Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Kettle’s Yard
5 March – 1 May
Reviewed by: Christel Tsilibaris
A rhizome, as commented and developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, is a structure that resembles a map with multiple entryways. A map made from lines that connect any point to any other point, with no beginning or end, but always with a middle from which it grows. Put in a very simple way, a rhizome is consequently an assemblage of multiplicities connected between them.
The Kettle’s Yard exhibition ‘The World, Abridged’ comprises the work of five British artists: Oliver Bancroft, Mark Edwards, Ryan Gander, Sally Osborn and Lucy Skaer. Clearly all the artists are using, as the source of their inspiration and creation, the ‘world’; that is, nature, history, people, places and objects. All of those things that are part of our lives or just constitute our lives. Nevertheless, they seem not to create a definitive and common discourse, but a work that is open to multiple interpretations, thus inviting us, the viewer, to make a sense of it. Installed into a space that allows the viewer to enter from various locations, as an ensemble the artworks resemble a rhizomatic map. Although they seem to function individually, they start to connect timidly with each other, thus allowing a multiplicity of meanings.
Ryan Gander’s photographs of ephemera (newspaper articles, drawings, album covers and other miscellaneous documents), pinned on a wall with no apparent order, seem to fit perfectly into the rhizome discourse. As Elisabeth Fisher, curator of the exhibition successfully puts it: “Following the branching patterns of thought, Gander makes work that explores the world at hand, moving from one thing (a newspaper article about a murder) to another (a photographic test card) by finding and making connections.” Loose associations is a booklet of similar nature made by Gander. Here it is he, rather than the viewer, who through the written text, processes and interconnects the various images.
Writer detail:
Christel Tsilibaris, is an independent curator based in London.
Venue detail:
Kettle's Yard
Castle Street, Cambridge CB3 0AQ
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