APURBA CHATTERJEE explains how British artists in India used the “picturesque” to reshape colonial landscapes and celebrate imperial power
A challenging spectacle
Mark Dion’s imaginative installations at the Whitechapel Gallery explore our often fraught and changing relationships with the natural world, says CHRISTINE LINDEY
PAUL DONOVAN welcomes a revival of Reginald Rose’s classic play that reminds us of the fundamental need for trials with juries
SIMON PARSONS applauds an exceptional performance of Wesker’s little-known play, by the same actor for whom it was written 45 years ago
ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Late Fame, The Death of Robin Hood, Leviticus, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
ANGUS REID recommends a uniquely accomplished documentary collage that contemplates our relation to the natural world
GORDON PARSONS enjoys Kant’s ‘mind-boggling’ theory of human reality: that we create the reality we experience
Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World
Whitechapel Gallery, London
IT'S rare to be met by birdsong in an art exhibition, but New Yorker Mark Dion’s installation The Library for the Birds does just that. Beautiful white, orange and grey zebra finches tweet and chatter convivially on the branches of a dead apple tree in a capacious aviary well stocked with seeds, fruit and water.
Individual birds suddenly swoop off in graceful elliptical flights or dart busily here and there for no apparent reason. They seem oblivious to the books or objects such as catapults and shotgun shells shelved on the tree’s branches and tucked at its base, yet these are potentially useful to bird survival, since they relate to the human pursuit of birds, whether benign or predatory.
Similar stories
BENJAMIN POTHIER suggests that Palaeolithic cave paintings in Spain point to the ceremonial use of hallucinogenic flora
SIMON DUFF is thrilled by a visceral, no-holds-barred exploration of the expressive powers of raw material
SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist