As somebody who has worked between activism and art and community organising for years, I know this particular participatory work, in art and research, is more than a symbolic one.
Laura Huertas Millán, The Labyrinth, 2018
Feature
Ruin Fever
Marcus Verhagen suggests that our romantic fascination with ruins wilfully ignores our part in creating them
In the elegiac tradition, the ruin exists in time but not in history – that is its chief attraction. Dora Apel is right to see this approach as, at root, consolatory. For the ruin to serve a more radical agenda, it has to retain echoes of willed destruction.
From the Back Catalogue Modern Ruins
Gilda Williams on the politics and aesthetics of ruins. First published in 2010, now free online.
Morehshin Allahyari, Lamassu, 2015–16
Feature
Repatriation v Duplication
Tom Snow argues that artists must be given a vital role in addressing longstanding issues about the repatriation of artefacts found in western museums and current debates about digital replicas
How might a more creative use of digital technologies critically resituate or intervene in conservative museum aesthetics, and productively renew the role of cultural institutions in representing so-called world history?
Sammy Baloji, Aequare: The Future that Never Was, 2023
Profile
Sammy Baloji
Elizabeth Fullerton
Struggling with the vexed history of photography, a medium so bound up in the (mis)representation of Africa’s inhabitants, Sammy Baloji has increasingly moved into sculpture, installation and film as a way of forging a visual language capable of reframing histories and generating new perspectives.
sponsored
Editorial
What on Earth?
Ruins continue to be romanticised, not least in TV shows such as ‘Abandoned Engineering’, yet the entertainment industry’s ahistorical approach is a diversion that distracts audiences from the present-day ecological disasters that such earth-shattering engineering and extraction continue to wreak on our failing biosphere.
During the Cold War era, the demand for uranium increased exponentially, with dire consequences for the miners at DRC’s Shinkolobwe mine – ‘Shinkolobwe’ is named after a kind of boiled apple that leaves a burn on the skin if squeezed.
sponsored
Artnotes
Just Stop in Jail
Peaceful climate protesters are punitively jailed for faux art attacks; further attacks are carried out in defiance; museum directors call for an end to the targeting of cultural artefacts; the National Gallery implements visitor restrictions in response to activist stunts; artists protest against the West’s arms trade with Israel during the war on Gaza; a Rasheed Araeen river performance is cancelled because of sewage discharges; museum artworks are mistaken for rubbish and binned; Scottish arts organisations warn of dire consequences as funding decisions are delayed; art-authentication charity IFAR closes down; plus the latest on galleries, people, awards and more.
Glenn Ligon, ‘All Over the Place’, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Exhibitions
Tina Girouard: Sign In | Conflicting Evidence | I Want You to Have a Good Time
CARA | Magenta Plains | Anat Ebgi, New York
Chris Murtha
Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Matthew Bowman
Manifesta 15
various venues, Barcelona Metropolitan Area
Chris Clarke
sponsored
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975–1998
Barbican Art Gallery, London
Chloe Chu
Dexter Dalwood: English Painting
Lisson Gallery, London
Cherry Smyth
Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane: Grey Unpleasant Land
Spike Island, Bristol
Virginia Whiles
sponsored
Emma McNally: The World is Knot Flat
Drawing Room, London
Andrew Chesher
Machine Painting
Modern Art, London
Chris Townsend
sponsored
Imran Perretta: A Riot in Three Acts
Somerset House, London
Alex Bacon
Ventriloquism: The Lost Voice Spoken by Others
Whitaker Museum and Art Gallery, Rossendale
Bob Dickinson
Olana Light, The Birch Tree Family, 2024
Events
Middlesbrough Art Week
Tom Jeffreys
The event makes use of many alternative spaces. It means that shoppers hunting fast fashion can also discuss mass species loss via Amy Dover’s drawing, or those having their mobile phone repaired can relax on a deck chair and watch Kyriaki Goni’s video in which a personified algorithm explains the systemic biases and catastrophic climatic effects of artificial intelligence.
Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art cover
Books
Co-operative Education, Politics, and Art: Creative, Critical, and Community Resistance to Corporate Higher Education
Natalie Bradbury
What unites these alternative courses is a clear belief in the social purpose of art. Common across the contributors is an interest in the place of art in everyday life, the role of art education in teaching skills such as criticism (or ‘crap detection’) and a responsibility to respond to contemporary social challenges, from AI to climate change.
