A review of Seem both distant and so close Warbling Collective, 6 – 10 March 2025 Just around the corner from Whitechapel Gallery, along a couple of streets, and down a long, dark, nervous alleyway; there, easily missed by unknowing eyes, is a small white cube with a brick-red floor. The gentle curatorial project Warbling […]
Review of Christina Kimeze’s Between Wood and Wheel, South London Gallery February 2025 Christina Kimeze’s first UK solo show is a disco – candid snapshots of a roller-skating rink blurred with memories of Uganda. Currently displayed in the main space of South London Gallery are nine suede windows into this neon parade. There is a […]
A review of the 75th annual New Contemporaries exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. January 2025. A muppet smokes a cigarette and sermons of oblivion. Opposite, a girl watches him, glitching in some Afro-surreal memoryscape. A cinematic Scottish oil rig breathes flutes into the same room; and behind, strangers are attempting to communicate through Google […]
A New Activist Cultural Practice In an age of ever-developing digitalisation, ease of international mass-movement and everyday weaving of divergent cultures, it is more important than ever before for artists to consider their work on an unavoidably global stage. ‘Artists cannot afford for a moment longer to operate in a vacuum of specialised discourse without […]
Why does performance have a significant role in activist artwork? ‘Certain assumptions prevail within ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ contemporary practices that stem from the strong Marxist tradition at the heart of many Western avant-garde art practices’ Jelinek, 2013. Many practices and discourses, particularly in debate surrounding artivism, reference the Marxist ideology that ‘philosophers have only interpreted […]
In the modern world, the internet provides a distinctly new historical condition (McQuiston, 2015); individuals on opposing sides of the world can share images and information within milliseconds, regardless of source, reliability, intent or level of expertise. And because of this same heightened interconnectivity, if something goes onto the internet, it rarely comes down. For […]
In investigating the relationship between art and politics, I think it’s vital to consider different socio-political conditions to the Western world; in China, there’s an evident historical connection between art, activism and politics. Although the country has come a long way to becoming a market economy, Communist ideology remains dominant, and one of the most […]
China’s authoritarian history of social control is echoed in the present day; globally, social media is providing a platform for activist narratives in art, whilst in China, there is an unsurprising hardline approach to cyber-freedom. Many contemporary artists respond to this through the use of surveillance technologies, e.g. footage from CCTV cameras and drones, or […]
The notion of ‘re-embracing context’ was introduced to me in an eco-activisms lecture delivered by artist Anne-Marie Culhane. The concept centres around a deliberate awareness of one’s environment; and although this was specifically in relation to the natural world, the ideas can be applied to social and political arenas. Artists working in the contemporary agenda […]
Kate Butler 