It is apt that Joy Gregory’s first major survey show at the Whitechapel Gallery should take its title from a proverb said by her mother. In every room, her words – ‘you catch more flies with honey than vinegar’ – ring true. Here, these honeyed photographs hold a pertinent political message that sticks. Using nineteenth-century photographic processes to explore issues such as race, gender and colonialism, Gregory’s works pack a punch, rendering them all the sweeter for it.

The subversive power of beauty is evident from the onset of the exhibition and her early series, Autoportrait (1989-90). In a succession of tightly cropped, close-up, silver gelatin prints, a glamorous young Gregory poses and pouts like a cover girl. Captured with Voguish verve and monochromatic chicness, these shots juxtapose the compositional, pictorial and material details of photography with a sharp point about western beauty ideals.

If we are charmed by the reflective gleam of the artist’s metallic drop earrings against the starched fabric of her little black dress, then we are equally disarmed by the unzipped back of said robe, the vulnerable gaze of her kohl-lined eyes or the moment her face is hidden behind her hands. Excluded from many fashion magazines at the time, Black women, Gregory implies, should be seen as the beautiful individuals they are by being placed front and centre(fold). Yet in a world where Black models grace the covers of fashion journals less than their white counterparts, the unease and vulnerability visible in these images still resonate today.

Interrogating unrealistic beauty standards through beautiful photography also comes to the fore in two renowned series, Objects of Beauty (1992-94) and Girl Thing (2002-4). If, in the former, the construction of femininity is deconstructed through kallitype prints of hairclips, combs and false eyelashes magnified to monstrous proportions, then the latter’s photograms approach the same issue but with a lighter touch. The hard material objects of Girl Thing go soft, dissolving into ghostly forms against a cyan background. Though no less beautiful and evocative, the trappings of femininity are here stripped down to their poetic essence. Luminous in a sea of deep blue, these ordinary objects become an extraordinary sight to behold.

Beautiful accessories again hide ugly realities in Gregory’s haunting series, The Handbag Project (1998-97). Made during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of Apartheid in South Africa, The Handbag Project illuminates the dark truth of how wealthy white women exploited Black female domestic labour. Her pictograms of collected luxury bags once belonging to said affluent white women are a sweet riposte to this oppressive era. Appearing a mere shell of its once coveted form, the handbag – or rather, the white female privilege it epitomised – is reduced to a remnant.

Impressive in its scope, skill and sensual sensibility, Catching Flies with Honey demonstrates that beauty can be a weapon and a joy, a trap and a method, but one thing is certain: we’ll be thinking about Gregory’s beautiful works of art, as well as their profound meanings, for many years to come.

Joy Gregory: Catching Flies with Honey is showing at Whitechapel Gallery until 1^st March 2026

whitechapelgallery.org

Running for the hills

Anna Fixsen, US editor

This Sunday, I drove four hours outside of New York City to run the Guthrie Wineglass Marathon in the quaint town of Corning in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. No, there was not wine served along the 26.2-mile route (for that, you’ll have to head to France); the race gets its name for its coveted glass medals, an homage to the town’s status as a glass-making capital of the US (if you go, be sure to check out the Corning Museum of Glass designed by architect Thomas Phifer). While the weather wasn’t as cooperative as I would have liked (the temps peaked at a sweaty 26°C) the course was fast, the scenery epic and the crowd support inspiring. I cruised my way to a PR (marathon speak for ‘personal record’) and promptly made a beeline for – you guessed it – a glass of Finger Lakes Riesling.

A powerful debut

Sofia de la Cruz, travel editor

I’d been anticipating Harris Dickinson’s directorial debut, Urchin, and finally had the chance to watch it last night. The film offers a raw, intimate portrayal of a young rough sleeper in east London, struggling to rebuild his life while battling a tendency toward self-destructive behaviour. It’s a deeply empathetic exploration of cycles, faith, and the complex journey of sobriety. Rather than romanticising hardship, Urchin presents a brutally honest narrative. Dickinson’s profound understanding of social realism shines through every frame.

A mechanical wonderland

Ellie Stathaki, architecture & environment director

A visit to the new Power Hall in Manchester on Monday reminded me how much I love science museums. ‘I like a noisy gallery,’ the museum director, Sally MacDonald, told me – and you know what? I think I do too. There are large locomotives, some older, some newer, and the world’s first passenger station is on site. There’s also a whole new eco-friendly heating system, with its pipes and equipment on full display for all to see and celebrate (thank you for the tour, Iain Shaw!). Big machines, refined architecture by the lovely Carmody Groarke, and an upcoming new public space will no doubt be well received by locals and visitors alike.

A Frieze countdown

Hannah Silver, art, culture, watches & jewellery editor

London is gearing up for Frieze which means exhibitions are opening everywhere. I’ve been lucky to see some brilliant artists’ works this week, from Joy Gregory at the Whitechapel Gallery to Marina Abramovich at Saatchi Yates, Nicolas Party at Hauser & Wirth and Lee Miller at Tate Britain. I particularly loved Wayne Thiebaud’s gorgeously painted American pies at the Courtauld – don’t miss it!

A reflective publication

Gabriel Annouka, senior designer

I had the pleasure of attending the launch of Are You Comfortable Yet? at ArtHub, New Cross, where Em—Dash – a South London publishing studio founded by Saundra Liemantoro and Aarushi Matiyan – presented their latest publication. The creative duo worked alongside artist Anahita Harding, translating her durational performances (of the same name) into print without losing their sense of tension or scale. Blueprints, signage, and architectural fragments sit alongside drawings of bodies and text, making the book feel less like documentation and more like an encounter, while prompting reflection on who public spaces are built for and how bodies move through them.

A recalibrating album

Jamilah Rose-Roberts, social media editor

I wasn’t able to make it down to CKTRL’s recent concert at London’s ICA, as I was tied to my desk with both work and personal commitments, but his new album has been on repeat in my headphones since its release. Spirit is music that settles in the body, recalibrates the breath, and restores focus. Each track feels composed to be absorbed as much as heard – a current of sound that restores balance from within.

Bradley Miller, known artistically as CKTRL, announced his debut album Spirit a few months ago. With its arrival, he released ‘Rush’, a single that draws together the emotional threads woven throughout the record. Spirit is his first full-length work since 2022’s Yield, and it carries the sensation of something refined over time – another project distilled through patience, sharpened by reflection, and charged with clarity. Guided by bell hooks’ words, ‘Healing is an act of communion’, Spirit turns toward connection as its foundation.

I first encountered CKTRL years ago in a dimly lit Shoreditch House set. In the famous 'Library', a modest crowd gathered – yet the performance was spellbinding. He drew silence into the space and made it resound. That intimacy remains in Spirit; it is a record that expands slowly, allowing each phrase to unfold with patience.

Listening to it is a delicious experience: strings that rise and dissolve, melodies sculpted with precision, arrangements that hold weight and openness in equal measure. It is music for communion – with oneself, with others, with the possibility of healing.

Spirit is available now – listen on Spotify or Apple Music.

The power of the image has long held a particular resonance for Peter Kennard, artist and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art, whose current exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery is both a tribute to and a warning of the influence of information.

‘Archive of Dissent’ exhibits Kennard’s body of work in the former Whitechapel Library space, a fitting location for his archive format. Uniting photomontages, installations and the newspapers where his images first appeared, the exhibition pays tribute to the space’s original purpose, once known as the ‘People’s University of the East End’ and used as both a refuge from poverty and a place to nurture radical philosophies around art and politics.

