Vinca Petersen

Me, Us and Dogs

★★★☆☆

On until 22 December 2023

This modest display of the artist’s personal photographs of people, campsites, and dogs taken during her fifteen-year spell as a traveller and squatter and recently made up into four framed assemblies hardly makes for an exhibition. The tableaux, sparsely annotated in Petersen’s hand, sketch stories of free love, free movement, and free association. 

But constrained by this gallery, they are merely vehicles for nostalgia. And that’s a pity because Petersen’s work of ‘giving voice to underrepresented communities’, as curatorial fashion today would have it, has roots in a life of both joy and struggle that social practice rarely succeeds in engaging. To go all out on it is no answer, either: Petersen’s website has pictures of this critic examining her much larger installation in 2019.

Such is the lot of political alternatives. Close up, Petersen’s innocents today conjure ideas of redneck resistance. At scale, of state-marketed utopia. The middle ground is envy.


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

Botond Keresztesi, NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia) at Seventeen ★★★☆☆

Botond Keresztesi

NPC (No-one Paints Chrysopoeia)

★★★☆☆

There is no “too much” in this fantasy meme game.

Matthew Barney, SECONDARY at Sadie Coles HQ ★★★☆☆

Matthew Barney

SECONDARY: light lens parallax

★★★☆☆

Secondary turns the gallery into an American Football stadium. But all the seats in the house are the cheap seats and the game lacks a cheerleader.

Judith Dean at South Parade ★★★★☆

Judith Dean

New Builds / Bilds 2: did you mean peace?

★★★★☆

Holbein’s skulls impresses no one anymore.

Bitch Magic at Alma Pearl ★★★☆☆

Renate Bertlmann, Cullinan Richards, Ayla Dmyterko, Permindar Kaur, Rebecca Parkin, Tai Shani, Penny Slinger, Georgina Starr, Unyimeabasi Udoh

Bitch Magic

★★★☆☆

There will be no women when this spell breaks. And no need for magic, either.

Stuart Middleton, The Human Model at Carlos/Ishikawa ★★☆☆☆

Stuart Middleton

The Human Model

★★☆☆☆

An interest in material is core to this practice but Middleton mistrusts his instincts.

Eva Kot’átková, The Czech pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Eva Kot’átková

The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter

★★☆☆☆

The giraffe’s taxidermied corpse is host to an ideological stunt.

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