“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Rumi


Between 1971 and 1979 Idi Amin's tyrannical despotism over Uganda killed an estimated 500,000 people. In addition many hundreds of thousands were forced to flee the country as refugees. At the age of eleven, British artist Zarina Bhimji was one of them.

“My sister and I had to suddenly flee leaving behind everything except two dresses and a cardigan. During the civil war in Uganda we had stayed indoors with curtains closed. I witnessed violence, shooting and death by Amin's military. We arrived in England not speaking any English."

Astonishingly, from these, to me, unimaginably horrific experiences, Zarina has crafted photographs and film installations of ravishing poetic beauty. It is deeply humbling to see the darkest and most violently abhorrent aspects of human nature transformed into something of exquisite grace through such profound and soulful investigation.

Zarina has travelled extensively across India, Zanzibar and East Africa, immersing herself in their ways and undertaking intense research into their overlapping histories. And yet the final works, film and photographs, exorcised of the human figure and of linear narrative, present surprisingly universal and seemingly apolitical journeys into the shared human experiences of love and loss.

The jewel in the crown of The Whitechapel's recently opened exhibition Zarina Bhimji is Yellow Patch (2011). Shot on location in India on 35mm, Yellow Patch was inspired by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean and is the second and latest film from the artist who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007. Loaded with the wisdom of wabi sabi, the melancholic but cathartic allure of decay, of lives lived and others still living, the film is overlaid with a powerfully elemental and haunting sound track: the echo of disembodied voices - crying, chanting, praying - thunder and driving rain, fires raging and crackling and birdsong, the voice of nature's daily life, startlingly but inevitably unperturbed by the catastrophe of humanity's annihilating bent.

Cool interiors, throbbing against the pungent equatorial heat, derelict and deserted, plaster crumbling from once grand, lofty ceilings, sunlight streaming in through wide open dark wood doors, delicately crafted furniture covered in the dust of colonies fallen to ruin, antlers from some long dead beast, lying, broken on the floor. The only movement, a spider's web snagged and swaying on a gentle breeze.

The absence of the human form leaves space for the viewer's own interpretations and projections, inviting us to open our hearts to the unknown, to traces and flickers of memory from personal tragedies, perhaps recalling what might have been as well as what was.

Disinterested by the grandiose, the sweeping epic drama of retrospectively overlaid stories, Zarina focuses instead upon the truth ensnared in the intimate detail, overlooked or ignored by the less discerning observer.

As well as Yellow Patch, also showing at The Whitechapel is Out of Blue, Zarina's first film, commissioned in 2002 by Documenta 11 and shot on Super 16, along with a selection of photographs, film stills and light boxes spanning the last twenty-five years. This is an exhibition you must see. It is an exhibition for the romantic, for the traveller, for those open to the beauty of pain and transformation. It is an exhibition for anyone who has ever loved and lost.



Written for and reproduced here by kind permission of Spoonfed

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
Royal Academy, London
21 January to 9 April 2012

David Hockney's Landscapes: The Forest for the Trees
THERE'S something profoundly enchanting about the English landscape. Ancient rolling hills receding to infinity. Gnarly trees like sagacious, wizened old men, weathering time as they silently witness history. Seductive, ariot and vivacious, full of light and life. David Hockney captures some of this in his new show at the Royal Academy. Some of it he misses.

Presenting over 150 works inspired by the Yorkshire countryside, "A Bigger Picture" is just that. Like his nemesis Damien Hirst, David Hockney enjoys scale. He likes to paint a very large landscape. So much so one feels it would be churlish ....

Click here to read my review for The Economist

Damian Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 - 2011
all Gagosian Galleries
London: Davies Street, W1 and Britannia Street, WC1
to 18 Feb 2012

Damien Hirst and the art market
Seeing spots, seeing red, but in the black

T-SHIRTS with spots, mugs with spots, plates with spots, skateboards, key rings, credit-card holders, clocks, deck chairs, tea towels, tote bags, cufflinks and even iron-on spots. Damien Hirst's latest extravaganza—25 years of spot paintings on view simultaneously at all 11 Gagosian galleries around the world—is at once far more and far less than an exhibition of artwork by Mr Hirst....

click here to read my review for the Economist

Expectation is rarely a helpful viewing companion when visiting an exhibition. On the other hand, one can't very well leave it at home. What one can do though is bring some awareness to it. That is to say bring awareness to the fact that a thing is almost always judged on the degree to which it meets, exceeds or fails to live up to what we, individually, expect of it. In and of itself, it's just whatever it is. It's what we project onto it that causes us problems. And then we want to blame the work for our projections when it doesn't live up to them. It's what makes being a 'critic' an impossible task.

The fact is I can't tell you whether an exhibition is good or bad. I can't even objectively tell you what it's about or what the artist intends. I can only tell you what my experience of it was and my understanding of the artist's intention filtered through my subjectivity. However educated or erudite I might like to tell myself I am, I am never going to be able to be objective. I am never going to be able to exterminate my expectations and my history.

Unfortunately I forgot all of that when I trotted off to see the Bridget Smith exhibition at Frith Street Gallery. The result was, sad to say, crashing disappointment. Probably nothing was going to live up to the breathtakingly sensitive Marlene Dumas paintings that proceeded it nor the exultantly creative press release that accompanied it.

What I was looking at was, in the first instance, six framed prints. Two images of the medical spaces at Lourdes, here empty of people, wherein examinations are carried out to test the validity or otherwise of so called miracles. The other four images were of various locations in As Neves, Galicia, the place where those who believe they've had a near death experience can express their gratitude to Santa Martha by way of pilgrimage. The rest of the gallery is curtained off into a cinema-esque space showing the thirty minute film We Must Live!

