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

What Is It Like?

★★☆☆☆

Curated by Helen Starr
On until 4 May 2025

For an exhibition that claims to concern itself with “embodiment”, this slick but gimmicky display of audio, video, and VR works could not be any less intelligible through the human senses. Starr turned the dimly lit gallery into an archive vault from which visitors must themselves assemble exhibits of bewildering artefacts: game world vistas, augmented reality performances, and soundscapes inflected by programmatic AI-fi.

This physical challenge might be surmountable (audiences love interactivity, right?) but it clouds the show’s crucial concerns. Can the machine know like a human? What does it feel like for an intelligence to be artificial? What do any of the artists in this show have to say about it? And what, if anything, does that have to do with a bat?

That this is moot is Starr’s very point. Yet if art is a knowledge-generating discipline, its knowledge itself needs an art that translates it into forms. In the optimism of the Enlightenment, this process was the core of aesthetics. Today, technology and art serve to mystify each other, leaving the human out of the picture.


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

The Poplar Bestiary at Tondo Cosmic ★★★☆☆

Tamsin Morse, Kris Lock, Casper Scarth, et al.

The Poplar Bestiary

★★★☆☆

This menagerie comes with no humanly comprehensible challenge.

Auudi Dorsey at PM/AM ★★★★☆

Auudi Dorsey

★★★★☆

Dorsey records the human experience with the true universalism of paint.

transfeminisms Chapter IV at Mimosa House ★☆☆☆☆

transfeminisms Chapter IV: Care and Kinship

★☆☆☆☆

Lack of care for the artefact is a strange USP for a gallery.

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. 

Marina Abramović, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas ★☆☆☆☆

Marina Abramović

7 Deaths of Maria Callas

★☆☆☆☆

Abramović wants to destroy all performance and all women until she holds the monopoly over stage death.

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold at Tabula Rasa ★★★★☆

Elli Antoniou, Ali Glover, Richard Dean Hughes

things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

★★★★☆

These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators don’t know which.

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