‘Chronoplasticity’
You know a gallery is absolutely winging it when they say their new show is an attempt ‘to fold or stretch time’ and ‘consider new conceptions of the “historical”’ while also being about climate change, clairvoyance and the ‘plasticity’ of the body. Which is to say that Raven Row is flying by the seat of its incredibly nonsensical pants in this exhibition somehow about all of those topics, curated by Denmark-based theorist and art historian Lars Bang Larsen.
Trying to unravel why all this art’s been put in the same exhibition will melt your brain. There are psychedelic drawings by a tragic Belgian artist from the 1960s called Sophie Podolski, some fancy plant pots by Öyvind Fahlström, little Perspex sheets about international law and territory disputes by Dierk Schmidt, an extract from a film about baby development by Emanuel Almborg, psychic abstract paintings by Anu Ramdas…just writing this out makes me feel like I’m having an aneurysm. Some of it’s good – especially the incredible tapestries made as a collaboration between the Black Panthers and the Zapatistas – but good god in heaven what does any of it have to do with any of it.
It’s kind of great as an exercise in total nonsense
All this before you even realise that there are two - two!! - mini-exhibitions within the exhibition. Downstairs there’s a display of modernist tapestries, and upstairs (in the gallery’s amazing timewarp apartment which is rarely opened to the public) there’s a show filled with drawings, hair a