Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
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
Mark Dion 7/3/18
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
The Star's critics ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA reviews I Am Love, The Penguin Lessons, Freaky Tales, The Thicket
MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
New releases from Steve Knightley, Jupiter & Okwess, Jason Palmer, Lisa Knapp and Gerry Driver, Kin'Gongolo Kiniata, Ingrid Laubrock/Tom Rainey, Dan Sealey, Simin Tande, PAZ
JOHN GREEN relishes photography that unfolds a longstanding and poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
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.
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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.
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