Exhibitions

Adam Pendleton: Toy Soldier is still on view at Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland until November 26, 2022

Toy Soldier, installed in three black-box spaces, integrates multiple ongoing flows of writing and reading. In a new set of small collages, Pendleton combines geometric forms – circles and triangles – with metallic sprays, drips, and other shapes, conducting an improvisatory play of shadow and muted light. Opaque black cut- outs dance across the foreground of each work. Spray-painted gestures, here rendered in silver and obscured to near illegibility, create a through line with the spray-painted text of the Untitled (WE ARE NOT) paintings, in which a single phrase, “WE ARE NOT”, explodes into fields of combinatory language, filtered and modulated by overlapping lines that form ovals, triangles, and quadrilaterals.

Simeon Barclay: In the Name of the Father is still on view at the South London Gallery in London, United Kingdom until November 27, 2022

In the Name of the Father brings together a new body of works that extends Barclay’s enquiry into questions of legacy, identity and masculinity, through the lens of the father son relationship. Works in various media weave together multiple references to the personal, the social and the geographical as an attempt to understand and negotiate one’s relationship to place. The history of Huddersfield’s cloth industry and the artist’s father’s original trade as a tailor are both alluded to in a duo of bespoke grey felt suits, as is the wider history of urbanisation and migration in the town. Barclay’s past employment as an industrial machinist has been a major influence in his artistic practice and a towering totem of containers hints at this, as well as being suggestive of the chimneys that remain a feature in Yorkshire’s post-industrial landscape.

Martine Syms: Grio College is still on view at Hessel Museum of Art in New York, United States until November 27, 2022

Grio College presents an expansive selection of Syms’ work, featuring major new and recent works. The exhibition includes her now iconic installation on gesture and femininity Borrowed Lady (2016), which was recently acquired by the Marieluise Hessel Collection, as well as recent installations Ugly Plymouths (2020), an immersive one-act play across three screens, and DED (2021), a gripping animation that follows an avatar of the artist moving through a digital netherworld. Grio College also emphasizes the artist’s versatile approach to photography, highlighting the many scales and methods through which she approaches image-making. Installations such as Misdirected Kiss (2016) and Grand Calme (2018), never before seen in the U.S., demonstrate how her research-based projects come to build entire environments, with photographs placed on the floor, walls, and interwoven into layered collages. The exhibition is also accompanied by a screening of Syms’ first feature film The African Desperate (2022), and premieres related new photographic works and drawings.

Festivals

LagosPhoto Festival 2022 will take place at Alliance Française and Mike Adenuga Centre in Lagos, Nigeria until November 12, 2022

LagosPhoto Festival announces its 13th edition entitled “Remember Me – Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects”. This year, the festival invites the future and the past to collapse into the present. The artists engage the language of photography to evolve a new language for our engagement. Restitution of cultural artefacts, knowledge, history, memory and the urgency of vigilance in the Anthropocene are the pressing issues of our age. The way we capture and address our most pressing issues and present them for dialogical engagement will determine the way we shape the present and build our futures. The human brain records and interprets factual and fictional instances through the eyes, which like a camera have become a bodily extension of the human mind to shape and sculpt images. First, as a faithful documentarian of events and happenings from the 19th century. Then, as a tool for subjective or fictional narration that trick us into dream-like, imagined worlds.

Art Fairs

Art X Lagos 2022 will open at Federal Palace in Lagos, Nigeria from November 4-6, 2022

This year’s theme “Who Will Gather under the Baobab Tree?” highlights art’s unique ability to inspire, uplift, educate and empower, inviting our audience to revisit the past as a precursor to looking forward. It’s been 7 years of creating and evolving West Africa’s leading international art fair, and the refreshed brand identity reflects the re-energized commitment to celebrating and amplifying the breadth of Africa’s creative expression. With careful consideration of the challenges currently being experienced in Nigeria, Africa and across the world, the 2022 edition of ART X Lagos will highlight the power of culture to speak to important local and global contemporary issues. With 31 galleries participating in this edition, it is the largest edition of the international art fair to date. Its programme will also include Special Projects showcasing the diversity of African contemporary art in response to this year’s theme.