Ananda Pellerin

For the next couple of months, this fine north London gallery is shining a spotlight on the backstage aspects of the creative process, with two shows centred on how artists use and respond to their workspaces. The larger exhibition is a significant retrospective of 91-year-old Romanian art doyenne Geta Brătescu’s multimedia output, while the other show is a one-room affair featuring an installation by London-born artist Paul Johnson, now in his mid-40s and known for his meticulous, painstakingly crafted sculptures. It’s probably more accurate to say that the room has been given over to Johnson, since he has dismantled his studio and reconstructed fragments of it in the gallery space – including parts of the flooring and other architectural features, as well as old newspapers, cast sculptures, a Super Mario Toad sticker, a discarded ginger beer can and a gallon container full of brown stuff. At first sight the light-filled room doesn’t seem to give much away – grey-scale plastic crates and grey cast mouldings are the predominant structures – and it’s only while walking around, stopping, stooping or looking up that meaningful details start to emerge: an empty jar of Tesco peanut butter, a comedy postcard of a ‘suntanned’ mannequin, a pamphlet written by philosopher Graham Harman. The multiple ceramic and clay shapes lying around also start to take on new meaning, crafted as they were by the artist from items such as pop-can tops and car tyres. By transforming these seemingly ba

You get the feeling that Bucharest-based Geta Brătescu is taken very seriously in the Romanian art world. On the eve of her 91st birthday, she has been chosen to represent her home country at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and has also been the longstanding artistic director of art and literature magazine Secolul 21. Over the past few years there has been an uptick of interest in her work outside of Romania, and even the title of this retrospective exhibition has a sober tinge to it. But there’s more to Brătescu than the thoughtful reception of her impressive output suggests, another layer to be found in her idiosyncratic way of expression – in a body of work encompassing photos, drawings, films, sculptures and textiles. Put simply, this nonagenarian multimedia artist has one finely tuned sense of humour. In a short film, ‘The Hands. For the eye, the hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait’ (1977) (admittedly not the most hilarious title ever), we see the artist’s hands as they pick up and consider various items lying around her studio. These include a rolled cigarette, some paint sticks – which she uses to draw lines on her hands – and some strings, which get her into a solo game of cat’s cradle. This film, appearing early on in the exhibition, sets an agenda of creative spontaneity and the liberating nature of play. Another silent film, ‘The Studio’ (1978), starts with a door opening into the artist’s home studio (a regularly occurring location in her work), and she shows us a

‘Immersive’ has to be one of the most overworked words of the past few years – from art to theatre to dining to film, all kinds of experiences are promoted this way. And as with all terms that carry a heavy cultural load,  it’s pretty much lost its meaning. Which isn’t to put the blame at the door of this new show by Danish artist Joachim Koester, described in part as an ‘immersive installation’. As you lie down on one of the raised padded platforms, put on a pair of headphones and listen to the white noise-laden, relaxing audio journeys (‘your limbs are getting heavier’) Koester made in collaboration with Stefan A. Pedersen, you’d be forgiven for blissing out over the 20-odd minutes of each recording as a hypnotic voice slowly guides you through various fictional museums. But when did such a thing stop being simply an audio installation? Regardless, the main focus of this show is video. The best of which is the newly commissioned ‘Maybe This Act, This Work, This Thing’, featuring vaudeville actors gesturing, moving and not-quite-dancing as they appear to grapple with a modernity set to make them obsolete. The framing is tight, the performers on form, and the nimble combination of pathos and comicality is compelling. Another new film, ‘Ghost Mantis’, doesn’t appear to have a centre, nor does the overcooked ‘The Place of Dead Roads’, a film with more gesticulators, this time women and men dressed as cowboys. These films feel weighed down by theory – with the dancers and movers

Welcome to the dark heart of urban regeneration. For her first solo exhibition, London-based artist Felicity Hammond throws us into an apocryphal building site/neon-tinged shanty town/post-apocalyptic metropolis. Entering the gallery space through a curtain of industrial-strength plastic strips, you’re hit by the glare of fluorescent light tubes scattered around, the smell of fresh timber, and the disorienting realisation that you’re inside part of the exhibition; a moving body trapped between partially constructed walls and ceiling and rubble all around. Using ballast, more plastic and other materials taken from building sites, alongside melting digital prints on PVC and manipulated vinyl, Hammond has created a baleful cocoon filled with the destructive materials and scenes associated with the housing and retail developments that now characterise (or, de-characterise) most of the world’s largest cities. Those awful composite murals featuring people drinking coffee, shopping and laughing that adorn the hoarding around construction sites come slyly into play, while there are also cunning references to luxury materials such as marble, as well as a mirrored trompe l’oeil that creates the illusion of looking down through multiple unfinished floors – a glance into the ponderous hell of an unexceptional structure destined to become ‘luxury’ flats. The exhibition’s crowning glory is a large, gleaming wall-mounted digital print, which is a composite – another reference to those mural