Over his five decade career, Kennard has been absorbed with exposing the links between financial profit and war, over the years responding to the Vietnam War, the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), through to the present day wars in Gaza and Ukraine. He returns, frequently, to the collage method as a means of removing what he refers to as the ‘mask’ of misinformation, inspired by John Heartfield’s introduction in the 1930s of montage as a political tool. By juxtaposing the tragic images we have grown accustomed to seeing daily, Kennard reveals the horror of acceptance.

Peter Kennard's 'Archive of Dissent' is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 19 January 2025

whitechapelgallery.org

The Max Mara Art Prize for Women, although only in its ninth edition, already has a reputation for playing a key role in the careers of women artists with unique practices. The award includes a residency in Italy, resulting in an exhibition at the Whitechapel in London. Announced last year, the recipient of the 2022-2024 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Dominque White, works with sculpture and installation through methods of deep research, and adds her name to the impressive list of previous winners, including Laure Prouvost, Helen Cammock and Emma Talbot.

White’s Whitechapel exhibition, ‘Deadweight’, which opens 2 July 2024, is a result of her Italian residency, completed predominantly in Todi, near Rome, and Genoa, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. The show takes its name from the measuring of the weight of ships’ contents, including people and cargo, as a single unit, exploring Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism and hydrarchy (the practice of gaining power over land using water). White looks at the submarine world as an Afrofuturistic space for emancipation, a world of possibilities both dangerous and filled with the potential of the unexplored.

Wallpaper* visited White’s temporary studio in the quiet town of Todi, while she was working on the sculptures we see in ‘Deadweight’, and spoke to her about her practice and the exhibition, for which she corroded her work by submerging it in the sea.

Dominique White on ‘Deadweight’ and her Max Mara Art Prize residency

‘Afrofuturism is a site of impossibility, and I don't have to only think of outer space, I can think of new intangible worlds, I can think about the sea and then I also just get really excited about the accidental discoveries that we find in the sea; these deep sea creatures that are so black naturally, that you can’t even see them on camera. All those little nuggets of information have always excited me much more than animals that we find on land, or the idea of outer space,’ White told us.

The work in ‘Deadweight’ takes inspiration from marine ephemera such as anchors, sails and sheets (rope) and combines it with the inherent danger of water and hydrarchy. There are unwieldy, twisted forms in metal, linen stained with carbon, and flotsam and jetsam. White is also interested in volatile materials, and the works, although heavy and static, are also in flux, some even being weighted into shape but never too permanently.

‘I feel like I am almost an anti-sculptor; I hate the idea of [the works] being protected – I want the viewer to feel like they can’t occupy the same space, like you have to tiptoe around the sleeping beast, but you want to see it, you want to get closer,’ said White. ‘I think that [feeling] also relates to this idea of being a difficult artist, not conforming to these very strict, very archaic ideas of who can be an artist or what art even looks like, or how art is supposed to be received.’

A passionate reader, White emphasises the role of research and reading in the making of her works. For ‘Deadweight’, her research led her, for example, to the modern legend of the salvaging of Roman Emperor Caligula’s party boats. The huge, ornate floating structures, decorated with marble floors and pillars, lay for centuries at the bottom of Italy’s Lake Nemi, before it was drained at the order of Mussolini in 1929, and the boats subsequently recovered, only to be lost to fire before the end of the Second World War.

White also travelled to Agnone, Palermo, Genoa, and Milan, instigating conversations with academics and members of the maritime community.

She even referenced the transcendental qualities of Alice Coltrane’s psychedelic jazz music. ‘I think it has that way of storytelling, that for me has always led either to the sea or to something completely intangible.’

Facilitated by the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and partner institution Collezione Maramotti, in Reggio Emilia, White was able to spend time conceptualising and realising the exhibition in collaboration with local fabricators, who helped make the larger sculptures.

On entering her studio in Todi during her residency, works in progress included twisted metal structures that had been exposed to salt water amid an ongoing process of alternation – acquiring and shedding layers of rust.

‘I call myself a mediator because the materials are so unruly,’ she said. ‘I have videos on my phone of my assistant straddling and holding onto a work so it didn’t crush me. They are almost like beasts; even with other works that are suspended, it’s always about finding the balance, so it doesn't crush itself.’

‘Deadweight’ promises to offer a commentary on how we see the past, how we record the past and how the vast unexplored expanse of water on our planet impacts our psyche.

‘It’s where your imagination can go completely free, up off the rails. You’re not limited by rules or boundaries. You can dream whatever you like,’ said White.

‘Deadweight’ runs at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 2 July until 15 September 2024, whitechapelgallery.org and then at and Collezione Maramotti, Italy, 27 October 2024 – 16 February 2025, collezionemaramotti.org

For more shows, see our guide to this month’s London art exhibitions.

The show ‘The Age/L’Età’ is the culmination of Emma Talbot’s six-month residency in Italy, facilitated by Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, after she was awarded the eighth Max Mara Art Prize for Women, in 2020. 

Presented first at Whitechapel Gallery in London before travelling to Collezione Maramotti in October, her exploration delves into the violence of Greek mythology and the balance of permaculture and paganism. Her work leads us to question the ‘role of destruction in the foundations of patriarchy’, explains curator Laura Smith. During her Italian residency, Talbot used knitted sculptures, animations from drawings, huge silk-screen paintings and disorientating soundwork to imagine a world anchored in nature’s wisdom.

Gustav Klimt’s The Three Ages of Woman, 1905, was the springboard for Talbot’s show. The painting, displayed in 1911 during Rome’s International Exhibition, organised to mark the 50th anniversary of Italian unification (Risorgimento), signifies the progression from tradition to modernity, and the birth of a united state. Able to observe the painting first-hand during her residency, Talbot imagined the elderly woman as emblematic of an old and ‘tired’ Italy. In response, she reframes the character as a saviour in a post-apocalyptic pagan dystopia, rooting her actions in the 12 permaculture design principles and a pagan respect for nature. 

At first glance, the show seems overtly feminist and uncomfortable. The loud, humming sounds offer a sense of unease and the images seem complicated – but what else could be expected from such a wide-ranging practice? A little time spent reading about the context of the exhibition sets the scene for Talbot’s imagined world, and is worth the extra moments of effort. It’s a rare treat to dive, layer by layer, into such depth of thought.

In Ruins and Volcanic Landscape, split across two silk screens, we follow the woman ‘trying to navigate the landscape of broken history’, as Smith explains. The tapestries hanging from the ceiling of Whitechapel Gallery contrast the serene with the brutal, depicting the woman in different forms; she nurtures hurt animals, is a 12-limbed figure busily twisted over swirling backgrounds and peers into cracks in her universe. The tone in the bubbles of speech dotted across the images range from advice that ‘life is a transformative process, keep going, learn and adapt’ to vehemently urging us to ‘use (our) agitations to rise up and survive’. The pieces portray the woman questioning the way of the world, presenting an amalgamation of thoughts that relate us in common moments of meditation. 

The facelessness of the woman is important; It enables the character to represent a universal ‘self’ and encourages understanding. In the 25-minute-long animation, The Trials, we see the elderly woman’s response to the mythical Twelve Labours of Hercules. Smith explains that Talbot doesn’t bind herself to conversations around womanhood, touching on ‘epic themes around feminism, age positivity and climate catastrophe’. Rather, she speculates on an alternative story of strength in which matriarchal wisdom prevails over violence. The charmingly awkward stop-start video depicts the woman redirecting power from The Lernean Hydra to more productive means, building trust with and calming The Nemean Lion and coexisting peacefully with The Cretan Bull. She uses patience and empathy to solve problems that Hercules famously blundered through with violence. She draws dystopian parallels between myths and modern-day problems, in turn questioning our role in change. The animations are also sprinkled with text, disjointedly narrating the story in questions such as ‘do you roar, is your rage suppressed?’ and reminding us that ‘your power comes from within’.