We Must Live! is set around the feast day in As Neves, of Santa Martha, who, her devotees believe, has the power to cure illness. The ritual of the day involves those who've been saved from the jaws of death climbing into a coffin to enact, perform as it were, their own death ceremonies. Out of respect they, in their coffins, are carried aloft through the streets of this tiny village, a throng with festivities, drinking, eating, dancing, chanting, wailing, praying, prostrating. All wonderful, rich, other-worldy stuff. And yet we see almost none of that. What we see is a few slices of staggeringly dull (under the circumstances) subtitled interviews with the death survivors, intercut with moments of the local Padre waffling pompously about what a load of old nonsense he finds all of this to be. Then a solitary woman jiving around on a deserted stage like some sort of highly alarming x-factor reject, and a few octogenarians enjoying a quiet vol-au-vent or two from the buffet table.

I'm not looking for sensationalism. Just a little depth would be nice. The press release tells us that the film raises questions of how much recovery from illness can be attributed to personal faith. It's a fascinating question but I don't see it being raised here particularly.

I don't. But you might. So you're probably best off taking my view with a pinch of salt. I'm not trying to tell you what the show's like or even what it's about. I'm just trying to share with you my experience and hopefully to amuse you for a few minutes with some vaguely engaging writing. That's all a writer can hope to do. If I've failed in even that, then it's time to hang up my boots!


Bridget Smith
We Must Live!
9 December 2011 to 11 February 2012
Frith Street Gallery
Golden Square

Written for and reproduced by kind permission of Spoonfed

Miriam Kahn
David Roberts Art Foundation, London
30 September to 17 December 2011

click here to read my review for This Is Tomorrow

Women and Art
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
to January 14th 2012

click here to read my review for The Economist

The work of French conceptual artist Anne Deguelle is engaged in the poetic task of locating the universe within a single atom. She leads us, in her search for all that is, to the most unlikely places. Always her attention is on the intimate detail, the overlooked, the rarefied.

Not so long ago her key preoccupation was a tiny star shaped biscuit the prodigious writer Raymond Roussel had been served whilst lunching with astronomer Camille Flammarion in the late 1890s. Rather than consuming the biscuit with his coffee as presumably did the other guests, Roussel placed it in his pocket, took it home and preserved it in a small glass case which he inexplicably retained for the rest of his life. For the exhibition currently showing at the Freud Museum Ms Deguelle focuses her attention upon the subtlest details of a highly decorative rug woven by the nomadic Qashqa'i tribe of Iran, that was sold to Sigmund Freud by his merchant brother-in-law and subsequently used as a cover for the famous psychoanalytic couch, first in Vienna and then in London.

In both cases the question that occupies Ms Deguelle is: why? Why would Raymond Roussel choose to preserve a seemingly innocuous petit four for decades on end? And why would Sigmund Freud drape the piece of furniture on which his most important work was conducted always with one very particular Iranian floor covering?

Sigmund Freud moved to the house in Maresfield Gardens that is now the Freud Museum in 1938 having left Vienna upon its annexation by Nazi Germany in the same year. There, in a downstairs room overlooking the garden, his patients lay on the couch talking of their dreams. There now we may see his consultation room just as it then stood. It is in this room that we encounter Anne Deguelle's first intervention into the home of the father of psychoanalysis. Above the iconic couch hangs a white neon that reads “to sleep to dream no more,” a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play Freud interpreted in essay form using his theory of the Oedipus complex.

'To sleep to dream no more' comes from the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy, itself an examination of the virtues of life lived to the full and the uncertainties of death, particularly death by suicide; which ties in with Freud's own death in the very same room in 1939, when he allegedly drew a line under his agonising battle with terminal cancer by means of a deliberate over-administration of morphine. Deguelle weaves a complex web. But what of the eponymous rug?

A Persian rug is a work of art in itself, every knot bathed in rich symbolism on levels individual (the weaver's personal story), cultural, tribal, spiritual and cosmological. One of the most common themes, and a theme of Sigmund's Rug, is that of lush garden, abundant with flora, fauna and heavenly bodies of water, the later symbolic in Islamic iconography of Paradise, that place wherein the faithful shall dwell in the afterlife, in psychoanalytic terms of the subconscious. The insignia of the cross that peppers Sigmund's Rug represents stars, the cosmos and the Infinite. If the viewer were to attribute an element of the spiritual onto Freud's choice of couch covering she might therefore interpret some link between the individual and the eternal, between that which stands without space and time and that which perceives itself as rooted very much within space and time.

Upstairs Ms Deguelle guides her enquiry into further intricate nooks and crannies, this time art historical. Strong similarities are highlighted between a rug that appears as a table covering in Holbein's The Ambassadors – a painting weighty with spiritual and cosmological reference and again foregrounding the momento mori - and another piece from Freud's twenty strong antique rug collection.

Perhaps amidst all these narrative twists and turns one might begin to sense the influence of Deguelle's fellow French speaker Hercule Poirot, and perhaps a shadow of reservation in light of that might not be entirely misplaced. Certainly the exhibition is heavily research based and not easily accessed on a visceral level. That said, it is so charming, so intelligent, and in many ways so subtly multi-dimensional that I feel to allow it a little elusivity is the least I can do. After all what is psychoanalysis but the search for the elusive, the uncovering of the hidden, perhaps even, ultimately, the locating of the universe within a single atom?


Anne Deguelle
Sigmund's rug - To sleep to dream no more
Curated by Yvan Poulain
at Freud Museum until 15 January 2012