notes and notices are short and curt reviews of exhibitions at (mostly) London galleries.
Nomenclature for the Time Being
★★☆☆☆Raven Row , LondonCurated by Imani Mason JordanOn until 6 September 2026Raven 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.
Maja Malou LyseThings to Come
★★★★★Danish pavilion , VeniceCurated by Chus MartínezOn until 22 November 2026Does representation have the power to shape its object? The answer was once obvious, but in today’s image-saturated culture, as the hackneyed phrase goes, to deal with the icon takes conviction. Lyse throws caution to the wind, confronting the image’s epigenetic consequences.
In clinically pornographic surround, the installation takes the classic female nude to its inevitable conclusion. If titillation was once the stuff of oil paint and the top-shelf magazine, the gallery now delivers it in OnlyFans perfection. Lyse’s barely clad women flex for the cameras, their poses optimised for maximum NSFW spell-bind. Ciccolina, the icon’s icon, performed at the show’s opening. No man’s desire has not been shaped by these apparitions.
In this barely fictional post-sex world, intercourse is a game of image veneration, its object divorced from old biological imperatives. Lips, tits, and cunts are the world, but men “race” their sperm under the microscope for kicks. IVF is GDP, and love is in surplus. In a Biennale under the spell of a dead woman, Lyse’s contribution is as morbid as it is vital. Eros is dead. Long live Eros.
Li Yi-FanScreen Melancholy
★★★☆☆Taiwanese pavilion , VeniceCurated by Raphael FonsecaOn until 22 November 2026Taiwan has form in staging depressing video installations next door to the Doge’s palace. This year’s contribution is an orgy of flesh, both on screen and at hand. Li’s animations follow a tribe of sketchily rendered humanoids as they engage in an operatic orgy of misery. The drama unfolds as the characters lose themselves in screens-within-screens, their masturbatory narrations performed from a cyclical script.
That’s the catch, though: Li’s characters are puppets, and their unfreedom his choice. The loop they are stuck in might be pure sarcasm. More likely that it’s Taiwanese melancholia.
Pavel BrăilaOn the Thousand and Second Night
★★★★☆Curated by Adelina LuftOn until 22 November 2026Who knew that total temporal collapse would manifest magic. Moldova’s first outing in Venice mixes the hackneyed craft of carpet weaving, which one might expect to see in a heritage project of an arriviste nation, with the futuristic might of drones that has become the calling card of China’s techno-cultural displays.
The carpets float in pitch dark, disorienting the audience under with the whirring of motors and gusts of chilling air. With detailed tales from the weavers’ cultures absent, the mind drifts to air warfare that today haunts the lands of a Thousand and One Nights. That we lack the patience for a thousand more is only a pity.
Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison, Jasmine GregoryGenuine Fake Premium Economy
★★★☆☆ICA , LondonOn until 5 July 2026Reorienting contemporary art to questions of labour and class, as this exhibition purports to, would be outright reactionary. Elsewhere, even the queer and post-colonial revolutions are already passé, having made no one’s life better. What would it take, hypothetically, for a struggling artist to take control of the means of aesthetic production?
That is not the aim of Genuine Fake Premium Economy, however. Gregory’s oil renderings of Patek Philippe adverts set the tone, pointing to other people’s desires as the object of capital. Ellison’s sparse arrangement of office paraphernalia calls for aesthetic refusal and has a feel of American Psycho to it, granted. But his wealth management graphics link art and capital in an entirely different manner.
Bliss’s pre-2008 art fair satire flic, by contrast, is well observed, funny, and well cast. Yet it, too, understands art in terms the contemporary can no longer bear. Together, these slight objects only obfuscate, promoting despite themselves indulgent, out-of-date theories.
Is Greece ok? Their pavilions of late have been dingy and gloomy, casting the motherland itself as a dark den. Emerging from it is increasingly doubtful. Angelidakis’s Escape Room stages Plato’s cave for “the current political climate”, where the shadows are Hitler, and Trump holds the keys. Maybe Greek love is the salvation! (Or something.)
Angelidakis mixes nightclub, 4chan, HIV, and MAGA imagery, casting the visitor as the confounding video silhouette. Greece is half-dungeon, half beautiful ruin, all narcissistic psychosexual babble ignorant of its history. This lair might be fun to dance in to Make Plato’s Cave Great Again. But is that a civics lesson?
China is one of the few countries who take the Biennale’s competition literally. Its contribution to the last edition recast Warburg’s Atlas as a Chinese invention, and this year mixes video gaming, animated print, robotic calligraphy, space rockets, and, in another gesture to imperial primacy, Vitruvian man and Kaspar David Friedrich.
Dream Stream is a dark theatre of “Eastern wisdom” (from which stay away, invader!) encoded to seamlessly fuel a plan economy dystopia with the help of European enlightenment “Lichtung” (no licence to use needed). The result is a mess, of course, but it’s hard to imagine that this was a worry for the country’s soft power policy. What if, as is the case in much contemporary art, China’s appropriation and regurgitation led to domination? Game on.
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.
Inspired in form and attitude by Manhattan Art Review.