Across her media, Talbot offers finely orchestrated concepts, which nudge gently into one another and will us to question truths about contemporary Western society. The show’s title work, The Age/L’Età, stands proudly in the centre of the room, the elderly woman in full form. Her skin is made from recycled fibres and appears like a muscular armour, her long silver hair frames dark, sparkling eyes which reflect into the portal in front of her. Talbot refers to her sculptures as ‘3D drawings’, they project a dream-like foreign reality, and along with the overwhelming and indistinct sound played throughout the room, the show is disordered, which allows exploration between the works and lets you jump in at any point to piece it all together. 

Overarchingly, ‘The Age/L’Età' is a reminder to reflect. Here, we can ponder Talbot’s fabricated universe, question our internal compass, find solace in resolution and consider ‘how will you survive in this climate?’

Information

Until 4 September 2022 at Whitechapel Gallery, whitechapelgallery.org

‘The Age/L’Età’, Max Mara Art Prize for Women: Emma Talbot, Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia, Italy, 23 October 2022 – 19 February 2023

The life and work of artist Theaster Gates are famously intertwined with Chicago – the city where he was born, raised, and continues to be based, whose South Side neighbourhood he has revitalised and transformed one building at a time. Lesser known, but no less interesting, is his long-standing affiliation with London. He remembers his first visit vividly: in 1998, while a master’s student at the University of Cape Town, he came to the British capital on a holiday and visited the Crafts Council Gallery. ‘I remember being so excited that I could see a Julian Stair work, and a Michael Cardew, a Shoji Hamada, and a Bernard Leach,’ he says, listing the ceramic artists who would come to shape his artistic practice. ‘It was a very important time for me.’

A subsequent sojourn, in 2012, was just as formative. Soon after Documenta 13, where Gates showed 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (restoring an abandoned hotel in Kassel, Germany with labour and materials from a derelict South Side building), he arrived in London for his first exhibition with White Cube, which involved suspending a fire truck from the ceiling of its Bermondsey gallery, with a cabinet full of Ebony and Jet magazines on its tether. Titled Raising Goliath, the work pointed to culture as a way to alleviate the Black American struggle. The audience ‘was so kind and generous, and my practice really flourished’, recalls the artist. ‘London has been like my second home. And while Londoners can be quite critical of a bad exhibition, because I’ve had such good reception in the past, I’m very excited to offer this proposal to this place that I love so much.’

Theaster Gates’ London cultural takeover

The proposal he refers to is ‘The Question of Clay’, an ambitious project involving some of the city’s top cultural institutions: a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery (until 9 January 2022) and an intervention in the V&A’s ceramics galleries this autumn, followed by a commission to create the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion. Add to this a show at White Cube Mason’s Yard (until 30 October 2021), and you have the biggest takeover by a single artist that London has witnessed in recent years. A seminal moment for sure, but Gates, who has become one of America’s leading cultural figures, feels no cause for anxiety. ‘Now that I have no more points to prove, I would use these next years to really share and explore my interest in ceramics. The shows are all varying exposés around craft, craftsmanship, the cultural connections between places, and my training as a potter.’ 

In parallel with his conceptual inclinations, Gates has always had a fondness for craft. He took up pottery as an undergraduate student at Iowa State University, eventually completing a residency in Tokoname, Japan, where he worked with a group of master potters. His 2007 exhibition ‘Plate Convergence’, often considered his breakthrough moment, showed a collection of his pottery, only disguised as the work of a fictional Japanese potter who moved to Mississippi and married a Black civil rights activist; three years later, his show ‘To Speculate Darkly’ paid homage to Dave the Potter (also known as David Drake), an enslaved 19th-century artist who created extraordinary stoneware pots. Gates believes that training in craft involves ‘thinking with the hands’ and is a necessary complement to the study of art, history, and philosophy: ‘If you bring contemporary art and craft together, you have the best of two really amazing worlds.’

Not surprisingly, craft was the starting point for the Whitechapel Gallery show. In 2015, Gates and Lydia Yee, the then-newly appointed chief curator at the gallery, sat next to each other at a lunch in Venice. They talked about ‘Spirit of Utopia’, a 2013 group show at Whitechapel for which Gates had installed Soul Manufacturing Corporation, a working pottery studio where visitors could learn how to make bricks and throw clay on a wheel from a skilled potter. Gates registered his interest in doing a follow-up show, thus kicking off a series of conversations. ‘And the more I talked to Lydia, the more I thought, there are so many places in London that have amazing craft histories and things in their vaults, but they’re rarely seen in a contemporary light. Could we connect with these places?’ Gates wondered. He thus set on a path to draw from other collections to create a history of ceramics, displaying the work of his artistic ancestors alongside his own.

An invitation from the V&A to undertake a research fellowship came at the right time. Given free run of the museum’s ceramics collection, Gates naturally gravitated towards craft potters he long admired. He was particularly interested in those who worked across different cultural contexts, such as Leach and Hamada, who co-founded the Leach Pottery in St Ives a century ago; and Ruth Duckworth, who fled Nazi Germany, studied in London and became known for monumental stoneware murals in Chicago.

But Gates also took the opportunity to explore more practical uses of clay: searching for the oldest bricks in the collection – including one marked with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BCE – and surveying the output of the Wedgwood factories, which represented the apex of 19th-century industrial manufacturing. He sought out ‘perversions’ within the collection too, namely ceramic figures of enslaved Black people from the early 19th century, some serving double duty as tobacco jars or candlesticks; though commissioned by abolitionists, these figures have exaggerated physical features that perpetuated racial stereotypes. A selection of these ceramics have made their way to Whitechapel, complemented by loans from other public and private collections (including a storage jar by Dave the Potter, who is not yet represented in the V&A collection).

‘The V&A was so excited that a contemporary artist was interested in these things,’ says Gates, who characterises the museum as an extremely open environment, deftly confronting its colonial past by championing openness, equity and diversity. ‘All the big institutions have the challenge of making right these complicated paths, and the only way to do that is to open your museums up to more artists of colour, more queer artists, artists across the gender spectrum, people who are trying to say new things with old objects.’ 

In this case, the juxtaposition of old objects – such as 18th-century Chinese earthenware, an emancipation medallion commissioned by Josiah Wedgwood, a series of Black ceramic caricatures, and Dave the Potter’s storage jar, all within in the same vitrine – speaks to the relationship between global trade, colonial expansion, slavery and abolitionism.

They accompany Gates’ own ceramic work across two decades, including his ‘Afro-Mingei’ sculptures, which incorporates Japanese elements with the culture of Africa and its Diaspora. For instance, a 2019 piece, titled Afro-Ikebana, comprises a bronze cast of an African mask paired with a rotund ceramic vessel containing a single branch, presented on a tatami mat. 

‘I’m trying to couple Mingei, the folk craft movement in Japan, with the Black Arts Movement in the United States. In this moment [in the 1930s] Japan was saying, “Who we are is beautiful, we don’t need Western culture to reaffirm our beauty and the importance of our craftsmanship and our people.” In the United States 20 years later, Black people were saying, “Our hair and our skin are beautiful, and the objects and foods of our culture are important.” The resistance to a certain kind of Western whiteness created both movements, which I’ve brought together. That very strong philosophical meld led to a material meld, which is very exciting to me.’

Also part of the show are Gates’ new stoneware vessels, installed on custom plinths of hand-milled wood and stone, referencing African sculpture, the human body, and industrial and utilitarian objects. Many of these were made at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, where ceramic artist Peter Voulkos had begun his career in 1951. Voulkos’ work ‘is very material and muscular, masculine and action-oriented’, describes Yee. ‘He would often work in an improvised way, even down to allowing some degree of chance to happen in the kiln. Some of the work that Theaster has made is in response to this.’ 

