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:

Miranda Forrester, Arrival at Tiwani Contemporary ★★★☆☆

Miranda Forrester

Arrival

★★★☆☆

Forrester’s project is timely when foundational concepts like ‘mother’ and their ‘as-though’ counterparts are readily confused.

Roe Etheridge, Happy Birthday Louise Parker II at Gagosian ★★☆☆☆

Roe Etheridge

Happy Birthday Louise Parker II

★★☆☆☆

Etheridge’s method finds an extreme in this tiny pass-by display.

Sylvie Fleury, S.F. at Sprüth Magers ★★★☆☆

Sylvie Fleury

S.F.

★★★☆☆

In Fleury’s car workshop cum womenswear boutique, everything is ready-made and ready-to-wear. But you can’t touch any of it and you certainly can’t afford it.

Michael Simpson at Modern Art ★★★★☆

Michael Simpson

★★★★☆

In this meditation of surface disguised as a study of objects, neither is a truer likeness of the events.

Anastasia Pavlou, Reader at Hot Wheels ★★☆☆☆

Anastasia Pavlou

Reader, Part 2; The Reader Reads Words in Sentences

★★☆☆☆

In this game of aesthetic cognition, the idea which survives is of the artist thinking.

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias at David Zwirner ★★★☆☆

Odoteres Ricardo de Ozias

★★★☆☆

These images are perfectly charming even to a viewer possessed of a cold anthropological eye. The troubling part is in realising just how far ‘outside’ the ideas are.

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