Never mind that, that was then, this, once again is about this week and next. Five more art things. five art things, five more art things happening somewhere around right now (or any moment now). Five art shows to check out in the coming days. An (almost) weekly round up of recommended art events. Five shows, exhibitions or things we rather think might be worth checking out. Mostly London things for that is where we currently operate and explore, and like we said last time, these five recommendations come with no claims that they are “the best five” or the “Top Five”, we’re not one of those annoying art websites that ignore most things whilst claiming to be covering everything and proclaiming this or that to be the “top seven things” or the “best things this weekend”. This is simply a regular list of five or so recommended art things happening now or coming up very soon that we think you might find as interesting as we think we will…
Mostly group shows this week, that’s no bad thing (and we do rather recommend that group show that opened last week at Annka Kultys Gallery, read more about that show here – ORGAN THING: Off we go then, the art year kicks off with a positive start as Cacotopia 07 opens at East London’s Annka Kultys Gallery…
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1: Eunjung Seo Feleppa, In Your Eyes at D Contemporary – 16th until 21st Jan with an opening on Monday 16th Jan (5.30pm until 8pm) – “D Contemporary is proud to present ‘In your Eyes’ Eunjung Seo Feleppa’s first solo exhibition with the gallery”. Haven’t been to the rater plush West End gallery since Lee Maelzer’s excellent show back in October (one of our art highlights of 2022). This one looks like it needs to be explored though.
“The gaze within the visual arts remains one of the most intriguing ways to understand an artwork’s narrative. From the Old Masters’ portraits with the enigmatic, direct and diverted eyes, to contemporary self-portraits, the gaze has captivated the viewers for centuries, giving insight into psychology and social relationships in eras past.
Taking a more ritualistic, introspective approach, Eunjung’s portraits reveal an unmistakably nostalgic contemplation. Building a visual library from familiar faces and people seen in family photography albums, films and even strangers’ pictures found online, the artist connects with those faces through the collective unconscious. She creates a connection to our shared experience through the gaze. The eyes are searching for something, waiting for someone, searching for meaning; missing people, places, looking directly at you, appreciating togetherness in the moment; looking at the sky, enduring sadness, planning tomorrow.
These works follow Marlene Dumas’ process, where the artist addresses the image and the outcome as two separate entities. Through this process, the painting becomes transformed from its source image into a separate entity. Eunjung creates such a journey, building multiple manifestations of her mind, adding a different face to each one of her thoughts, connecting them through the gaze.
‘As I add colours, shapes, textures, and painterly gestures, it triggers certain feelings inside me. Then I start to listen to the painting, and become mindful about where this flow is going. You have to do what the painting wants to do. The result is always surprising. I tend to express my own feelings at the time in their eyes. In a way, these are not portraits of them, these are rather self-portraits of my own mind.’ Eunjung is a South Korean, London-based painter”.
D-Contemporary is at 23 Grafton Street, London, W1S 4EY. The Gallery is open Tuesday until Saturday, entry is free, 11am until 5pm (Saturday, Midday until 6pm)
Previously on these pages –
2: Joseph Yaeger – Time Weft at The Perimeter – 11th Jan until 18 Feb 2023 – “The Perimeter is proud to present Joseph Yaeger: Time Weft, the first public exhibition of new works by the London based American artist”.
“The exhibition’s title is derived from the Einsteinian notion of a time warp— the distortion of space/time. Rather than traveling radically up or down the longitudinal axis of time, this exhibition examines the latitudinal notion of the weft (weave’s past tense), which, in textile production, continually doubles back on itself. In this manner the exhibition explores recurrence— the way, to extend the metaphor, a wefting thread, transversing through the warp, may over the course of a life realign with aspects of itself, years on; the way, in a tapestry, this same phenomena creates an image, or pattern. The new paintings function as repairs or weaves or sutures in the failure of language, just as the prose-poems in the exhibition’s titular book repair the failures of image. Like the metaphorical fabric referenced in the title, it is in the interplay between these two disciplines that an auto-portrait or auto-analysis begins to emerge. For instance how does desire conveyed in language differ from image, where affect circumvents denotation?
The accompanying book, Time Weft, being made of language, speaks, in a manner of speaking, for itself. It is comprised of prose-poetic texts split into two parts describing existence in the ‘weft.’ Another way of saying this would be: describing life and its complexities; an acknowledgement of a, and the, recurring past. Around and within these text-bodies is a prologue, an intermission, and an epilogue, which describe a fictionalised account of the artist’s death, told through the perspectives of three ostensibly bureaucratic figures.
An artist attuned to the vagaries of contemporary cultural memory, Joseph Yaeger’s practice can be thought of as a parallel investigation in the fetishisation of images in contemporary libidinal economies, and in painting’s contemporaneous agency in the transformation and circulation of the visible.
“The imagery I use is a protracted search to better understand myself; playing or putting on roles that might clarify an interior that is sort of naturally hidden, even from myself. I’ll come across an image––sometimes I’m searching for one, sometimes I stumble into it––and the feeling of it, the arrangement, the subject, the relation of subjects within the image, will sort of jar me, attract me, dislodge me.”