Gates additionally brought his band, the Black Monks, to Montana to make music that explores themes of craft labour and spiritualism; at Whitechapel, their performance becomes part of a new film that explores the history of clay practice in the UK, US and Japan. The spiritual aspect ties in with the title of the show, ‘A Clay Sermon’.

‘Theaster grew up in the Baptist church in Chicago, and he’s said that he learned about art every Sunday by going to church: the aesthetics, the way people put themselves together, the music. I think that goes very much to the fact that music, and the community spirit of being part of a church, is integral to his work today,’ explains Yee, adding that Whitechapel Gallery has a similar history of community engagement.

‘A Clay Sermon’ coincides with Gates’ intervention at the V&A. ‘Because they are loaning me works from their ceramics galleries, I will replace those works with my own, so their vitrines are not empty. There’s a little bit of trade happening, and I think it’s an interesting way to get people into the museum,’ hints the artist.

Serpentine Pavilion 2022

And while the design of his 2022 Serpentine Pavilion is yet to be unveiled, Gates is brimming with enthusiasm for the commission and already eager to talk about it, unfazed when I point out that he will be the first non-architect to take it on (previous participating artists have partnered with architects – Ai Weiwei with Herzog & de Meuron, and Olafur Eliasson with Kjetil Trædal Thorsen). ‘I’ve restored a lot of buildings,’ says Gates of his work on the South Side, through the Rebuild Foundation. ‘And while I’m not a trained architect, I think about space more than anything. Black space, especially, is core to my practice. And I feel that making space is such an amazing power move within art, for people like Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, Donald Judd, or Hiroshi Sugimoto. I’m part of a continuum of artists who have been thinking about disruptions and interventions in the public sphere and in nature – in my case, the urban environment in a Black neighbourhood.

‘My art has always been kind of land art. So if we can open up the architectural project to one that is actually concerned about land, its politics and complexity, then it seems quite reasonable that not only me, but more artists in the future, will do substantial things [with the Serpentine] commission.’

The first thing about making a space, Gates contends, is to create the conditions for a gathering of people, which is why he’s thinking not only about physical architecture but also ‘the sound system, the food, the energy, the lighting’. Since 2013, he’s run an annual gathering called the Black Artists Retreat, and he hopes that his Serpentine Pavilion ‘will be a place where we might also convene, converse, party, reflect, and celebrate together’.

Looking at the various elements of ‘A Question of Clay’, it becomes clear that Gates wants us to engage deeply with art, design and architecture, not just taking them at face value but also understanding their social function, and the political implications that come with putting them on display.

‘Sometimes politics are on my mind, and sometimes the colour red. And I want to have self-permission to talk about either. There are moments when a truth should be shared, and I don’t want to hide behind the colour red, out of fear it would diminish my artistic practice. Some people choose not to talk about politics because it can be a little messy. I never want to lose that courage. I want to grow in courage to be as sophisticated in my knowledge in politics, as I am in my belief in colour.’

Exemplars of Black excellence

It follows naturally that Gates’ creative leaders of the future for Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue ‘5x5’ project would be creators of elegant, distinctive forms who are advancing a social message with equal confidence. His pick of five talents are exemplars of Black excellence in Britain and the United States, ranging from fashion to architecture to furniture. He lauds shoe designer Kendall Reynolds, co-founder of the Kendall Miles brand, for delivering ‘an elegance, luxury and femininity for Black women’, menswear designer Grace Wales Bonner for ‘offering a new lens through which to consider conversations on race, identity and sexuality’, and fashion and textile designer Tolu Coker for being ‘a fierce advocate for Black models and models of colour’.

Gates selected architect Germane Barnes for being ‘unafraid of uprooting contemporary notions of scale, ideological complexity, or boundaries within his design. He moves me to have deep conversations about what design can achieve for the masses.’

Also on the list is Norman Teague, a more established talent who worked with Gates on 12 Ballads for Huguenot House. ‘Brother Teague designs collaboratively, thinks strategically, and is committed to training Black and brown makers. His determination and design vocabulary continue to inspire me,’ Gates enthuses.

He acknowledges that his mentors – among them artists Kerry James Marshall and Ingrid Lilligren, curators Okwui Enwezor and Thelma Golden – had a major role in shaping his practice, encouraging him to study abroad, learn about other cultures and indulge in craftsmanship. ‘Those moments were very important to me, and I’ve always tried to create opportunities to have that time and space to speak to younger people, to offer them support and advice.’

With support from Prada Group, Gates has just launched the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, a three-year programme that will provide emerging artists of colour with opportunities for exchange, training, critical feedback and exposure. 

‘I’m trying to mimic what I was blessed to receive,’ says Gates. ‘And I’m excited to be able to invest financially, invest emotionally, invest lots of different kinds of resources into designers, artists and other creatives so that they can do more of the great things they want to do.’

Meet Theaster Gates’ five creative leaders of the future: 

• Kendall Reynolds
• Grace Wales Bonner
• Norman Teague
• Tolu Coker
• Germane Barnes

INFORMATION

theastergates.com

‘Theaster Gates: A Clay Sermon’, until 9 January 2022, Whitechapel Gallery, London, whitechapelgallery.org

Theaster Gates: ‘Oh, The Wind Oh, The Wind’, White Cube Mason’s Yard until 30 October 2021

A version of this article appears in the October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue of Wallpaper* (W*270). Subscribe today – 12 digital issues for $12,£12,€12

In March 2021, Whitechapel Gallery turned 120. The vision of Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, the east London gallery was conceived of a commitment to social reform and experimentation. Its inaugural exhibition, ‘Modern Pictures by Living Artists, Pre-Raphaelites and Old Masters’, opened in 1901 and attracted 260,000 visitors. Some attribute this impressive turnout to the gallery’s electric lighting – which many visitors would have experienced for the first time – but its founders knew they had tapped into something deeper.

One of the most notable moments in Whitechapel Gallery’s history was in 1939. A young Spanish painter sought to highlight awareness for civil rights in his home country. He exhibited a single painting and requested that visitors leave their boots behind as donations for freedom fighters in Spain. The artist was Pablo Picasso; the painting was Guernica.

The gallery brought international art to London’s East End. Over the decades, it has hosted a wealth of artist debuts and has seen the work of many a modern master grace its doors, including that of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barbara Hepworth, Frida Kahlo and David Hockney. In more recent times, the gallery has handed over the reins to contemporary art trailblazers such as Nan Goldin, Zarina Bhimji, Gillian Wearing, William Kentridge, Michael Rakowitz and Elmgreen & Dragset, who famously turned Whitechapel Gallery’s ground-floor space into a vast, derelict public swimming pool.

In celebration of its milestone, Whitechapel Gallery has launched a 12-month interactive online campaign. It will put out a ‘call for memories’, encouraging audiences to share anecdotes from their experiences with the gallery, and will also delve into the archives to unearth rarely-seen material that shaped its history.

The gallery seems to have found a recipe for longevity: a spirit of innovation, an understanding and appreciation of its diverse East End community, and a fearless willingness to experiment. Over its 12 decades, it has united, subverted, educated, shocked, transformed and inspired.

Iwona Blazwick: 20 years at the helm of Whitechapel Gallery

Iwona Blazwick has been director of Whitechapel Gallery since 2001, steering the gallery into even greater renown. In April 2022, after 20 years at the helm, the celebrated director will step down from her role. 

