An audio installation fills the main gallery of the ICA. The voices comprise the testimonies of five participants, tasked by Autumn Knight to simply complain. The empirical corpus is overlayed and spliced with tangled threads of audio, unmistakably mined from TikTok. Their perspectives differ: one woman narrates that ‘these simple red beans don’t taste the…
As usual for Somerset House Studios commissions, the artwork begins as soon as you enter. The floor and walls of the Lancaster Rooms are a warm, almost putrid pink, the colour of a wrinkled rose petal after a week in stagnant water, feeding only on its own mouldy roots. The shade is quaint and natural…
Sung Tieu’s work, spread across the small gallery’s fragmented rooms, resists being taken in all at once. Each element of the ‘day’, represented across the various works, appears as a fragment rather than a whole. For what is a day but a series of moments we try to string together with a sense of self-imposed…
Martine Syms, the conceptual artist and filmmaker behind The African Desperate (2022), brings several new wall paintings, sculptural works and two video works to Sadie Coles’ Kingly St venue. The show centres on the release of a new short film, RW-LO (2026), which will premiere at both the New York and BFI London Film Festivals…
For the brilliantly bizarre AUTOPSY group show, Seventeen repositions contemporary issues of AI, post-truth and conspiratorial paranoia into good old-fashioned cult and science fiction. Science fiction is a paradoxical genre. In the heyday of B-movies, legacy television and cultural responses to conspiracy politics, visions of what technology could provide (or destroy) in the future were…
With Good Night, Asako Ujita presents a beautiful, intimate exploration of culture, place and memory at the margins of light, image and sound. Stretching the bounds of meaning and understanding, Good Night operates entirely in the realm of memory; arguably a landscape work above all else, Ujita’s practice of understanding the past relies on listening through silence,…
Marking the end of three years of research, Patent 3306x is Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom’s pithy exploration of repetition, categorisation, and ephemera through the ages—from biological taxonomy to sex-driven songwriting. Running concurrently with a show at Modern Art Oxford that includes sound recordings on historic instruments, Boakye-Yiadom’s NıCOLETTı show is as much a presentation of research…
Kulpreet Singh’s short statement on climate change and agricultural crisis, Indelible Black Marks, leaves much unsaid—an ongoing problem with climate justice art. Nonetheless, the Hayward Gallery show could not have come at a better time. For his first solo show in the UK, Kulpreet Singh plays with ideas of trace, action and immediacy to bring…
The experimental-filmmaking duo dmstfctn (pronounced demystification) adopt an irreverent approach to technologies of the future. In 2022, they transformed a replica of a supermarket AI training ground into an interactive video game. In 2024, they set a live film simulation in a purgatory for AIs who cheat during training and an on-chain text game in…
Last weekend, Barbican screened four shorts as part of their Project a Black Planet season, which all use memory and myth. But how does eternalising and internalising the past help reimagine cultural identities today? “You cannot step in the same river twice,” Heraclitus reportedly said of our experience in the world. The past is gone;…
