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:

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

Roland Knowlden

Negations

★★★☆☆

An exhausted porcupine and an architectural war plan.

Pakui Hardware, Maria Terese Rozanskaite, Inflammation at Lithuanian pavilion Venice ★★★☆☆

Pakui Hardware, Maria Terese Rožanskaité

Inflammation

★★★☆☆

One of the novelties in Venice is the artwork that looks good but on reflection isn’t.

A light here required a shadow at Maximillian William ★★★☆☆

Grant Falardeau, Rimantė Mikulovičiūtė, Benjamin Sasserson, Bu Shi, Dylan Williams

A light here required a shadow

★★★☆☆

Catch the wrong end of the spectrum and forever remain obscured.

Noah Davis at The Barbican ★★★☆☆

Noah Davis

★★★☆☆

Davis’ canvases give an account of time more sensitively than the Victorian portrait photograph

Nick Relph, Fils, ta vision! at Herald St ★☆☆☆☆

Nick Relph

Fils, ta vision!

★☆☆☆☆

There’s little for the eye to hang on and none of the punk culture of Relph’s earlier practice emerges from the works.

Tommy Camerno, Delirious at Filet ★★☆☆☆

Tommy Camerno

Delirious

★★☆☆☆

What’s left of the show are stage props that feed adolescent imaginations with false memories of the long-finished party.

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