Some exciting exhibitions we have seen on past London trips
YOKO ONO - MUSIC OF THE MIND
TATE MODERN, LONDON
UNTIL 1 SEPTEMBER 2024
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Andy recently visited this exhibition and would highly recommend it.
Funny and powerful in equal measures, with lots of interactive elements making it an exciting experience throughout.
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"Yoko Ono is a trailblazer of early conceptual and participatory art, film and performance, a celebrated musician, and a formidable campaigner for world peace. Developing her practice in the United States, Japan and the UK, ideas are central to her art, often expressed in poetic, humorous, profound and radical ways.
Spanning more than seven decades, YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND is the UK’s largest exhibition celebrating key moments in Ono’s groundbreaking, influential and multidisciplinary career, from the mid-1950s to now – including her years in London where she met her future husband and longtime collaborator John Lennon.
The show traces the development of her practice and explores some of Ono’s most talked about and powerful artworks and performances. This includes Cut Piece (1964), where people were invited to cut off her clothing, to her banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966-67) which she created as a ‘petition for peace’. Visitors are invited to take part in both simple acts of the imagination and active encounters with Ono’s works, such as Wish Trees for London, where visitors can contribute personal wishes for peace.
Audiences will discover over 200 works including instruction pieces, scores, installations, films, music and photography. The exhibition reveals a groundbreaking approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment."
BARBARA KRUGER - THINKING OF YOU. I MEAN ME. I MEAN YOU.
SERPENTINE SOUTH GALLERY, LONDON
UNTIL 17 MARCH 2024
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Kruger makes politically motivated art, which challenges capitalism and is rooted in feminism. Visually it firmly embraces graphic design sensibilities. Often her work is location specific, but this exhibition offers the opportunity to see work in a gallery context.
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"American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945, Newark, New Jersey, USA) is widely known for her impactful work with images and words. Drawing from an early career as a graphic designer for magazines, Kruger developed an iconic visual language that frequently borrows from the techniques and aesthetics of advertising and other media. Since the 1970s, her artworks have continually explored complex mechanisms of power, gender, class, consumerism, and capital.
Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. at Serpentine South is Kruger’s first solo institutional show in London in over twenty years. It features a unique selection of installations alongside moving image works and multiple soundscapes. The exhibition is the UK premiere of Untitled (No Comment) (2020). This immersive three-channel video installation explores contemporary modes of creating and consuming content online. In the work, Kruger combines text, audio clips, and a barrage of found images and memes, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats.
The exhibition also features recent video reconfigurations – or, as the artist calls them, replays – of several of Kruger’s most iconic pieces from the 1980s, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989). Over decades, Kruger has presented her work across various spaces and forms, including on buildings, billboards, hoardings, buses, and skate parks. For this exhibition, the artist has adapted works, which were recently presented at museums in the United States, to specific locations within Serpentine, both indoors and outdoors."
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Marina Abramović - The Royal Academy (2023):
The most talked about exhibition of 2023 and definitely one of the departments favourites ever.
An art world icon and a performance art pioneer – Marina Abramović has captivated audiences by pushing the limits of her body and mind, for the past 50 years.
Marina Abramović Hon RA has earned worldwide acclaim as a performance artist. She has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work, subjecting herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death.
In her early work Rhythm 0, Abramović invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose – famously resulting in a loaded gun being held to her head. Her later work The House with the Ocean View saw the artist live in a house constructed in a gallery for 12 days. Held in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the performance invited audiences to witness and share in the simple act of living.
This major exhibition presents key moments from Abramović’s career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. Works such as The Artist is Present will be strikingly re-staged through archive footage while others will be reperformed by the next generation of performance artists, trained in the Marina Abramović method.
Live performance art can be both startling and intimate. For Abramović it also has the power to be transformative. Experience this yourself through performances of Imponderabilia, Nude with Skeleton, Luminosity and The House with the Ocean View.
Marcus Coates - The Directors (2021)
The Directors is a collaboration between artist Marcus Coates and five individuals in recovery from different lived experiences of psychosis. Positioned behind the camera, each of them directs Coates in a filmed restaging of particular episodes from their lives.
The five Directors are: Lucy Dempster, Anthony Donohoe, Marcus Gordon, Mark Banham, Stephen Groves
Following extensive research, working alongside Dr Isabel Valli and discussion, the five short films challenge cultural stigma through an attempt to understand different realities. Each director chose a location of personal significance where they filmed Coates embodying and performing their own experiences.
The five short films were screened across five locations in Pimlico, in and around the Churchill Gardens Estate, each within a short walking distance of the other. Anthony was shown at Pimlico Health at The Marven (Doctor’s Surgery); Lucy in a 5th floor flat of Chaucer House, Churchill Gardens Estate; Marcus at Churchill Gardens Residents’ Association; Mark in the antique shop, The Cave and Stephen in the closed restaurant, Pimlico Spice.
They were presented alongside a contextual programme of talks and workshops to encourage open public discussion around the nation’s mental health.
The five films now form part of the Artangel Collection, available to be shared across the UK and beyond.
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Click here to watch Marcus Coates discussing the films.
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This exhibition will be of interest to anyone who wants to make work about mental health, or wants to look at video or performance art.
What Duchamp Taught Me Exhibition (2014):
An exhibition from 2014, featuring numerous contemporary artists responding to Duchamp's work and ideas.
The UK’s oldest commercial gallery was turned into a homage to Duchamp — celebrating him across the entire building a century after he created the first readymade and changed art forever.
Click here for the exhibition catalogue.
This exhibition will be useful for those who are interested in Duchamp/Dada or are wanting to respond to critical links in a more innovative way.
The Tate Modern - Turbine Hall (2000 - Present):
Every year the Tate Modern offers a different artist the chance to us their vast Turbine Hall for an installation. This is always one of the highlights of the year in the art world. We have been lucky enough to visit most of the past exhibitions. Andy's personal favourite is Carsten Höller's from 2006 (pictured left). How can you not enjoy going down a massive slide really quickly?
To see all the commissions from 2000 -0 2019 visit this link.
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Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2006
For Carsten Höller’s Test Site, five swirling tube slides were installed into the Turbine Hall, linking up with each floor of the Tate Modern. “Slides deliver people quickly, safely and elegantly to their destinations, they’re inexpensive to construct and energy-efficient,” the Danish artist, who has incorporated slides into his work time and again over the years – Miuccia Prada even has a Höller slide installed in her office in Milan – told Tate at the time. “They’re also a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness. It was described in the 50s by the French writer Roger Caillois as ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.”