Zyad Menk

Scar Tissue

★★☆☆☆

On until 7 August 2026

Piling up tonnes of junk in the corner of a gallery is an old trick. This showroom is tiny, its corners everywhere, and Menk’s collection of electronic circuit boards, wires, and half-broken peripherals thus looks almost as impressive here as Christoph Büchel’s equivalent once did in a warehouse. 

But volume alone is trivial, each item in this mess offering less to the eye than the last. Menk knows this: he used most of this matter before. Not always to such “rubbish” effect, either: e-waste was a game of research for him only three years ago.

For an artist so young, Menk’s electronics are very old news in the age of the chip implant and cloud computing. This could be intriguing but, in this rendering, isn’t. The form-factor turn on history’s scrapheap offers no interpretative powers.


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

Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler at Victoria Miro

Stephen Willats

Time Tumbler

★★★★☆

Willats orders fragments of time, matter, and space into data packets on one side of the flow chart and puts them to use on the other.

Jordan Derrien, Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte at Des Bains ★★☆☆☆

Jordan Derrien

Painted on a Wall of the Inn at Marlotte

★★☆☆☆

Derrien has his audience discussing the nature of paint drying out loud.

Tarek Lakhrissi, Spit at Nicoletti ★★★☆☆

Tarek Lakhrissi

Spit

★★★☆☆

Writing poetry is hard enough.

Rose Finn-Kelcey, Suit of Lights at Kate MacGarry ★★★★☆

Rose Finn-Kelcey

Suit of Lights

★★★★☆

Local-art-centre retro exposes the breakdown of the feminist art project.

Choon Mi Kim, ACID—FREEEE at Ginny on Frederick ★☆☆☆☆

Choon Mi Kim

ACID—FREEEE

★☆☆☆☆

Some forms of abstraction simply scream ‘my kid could have made that’.

Ed Webb-Ingall, A Bedroom for Everyone at PEER ★☆☆☆☆

Ed Webb-Ingall

A Bedroom for Everyone

★☆☆☆☆

How can art improve the lives of communities? Wrong answers only.

×