The images appear at first glance immediately recognisable and equally untraceable, an uncanny déjà vu. Yaeger’s first solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, titled Doublespeak, 2021, took glass as a guiding visual metaphor for the distorting qualities of language. This was followed by solo presentations at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2021 and Antenna Space, Shanghai in 2022. Yaeger will present his second solo exhibition at Project Native Informant in Autumn 2023″.
The Perimeter is at 20 Brownlow Mews, London, WC1N 2LE. The show runs from 11th Jan until 18 Feb 2023 with an opening on Jan 10th, 5.30pm until 7.30pm. The gallery is open Tuesday through to Sunday, 10am until 6pm, entry is free.
Jhonatan Pulido, Sapo, 2021, Oil on canvas, 188 x 145 cm (at No.20 Arts)
3: After Before at No.20 Arts – 11th Jan until 25th March (which does seem like a long time to run a group show), we’re promised a group exhibition featuring artworks by Judith Burrows, Jo Dennis, Tom de Freston, Simon Kidd, Arthur Lanyon, Max Maxwell, Jhonatan Pulido and Keith Roberts. – “The exhibition brings together the work of eight artists who, in different ways, embrace risks, uncertainties and organic transformations of materials and forms to create distinctly captivating works of art that investigate themes of change, belonging, violence and hope.”
No 20 Arts is found at 20 Cross Street, London N1 2BG. The gallery is open Tuesday through to Sunday, 10am until 6pm
4: The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue at The Approach – 14th Jan until 23rd Feb 2023 with an opening night on Saturday 14th Jan, 6pm until 9pm. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue is a group show featuring Rinella Alfonso, Lynda Benglis, Enzo Cucchi, Rezi van Lankveld, Alina Szapocznikow and Erika Verzutti. We don’t know much about this show or these artists but hey, we’ve been to many fine shows up those difficult stairs at The Approach, we think we can trust the gallery to come up with the goods…
The Approach is found on the first floor above the pub, 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9LY, Access to the gallery via The Approach Tavern pub, there’s a brown door at the end of the left side of the bar that the staff may or may not feel like pointing out to you. Gallery open: Wednesday to Saturday (some places say Tuesday) 12–6pm or by appointment,
4 and a bit:: (It’s My Party) I Can Cry If I Want To at Guts Gallery – 13th Jan until 2nd Feb 2023 – An eight artist group show – “At the end of Věra Chytilová’s 1966 film Daisies the two central characters come across a banquet hall laden with expensive food and rich delicacies. Over the course of a few minutes, the two characters systematically devour the entire table; moving from seat to seat and engorging themselves on the platters of fine foods there. Accompanied by a regalia of grand trumpets, the two women end up frenziedly destroying or consuming every single thing in the bourgeois dining hall. They have decided that, since the world has been spoiled by its obsession with the materialistic and its oppression of women, they will be spoiled too.
In (It’s My Party) I Can Cry If I Want To excess is political. Consumption is a statement; it is an act of self-empowerment and self-affirmation. Just like the banquet scene in Daisies, these bodies devour the world in a narcissistic act of self-indulgence and, in doing so, prevent the world from devouring them. This scene is central to Guts Gallery’s new exhibition (It’s My Party) I Can Cry If I Want To; a group show of women artists exploring visual motifs around birthdays, hysteria and consumption. This show is a celebration of the ‘grotesque;’ it is a carnivalesque revelry in which women’s bodies are presented as transgressive, unbound and open-ended. Throughout the show, figures luxuriate in their unfixed, metamorphic states. Here, physical and emotional boundaries are destabilised and disrupted; bodies enter the arena of the ‘cosmic’ as they extend beyond their own limits through a process of transformation and consumption.
Each work also treads the uncomfortable line between the erotic and the abject. Here, figures refuse to align with any societal expectation of them as they occupy ever-shifting positions of simultaneous allure and disgust. For these artists, the human body is a site of revolt, a space where preconceived notions around gender roles and behaviour can be uprooted, dissected and, ultimately, overturned.
The artists are: Juno Calypso, Victoria Cantons, Vilte Fuller, Ariane Heloise Hughes, Catherine Mulligan, Elsa Rouy, Brittany Shepherd and Olivia Sterling
Guts is at HQ Unit 2 Sidings House, 10 Andre Street, London, E8 2AA. There’s an opening on Friday 13th Jan at 6pm (no indication of closing time) and the gallery is open Tuesday through to Saturday, 11am until 6pm, the show runs from 13th Jan until 2nd Feb
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5: A Path With Heart at The Split Gallery – 14th until 20th January 2023. There’s an opening night on Saturday 14th, 6pm until 9pm. We’re guessing that, after all the drama along the Hackney Road (read about it on their social media feed) and the two rather promising debut shows at the space that was home to Split Gallery, that they’re now nomadic? The gallery’s third show is something that goes under the title of A Path With Heart and is happening over on Fish island, Hackney Wick.
