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 and debris-based sculptures by 14 different artists, curated by someone else who was invited by Lars Bang Larsen. That second mini-exhibition is great, but congrats Raven Row, I am now a being made of pure confusion, a human question mark, a giant, living, breathing furrowed brow.
It’s just proof that if you write vague enough bollocks, you can say that literally any artwork fits your theme. What the show should’ve been called is ‘Some stuff Lars Bang Larsen likes’ because this just about works as a kind of complex visual mixtape, but it doesn’t have a functional overarching curatorial theme or any cohesive meaning.
I don’t know, it’s kind of great as an exercise in total nonsense. You have to respect the chutzpah it takes to whack a load of stuff in a gallery, slather on some self-contradicting art theory and then head to the pub knowing you’ve done your level best to make sure no one could possibly ever know what you’re on about.
The show might not stretch or fold time, but it’ll stretch and fold your brain.