The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: exhibitions

  • Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Edge and Shift: Brighton Festival and HOUSE

    Agnes Varda, the legendary eighty-six year-old Belgian filmmaker and artist, is putting the finishing touches to an installation. Towers of lurid plastic buckets and baskets, the pleasing wordplay of “Ping-Pong Tong Camping”, stained glass window panels of flip-flop frisbees, and the photo-puzzle of the Baccalaureate celebrations of naked boys on the beach: Varda’s new work…

  • Ravilious

    Ravilious

    Fashions in art have a way of carrying all before them. They crash into the public consciousness, all splash and spectacle, and it is all too easy, in the rage to reorder and make sense of what ensues, to take epoch-making headlines for the whole story. It is under these conditions that a talent like…

  • Forensics: The anatomy of crime

    Forensics: The anatomy of crime

    What kinds of death need investigation? A criminal death is one that “didn’t happen naturally”, according to a Baltimore detective in 2012 documentary, Of Dolls and Murder, on show now as part of the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition, Forensics: The anatomy of crime. Once natural causes have been eliminated, the detective continues, that is when “you…

  • Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy

    Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy

    The Human Rights Act (1998), which enacted the European Convention of Human Rights (1950), has been in the firing line almost since it was passed. Some opposition is rooted in its ability to protect dangerous suspects, like giving alleged terrorists the benefit of a fair trial or delaying their extradition. For others, dislike is linked…

  • From the Foreshore

    From the Foreshore

    This March sees an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Sophie Charalambous hosted by curator and gallerist Jessica Carlisle. The works on show capture the strange energy of the Thames foreshore – a place of washed out tones and washed up objects. Timeless characters pick through the sedimentary layers of history; silver and black flows past…

  • A View from the Other Side

    A View from the Other Side

    Spot-lit in the cavernous darkness, a model of a city. A model city: monotone, empty, pure, with the pristine edges of laser-cut steel glinting under light. It sits in the centre of an oil-black moat. The whole is perched waist-high on a slowly rotating table. Like many architectural models, the piece feels both large and…

  • A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    A Needle Walks into a Haystack

    Sound carries. And it is the sounds of political and social unrest that offer one of the most interesting threads for navigating this year’s Liverpool Biennial – a constellation of exhibitions, events and curatorial side-shows grouped under the title, A Needle Walks into a Haystack. The Biennial’s greatest achievement is its power to make you…

  • What Was Once the Threshing Barn

    What Was Once the Threshing Barn

    Public/private, urban/rural, commercial/not-for-profit: it’s not like the waters between the two have ever been crystal clear, but now, with the opening in Somerset of the latest outpost of contemporary art giants Hauser & Wirth (London, Zurich, New York) the silt has been stirred up and it all seems just that little bit muddier than before….

  • Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Travelling with Unfamiliar Spirits

    Taking place this October – just in time for Hallowe’en – is a two-week festival of esoteric art, entitled I:MAGE 2014, that promises to explore the fertile relationship between artists and spirit entities. If the world of the esoteric can often seem closed off (almost by definition) then I:MAGE 2014 goes some way towards breaking…

  • Touching Wood

    Touching Wood

    Rarely do curators at large public museums co-ordinate concurrent exhibitions to complement each other. But by chance or design, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC) in Santiago, Chile, is bucking the trend. Of the half-dozen or so solo exhibitions currently on show, there are three which share a common material interest: wood. They form, if…

  • Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    Twelve-Fisted Boxing Caterpillar

    On my way back from the gallery I took a train and experienced the usual flicker of annoyance when the conductor began speaking to us as if we were in a plane. He gave the estimated arrival time, pointed us to the safety notices, alerted us to any suspicious looking bags. It was the usual…