“A Path With Heart embarks on a journey through a haze of fragmented and illusory visions. The exhibition features six artists — Johanna Bath, Georgia Grinter, Anna-Lena Krause, Holly Mills, Norberto Spina and Thom Trojanowski — accompanied by a story of voyage and mirage by Harry Kumar. On this journey, our protagonist is confronted by loneliness, desolation and yearning. Sand is endless; consciousness is sapping. Every door opens to an uncertain, ever-transmuting realm. The protagonist’s perception of the world persistently morphs; reality is molten and the margins of each surfacing scene gently crumble into dust. Between faint visions of a desolate land appear fragile memories from a more familiar world. But the comfort of this familiarity is temporary; every moment dissolves unresolvedly into the barren landscape. Efforts to detangle the ambiguous become entwined in a knot of nebulous inexplicability. As more is revealed, less is resolved”.
A Path With Heart happens at 7 Casings Way, Fish Island, Havkney Wick, London E3 2TH. The show runs from 14th until 20th January 2023. There’s an opening night on Saturday 14th, 6pm until 9pm. We have no other information regarding opening times, previous shows were (rather annoyingly) by appointment only, alas The Split Gallery are not big on information or communication, another set of curators who think it starts and ends with a useless “Story” on Instagram then even if you do follow them you’ll be lucky to see. Not big on information, almost delibrately so in a too-cool-for-school kind of way maybe but hey, there’s been two rather good shows from Split so far… Instagram is the best place to find out more. Good to see them back for a third show…
Previously on these pages
And well we’re here, a couple of things that AREN’T recomendeations, but may well be worth checking out, watch this sapce, if they are then we’ll follow things up….
The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete at Banner Repeater – 13th Jan until 30th April 2023 – Shock horror, something happening at Banner Repeater! oh the number of times we’ve passed this locked up gallery or art space or whatever it is and wondered why there was never ever any sign on life or even a lice or two of information in the window, good to see something actually happening on the platform at Hackney Downs railway station – “With the compulsive energy of an anime binge-watch, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete observes the technical, perceptual, and emotional intervals of the contemporary animated image. From macabre cartoon studios to NPC burial grounds, pre-rendered cyberpunk megacities to hauntingly vacant train platforms, this group exhibition assembles a body of artists films that pursue the animatic affordances of cartoons and video games, while tentatively defining their own vernaculars of critical fandom.
Curated by writer Jamie Sutcliffe and artist Petra Szemán, the show anticipates the publication of WEEB THEORY by Banner Repeater in 2023, an edited volume of artists’ texts, interviews, and essays that interrogate the inter-media resonances of contemporary animation, be they produced by popular cartoon shows and video games, or animation theory and artists video. Featuring works by Bob Bicknell-Knight, David Blandy, Emily Mulenga, Hardeep Pandhal, David Steans, Petra Szemán and Christian Wright, and including contributions from Ami Clarke, Cole James Graham and Sahej Rahal, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete indifferently sidesteps notions of digital dualism to situate animation in peculiar proximities to the bodies that manufacture and consume it. Following theorist Deborah Levitt’s suggestion that developments in commercial and industrial animation have defined a new techno-political continuum in which the relationship between body and image has been irrevocably complicated, The Advantages Of Being Boneless And Incomplete asks how animated images might produce, pollute, or populate our emergent media-saturated lifeworlds, inducing multi-planar reveries and hybridised forms of perception.
Banner Repeater is actually found on platform 1, Hackney Downs Railway Station, Dalston Lane, London, E8 1LA. 13th Jan until 30th April 2023, How long? And well, alas the place can only be visited by appointment which is frustrating, there they are on a busy railway station and well, surely the place could be open, it could be looked after by participating artists, it could be there for the hundreds of people who passing by? Who are waiting for trains? One show that last four months and is never actually open? What the hell is the point? What a waste of a brilliant space! Actually, now I;ve read about what’s happening, I;m a tiny bit pissed off, why does art go out of the way to avoid engagement. If you are going to go then “Please note that we are actually on the train station platform but you do not have to purchase a ticket to visit us, you just need to ask to visit Banner Repeater, or the gallery, and you will be let up without having to pay. If you arrive by train, please ensure you pass your card out to avoid being charged the maximum fare”. There is an opening night on January 13th although, what is the point if you’re never going to open, is is all jsut about opening night and congratulating each other? I bet they’re Arts Council funded! Opening night, Friday 13th, 6:30pm until 9pm. Yep, there’s the Arts Council logo on their website along with the Hackney Council logo. Open your damn gallery, engage with us! It does look like an interesting exhibition, I was excited ot see it happening, but hell, come on! This could be such an exciting space, all those people on the platforn with ten minutes to kill while they wait for a train, I’ve stood outside it so many times.
There you have it, do what you will with the information, we’ll be along with coverage of some or maybe all of the shows over the next few days….
Meanwhile, Mixtape No.3 will be along in a moment, explore the previous two here.
THE ORGAN 
Hi Sean, was delighted to see my yellow Gun popping up
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