Tour of Amy Winehouse's Personal Effects: Five Free Art Exhibitions to See
Books, shoes and puzzles belonging to the singer are on display as part of 'Back to Black.' Elsewhere in London this week, a leaking Barbican and a number of statues with a tragic splendor can be seen in galleries. Continue reading...
They tried to get him into rehab and he said "no, no, no". And she probably would have said no to letting artist Alex Margot Arden put on an exhibit of all her vintage junk, but unfortunately Amy Winehouse isn't around to protest, so Arden just went ahead regardless.
Arden has amassed a collection of objects and books based on what Winehouse once owned in the storefronts and shelves of her lush Chelsea apartment. Digging through archival materials and auction records, Arden has bought replicas of Winehouse's makeup, Vogue editions, board games and books.
So you can dig through his private junk, imagine him reading all these biographies of jazzers and celebrities, or Claudia Roden's book on Jewish food. The idea of him reading Roy Keane's biography while eating matzah ball soup is so cute.
Did Winehouse really do the Cadbury 1000 piece puzzle? Did she read the "The Body We All Want Now" article in that issue of Vogue magazine? Arden forces you to ask these questions, to imagine these scenarios, making you a famous comet, one who cannot separate the idol from the human.
There's a pair of ballet pumps signed by fans that were left on Winehouse's doorstep after her death, a birthday card from Mark Ronson and Adele that she never got around to opening. Now we are very close, now it's like we are intruding.
This is a strangely cold and emotionless show. But two things unfold here simultaneously: a portrait of an icon creating a stasis of objects and the passage of time in their lives, and there's an unsettling exploration of celebrity fetishization. There is an act of love and sacrifice, and there is an act of critical self-reflection. Happiness and sadness, clumsily rubbing against each other. It's very clever and very critical concept art that makes you feel very badass and annoying.
Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, until January 23, 2027
The Barbican has leaked. In fact, there have been quite a few of them, which is why they are investing heavily in trying to fix this poor old beast.
But in Yoko Mohair's installation, these leaks are not maintenance problems, but creative collaborators. Water flows out of sinks and curved pipes, collects in buckets and tarps, is funneled and pumped through pipes. Each drop sets off a small cymbal, a triangle, a mallet on the drum. The crumbling infrastructure of the Barbican is playing you.
It's surreal and unsettling: the repurposed Barbican's lamps flicker on and off, controlled by sensors that measure the moisture levels of rotting fruit, sensors by the breeze blowing through the dry walls of the Barbican - all at the whim of moldy fruit and crumbling concrete walls.
This is the best use of the Curve in years: Mohri has turned decay and decay into instruments, building weaknesses into a symphony of survival. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When you have a leaky roof, you concrete the music.
Light is a positive thing in popular culture. We call smart people smart, we say good things are "bright", etc. But Chinese artist Yuyan Wang's approach in this new film is dark.
It takes as its starting point in 2018 the Chinese government's initiative to launch artificial moons to provide continuous daylight.
Butterflies and insects fly across the screen downstairs, drawn to a lamp, their natural instincts tricked by the artificial light. Upstairs, videos of drills and mines, LEDs, fireworks, lasers, rockets, torches and neon lights play out to the chords of a synthesizer chorus. Wang asks what it means to not have darkness, to be constantly productive, to rest or escape.
I guess we are butterflies now, lured by the artificial lights of a world that treats us like insects.
In the crypt of neighboring Shoreditch Church, another video shows humanoid robots being built. You get the sense that Wang knows that our horrendous impending future will be just more forgotten industrial waste.
This is what arthouse cinema does well: non-narrative, fascinating, strange.
Rebecca Warren: There will be another you
Twenty years after being nominated for a Turner Prize, Rebecca Warren has lost none of her angular, rough, rough and weird power.
The sculptor is back for his first London show in 16 years with more of his bronze and unfired clay figures, and they're still great. The smaller sculptures look like a post-apocalyptic take on Rococo decorative ceramics. Instead of glittering perfection and flowy finery, we have rough, sullen, fragile nudes stretched out on rocks. They are funny and ugly things. But you can't help but feel that the avalanche of amateur and kindergarten class synthetic ceramics so popular these days might be Warren's fault.
Large bronzes are best in the main space. Life-size nudes with grotesque and lampooned hands and feet, they're somewhere between Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Robert Crumb, like a grotesque take on modernism. It's like all of your favorite modernists melted together and made one big, lumpy but oh-so-delicious visual soup.
William Kentridge is in despair. For decades, the South African artist – last seen around these parts in 2022 with a major show at the Royal Academy – has been making animated films about the fate of his hometown, Johannesburg. The latest version is displayed here, and it's a very bad thing. Any hope found in previous works is gone. Johannesburg has fallen further into ruins. A gas explosion has destroyed the building, trees are charred by fungus, women are cradling their terrified children, protesters are crowding the streets, all of them have been turned into dirty coal. Soho Eckstein's character, a master craftsman in a modernist house, reappears – but now he seems to be standing in for an isolated artist. An older man watches as everything falls away from the safety of his mansion.
I've never been much of a Kentridge fan, and this all seems a bit odd for the subject matter. But it's still classic Kentridge: experimental, theatrical art about deeply emotional issues. It's a small, museum-quality display of paintings and sculptures that will make Kentridge fans very happy, but probably won't do much to win over the rest of us.