A fierce champion of emerging talent and young artists – discovering Damien Hirst is just one of a catalogue of achievements – she was given an OBE in 2008. Blazwick, whose critical writings are pored-over by students (and lecturers) globally, is also known for her support of female artists, having chaired the Max Mara Art Prize for Women since its inception in 2005, winners of which have included Emma Hart in 2017, and Emma Talbot in 2021.

Here, Blazwick reflects on 120 impressive years of the Whitechapel Gallery.

1901 - 1910

1902: Japanese Exhibition

‘With this show of reconstructed tea-houses and temples, porcelain, armour and musical instruments from Japan, Whitechapel Gallery set the foundations for a century of bringing global perspectives to local people.’

1910 - 1920

1914: 20th Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements – David Bomberg, Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Walter Sickert

‘Around the corner in impoverished Brick Lane, young Jewish artists were revolutionising British art with their brand of futurism, premiered at the Whitechapel Gallery alongside Camden town post-impressionist Walter Sickert and his atmospheric evocations of street life.’

1920 - 1930

1929: Kibbo Kift Educational

‘This utopian movement drew from Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Egyptian and Native American crafts, dress and language to create habitats and activities that were transformative for inner city children and young people.’

1930 – 1940

1939: Picasso’s Guernica

‘Perhaps the greatest history painting of the 20th century made its debut at New Burlington Galleries and consequently the Whitechapel Gallery as part of a tour to promote anti-fascism in Spain. Picasso asked that the price of entry was a pair of boots. By the end of the show 400 pairs had been donated for the freedom fighters in Spain.’

1940 – 1950

1941: Dr WM Crofton’s collection of British masters (including Turner and Constable)

‘Defying 56 consecutive nights of bombing in the East End, at the height of the Blitz, the gallery brought old masters out of their stately homes and into the lives of East Enders.’

1950 – 1960

1956: This is Tomorrow

‘A radical experiment brought 12 groups of young artists and architects together to shape their visions for the future through eye-popping pavilions that went from cool constructivism to brash pop art.’

1960 – 1970

1961: Mark Rothko

‘This sublime immersion in Rothko’s evanescent canvases was one of a series of solo shows featuring Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Morris Louis and Lee Krasner and that introduced cutting-edge art from America to British audiences.’

1970 – 1980

1979: Eva Hesse

‘This was the very first exhibition I saw at the Whitechapel Gallery. I was studying art and English at Exeter University and Hesse’s biomorphic, space-invading resin sculptures blew me away. I knew then that art would be my life.’

1980 – 1990

1982: Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti

‘A joint show of these then unknown artists established Kahlo as a feminist cultural icon, juxtaposing her intense visionary paintings with Modotti’s photographs of the revolutionary Mexico they had emerged from.’

1990 – 2000

1995: Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa

‘Modern and contemporary art from Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Sudan testified to the avant-garde creative energy of the continent.’

2000 – 2010

2002: A Short History of Performance: Jannis Kounellis’ 12 live horses

‘Twelve live horses spent the day at the gallery in a recreation of an iconic 1969 Arte Povera work by Jannis Kounellis, an encounter of nature and culture that proved unexpectedly emotional.’

2010 – 2020

2018: Elmgreen & Dragset: This is How We Bite Our Tongue

‘Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset conjured away the Whitechapel Gallery and replaced it with the ruin of a public swimming pool, a memorial to all civic facilities destroyed by commercial development. A testament to our mission to realise artists’ visions.’

INFORMATION

whitechapelgallery.org

ADDRESS

77-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX

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The work of Emma Talbot is part art, part poetry. Much of her ideas are autobiographical, yet also confront some of society’s most pertinent structural issues, from gender inequality to environmental collapse. Her work eschews pessimism and cynicism in favour of hope, a timely sentiment as spring emerges and the world begins to recalibrate in response to one of the bleakest periods in recorded history. 

Coinciding with International Women’s Day earlier this month, Talbot became the latest Circa artist, staging work on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights screen following projects by the likes of Patti Smith and Ai Weiwei.

For the commission, Talbot created four animated films in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, Collezione Maramotti and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Titled Four Visions for a Hopeful Future, the films follow a woman at the gateway between an old and new world. Mirroring the year, the screens light up with Talbot’s work at 20:21 each evening, disrupting the usual advertising on a rolling four-night schedule throughout March. ‘I really wanted to make some work that spoke of our times, to narrate the extraordinary zeitgeist,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘In lockdown, I’d been struck by the way a lot of contemporary thinkers (e.g. Valarie Kaur, Rebecca Solnit, Isabelle Stengers, Starhawk) were articulating the need to take time to reconfigure the ways we act, to build a more equal, considerate, sustainable, responsible, caring future.’ 

Talbot’s influences for the piece are wide-ranging – from Arundhati Roy’s article, The Pandemic is a Portal to the work of medieval visionary Hildegard von Bingen. Her work is anchored in the here and now, observing the bleakness of recent times, while also harnessing the transformative and cathartic power of springtime. The films, comprising hand-drawn landscapes of dreamlike natural beauty, rich with floral and bodily forms. ‘The four animations come at the subject from different perspectives – they ask various questions; what a city is, how have power structures have been constructed, how powerful can communities be, what voices get heard, how can we connect with nature,’ says Talbot, who taught herself how to translate her drawings into animation during the first lockdown.

Last year, Talbot became the recipient of the eighth Mara Art Prize for Women, a biannual award established in 2005 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. As the sole visual art prize for women in the UK, it aims to promote and nurture female artists who are yet to receive a major solo exhibition. Talbot’s winning proposal focused on the perceived shame attached to female ageing, a feminist response to Gustav Klimt’s painting The Three Ages of Woman (1905). Klimt’s work depicts a baby, a young woman and a nude elderly woman seemingly stooped in shame. ‘I was fascinated by the painting on a personal level, thinking about the ways ageing is considered negatively, but I also had a sense there was more to the subject,’ Talbot explains. 

In response, Talbot will turn the concept on its head, reframing the woman as someone with agency. ‘The elderly woman will be a future survivor, who learns permaculture and sustainable living, relearning ancient practices and she will go back to the past and reconfigure the roots of power. To do this, she will perform the twelve trials of Hercules. Instead of resolving the tasks by killing, capture, theft and trickery, as Hercules did, I imagine the wise elderly woman would use more considered, benevolent means, such as commensalism and mutualism.’ 

When travel restrictions permit, Talbot will embark on a six-month residency organised by Collezione Maramotti. On her trip, she plans to research Etruscan pottery depicting the Herculean myths in Rome, visit permaculture sites and the ruins of the Temple of Hercules in Sicily, and explore the history of hand-painted silk in Italian fashion houses and learn intarsia knitting in Reggio Emilia. This will result in a new body of work to be shown first at Whitechapel Gallery and then at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy in 2022.

INFORMATION

Four Visions for a Hopeful Future will be on view in Piccadilly Circus, London until 31 March, 2021. circa.art

emmatalbot.org.uk

maxmara.com

collezionemaramotti.org

whitechapelgallery.org

In 1999, Robert and Nicky Wilson began drafting a star-studded shopping list and populating their 100-acre plot on Edinburgh’s fringes with contemporary art, turning fields, a farm and a Jacobean manor into a sculptural utopia. Almost 20 years later, Jupiter Artland still feels like an anomaly in the art landscape. For the Wilsons, personal aspiration and philanthropic ideals have merged in a palpable lust to bring art to the masses. Jupiter Artland offers rural escapism, soul cleansing, and in the case of Brazilian-Indonesian artist Daniel Lie, an education on how to use the landscape as a canvas.

