Sara Sadik, Annka Kultys Gallery, East London, January 2024  – Now before anything else, the gallery really wasn’t quite that green, it was more like a hint of green in the white of it all, just a green tinge in the air, this is Annka Kultys Gallery though and in the true spirit of the blurring of real life and the virtual reality and that place somewhere in between where the rather unique London gallery is at now, we’ll go with the strange green photographic “accident” that the combination of the lighting in the space and the effect said slightly green light had on a camera phone (it really was, in reality, nowhere near as green as the photos, there was just a hint of fresh green to the whitecubeness of it all). It really was that digital art thing in action, you’d almost suspect the gallery knew it was going to happen to people’s photos, and none of it was accident. I note the photos on the gallery’s own website are just as deliciously green as ours are, the line where reality starts and ends is way passed blurred now, you might say that is no bad thing?

Been a while since there’s been something that has called us to the gallery in a small warehouse in the far corner of that now rather dated 80s feeling industrial estate just off the Hackney Road even though the space is little more that a Jacksonesque flick of a loaded paintbrush away for the Organ bunker here in Hackney (not that Annka Kultys Gallery is that interested in the movement of a paint brush). There was a time when the space was one of the busiest of the more conventionally run London galleries, as well as one of the most rewarding (conventional rather than an artist-led DIY alternative). Don’t think we’ve had occasion to be in the space since the start of June last year during that much hyped London Gallery Weekend, certainly nothing that had demanded the frantic hammering of keys and the shouting about things on these fractured pages. Has anything even happened in the space? Has it just been closed? We were starting to think the gallery might have actually shut down, thankfully not.

No Cacotopia again this year, not physically in that traditional spot at the turn of the year anyway, did I spy some kind of mention of it happening digitally? Cacotopia has delivered so so much at the gallery at the start of each year over the last seven or eight January’s or so, we do have something physically happening at Annka Kultys Gallery at the start of January though and that is something to celebrate. There a welcoming green and blue glow in the corner of the cold winter darkness of that industrial estate. There’s cold looking dark figures silhouetted in the light of the always challenging art space, people’s breath hanging in the cold air, big coats and hats outside the gallery. I like Annka Kultys Gallery, I’ve never seen a bad show in there, I’ve seen shows I’ve questioned, shows I’ve debate with myself about, I’ve been taken out of my painterly comfort zone on several occasions, there’s been shows I’ve not really liked but I’ve never seen a bad show at Annka Kultys Gallery which is why, even though this whatever it is that Sara Sadik and the gallery are offering really doesn’t look like my thing, I have chosen to come out in the almost unbearable cold tonight. This isn’t a gallery that plays things safe, they don’t do average, no such thing as just another show at Annka Kultys Gallery and  tonight, in the green glow of it all the Gallery presents the opening night of an exhibition of a single-channel video by Sara Sadik (b. 1994). This will be the Bordeaux-born, Marseille–based artist’s debut solo presentation with Annka Kultys Gallery and her first solo exhibition in London.

What to make of this one? What is a “single-channel video” anyway? Well we’re in the slight green light (but not as green as those photos have you believe), there’s a big video screen on one of the big gallery walls in the main room, there’s a rather fine looking snake-like communal seat that surely doubles as a piece of art in the middle of the room and we’re all invited to sit and watch. Our ideas of what an art gallery should be are being challenged once again. Or are they? Isn’t this how it is now? Here we are at the start of 2025, video screens are almost the the norm now aren’t they? Isn’t this kind of where we’re at now? (two day on from the Sara Sadik opening we’re going to enounter big screens in numerous on the Condo galleries of East London) Can’t I just watch this on YouTube? I mean, I can watch all this at home can’t I? I can’t look at a big painting on a computer screen, not really, although I am forced to do just that more and more, no room for paintings in these screen-filled galleries (as a painter I am forced to show my work more and more on line and not in a physical gallery), isn’t standing in an art gallery looking at something moving a big flat screen kind of normal now? Is it relaly challenging that much? Yes it does (positively) change the dynamic to be sitting in the reverential belly of an art gallery and behaving in the way convention dictated that we do in a gallery so I’m probably kind of answering my own question but then am I? Isn’t this what shared YouTube appointments to view are for? Those shared live comment feeds at the side and such? And what of the piece of art itself? The piece of video art? The Film?  What are we calling it? Are we still calling them videos? What of Sara Sadik’s flat screen painting up on the gallery wall?       

