City and Sculpture
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...
March 14, 2023

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Jelena Sofronijevic
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
City and Sculpture
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
City and Sculpture
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
City and Sculpture
Written by
Jelena Sofronijevic
Date Published
14/03/2023
Sculpture
Hayward Gallery
MK Gallery
Somerset House
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
14/03/2023
To Do
Jelena Sofronijevic
City and Sculpture
We take a look at some of the best sculpture works investigating urban life...

Mike Nelson’s Extinction Beckons deserves its nihilistic name, as it heralds the end of exhibitions as we’ve known them. Wholly immersive, it’s crafted for those, as Alex Needham once suggested, craving experiences (and value for money) after the COVID lockdown.

Extinction Beckons, Mike Nelson (installation view)

We walk around the severed heads of Gulf War veterans. A sandy bunker, built during the Iraq War; a Shell Oil-branded pipe is buried inside. Deeper into history, ‘The Deliverance and the Patience’ (2001) is named for the ships built by prisoners and indentured labourers shipwrecked in Bermuda on route to the colony of Virginia. In ‘The Asset Strippers’ (2019), Nelson makes a sculpture park of redundant machines, all homages to deindustrialisation in his own East Midlands. 

But regardless of the artist’s intentions, no one is there for his politics, but for his perfectly Instagrammable installations. Spooky found objects. Creaky doors to open and slam shut (a delight for us audio producers). A haunted house for adults, but there’s always an exit – forming it into a safe political playground for yuppies.

But the cost-conscious gallery-goer can find another Henry Moore Foundation exhibition at Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. For the same price - train ticket included – Trickster Figures offers an equally monumental survey of contemporary British sculpture. 

Alice Channer’s monumental ‘Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies)’ (2023) stretches a single photograph of sandstone onto an imposing scale. Nicolas Deshayes presents post-modern Gothic gargoyles, and digestive, sloshing fountains - wonderfully curated with Saelia Aparicio’s sexual murals, next door.

Ro Robertson clothes their ‘butch’ steel bodies in white vests; like Nelson, nodding to their entwined family and industrial histories. The artist refers to shipbuilding in Sunderland; a ‘gendered graft’, of ‘working class masculinity’. The soft undergarments equally acknowledge the US and UK Masquerade Laws, which criminalised those who challenged gender norms in clothing.

Body Landscape Memory. Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op.63, Harold Offeh (2019)

Here, Harold Offeh departs from his sound installations, adding visual delights. Co-opting the popular - but predominantly white - image of the reclining figure in the rural landscape, he inserts Black bodies who refuse to meet their viewers’ gaze. It’s defiantly tongue in cheek, set to the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, and playing on Bruce McLean’s queer sculpture satire, ‘Pose Works for Plinths’ (1971).

Curated by Jes Fernie, Trickster Figures takes an intersectional, bodily look at how sculpture articulates issues of contemporary social, political, environmental, and artistic concern, and faces the future. It is, no doubt, worth keeping an eye on where MK Gallery will go next.

Whorled, Jitish Kallat (2022)

The neoclassical courtyard of Somerset House turns Spaghetti Junction with Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s installation Whorled (Here After Here After Here). With two intersecting spirals of UK road signs, each 336 metres long, Kallat creates a continuum of text and symbols which drives us not in circles, but out, into the cosmos. Its arrows point from familiar earthly locations, to planetary bodies like the Moon, Mars, and distant stars in the Milky Way.

Kallat’s non-linear approach to time is more powerful than that of space. Some of the places featured are subject to rising sea levels, and under environmental threat of submersion within the next thirty years. Warning signs next to their place names suggest of Somerset House’s own proximity to the River Thames, and London’s vulnerability to flooding. From the terrestrial to the celestial, Whorled makes us consider the roads we take as individuals, and how those decisions have concrete impacts on our collectives.

False Flags, Polly Morgan & Leena Similu (installation view)

Transport delays kept some of Leena Similu’s works from arriving on time at False Flags, her joint exhibition with Polly Morgan at the Royal Society of Sculptors. Now, her anthropomorphic pots, inspired by masks from Cameroon, her mother's homeland, sit in their rightful place alongside Morgan’s reptilian tiles. 

Appropriating the animal’s use of colour and pattern to dazzle its enemies, the artists draw a parallel with modern military and cultural warfare. Where naval officers might raise a neutral or enemy flag to misdirect in war, a deadly cobra flares its hood, showing its large eyes and colourful markings common to benign snakes, to hide its true identity.

Taxidermy is Morgan’s trademark; outside, her Open! Channel! Flow! makes for a snakeprint-cum-brutalist building site. Still, it is these collaborations – of two artists, and of inside and outside installations, that make her work all the more biting. 

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body is on show at MK Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons is on show at the Hayward Gallery until 7 May 2023.

Whorled (Here After Here After Here) is on show at Somerset House until 23 April 2023.

Polly Morgan and Leena Similu: False Flags and Polly Morgan: Open! Channel! Flow! are on show at the Royal Society of Sculptors until 29 April 2023. 


Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app with each exhibition you visit!

Thanks for reading
Collect your 5 yamos below
REDEEM YAMOS
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