‘Sometimes I feel like I’m an employee of the work’, Lie, who uses they/them pronouns, admits ahead of their debut solo exhibition in Europe and the first in a new season for Jupiter Artland. Lie’s commission, ‘The Negative Years’, is not on the land: it is the land. The concept has been in the works for four years, two of which were spent collaborating with scientists, archaeologists, mycologists and the Jupiter Artland Foundation. The work is weighed down with environmental uncertainty, the future of energy production, the power of fungi, post-humanism, and colonisation in every sense of the word.

Lie is not an artist you can peg to any conventional discipline. There’s barely a whiff of personal narrative here. Instead, they enjoy the lack of power over these autonomous materials, commemorating the long and deep relationship between human and non-human species. Organisms are the artist’s collaborators, subjects, and the protagonists of the work.

‘This is a non-verbal exhibition. The fungi react to sound,’ Lie says, as a politely veiled instruction to keep noise to a minimum as we enter each installation. What first strikes you isn’t necessarily the shrewd and resourceful use of materials, it isn’t even the fact that you can barely distinguish between what’s Lie and what’s just the lie of the land, it’s the smell. The smell you get when flowers have festered in the vase too long or the aroma you imagine to be back of house at Kew Gardens. It’s an unexpected, gritty, earthy odour that isn’t necessarily unpleasant, it just lingers. 

In the Steadings courtyard, we’re greeted with a pile of compost, which could just as well be a staple of agricultural life, but is in fact a bio-digestion heap cleverly generating heat for the studios. Inside, Quing takes a while for you to get your head around. The walls are liberally lashed with turmeric paint and linseed gel. Large terracotta pots containing Lie’s spawning fungi ‘queendom’ are bound and suspended on ropes like ritualistic urns. Plastic hay-filled sacks sag and sweat with condensation, suggesting life, death, rot or everything at once.

In the upper gallery, To Mourn the Living takes the mood from intriguing to somber. The walls are a muted black charcoal and bunches of decaying flowers are laid in each corner, seemingly in memoriam. The mushrooms make a return, this time sprouting from a large jute sack. ‘All of these living beings are just like us humans, bound by time,’ says Lie, who urges us to have a ‘conversation with the art’, but it’s difficult to know where to start. ‘Each person navigates in their own way and I respect this individual experience. Art can be very democratic and cross various different languages, social classes, race, gender. I think that’s the most beautiful power.’

On approach to the ballroom garden, you walk under a knotted rope linking two wooden stakes. If you weren’t scouting for Lie’s work, they could well be telegraph poles, or an innocuous gateway. Look closer, and Unable to Destroy takes a sinister turn; bundles of tinder encircle each base like funeral pyres and evoke the region’s violent history, specifically the persecution of witches burnt at the stake.

Inside the stately ballroom, the dimmed light augments other senses and makes for eerie viewing. A three-metre hoop comprised of 10,000 flowers plucked from the land and wool sheared from Jupiter’s resident sheep is suspended from the rafters. It droops down like a pendulous wreath with an intricacy on par with the ornate ceiling plasterwork. The Others’ Privacy is accompanied by an ambiguous soundtrack that could either be someone chewing or sped up audio footage of growing organisms. The smell of decay and decomposition here is the most pungent yet, and the exhibition has barely opened. 

By mid-July, Lie’s show will be unrecognisable. The flowers will have withered and shriveled, the fungi may have formed an army and the smell might have evolved from an inoffensive whiff to a full-blown pong. Unlike its Jupiter Artland neighbours – the Gormleys, Kapoors, and Parkers – this living, breathing art doesn’t exactly make for a collectable commodity, but making art with legitimate purpose is a marketable concept. Lie’s scrutiny of micro entities to wrestle macro issues has transformed Jupiter Artland into a biological pilgrimage.

Information
‘The Negative Years’ is on view until 14 July. For more information, visit the Jupiter Artland website

Address

Jupiter Artland
Bonnington House Steadings
Wilkieston
Edinburgh EH27 8BY

In a Britain still recovering from the destruction and trauma of Second World War, in 1956 a group of artists and architects came together at the Whitechapel Gallery to think about the future. Envisioned by architect and critic Theo Crosby, the now-seminal exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ gathered 38 participants into 12 groups, under the premise of collaboration – often weighing modernism against mass culture.

The postwar era was marked by openness, and thus interdisciplinarity. So it might come as a surprise that, some 63 years later – an unlikely anniversary, amid a radically-contrasting context – the landmark east London institution has decided to revisit its legacy with a new show. ‘We found that many artists were interested in mining its history,’ says chief curator Lydia Yee, who was responsible for the pairing of 10 artists with architects, all born after 1956. ‘I left it quite open as to what the future meant,’ she continues, pointing to the unapologetically speculative nature of the show, titled “Is This Tomorrow?”’

Through their collaborations, the broad range of participants — including David Adjaye, Kapwani Kiwanga, Cécile B Evans and Andrés Jaque — explore some of the 21st-century’s most pressing issues, from climate change and industrial farming to genetic engineering and rising social inequality. ‘I wanted to make sure it was not a British exhibition,’ Yee continues, stressing the international ambition of the show, a key distinction from its original edition.

At the entrance of the exhibition, on the ground floor, London-based 6a Architects and artist Amalia Pica invite visitors into a maze-like environment made of an enclosure. It derives from animal managing systems and questions the way we treat other species. The conversation started with ‘recognising that we are just one part of a global ecology’ says the architectural firm who, in collaboration with the Argentine artist, delved into research that highlights the interdependence between species and their connection with the natural world. ‘The question, is how is this to flourish in the future and not become overwhelmed by our anthropocentric age?’

Meanwhile, for architect David Kohn and artist Simon Fujiwara, the work is not set in the future: ‘It’s about now,’ they say of their collaboration. The Salvator Mundi Experience, on the first floor, brings visitors into an immersive miniature museum dedicated to the presentation of a single artwork: Leonardo da Vinci’s once-lost Salvator Mundi, acquired in 2017 on behalf of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. ‘We wanted to see if there was anything left to say about something that has been so over-narrated and marketed,’ explains the London and Berlin-based duo. Ahead of this collaboration, they visited the Jean Nouvel-designed Middle East outpost, only to realise that the coveted masterpiece was not yet available to view. ‘Even in its absence, the painting had changed the museum and the city. We speculated about a near future museum that would be solely about this one icon, in which no other art was necessary.’

For artist Marianna Castillo Deball and architect Tatiana Bilbao, both Mexican, thinking about the future meant revisiting the past. Departing from the Mesoamerican calendar Tōnalpōhualli, their collaboration expands on how living spaces are designed based on conviviality rather than conventional living standards. In Mind Garden, Heart Garden, the 260-day calendar was transformed into 20 coloured-metal strips, each perforated 13 times, corresponding to a day. ‘There are very few studies about how spaces were measured then,’ says Castillo Deball, pointing to the ancient Mesoamerican spatial measurements that are central to the work, and which are often based on the human scale. ‘Bringing them back is somehow taking them into the future’.

It is no exaggeration to say that the original exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ changed the art world forever. While laying the foundation for the advent of pop art – thanks to the contribution of the Independent Group – it has continued to inspire interdisciplinary collaborations around the globe (take Archivo’s recent trilogy of exhibitions in Mexico City, for instance). Will the new iteration be able to compete with this legacy? ‘I hope it will have a life of its own,’ says Yee, ‘but we won’t know that for a while.’

INFORMATION

‘Is This Tomorrow?’ is on view from 14 February – 12 May. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

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Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have been disrupting white cube architecture since the 1990s, but their recently unveiled installation at London’s Whitechapel Gallery may be one of their most sagacious transformations yet. The site-specific commission – a ghostly derelict swimming pool in the ground-floor gallery – is a timely monument to the fate of civic spaces in an era of austerity politics.

