures in one corner show ornate cathedral doors, elsewhere many dozens bear the faces of twentieth-century Popes. Cats get their own field, as do toy dolls dressed in period costumes. They share a wall with antique mosaics, not far from dramatic mountains and marbles of Christian saints.
The dance of the constellations is never ending, which makes their critique counter-intuitive. In it, the non-linear totality of Western creation — a “civilisation”, as Kenneth Clark may have put it — inspires awe.
Making visual displays about music is hard. This may be why V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, ostensibly celebrating the work of black British musicians, opens with extensive notes on the transatlantic slave trade. A dozen objects and infographics, of no relevance to music, imply between staves that Africa is the origin of sound.
To the eye rolling in response, what follows looks like a jumble of archival photos, vinyl records, and audio kits, arranged to quasi-educational, quasi-entertainment ends. The show’s thesis — that there is a uniquely black British music and that it is synonymous with postcolonialism — is hard to evaluate because the display can’t figure out what blackness means in Britain that’s only “Great” enough to be named so in scare quotes.
There’d be plenty to hear here. Yet the show barely explores, for example, the source of racial tensions in Notting Hill when it takes on the Carnival in the 1960s. It treats Windrush as if it were myth, not a subject worthy of research and mindful interpretation.
The exhibition’s soundtrack is rich, at least, yet the individual headphones turn would-be rave-goers into mute, inanimate zombies. The celebrations are, therefore, mindless. A large section on contemporary black music venerates 2 Tone for “confronting Britain with its own reflection” and Trip Hop for “opening listeners’ eyes [sic] to emotion”. But there’s no mention of Drill, a uniquely black British genre, nor the incarceration of its many makers for gang crime.
The exhibition, if not the entire V&A East enterprise, presents a tired, corporatist response to questions of identity that the institutions made bank on in 2021. The project’s intellectual gentrification is as lazy as it is advanced, shedding even Blairite Millenium Dome ambitions. This may be fitting for the new Stratford desert but hits few notes beyond.
For a composer who believes, according to the gallery’s note, that music constitutes identity, Bailey hardly cares about sound. The bassy backing of 5C Jacques Road, an overlong video record of a car journey around Kingston, is as drab as it is repetitive.
But — and this is perverse in a video installation — she cares even less for the image. The town, sea, and forest scenes shot from the passenger’s seat are inconsequential. Bailey pairs the sequences with quasi-poetic subtitles: “You might hear a gabby sound”, “Why am I so concerned that I be able to feel anything at all”. The passages correspond to no speaker.
Taking the artist’s mission as activist consciousness-raiser in earnest, one might read Bailey’s unstoppable dub as the memory of a distant childhood. Whom does it rally, however, when the project makes no aesthetic claim on the gallery? Music, if that’s what’s on offer, turns into a commodity of an entirely projected culture. Without the gallery’s lush sofas, no one would stop to hear it.
Ryan’s bibelot installations do have a charm to them. Through the ground floor gallery’s window, the retrospective looks like a playground. Assemblages of match boxes, carpets topped with indiscernible colourful entitles, and crochet yarn nets filled with conkers are cute enough. But here the fun ends, sadly, and one gains little from entering to eye up these objects closely. Ryan, more sadly still, has gained even less by ordering them in her entirely imitable manner for over four decades.
The impulse at play — and one sees this from any one of the hundred works here — is that repetition makes up for an idea by sheer volume. It doesn’t. Ryan sews together pin cushions until they become duvets, for example, or stacks cardboard trays until they turn into totems. This strategy fails precisely in its repetition. Ryan expects that each of her collections carries a different thought. How no one spotted this juvenile error is bewildering.
Ryan’s giant bronze fruit, lesser represented in the show, are the one exception in her oeuvre, and it’d have been good to see more of them. How far they travel beyond merely “exotic” is hard to chart in this context. Ryan, it seems, prefers to hang kitchen gadgets on the walls of her studio as she did in the ’80s, having barely developed an engaging idiom. The gallery knows this and launches each little trinket with not only curatorial verbiage but also the artist’s autobiographical note. If these texts are more interesting than the works, they only indict the enterprise further.
No object exists without its double, no form without an opposite. Phillips’s dainty assemblies of ceramic, steel, and PVC tube exist only as much as something else—the artist’s body and mind, for example—took a lead in shaping them.
The resulting inanimate masks, saddles, and tongues brim with desire. Phillips carefully suspends them in balance, which negates any idle negation. Instead, the sculptures attest that their original lacked something too, itself borne from a chain of such very lack.
Philips dwells on this line’s undeniability, bringing, for example, male and female forms too close for their own comfort. Their quasi-sexual, quasi-medical shapes are hard to own up to. To deny where they came from, however, is impossible.
The Colombian González spent the 1960s studiously rephrasing European old masters into South America’s collage and print culture. She then applied the same exercise to the early Modernists and Western magazine imagery.
The results of this practice are iconic—what’s more 1970 than a Pop art Last Supper on the top of a dining table?—but they are also unremarkable as third-worldly knock-offs. Even the exhibition’s clumsy narration of González’s practice as feminist and decolonial resistance doesn’t excuse the volume of her copy-and-distort production. The Barbican’s cavernous galleries encourage such curatorial indulgence. This does González a disservice. When her work turned to closer matters in the 1990s, this retrospective has run out of steam.
Yet it is the collaged images in which Gonzáles captured Colombia’s unending guerrilla warfare, corruption, and ever-present death that are extraordinary in her oeuvre. They combine grief with eerie ideas of leisure. She stacks caskets next to monoblock chairs; the poolside is for sun-seeking and for revenge by drowning. The show’s arc misses these works’ true contradictions: cartoonishly remaking Guernica saved no one, and the Colombian state bought some of the painter’s most politically damning works.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
