“Ottessa Moshfegh is a perv”
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This Week
🧊 All the rage: neo-medieval fashion, Catholic aesthetics, mysticism, chamber chorals, and pagan ritual
🧊 a cocaine-laden sex den at CSM
🧊 Kirstie Allsop swallows own airpod
Events
Exhibitions opening this week are making us feel that good summertime melancholia: Golden Sorrow, Ship of Fools, Old World New Thoughts, World Famous Babylon… the names on the list go on. Make sure not to miss cult renegade outfitters Fantastic Toiles’ summer launch on Saturday – spittle advises arriving early early early before all those rare as fook borderline-art-borderline-fashion pieces are totally mobbed by goth-babies.
27 June–3 July | World Famous Babylon: Lucia Farrow, Mila Rowysyzn, Jake Hasapopoulos, Arlette, Barbican Arts Group Trust [Blackhorse Road]
29 June | 6–8pm | Juliets Cafe & Bar Opening, Studio Voltaire [Clapham North]
29 June | 6–8pm | Katja Seib: Old World New Thoughts, Sadie Coles Davies Street [Mayfair]
30 June | Rene Matic: Soul Club, House of Voltaire [Clapham North]
30 June | 6:30pm | White Review Summer party (readings from Fahad Al-Amoudi, Claire-Louise Bennett and Amber Husain), Bold Tendencies [Peckham Rye] | £6
1 July | 6–9pm | Soshiro Matsubara: Golden Sorrow, Union Pacific [Aldgate East]
1 July | 5–8pm | Sholto Blissett: Ship of Fools, Hannah Barry Gallery [Peckham Rye]
1 July | Mothering: Group Show, Kupfer Project Space [Hackney Central]
2–3 July | 11am–7pm | Fantastic Toiles Summer Launch, 12 Stour Road Unit E4, Fish Island, E3 2NT [Hackney Wick]
2 July | 5–10pm | Bloat Collective & All Terrain Training: BLO-ATT, Collective Ending [Deptford]
3 July | 6pm | Sol Marinozzi: About that Time, White Cubicle, The Queen Adelaide [Cambridge Heath]’
3 July | 4–6pm | Alex Margo Arden: Living History Display (performance), Ginny on Frederick [Barbican]
Exhibitions
In lieu of an exhibition review this week, some highlights from this year’s degree shows! We loved Gillies Adamson Semple’s post-apocolayptic installation at Slade, including materials such as dissected organ pipes, pedals, lead, and lavender oil; Louis Blue Newby’s intersection of overlooked, corporate methods of archiving and display with tender queer futures and lost histories at Slade; Bo Sun’s retro-futurist aluminium and perspex sculptures evocative of techno insects and bodily processes at CSM; Kobby Adi’s deconstructivist interrogation of the RA and the whole concept of a degree show itself at the RA Schools; Nicola Gunnarsson’s bejewelled abstract paintings with super-cute sparkly details at RA Schools; Ollie Jailer’s Marilyn Monroe fever dream strobe-laden film shown at Goldsmiths BFA; Sol Mussa’s layered and decaying porn magazines at CSM; Lucia Farrow’s sharp, dangerous swinging lovehearts at CSM; Katie Anne Maria’s ode to teenage angst in the form of a cocaine-laden sex den at CSM; Can Sun’s photographs of uncanny, frankensteined fruits at RCA; Oda Oselin’s dystopian portraits capturing ennui and horror in the city at RCA; Yage Guo’s nymphish monochromatic paintings at Slade; Artist duo Boon and Baum’s enormous trousers also at Slade; Sophie Knight’s Americana-infused canvases at Slade too; and Marie Larsen’s oversized steel-cast body piercings, also at Slade!
Hot links
🏰“Ottessa Moshfegh is Sad Girl summer” – Eloise Hendy asks why contemporary female writers are obsessed with the mediaeval for ArtReview. The answer, she suggests, is that we are obsessed with the grotesque: ‘from the club to the catwalk, neo-medieval fashion, Catholic aesthetics, mysticism, chamber chorals, and pagan ritual are all the rage.’
❄️“There’s a man out there, showing off his stab wound… He seems pretty happy.” – In The Guardian, writer Tabitha Lasley tells a moving story of her time spent trying to write a book, escaping London for a rural town in the north of England. A fast acquired cocaine habit makes a mess of these plans… A tale on drugs and class, she ultimately surmises how the middle class – who dominate the arts – ‘can monetise their mistakes, expurgating sin through confession…’
🔧“breathless tweetstorms, scatterbrained sociological wanderings and Peter Thiel-backed political machinations” – Nate Freeman dives into the history of the lauded – often cringe-inducing – Dimes Square area of NYC. From Dean Kissick and The Drunken Canal to the luxury 9 Orchard Hotel Development, from afar spittle reckons it has the same fate as Shoreditch High Street.
🦶“I was walking on the beach last night, and I said, ‘No more human war’.” – Ye and Tino Segal shoot the shit in a wide-ranging conversation touching on the freedom to be disliked and ego death, and proving a real tonic to the over-simplified version of Ye we’re served in the media newscycle, frankly.
👠“Schumacher himself belongs to a long line of modern visionaries that, like most fetishists, wish to dominate whatever they cannot control.” – Ido Nahari looks at Zaha Hadid’s new digital city and how the web’s founding principles of anarcho-cyberpunk ‘open accessibility’ have descended into a mess of metaverse gentrification.
🔬“Biology is hard” – Hypochondriacs look away now because Endemic Pathogens are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You.
Add-to-cart
We are lusting after the ceramic explorations of Ellie Andrews including her recent ‘wonky brickhouse’ experiment. POA (prices on application!) from Ellie: ellie.andrews.art[a]gmail.com
Parting Shot
In news unrelated to art, but no less important, Kirstie Allsop of soft-tory daytime TV fame announced on her twitter that she had done the unthinkable, and swallowed her own airpod.
London’s beating ‘art
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