The key word at Lisson Gallery during the month of February is NO. Not NO to something specific, to some particularly irksome something or other. This NO is bigger than that. This is a NO to everything. An all-encompassing, universal, absolute NO.

Visually, this monumental negation by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra manifests itself in the form of a black painted wood sculpture shaped as the word NO, spelled out in an Arial typeface, weighing half a ton and measuring somewhere in the region of 6 by 14 feet.

Since 18 July 2009 when it left Lucca, Italy, the giant NO has been on a road trip. Now it stands proud – incidental graffiti picked up on its travels notwithstanding - in Lisson's back gallery. In the interim it has visited Milan, Berlin, Rotterdam, Maastricht and Brussels, where it made an appearance in various venues including the NATO headquarters and the European Parliament. Other NOs have been built and simultaneously they've criss-crossed the globe like jet-setting movie stars.

Before we encounter the NO at 29 Bell Street we come across what is perhaps the ultimate manifestation of the sentiment in the form of Death Counter that in 2009 made the news for its year long residency outside Hiscox Headquarters, London, and now hangs above the entrance to Nicholas Logsdail's longstanding palace to contemporaneity. The giant LED sign registers the annual number of human deaths worldwide, from any cause, over the course of one year starting from zero on New Year's Eve. I imagine this is supposed to remind us of the transience and essential meaninglessness of existence, with, knowing Sierra, sub-narratives around themes of work, the commodification of human life and the structures of power that make life the disaster riddled horror it sometimes seems to be.

The exhibition is entitled 'Dedicated to the Workers and Unemployed'. From the gallery's entrance the viewer might be daunted by the sight of fifteen flat screen televisions showing black and white footage of what turns out to be various groups of unidentified workers engaged in niche forms of gainful employment.

In this way Sierra presents us with 8 People Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes; 68 People Paid to Block a Museum Entrance; 11 People Paid to Learn a Phrase; the almost rather droll in its surreality A Workers Arm Passing Through the Ceiling of an Art Space from a Dwelling and, doubtless the pièce-de-résistance played on a vast screen in the main gallery, 10 People Paid to Masturbate. This film is 55 minutes long. I confess I didn't sit through the duration. I assume they were all men.

One could perceive here a whiff of self-righteous indignation on the part of the artist - not of the workers themselves of course, but of the structures of power that have reduced them to this indignity. But we are warned by the artist not to be fooled into an over simplistic reading. Sierra has said “it's not the kind of art that says George Bush is a mother fucker.. people become uncomfortable because it's a portrait of themselves.”


written for This is Tomorrow

“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

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