“La Potion (EH) (2023), Sara Sadik’s elegiac work of video art commences with a narrator who introduces a new video game and like us, is looking at the ‘gameplay’ for the first time. However, this game features an avatar of himself. Stressed and anxious the avatar sets out on a walk looking for light and healing : “We will seek happiness since it does not come to us”. Like a magic drink, La Potion takes the narrator/avatar on a journey to find a way to feel better. Imagining constellations in the sky, walking through a beautiful garden, jumping towards the sea and swimming beneath the waves he feels soothed and calmed”.

Now I readily admit I don’t talk the language of video games, I don’t play video games, I never have wanted to, I don’t naturally read these things, I have no real authority here, I don’t really want to have any authority here, I am a Luditte, I don’t like stream powered looms. This art does not engage with me, it does not excite me, it doesn’t move me, it doesn’t anger me. The visual language is not my language, this is like some hip-hop fan trying to write about about prog rock when he knows nothing about Emerson, Lake or indeed Palmer. I can talk (or write) for hours about standing in front of this or that painting, the emotion of a Peter Prendergast landscape, the painful depths of that Tracey Emin exhibition from last year that’s still running around my head for way more than just one reason, that Gentle Giant sample that Travis Scott uses in Hyaena, those big big Ken Currie paintings, I really can’t seriously write with any kind of authority about what’s on the wall in the gallery here, I can’t connect with it, engage with it,  it isn’t loading for me, I am lost here (in the heart of anxiety), no state of uncontrollable vertigo, no wanting to learn how to transform, it is a beautiful night though, it does feel good in here, in this formal art gallery, in this comfort zone. I’m not sure if the piece does make anyone’s lives more visible? I am looking at the game for the first time like everyone else, it isn’t really making me think this story exists elsewhere, somewhere a little more real than this, it kind of just looks like an old video game, it kind of looks like a piece of slick brightly coloured almost sickly pop art on a screen on a gallery wall but then what do I know about any of this? I’m not a gamer, this really isn’t talking to me, I’m not really feeling a “psychological space of darkness full of anxiety and fear” even though the real face is there on the screen introducing us to his avatar (in French).           

“Sadik’s work seeks to make visible the lives of the Maghrebi youth of France and especially the second-generation emigres from former French colonies of North Africa, who make up 28% of the population of France. Often inspired by real people she knows in her home town of Marseille the artist explores masculine identity through computer-generated fantasy scenarios. By placing her characters in an imaginary world, she takes them out of the physical reality of contemporary urban life with all its barriers and politics. As Sadik says, “the story exists elsewhere” and a new reality is created for them. Elevated from their overlooked lives, in her stories they become heroes. “Do you remember how we started the game?” asks the avatar – from a liminal psychological space of darkness full of anxiety and fear, at the conclusion the gamer and his avatar seemed fused in a moment of peace”.

Hey look, you’ve got a rather soothing rather inviting green gallery, a rather friendly welcoming gallery, you’ve got a big video screen on one of the walls, you’ve got a brilliant snake-like seat that’s worth going to the gallery to see all by itself – yes, you could watch the film on line, it probably almost certainly surely changes the dynamic to watch it in the gallery. You’ve got untilthe start of March to go see it, I shall probably go again, I like the way this gallery engages, challenges, I hope we haven’t seen the last of painters like Horacio Quiroz, Juliette Sturlèse, Kate Bickmore, Marton Nemes (yes, those pieces of his are paintings), Rachel de Joode, a group show of painters would be something rather radical right now, oh there’s been so so many good shows at Annka Kultys Gallery, good to have it back (sw)

The Annka Kultys Gallery is at Unit 9, 472 Hackney Road, London, E2 9EQ. Sara Sadik’s show runs until March 1st 2025. The gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, midday until 6pm

Previous Annka Kultys Gallery coverage on these pages (there has been rather a lot of it)