The Kibbo Kift Kindred (no connection to the KKK) were a British outdoorsy social movement set up in 1920 as a non-militaristic, co-educational alternative to the Boy Scouts. It was pretty weird – they hoped that nature play would eventually lead to world peace – and it’s referenced by London-born Olivia Plender as part of her new solo show in photographic ink drawings that depict the brethren waving flags in the countryside in full regalia. She’s also taken a look at the Women’s Social and Political Union and other left-leaning protest groups.  Alongside these drawings, hanging in the gallery space are two floor-to-ceiling silken curtains of a disquieting nicotine-fingertip hue. They bring a muted, funeral-parlour feel to the otherwise sparsely filled converted industrial space. On one wall is a tapestry of Britannia, the feminine embodiment of Great Britain, and in the middle of the room is a detailed architectural model of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, while a small sculpture of a duck house, called ‘Stockholm Duck House: A Proposed Monument to British Parliamentary Corruption, Circa 2009’, is one of the few pieces related to more contemporary events.  Plender is a fine multi-disciplinarian: she’s done everything from recreating the Google offices to publishing a comic strip called ‘The Masterpiece’. She’s also clearly an avid social historian. And while her idiosyncratic approach to accessing the past doesn’t always make obvious the exhibition’s themes – national id

There was a lot of naked performance art happening in the ’70s and ’80s, but maybe none of it quite as jolly as the shows put on by the Neo Naturists. Unlike confrontational groups such as Coum Transmissions – known for the blood and discomfort in their performances – the Neo-Naturists’ approach to free-form expression was more, well, Benny Hill. But done by nude feminist women artists.  Started by St Martin’s School of Art graduates – and sisters – Binnie and Wilma Johnson, the group embraced a DIY approach to dissent, literally using their bodies as canvasses, covering themselves and their companions in swirling paint-patterns and throwing themselves into unplanned performances. The aesthetic was a mix of pagan symbolism and gloopy mayhem. Speaking in an interview – shown on one of the many screens in this multimedia exhibition – a male participant explains: ‘We are accepting of age-old traditions. And modern things like Tesco as well.’  They seem to have been excellent documenters, so this exhibition feeks like a visit to the archives: films, recorded performances, news clippings – and some new works painted on the walls of the gallery. It offers a glimpse into a slightly twee, totally British and very fun wrinkle in time.  Despite the slapstick elements, the Neo-Naturists weren’t without their grand gestures: flashing at the British Museum, and getting bare at the Henley Regatta – a stunt that got them a write-up in The Sun (next to the topless Page 3 girl, hilariously).

This exhibition is a rarity: it breaks the rules but gets it right. Set in one of London’s loveliest local galleries, Camden Arts Centre, the show is curated not by an art-world regular, but by iconoclastic fashion designer Duro Olowu. His selection spans mediums, countries and centuries with seeming abandon. It’s totally fun.   Nigerian-born, London-based Olowu, famed for his mixing-and-mismatching of African fabrics and other textiles from around the world, has brought together a whopping collection of works that have inspired him. There’s everything from shots by recently deceased Malian street-style photographer Malick Sidibé to awe-inducing knotted hemp-rope sculptures by Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee.   Olowu has included tons of brilliant female artists, including heavy hitters such as Louise Bourgeois and Lygia Clark, and contemporary artists such as Turner Prize-nominated Anya Gallaccio, with her giant hammocky ropework in the back garden.  One of the exhibition’s focal points is Anni Albers, the American wife of German artist and educator Josef Albers, and a prominent member of the Bauhaus design movement during the interwar period. Spurred on by the fact that women were at that time discouraged from taking up certain disciplines, including architecture, Albers turned her acute eye to textiles, and her geometrically grounded pieces – necklaces, tapestries – still resonate as perfectly modern and ancient at once.   There’s a lot to take in, and with so many works

Yayoi Kusama is one of those artists whose mythology often overshadows her work. Now 87 years old, she has had a litany of avant-garde terms thrown her way over the years – conceptualist, feminist, minimalist – and was an indisputably huge influence on pop art giants including Andy Warhol. Having done her time on the 1960s’ New York scene, in the early 1970s Kusama returned to Tokyo, checked herself into a mental institution and has lived there willingly ever since – travelling to her nearby studio to work. Add to this personal history her colourful dress sense (with bright wigs and polka-dotted smocks, she is like one of her own patterned paintings come to life) and her record-breaking auction results, and, well, the myth builds itself. But now on to the artwork itself. This ambitious new exhibition of paintings, sculptures and installations across two sites – Victoria Miro galleries on Wharf Road in Old Street and on St George Street in Mayfair – is teeming with Kusama’s continuing preoccupations: pattern, repetition, mirrored ‘infinity rooms’ and huge, distended pumpkins. It’s not hard to believe her claim that she has experienced hallucinations since childhood. Or, by extension, to think that she harnesses such visions through the act of creation. Especially when standing in the ‘All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins’ room. Here, you’re surrounded by a sea of the artist’s signature dotted gourd-shape lanterns, which seem to undulate while their shadow selves stretc