The art of the con lies in the materiality of the environment: the nostril-tickling perfume of chlorine, a teak changing room door that leads nowhere, the grime-covered municipal tiling, and the peeling mint-green paint that evokes an uncanny sense of nostalgia and queasiness. More fascinating still, is the elaborate narrative that Elmgreen & Dragset have constructed for their audience.

Established in 1901 through social reform, the pool was renovated in the 1950s and used daily by local Aldgate residents until it fell into disrepair during Thatcherism. A plaque by the installation proclaims this is also the site where David Hockney made his first drawings of a swimming pool’s surface (Whitechapel Gallery in fact hosted the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in 1970).

The Whitechapel Pool, 2018, by Elmgreen & Dragset.

Naturally, the pool is destined to become the showpiece of a luxury hotel spa after being bought by a developer in 2016 (notably Boris Johnson’s final year as Mayor of London) – a fabricated outcome that convincingly aligns itself with the ‘intense gentrification’ of East London. Where fact ends and fiction begins has been an ongoing preoccupation of the former Wallpaper* Guest Editors (see W*175), who notoriously once wrapped the V&A in development hoardings and ‘for sale’ signs, shocking unsuspecting visitors to the museum.

The Whitechapel Pool is the focal point of the Scandinavian artist duo’s first survey in the UK – ‘This Is How We Bite Our Tongue’ – which also spans two decades of sculpture. A fallen classical figure of a man, described as an ‘anti-heroic sculpture’ by the artists, is a prelude to the figurative works in the upstairs galleries, exploring notions around masculinity, childhood, capitalism, religion and social class.

They’re sobering themes but Elmgreen & Dragset prove their sense of wit is as honed as ever. Portraits of the Artists (2018) – an empty wall with the faint trace of two portraits that previously hung there – echoes a 1998 sculpture of a couple of pairs of Levi’s jeans and Calvin Klein underpants left crumpled on the floor in a previous gallery. Like with The Whitechapel Pool, we’re left to ruminate on an imagined history of what could have taken place.

INFORMATION

‘This Is How We Bite Our Tongue’ is on view until 13 January 2019. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

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‘Do not eat the sweets yet,’ German artist Ulla von Brandenburg commands, walkie-talkie in hand. After a few tense moments, each of the 100 schoolchildren she has recruited for her Sweet Feast project edge sheepishly in single file through the doors of London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

The camera rolls and the subjects (though with some hesitation) fall in line – unlike their counterparts in this exact spot in January 1973. Back then, to hail the UK’s entry into the European Common Market, more than 500 schoolchildren had been invited to sample a small selection of sweets to learn about ‘confectionery as an art form’.

There were contributions from members of the newly expanded European community, including Eiffel Tower shaped lollipops, German gummy mice, coffee-flavoured Hopjes from Holland, Italian marzipan fruits and salty Danish licorice. But events took a bittersweet turn when the overly zealous children succumbed to temptation, overwhelmed the gallery guard and devoured the entire exhibition. 

In a multidisciplinary piece in partnership with Le Prix Marcel Duchamp, von Brandenburg has recreated this unexpected turn of events through performance and film, marrying the structure of theatre with the freedom of art. ‘This was all very frightening for me,’ she laughs, having previously worked on films and performances with an all-professional cast of actors, ‘this wasn’t rehearsed, it was more of a “happening”.’

Behind the scenes, a teacher mouths instructions frantically from the sidelines as the children – from local school Arnhem Wharf – meander around the sweet-stacked tables. A tambourine signals the completion of a scene and so far, all sweets are still miraculously intact. As the next scene develops at an accelerating pace, the distress of the guard (the only trained actor in the film) mounts, and the anarchic children dominate and eventually demolish the display.

Screened in the Whitechapel’s immersive second gallery, the film is accompanied by a geometric and vibrant seating structure, designed by the artist and upholstered in fabric by Nanna Ditzel for Danish textile experts Kvadrat. Viewers are invited to clamber onto the structure, as though a seamless extension to the film. ‘It’s important to make the barrier between the public and work as small as possible,’ von Brandenburg says.

Both playful and political, the work also explores the radical shift in attitudes towards sugar, which is rapidly becoming the forbidden fruit of our time. ‘There are a lot of obese kids, which is a big problem, so I didn’t want to handle a very difficult topic in a naïve way,’ the artist continues.

In her multilayered Sweet Feast, von Brandenburg combines the curiosity of childhood, the looming uncertainty of Brexit and skilfully refines the art of controlled chaos in the process.

Related: tuck into Ulla von Brandenburg’s recipe for orangettes

INFORMATION

‘Sweet Feast’ is on view until 31 March 2019, two days after the UK is due to leave the European Union. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

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Bulbous ceramic jugs hang upside down in the darkened Whitechapel Gallery. Sickly yellow light pours from each, casting cartoonish speech-bubble shaped shadows across the floor and walls.

‘They're not just jugs – they are decapitated heads, chopped open below the nose,’ says their creator, Emma Hart – the sixth recipient of the biennial Max Mara Art Prize for Women. This pioneering award, in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery and Collezione Maramotti, offers a female artist the luxury of time, space and funding to create a significant body of work.

Hart used the six month, bespoke residency offered by the Prize to travel around Italy. Joined by her young daughter and partner, Hart immersed herself in Italian culture, meeting with artists in Milan, ceramicists in Faenza and researchers in Rome.

Installation view of 'Mamma Mia!,' by Emma Hart.

Issues surrounding family dynamics preoccupied Hart on her travels, reflected in the finished work, which she refers to as ‘a family of jugs’. Each is interconnected in literal ‘family ties’ by reems of red rope, curled around the ceiling beams.

Notably, Hart observed family therapy sessions while she was in Milan. Shadowing psychotherapist Matteo Selvini, she learnt about the Milan Systems Approach – a constructivist method of therapy, that emphasises the importance (and power) of non-verbal communication.

And so the skulls are mouthless; their colourful ‘brains’ fall out of their open, gaping necks, with no lips to speak of. Their stark black and white exterior walls conceal vibrant underbellys. ‘The interior patterns reflect my state of mind while I was in Italy, and the things that I saw,’ Hart explains. ‘One design features a green lady. She might be me, I don’t know. She’s trapped in a jealousy plant and she can’t get out. She’s constantly looking over her shoulder to see the person next to her.’

Another sees a tessellation of heads, each crying speech-bubble shaped tears. A third pattern features a tangle of arms with their thumbs up or down, depending on which way you look at it. It's the first time Hart has attempted illustration, and the drawings’ childlike nature belies their ulterior, difficult subject matter.

More grown-up, violent symbology comes courtesy of the swinging ‘cutlery’ ceiling fans, that skim dangerously close to the base of the skulls. Each rung features a knife, fork or spoon, flinging elongated shadows across the floor. The flying cutlery recalls tea-time traumas, and tantrums around the kitchen table.

It's uncomfortable viewing. Many gallery-goers skirt the edges of the installation, hesitant to walk into the jugs’ bright spotlights; or scared to be clonked by a swinging spoon. ‘Awkwardness has been an ongoing theme in my work,’ Hart says. ‘By using the light in this way, I was really trying to think of how the sculptures could affect a viewer. There’s trepidation when you’re forced to step into its projection. The light shouts on you, it spits on you – or it just talks to you. You choose.’

INFORMATION

’Emma Hart: Mamma Mia!’ is on view till 3 September. For more information, visit the Max Mara Fashion Group website, and the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX

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Over the weekend, London’s night tubes were filled with more than muddled party goers and sleepy service operators. An army of art lovers joined the midnight express.

