Top Ten Virtual Shows Across the UK and Ireland
From a critical reimagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ to a research project on the role of photography in the Irish civil rights movement, these are the best shows to stream
As we near the anniversary of lockdown 1.0, there are lots of reasons to feel flat and unmotivated. Nobody knows when public spaces will open up again, nor the long-term effects of this trauma writ large on society. But art can assuage some of the frustrations we’re facing. A host of platforms across the UK and Ireland have devised virtual shows that speak to and guide us out of limbo. Here are ten highlights.
Film:
Nomadland (2020) Chloé Zhao
A movie about American poverty? Yes, but also a film about the complex and varied ideas of freedom that come with living in this humongous, politically and economically disparate country. What is monetary, individual and emotional liberation in an American west pocked with Amazon packaging plants? Giant corporations engender a giant gig economy, not stability or growth. Frances McDormand brilliantly plays the resilient protagonist, Fern.
Luis Camnitzer,
Book:
One Number Is Worth One Word (2020) Luis Camnitzer
Few write with such succinct eloquence and intent on the potentials of learning and artistic knowledge, or the failures of university art programmes. Here, the artist and teacher addresses, among other topics, the pitfalls of disciplinary study as related to the reorientation of power, in writings penned between 1960 and 2017. ‘If, instead of being concerned primarily with certain particular skills, we would apply ourselves to the g
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night at Tate Britain 2020. Photo: Tate. (Seraphina Neville).
After leaving Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s blockbuster mid-career Tate Britain retrospective, “Fly In League With The Night,” I rushed to post my thoughts about the show on Instagram. My own impassioned views were swiftly swallowed by others, as the often-touted “art-world darling” met almost unrelenting praise from critics.
Indeed, this is the exhibition we needed. We needed to see Black people Black joy, angst, trouble, and all its complexities. We needed painting that hits at the soul like this.
For all its merits in contributing to depictions of Black people in art, and the poignancy of filling Tate Britain with proud Black figures, the exhibition cements how Yiadom-Boakye triumphs as a figurative painter, irrespective of her chosen subject.
ArtReview
Bharti Kher, ‘Intermediaries’, 2019–20 (installation view, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka). Courtesy the artist; Nature Morte, New Delhi; Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka; and Perrotin, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Shanghai
It’s been a long time since the biennial Dhaka Art Summit took place in February this year. In more ways than one. The fact that it was titled Seismic Movements, a play on the notion of the summit as being something geological as much as social and political (or ‘how the world is moving and how we move in the world’, as the summit’s chief curator, Diana Campbell Betancourt, put it in her introduction in the catalogue – a theme that seemed to be summed up by Bharti Kher’s