The deeper you get into Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar’s personal story, the more you’re likely to be drawn to his work. Born into a lower-middle-class Mumbai family in 1934, he eventually moved to the western city of Vadodara where, in a community of forward-thinking artists, he developed his bright, bold approach to figurative painting. He travelled in Europe and was a strong supporter of Gandhi, depicting everyday Indian life in a Henri Rousseau-influenced style, adding the mythological, cosmopolitan and autobiographical touches that give his work its trademark eclecticism. The big headline, though, is that Khakhar was openly gay at a time when homosexuality wasn’t just frowned upon but illegal, and carried a life sentence (Indian law still upholds this, despite opposition). His earlier works – of city and family scenes and tradespeople – are mostly focused around male figures, and masculinity is a recurring theme: the lonely, silent men he saw in England (‘Man in Pub’ 1979); the moment when a young man is wished well by his elders as he flies the family nest (‘Man Leaving (Going Abroad)’ 1970). Around 1990 Khakhar started painting more intimate encounters between men, some tender, some sexual, and by the late 1990s, his knack for storytelling took an unflinchingly visceral turn with a series of paintings about the agony of the prostate cancer that eventually killed him. Edged with humour and horror, pieces like ‘Bullet Shot in the Stomach’ (2001) are full of blood, guts and

‘Lightly, Slightly, Politely.’ In her ‘Glossary of Harlem Slang’, American writer Zora Neale Hurston says this expression means ‘to do something perfectly’. The three words appear on the wall of Martine Syms’s current solo ICA exhibition, in a typeface the LA-based artist also created. It’s just the tip of the show’s iceberg of cultural references. Over two rooms we are invited into Syms’s manifold universe – layer upon layer of historic and pop-culture moments and personal experiences; a sophisticated collage of digital art and analogue memories.  At the centre of this first room two TVs stand back to back. They show 30-second videos – found, personal and archive footage – which fade softly in and out and alternate between the screens. The clips, using the visual grammar of the internet  – Gifs, Vines – depict everything from activist and Public Enemy affiliate Sister Souljah in front of a daytime talk show audience, to a mid-range shot of a young woman’s face placidly watching a screen (we watch her watching). Syms has titled the work ‘Lessons’ and she calls the clips ‘commercials’ for these lessons, which feature mantras like ‘what you claim, you are’.  The walls and ceilings of the exhibition entrance are covered with a teenage-bedroom-style collage of photos entitled ‘Misdirected Kiss’. Family snaps, a profesh shot of Boney M and pictures of Syms herself are wallpapered together, levelling the pop and the personal. The theme continues in the second room, where publicity

Children love Argentine artist Pablo Bronstein. Or at least they love his 2016 Tate Britain Commission, a performance currently running all day in the Duveen Galleries (the grand hallway) at Tate Britain. When little ones wander in, more often than not they stop and stare, enraptured. What’s the appeal? Let’s break it down: three classically trained dancers make their way through the lofty space, performing movements that hover somewhere between baroque dance and voguing – a combination of classical formalism and modern minimalism. They wear comedy-size fake pearl necklaces. They glide, strut, mince and perform a series of hand flourishes. They confuse newcomers and get in the way of people trying to walk between galleries. Mostly, the performers move in silence, but at points, for around a minute, baroque music is piped in. Marking out the performance space are two visually manipulated super-scale drawings of the gallery’s exterior that sit flush with the interior walls, giving the impression that the building has been turned inside out. Known primarily for his witty architectural drawings, which exhibit a knife-edge balance between craftsmanship and cunning, here London-based Bronstein’s choreography is deliberately referencing sprezzatura, a sixteenth-century Italian term for studied nonchalance, used to describe anything from a courtier’s manner to Raphael’s painting style. Perhaps it is this out-of-time behaviour that youngsters find so compelling – the peculiarity of pa

It might be tough to convince gallery goers that a five-screen video installation featuring non-actors reading aloud letters written to defunct feminist publications makes for a good time: but it really does. Firstly, American artist Sharon Hayes’s debut UK solo exhibition answers that burning question: what did people do before the internet? If you were a lesbian living in smalltown America or rural UK, you might have subscribed to a bulletin, delivered to your home by post and containing political action updates and readers’ letters compiled by collectives surviving on volunteer power. Featuring 13 members of the queer and feminist community in Philadelphia, where Hayes is based, the five concurrent films show domestic settings – kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms – through which various people walk, lounge, make a sandwich, listen to music, and deliver the contents of such letters (written between 1955 and 1977). The domestic settings reinforce a sense of ‘normalcy’: it is in regular homes that politics take place.  The missives express all manner of isolation, frustration, alienation and debate. Not only about society’s failings to protect the rights of individuals, but also the complex nature of self-described communities themselves, where whiteness and blackness and class structures don’t just disappear. One letter writer’s refrain reads: ‘We are black, we are gay, we are women.’ She goes on to say that this triple oppression has been reinforced, not lifted, by others in the