Culture vultures and their confused housemates filled the streets, traveling from church, to gallery to apartment block, visiting 40, one-night-only events staged in unusual locations across the capital.

The festival borrows the style and format of Paris' long-running, effortlessly cool Nuit Blanche events. But can London's (no longer quite so edgy) East End really pull of a Parisian-style art night with the same romantic finesse?

Dennis Severs House, the location for one of two Chapman brothers' installations

It turns out, that wasn’t really the aim. Judging by the programming, (which included an open-air silent disco at Exchange Square), Art Night London is more about fun, spectacle and attracting the masses. The curator Fatoş Üstek speaks of offering everyone a warm welcome. ‘The festival celebrates the multiplicity that the East End holds,’ he explains, ‘with its diverse architectural, societal, psychological and linguistic profile.’

And attract the masses it did. Like Paris’ Nuit Blanche, famous for its snaking lines of louche flaneurs, there was no let up in queueing time, even into the wee hours. But spirits didn’t dip, (and nearby off-licences were thrilled by the late-night peak in beer sales).

The longest wait times, by a country mile, were at the Chapman brother’s duo of installations. Jake and Dinos premiered a new video installation – The Misshapeness of Things to Come – in a listed warehouse at London Dock, accompanied by a live performance by Jake's band. A selection of the Chapmans’ defaced prints were also installed in Dennis Severs’ House, an 18th century candlelit Huguenot house, tucked on a side street near Spitalfields.

Do Ho Suh’s compelling photographic installation, in Christ Church on Commercial Street, also attracted a continuous crowd. In the work, a single camera pans through endless apartment block rooms, slicing through walls and floors, offering an intimate look into the lives of unknown occupants.

Hopping from venue to venue feels very much like we're inside Suh’s film. These fleeting glimpses into previously closed-off areas of London are intriguing enough to keep anyone perky until morning.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Art Night website

The Scottish artist Peter Doig, whose disorientating figurative works have garnered global artistic acclaim, has become the fourth recipient of the Whitechapel Gallery's Art Icon award. Supported by Swarovski, the lifetime achievement award recognises an artist's notable contribution to their chosen medium. Recipients include painter and printmaker Howard Hodgkin (2014), land artist Richard Long (2015) and video art pioneer Joan Jonas (2016).

A committee of internationally prominent figures – including Max Mara's Luigi Maramotti, art consultancy Nine AM founder Bettina von Hase and Swarovski executive board member Nadja Swarovski – made the decision to honour Doig, who Swarovski describes as a 'truly visionary talent'.

Praising the artist, Swarovski picks up on his work's 'celebration of the natural environment', which she describes as 'something that speaks to us all'. Indeed, Doig's humbly rendered landscapes, which are influenced by formative years spent in Canada and Trinidad, depict an artist who has a deep appreciation of and respect for nature's beauty – something, it seems, that's increasingly important to memorialise.

Co-hosted by Nadja Swarovski and Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick, a luxurious gala dinner and award ceremony held at the gallery ensured that affairs were conducted in appropriately high style. The event also saw a charity auction led by Henry Highley of Phillips, in which an impressive catalogue of works donated by leading contemporary artists (including Cecily Brown and Enrico David) went under the gavel. All funds raised will go towards the Whitechapel Gallery’s outreach programmes, in particular its work with thousands of children and young people each year.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website and the Swarovski website

When you think of Internet-based art, your mind might jump to the cutting edge. Although the hyper-modern aspects of multimedia art are displayed in the Whitechapel Gallery's first show of the year, the emphasis is firmly on the medium's rich and rebellious history.

'Electronic Superhighway' takes its name from one of its contributors - South Korean video artist Nam June Paik, who coined the term in 1977. In Paik's Internet Dream – a major video-wall installation of 52 monitors displaying electronically-processed images – blurred, garish colours have a hypnotic effect, showing his early awareness of society's move towards information saturation.

This abundance of data, ironically, could occur in such an ambitious, extensive exhibition. The dizzying array of computer screens, installations and radio static that greets gallery-goers is deliberately overwhelming. To prevent complete over-stimulation, 'Electronic Superhighway' is dispersed over two floors and three different gallery spaces, working backwards chronologically from the present day.

On the ground floor,  web art is represented by Amalia Ulman's Excellences Perfections Instagram, a four-month documentary series which examines the influence of social media on attitudes towards the female form. The theme of online identity (or lack thereof) is continued by Douglas Coupland's famously obscured Deep Face - a comment on Facebook's involuntary facial recognition technology.

As visitors make their way up stairs, they journey back to the 1990s. At the top of the staircase, Aristakh Chernyshev's custom LED panel eternally loops the word 'Loading' around in a frustrating circle. This signifies that although visitors are moving upwards, they are regressing into a time when information was not demanded or expected instantaneously.

The second gallery space concentrates on the explosion of the Internet, which brought with it an explosion of browser-based works. Ann Hircsh's Twelve (2013) and Martine Neddam's Mouchette.org (1996) present interactive narratives about vulnerable teenage girl-users. In the latter, fluffy pink pens sit alongside vulgar images on a tablet, with no writing paper in sight.

In the final space, the tone shifts again. Here, the exhibition's pervading sense of foreboding is mingled with some light optimism - the works look forward to a bright-screened future. The 60s and 70s feature boundary-testing artists who pushed early technology to its creative limits. Highlights include the intricate, plotter-based algorithmic work by Manfred Mohr, and the early digital-media design of Frieder Nake.

'Electronic Superhighway' ends at the beginning, with memorabilia from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T) - a series of events that took place in 1960s New York, which showcased artists like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg. And what better way to end an exhibition about screen-based works, than with a good old-fashioned cabinet of physical artefacts.

INFORMATION

’Electronic Superhighways (2016 - 1966)’ runs until 15 May 2016. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

77-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX

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At some point, while immersed in artist Laure Prouvost's new video installation at London's Whitechapel Gallery, you realise you are being watched. You turn around to find two smaller screens, each featuring a woman swaying languorously, eyes focused eerily on you, like a hippie Mona Lisa.

Provoust's 'Farfromwords' sneaks up on you that way. It seduces you with a big-screen ode to the Italian countryside - all rushing streams and sun-kissed rose petals - but keeps you in check with surreal elements that make you wonder if this garden of earthly delights is as it appears.

The London-based French artist was the winner of the fourth Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011, offered in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. The award came with a six-month residency in Italy, home of the fashion label. It was not, however, without strings attached. Prouvost returned this year with a show that displayed the fruits of her labours in rural Biella, near Milan: a mini-coliseum installed in Whitechapel's Gallery 1 that immerses the viewer in the landscape, palette and eccentric energy of rural Italy.

The circular structure is an allusion to classical Rome, plastered inside like a fresco with evocative elements. There are Roman pillars, olive trees, stone fountains and disembodied extremities (breasts and all) that recall marbles from the Borghese. This is where the smaller screens are displayed, with models who seem to stare in your direction, no matter where you wander.

On the main screen, a film called 'Swallow' cuts together spring-like images (fitting that the exhibit launched on the vernal equinox). There are feet steadying themselves on the river rocks, lips parting over soft ice cream, bathing nymphs - all to an audio track of constant breathing, like the earth coming to life after winter. Then it, too, gets surreal, with flashes of lips on a live goldfish and bare toes squishing raspberries.

The exhibit's full-length name is 'Farfromwords: car mirrors eat raspberries when swimming through the sun, to swallow sweet smells' and as part of the finale, guests exit past a series of mounted car mirrors upturned into platters for fresh raspberries for the taking. Savouring the tartness brings it all home.

Watch an extract from 'Swallow', 2013. Courtesy the artist and Mot International

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London
E1 7QX

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