RE/SISTERS

★★☆☆☆

On until 14 January 2024

There are two reasons to see this show. One is that it collects so many must-see works that you might not have seen some of them before. The other is that the exhibition is a Johnsonian effort to catalogue the modern-day cult of Gaia and you might never have known without it that all female artists are gentle nags. 

Unparadoxically, these are also reasons not to see this show. The works are ‘diverse’, but most feel the same as the next. Too many deadpan landscape photographs turn intrigue into fatigue and into paralysis. And this anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-male dictionary of environmental resistance is even more biased than the one it seeks to replace.

And that’s a pity because why we insist that women are and will save the Earth is forever intriguing. Individually, each practice on show could choose to worship or dance on Gaia’s altar. But in this Hades, the works fall prey to other agendas that call for dull slogans, not myths. 


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

What Is It Like? at Arebyte ★★☆☆☆

Anna Bunting-Branch, Choy Ka Fai, Damara Inglês, Katarzyna Krakowiak, Lawrence Lek, Kira Xonorika

What Is It Like?

★★☆☆☆

What does it feel like for an intelligence to be artificial?

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.

Nicola Turner, Edward Bekkerman at Shtager&Shch ★★☆☆☆

Nicola Turner, Edward Bekkerman

The Song of Psyche: Corners of a Soul's Otherworlds

★★☆☆☆

Who opens a space in Fitzrovia only to fill it with such drivel?

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Tamara Henderson, Green in the Grooves at Camden Art Centre ★★★★☆

Tamara Henderson

Green in the Grooves

★★★★☆

The whole thing feels like a remake of Wind in the Willows directed by a garden gnome.

When Forms Come Alive at Hayward Gallery ★★☆☆☆

When Forms Come Alive

★★☆☆☆

This exhibition cannot decide if it’s a tourist attraction or a serious examination of sculpture’s relationship with movement.

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