Raed Yassin

Eternal Ghost

★★☆☆☆

On until 12 July 2025

Pictures of other people’s children don’t sell. Ask me how I know. Yassin half-understood this, but only after he’d collected a cache of strangers’ family albums. His dealer is eager to tell me that they came from the artist’s native and oh-so-war-scarred Lebanon. In a gesture of pictorial grief, maybe, Yassin obscured the toddlers, young women, and the odd grandma by only lightly impressing their image on brightly coloured paper.

This appeal to human universals – that girl could have been my mother! – entirely misses the specificity of a family that’s not “chosen”. Photography’s about death, we get it. The exhibition essay, however, confusingly cites Sontag rather than Barthes and fails to recognise the woman. Yassin’s memory act is a category error when videos of dying children on social media feeds either solicit donations or carry “explicit content” labels.


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

Yi To, Terminal Lucidity at Project Native Informant ★★★★☆

Yi To

Terminal Lucidity

★★★★☆

All evidence erodes eventually.

Roland Knowlden: Negations at House Work Presents ★★★☆☆

Roland Knowlden

Negations

★★★☆☆

An exhausted porcupine and an architectural war plan.

Sosa Joseph, Pennungal at David Zwirner ★★★★★

Sosa Joseph

Pennungal: Lives of women and girls

★★★★★

The night, finally, recognises despair and witnesses infanticide.”

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

Talar Aghabshian, Solace of the Afterimage at Marfa’ at The Approach ★★☆☆☆

Talar Aghbashian

Solace of the Afterimage

★★☆☆☆

The carpet dealer gallerist’s zeal reveals the work’s lamentable inadequacy. 

Shu Lea Cheang at Project Native Informant ★★☆☆☆

Shu Lea Cheang

Scifi New Queer Cinema, 1994-2023

★★☆☆☆

With material this gratuitously explicit and a curator this absent, it’s a miracle that this project wasn’t shut down by the licencing, or indeed art-historical authorities.

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