Category: Exhibitions
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Everything that Worldcon taught me about indie authors that I didn’t know I needed to ask
Well, so that was a Worldcon. Oof. I mean, it was wonderful. It was intense. It was people. It was information. It was magic. It was science. It was huge. It was joyful. It was exhausting. I haven’t quite put it into order in my head yet. Worldcon, if you…
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Lessons unlearned
Infographics are big business. You can buy a big glossy book of infographics on more or less any topic, for any age of reader. They appear in magazines, newspapers, websites and on video, where they are sometimes expanded into extraordinary 3D animations. They’ve clearly been around for a while, and…
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State of the planet
At the age of eighteen I was a dope-smoking, layabout, benefit-scrounging squatter. During this phase of my life I was arrested for shoplifting. The thing I stole, however, was not food, or something I could sell to buy drugs, but a book. It was The Atlas of the Solar System…
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Hurtfully real
Paula Rego’s lumpen figures, often so sturdy their proportions seem dwarf-like, have such presence, such immediacy, that it’s easy to forget they are mediated. So much more real than figures in a photograph, which are rarely more than optical phantoms, they are imbued with mass and duration, in a sense…
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Now’s the time
Time is an important theme for now. Wait, what did I just write? For the concept of ‘now’ it seems tautological to stress time’s importance, but it is also an important theme in Now, the sixth and last in a series of exhibitions of that name held at the Modern…
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A book on the wall
For a small, softly-spoken country, Scotland carries a large intellectual stick. Voltaire said that ‘we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, and its influence during the Enlightenment would probably be hard to overstate. It’s difficult to find agreement on exactly what or when the Enlightenment was, but…
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Distant whispers
Whispers sometimes reach our ears from long-silenced voices, reverberations reflected by a documentary record that has diversified over the last century-and-a-half to include photography, recorded audio, video and a still expanding palette of newer media. Tradition and transmitted recollection have been augmented by technologies with an appearance of truthfulness, which…
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Capitalising on the dark
Darkness is an abundant resource during December in Edinburgh. To many of the city’s residents, trapped in an indoor workplace during the season’s fleeting daylight hours, this may sound like an insufferably upbeat formulation, but for anyone wishing to capitalise on festive cheer, it’s a gift. Christmas markets, cosy shop-fronts,…
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Knowledge, from extraction to production
The approach to Giles Gilbert Scott’s menacing Ministry of Truth building in Cambridge is designed to diminish and belittle the pedestrian penitent, to crush their spirit with the giant phallus of authority that rises above its forbidding entrance, looming over the city like a threat. However, if one is forewarned…
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The truth is a collage
We recall and communicate experience as coherent, continuous, meaningful – it is so important to us to do so that we will construct sometimes heartbreakingly arbitrary meanings to impart coherence to our experience of happenstance, as when a child ascribes the disappearance of a parent to their own failings. But…
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History, re-mediated
‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, it refers to any kind of grand residence, from the substantial townhouses of the prosperous bourgeoisie to the vast combined residences and governmental seats of dukes and bishops. The principal…
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The truths between instants
‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera,…
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The city’s invisible family photographs
The Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna is housed in what was once a Franciscan friary. I can’t remember entering it, or how it presents itself to the street; I can simply recall being in it, and how it looks inwards, from all sides, onto its cloistered central courtyard. Where once a…
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Moments of erasure
Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also situated in a city endowed with an embarrassment of Baroque riches. Despite the twin catastrophes of the WWII Allied bombing campaign, and the mafia construction scams of the ‘Sack of…
Oliver Arditi 