1st || Thursday
Unit9, Growth (detail).
An installation of newly commissioned works by London-based artist Soojin Kang. Four large pods woven from linen, silk and jute are suspended full-height occupying the space of UNIT9, seeming hybrids between organic and alien forms. Kang is interested in expressing character through the elevation of material through process. Bordering on dystopian, the deflated works nevertheless offer a humble beauty with emphasis on the handmade, imperfect and unfinished.
Zadie Xa, Crash, Boom, Hisssssss. Legend of the Liquid Sword.
Zadie Xa // Crash, Boom, Hisssssss. Legend of the Liquid Sword, Lancaster Rooms, Somerset House, 7pm
Creating an immersive environment for this performance, Zadie Xa’s work interrogates ideas of authentic versus inherited positions and displacement within the Asian diaspora. Through a fantastical over-layering of cultural references, the show will transport the audience into a supernatural narrative inhabited by shamanistic beings, based on Manshin (Korean shaman) and loosely inspired by Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling performed by a vocalist and a drummer. Tickets from £ 7.50.
2nd || Friday
Nicole Bachmann, I dont want your whispers.
I don’t want your whisper – Nicole Bachmann, Kachette, 7pm
During the festival Block Universe, back for the third year – with a programme of newly commissioned performances, talks and workshops – Bachmann’s new commission examines the relationship between language, voice and power. This work is informed by ideas surrounding activism and dominant discourse, and how to find one’s own voice in order to be heard and listened to. Performed by actor Anna Tierney and dancer Patricia Langa, this piece deals with negotiations of speech and the materiality of the voice and gestures. Tickets are £ 10.
3rd || Samedi
Performing Objects.
Performing Objects, screening and performance, Kunstraum, 6-9pm
Inspired by Graham Harman’s essay On Vicarious Causation, the show speculates on the performativity of objects through a selection of videos by Isabelle Cornaro, Benedict Drew, Anna Franceschini, Rebecca Lennon and Zoe Williams, and additionally draws parallels between object-oriented theories and the objectification of the human body. Curated by Caterina Avataneo, the event will be followed by a Symposium on Saturday the 4th from 2 to 4 pm, featuring performer Anna Franceschini and artist Zoe Williams, as well as art historian Maria Walsh and philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant (booking necessary at rsvp@kunstraum.org.uk)
14th || Wednesday
Charles Harrop-Griffiths, Clearly No Sense of Gravity.
Controlled Realities, Anise Gallery, PV 6pm
A collaborative exhibition between artists Rachel Ara, Charles Harrop-Griffiths and Jacek Ludwig Scarso, who have highly varied and innovative methods in making art, but come together in conversation on how art has the ability to highlight powers of control and different perceptions of reality. Each artist provides an insightful critique on power via commentary on fake news, technology and subsequent distorted human perception. The show looks at constructed environments and how different technologies have contributed to the blurred lines of the real and the artificial. Its subtitle, ‘Virtual. Digital. Analogue’ describes each artist’s technique.
17th || Saturday
Leslie MacDonald Gill, Wonderground Map of London, 1914.
London Map Fair, Royal Geographical Society
Running for two days, the largest map fair in Europe has return every year since 1980. This event brings together around 40 of the leading national and international antiquarian map dealers as well as hundreds of visiting dealers, collectors, curators and map aficionados from all parts of the world. A very large selection of Original Antique Maps will be available for sale.
21st || Wednesday
Copyright Kim Keever, Courtesy Waterhouse Dodd.
A multi-sensory exhibition featuring ten extraordinary perfumes and their pioneering creators. Contemporary perfume provocateurs are dispensing with traditional high gloss communication concepts, gender boundaries and conventional notions of good taste. From the self-taught to the classically trained, the exhibition explores perfumers reworking their palette of ingredients to construct original and outrageous signatures which assault all of the senses. There will also be a functioning perfume laboratory where visitors will be able to interact with professional perfumers.
22nd || Thursday
Donald Rodney, The House That Jack Built, 1987.
The place is here, South London Gallery
The exhibition features work by over twenty black artists and collectives working in 1980s Britain. Shown across the South London Gallery and Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, the exhibition spans painting, film, photography and archival material from this pivotal decade in British culture and politics.
23rd || Friday
DiÇbÇdo Francis KÇrÇ, Serpentine Pavilion 2017 (project), Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.
Serpentine Pavilion 2017,Serpentine Gallery
The opening of the structure designed by Diébédo Francis Kéré, the award-winning architect from Gando, Burkina Faso, who responded to the brief with a bold, innovative structure that brings his characteristic sense of light and life to the lawns of Kensington Gardens.This is the gallery’s seventeenth Pavilion, inspired by the tree that serves as a central meeting point for life in his home town of Gando, Francis Kéré has designed a responsive Pavilion that seeks to connect its visitors to nature – and each other.
Silvia Meloni
CuratingtheContemporary (CtC) 