Diego Marcon, La Gola, 2024
Film
Diego Marcon: La Gola
Chris McCormack
Diego Marcon’s blending of the mechanical and the digital gives a queasy feeling of a life imprisoned inside the limits of flesh, as if the characters have awoken locked inside a body as coffin.
Jeane Dunning, The Toe Sucking Video, 1994
Reports
Letter from Vienna
Miriam Stoney
Vienna has always suffered from some form of malaise, at times bearing it with more dignity than at others. This malaise has often been ‘sublimated’, as Sigmund Freud termed it, through art forms that probe the visceral discomfort involved in ‘being’ – a body, a human, an Austrian or otherwise.
Marcel Broodthaers, Éloge du sujet, 1974 estimated at £80,000–120,000, sold for £381,000
Salerooms
Cutting the Mustard
Colin Gleadell
A rare assemblage of found objects arranged and labelled like a museum display by the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers sold for a triple-estimate £381,000. Conceptual Art has a back seat in the market behind Minimalism, Pop Art etc and great examples are usually the terrain of museums.
Kirsha Kaechele, Ladies Lounge, 2020
Artlaw
Ladies Lounge
Henry Lydiate
A key aspect of the legal and artistic circumstances of the case, as submitted to the court by the artist’s lawyer, was the ‘participatory element of allowing women and denying men … who are experiencing Ladies Lounge: their experience of rejection is the artwork … they experience the artwork differently than women, but men are certainly experiencing the artwork as it’s intended’.
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Iain Hales m2 Gallery, London, opens Sun 3 Nov | PV 3 Nov
Keran James: Control-Alt-Delete studio1.1, London, 7 Nov to 1 Dec | PV 7 Nov With metaphor and illusion, James’s new video/installations offer surface pleasure while placing us in an interim, problematic space. This isn’t where we came in.
promoted
In the Thick of Things APT Gallery, London, opens Thu 7 Nov | PV 7 Nov
Cosmotechnics Fact, Liverpool, opens Fri 8 Nov | PV 7 Nov
Linett Kamala Metroland, London, opens Fri 8 Nov | PV 7 Nov
Denise de Cordova Standpoint Gallery, London, opens Fri 8 Nov | PV 7 Nov
image-event: Tanoa Sasraku and Anastasia Xirouchakis Inspection Pit, West Sussex, 9 Nov to 6 Dec | PV 8 Nov Curated by Will Vetch. Within this exchange, memory, landscape, and the reanimation of the human body occur via photographic and sculptural stand-ins.
promoted
Wave/Colour/Turbulence Tension Fine Art, London, opens Sat 9 Nov | PV 8 Nov
Spectroscopic Coleman Projects, London, opens Sat 9 Nov | PV 8 Nov
Tanoa Sasraku, Anastasia Xirouchakis Inspection Pit, East Harting, opens Sat 9 Nov | PV 8 Nov
Neil Zakiewicz domoBaal, London, opens Sat 9 Nov | PV 9 Nov
Forest, Woods and Groves: An Exhibition by The Arborealists Batsford Gallery, London, opens Thu 14 Nov | PV 14 Nov
Martyn Cross Hales Gallery, London, opens Fri 15 Nov | PV 15 Nov
Filippo Caramazza Lychee One, London, opens Mon 18 Nov | PV 15 Nov
Artist Fundraiser for Médecins Sans Frontières 14 Wharf Rd, London, opens Fri 22 Nov | PV 22 Nov
Land Sea Sky: Ingrid Pollard, JMW Turner & Vija Celmins The Box, Plymouth, until 12 Jan 2025 Three artists connected through their close observation of nature. In partnership with ARTIST ROOMS, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland.
Find local shows with the Art Monthly gallery maps!
Podcasts
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Oct: Bob Dickinson discusses artists who connect the sleep crisis to the climate crisis, while Tom Denman reviews the ‘Towards New Worlds’ exhibition at MIMA in Middlesbrough.
Sep: Michael Kurtz discusses the work of Delcy Morelos; Lauren Velvick on Roy Claire Potter’s ‘The Wastes’; Sarah E James examines the exhibition as performance.
Jul: Vaishna Surjid, Amna Malik and Henry Broome discuss Soumya Sankar Bose, Perminder Kaur, and public art in relation to homelessness and sanitation.
Online Mentoring with Critic Laura Robertson (BBC, frieze, Art Monthly, Royal College of Art)
· Neurodivergent friendly · Goal-orientated · Working with adults at any stage in their creative career · Fix it or vent it... Let’s get organised! · £125 p/h On Zoom laurarobertsoniswriting.cargo.site
