Current Affairs 13.11
Ice skating at Somerset House
Somerset house has opened up London’s most beautiful ice rink. Skate day or night with family and friends, with Skate Lates, a specially curated programme of music nights throughout the season. Also open is Fortnum’s Lodge, where you can share Skate Extras or watch the action rink-side from the Skate Lounge. The West Wing once again has transformed into Fortnum’s Christmas Arcade where all your present needs can be met.
Somerset House
Inside Pussy Riot, 14 November - 24 December 2017
Inside Pussy Riot shows the story of a group of modern day, post-punk feminist art collective and Nadya Tolokonnikova's tribulations as the founder of Pussy Riot, a group who revolted against the Russian system even when faced with the consequences.
Marking the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, visitors are invited to experience the realities of imprisonment through a theatre experience from Les Enfants Terribles. Inside Pussy Riot tells a story that needs to be experienced to be understood.
Saatchi Gallery
Rasheed Araeen in conversation: Art and Activism in Post-War Britain,
Friday 17 November, 2017
Rasheed Araeen will speak on the eve of his retrospective at the prestigious Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven about his work in the context of Modernism in Britain. Born in 1935 in Pakistan, Araeen is a London-based conceptual artist, editor, writer and curator. Moving to London in 1964, he started making sculptures that were influenced by Minimalism, his engineering background, and the principles of Islamic geometry and architecture. Rasheed has been hugely influential in the recognition of artists of Asian and African origins within the mainstream discourse of modernism.
The Courtauld Institute
Sculpture in the City
Every summer the City of London with support from local businesses, unveils a brand new selection of public art by major and internationally acclaimed artists. World class contemporary sculpture is designed to complement the unique architecture of the area and engages the passers-by, who range from local workers to architectural tourists and animates one of the most dynamic parts of the City of London. Now in its seventh series, the 2017 selection shows 70 artists to date, continuing to grow.
The Square mile, map available on the website.
Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Friday 24 November 2017
To mark the recent publication of her new book Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson will discuss both fine art and amateur registers of hand making in art since 1970 unveil crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles, high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be.
The Courtauld Institute
Thomas Ruff: Photographs 1979 – 2017, 27 September 2017 – 21 January 2018
Thomas Ruff, L’Empereur 06 (The Emperor 06), 1982, C-print, 30.2 × 40 cm, © Thomas Ruff
Thomas Ruff (b. 1958, Germany) addresses the subjects of cosmology, suburbia, nudity, utopianism, and catastrophe in his photographic series. For almost four decades he has investigated the status of the image in contemporary culture. This exhibition draws from the full range of Ruff’s output, from his acclaimed portraits reproduced on a huge scale and revealing every surface detail of their subjects, to his most recent press photographs, which drawing on newspaper archives from the era of the space race and Hollywood.
Whitechapel Gallery
Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, the Message is Death Store Studios,
5 Oct 2017- 10 Dec 2017
Arthur Jafa, the one-time Spike Lee cinematographer and Beyoncé collaborator, has pitched a tent to screen his film at 180 The Strand. The tent is pitched to evoke the Baptist churches of the American South, however Jafa wants to use his art to create a black visual aesthetic. In ‘Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death’, he knots together clips and archival footage of civil rights marches, police violence, rappers, dancers and sports stars, all set to Kanye’s ‘Ultralight Beam’. ‘Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death’ is a hymn, a paean and a eulogy to black America.
180 The Strand, London
