Whitechapel Gallery

Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce, two artists separated by decades and continents, but brought together at the Whitechapel Gallery to explore their aesthetic connections and similarities. Does it work? Are they linked in some deep, profound, interesting way? No. Clark was a Brazilian modernist, who over the course of her career moved away from 2D geometric abstraction towards artworks you could touch and interact with, artworks that could shape your emotions. There are some beautiful examples of her clever abstract paintings and drawings here; a clash of white and green triangles, a piercing composition of sharp red and black spikes. But her ‘bichos’ are the real draw, neat little metal structures you can fold and reshape, allowing you to become an integral part of the art-making process. Later, Clark would get into psychology, creating artworks that had therapeutic uses; bags of ping pong balls that act as sensory toys, multiple jumpsuits sewn together forcing six people to function as one body. It might work as therapy, but it’s not great art. Then there’s a not-quite-successful attempt to show how Clark’s participatory artworks relate to English artist Sonia Boyce, who has also co-curated this show and whose work takes over the upstairs galleries. A 2006 video piece comes first, showing a white man and a Black woman having their hair braided together. It’s an incisive, tense metaphor for the awkward relation of the show’s title, people forced to find a way to share...

Peter Kennard is outraged, irate and angry. Because when the British artist and professor of political art looks at the world around him, he sees nothing but injustice, greed, violence and pain. But rather than shouting pointlessly about it or collapsing into a powerless heap like the rest of us, he channels his ire into art. His stark photomontages have been a visual diary of corporate greed and state warfare for decades. Here at the Whitechapel, posters from throughout his career attack nuclear proliferation, the Gulf War, Thatcher, British imperialism, Nato’s involvement in Yugoslavia, privatisation and countless other charged, sensitive, volatile topics. His best work is instantly recognisable: minimal, funny, shocking, filled with skulls and gas masks and bombs and barbed wire. Peace symbols disarm warheads, the earth wears a gas mask, hands crush missiles. Kennard is screamingly, heatedly anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-imperial. These vicious, confrontational images represent the despair of the powerless. The same images appear repeatedly – gas masks and clocks and bombs – but here updated in a recent installation with Palestinian flags, their red running like blood. The final installation combines his original montages with newspapers in which they were reprinted. This is art for dissemination, messages to be spread, not something pretty for your wall.  Kennard’s influence today is obvious and widespread, and his visual language has been latched onto by countless...

In his far too short career, Donald Rodney (1961-1998) created an incredibly varied body of work, using a huge breadth of mediums to confront the prejudices that course through British society. The works here tackle themes of racial identity, chronic illness and colonial history, and are a fascinating window into the issues that mattered in 1990s Britain, and still resonate today.