Common Salt
This is an instrument I have never seen before. A slender dark wooden box, one side opening to become a bellow, pushed back and forth in a solemn rhythm by…
London
Finley Styles
Conceptual artist, painter and writer, Finley Styles, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England on August 15, 1972. The son of market-trader parents, Styles proved academically gifted despite a shoddy school…
The Night Horse and the Holy Baboon
Victoria Rance and I met at Newcastle University in 1980. We were studying Fine Art and English Literature respectively and have remained friends ever since. We share an interest in…
Of Shadows
One Hundred Objects from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic Effigies, pentacles, masks and charms. Robes and blades, crosses and cauldrons. The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall,…
Gordon Cheung – Unknown Knowns
Unknown Knowns is Gordon Cheung’s third exhibition at Edel Assanti, London. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Slavoj Zizek’s observation that Donald Rumsfeld’s theory of knowledge omitted a crucial fourth…
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LEAD
If, as Rebecca Solnit has argued, “science is how capitalism knows the world”, then it should not be surprising that, as new auction records are broken seemingly every week, it…
Great and Small Mythologies
Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid, released last year in a posthumously published translation by Seamus Heaney, is concerned, amongst other things, with the inadequacies of art. In it, Virgil describes…
Sparrow Come Back Home
Sparrow Come Back Home, Carmel Buckley and Mark Harris’ exhibition at the ICA, examines a reflective side of the display of archive as monument. Taking place in the Fox Reading…
Unrelated
A young woman slams her naked body furiously against a wall, again, again, and again, so brutally that I have to remind myself to breathe. Only moments before, I’d carefully…
Hello, World: Making Nature at Wellcome Collection
Karl Reich’s 1913 recording of a nightingale – among the world’s earliest extant recordings of bird song – feels like a bottled metaphor for modernity. Trapped in shellac, this sweet…
Chroma Hunt
From cave drawings to medieval tapestry, classical pottery to Rubens or Rembrandt, the hunt has provided artists with powerful subject matter for thousands of years. Much of this power has…