Articles

Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins’ exhibition starts with a large, white embroidery, not unlike a screen at a Japanese temple, spiritual and serene. But don’t be fooled – Atkins is not returning to the handmade in an attempt to counter our ever-more digitalised world. In fact, the work incorporates an acoustic device and takes in the sounds of the videos on the reverse. Or as Atkins words it, the embroidery is “putting out silence”.

Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021

Atkins’ words are used as labels throughout the exhibition. It is a device Tate Britain has used before and the curator, Polly Staple, tells me it proved popular with audiences. “Ed is a writer, as well as an artist who is living and breathing his voice, so it made sense to have him write the labels. It questions the authority of the museum text,” she says. Atkins also uses a more objective voice in the form of wall labels by a fictional art press. “In 1905, the composer worried. Would parents still sing to their children? If they could press play on a song with the same ease that she applies to the electric light …?” one of them reads. Here we are, more than a century later, still worrying. Will artificial intelligence take over the world? Will humans become extended computers, chips implanted in their bodies?

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Rafal Zajko - The Spin Off

Rafał Zajko likes bread. It appeared in ceramic form at his show at Public Gallery in 2021, where I first encountered his work, and it was the thing that stuck with me then as the antithesis of art – basic, edible, perishable. So, I was happy to encounter the bread again at this exhibition at Focal Point Gallery, like a welcome gift, a spin-off of sorts.

Introducing the exhibition in the first gallery, which is painted a sugary pink, Zajko ignores the six modest, ceramic kaiser rolls resting on the shelves of one of the Larders (2025) – cabinet-like sculptures with relief sliding doors. Instead, he grabs a glass pot filled with pickles (which also contains ceramic miniatures of earlier sculptures), then walks to the large floor-based sculpture in the centre – eight modular parts on wheels, arranged in an ellipse. Each module has an apple-green base and an elaborate relief pattern on top, like the tiled murals you find at underground stations or entrances to public parks. The circular shapes turn out to be lids, and Zajko lifts one lid carefully in order to put the gherkin in its place (gallery staff will be reconfiguring the installation daily). It is captivating to watch, a mix of art performance and the banal gestures usually associated with shopkeeping. Zajko seems at ease in this mysterious realm of art and domesticity, of manufacturing and consumption. Born in Poland in 1988, the year before the fall of the Berlin wall, he came of age in an era when consumer goods still had something of a magical aura.

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Mohammed Z Rahman - Remember to Live

When I enter Peer half an hour before the opening of Mohammed Z Rahman’s exhibition Remember to Live, I encounter the gallery’s director, Ellen Greig and guest curator and trustee Eliel Jones sitting nonchalantly side by side on one of Rahman’s upturned wood crates, chatting. It perfectly sets the scene: Rahman’s work is fuelled by conversations. Between friends and family, between people and animals, between reality and dream, with the self.

Rahman, a self-taught artist with a degree in social anthropology, is getting noticed: their painting Divali was purchased by the Government Art Collection last year and Tate’s Frieze Fund enabled the acquisition of two paintings: The Lovers and The Spaghetti House. Through the multiple arched windows of the yellow Spaghetti House people can be seen eating; piles of spaghetti stacked up in front of the house and on the roof, and dangling off a giant fork like an edible streetlamp. Rahman’s paintings always contain something slightly mysterious, absurdist and humorous.

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Lauren Halsey - Emajendat

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Writing about this show is a little like writing about hip-hop, a cultural movement that prides itself on its nature of being indefinable. Or, as Greg Tate said in his 1996 spoken word performance, What is Hip-hop: “Hip-hop currently resides beneath the noise … You know hip-hop when you see it, you may not see hip-hop before it seizes you. Hip-hop is not what it is today but what it could be tomorrow … Arguing with hip-hop about the nature of hip-hop is like arguing with water about the nature of wetness … Hip-hop flows right through ya … Hip-hop is black Prozac.”

Halsey has created a multicolour, candyfloss, shout-out vision of a universe, a Gesamtkunstwerk that is maximalist yet hyper-specific, a meta-commentary on what it is to be part of something, to have a past and a future, to believe and to thrive, to make a mark. I leave the show upbeat and a little confused, in all the right ways.