Reviews of Test Dept, Madli Marje Gildemann, and Heinz Holliger and Marie-Lise Schupbach
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Glimpses of social experience
EXPLORATION: Girl and Fryed
[Ian Currie]
JOHN GREEN appreciates an informative and readable account of the nation state and its current dilemmas, but doubts the solutions this author has to offer
JOHN MCINALLY recommends that this rational, reasonable and devastating case against the End Of Life Bill be read by every serious socialist activist
CHRIS SEARLE urges you not to miss Mark Sanders’ three night residency at Cafe Oto, Dalston, London
JENNY MITCHELL surveys the work of Hurvin Anderson, now a centrepiece of Britain’s white-dominated art establishment, and explores some of the complexities it opens up about British Caribbean identity
SOPHIE STOLL wallows in a fine live recording of old blues-infused folk songs immersed in American blue-collar culture
ANGUS REID and MARIA DUARTE review DJ Ahmet, Redoubt, They Will Kill You, and The Magic Faraway Tree
A Sense of Exposure (photography by Ian Currie)
The Hive Coffee House
Blackpool
AS the Hive opened its doors for A Sense of Exposure, a drummer called Busking Joe began a spirited performance on the pavement outside. The controlled but restless clatter provided an apt soundtrack to this exhibition of Ian Currie’s photographs.
Currie’s arresting images, as stylistically diverse as Joe’s grooves, were presented in four sets, each exploiting a phenomenon well established in neuroscience – the tendency of the brain to impose order and meaning on visual information.
In Surface Textures, Hidden Depths, a collection of abstractions based on everyday features and objects, there are competing hints of the organic and manufactured. At times, the weirdly decorative gives way to impressions of human anatomy, seething lava and looming monsters in dense, menacing oceans.
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