Author: Alx Phillips

INTERVIEW: Carolina López on ‘Metamorphosis’ – the exhibition

The more we try to rationalise our world, the more we crave the weird and the wonderful. The exhibition Metamorphosis lures us into the interconnected worlds of two individual and one ‘twin set’ of artists, all of who work or worked on the fringe of film and animation. The exhibition, that took 10 years to find its… Read more »

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Review: Tauberbach – les ballets C de la B / Munich Kammerspiele

It’s dark and something’s buzzing. Lights up, except they’re literally down, a big bar of them rests on a mass of old clothing… so much to choose from but who needs any of it? Nice to play dress up, at least, the idea has occurred to a small team of scavengers who wade through it all, selecting,… Read more »

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Review: Roni Horn – Everything Sleeping… at Fundació Miró

My dream is to renovate my bathroom and put in wall-to-wall showering. In the middle, I’d have a huge, bubbling jacuzzi that takes up most of the floor space, with a sauna option operational via a toe button. Tropical plants would surround me, a robot would bring me drinks, and there I’d sit, sniffing steam… Read more »

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Review: Kerry James Marshall – Painting and Other Stuff

Is it possible to reinvent yourself completely? After all, it gets to the point when you just don’t feel like you. Pick a university in some far-off town, move house, dump your partner, move abroad… Some call it running away; some call it finding yourself. ‘Course, ‘you’ are the least of your problems: family, mates,… Read more »

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Loop Art and the Meaning of Engels

It’s only a matter of time before everything turns into bad theatre. Oh, the theme park that history becomes! All those momentous events and monumental ideologies… Walls slapped up and beaten down. Files filed and family members disappeared. Slivers of land fought and died for. Gruff men with bushy beards, whose big ideas engulfed 20, 50 years, entire lifetimes. All of… Read more »

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Estudio Nómada – Loop art route around the Barri Gòtic

Creator versus curator… aye, that old chestnut. Seriously, who wants to sleep with the guy with the great music collection to the same extent as he who composes his own minuets? And yet, when it comes to the visual arts, perhaps it’s worth reconsidering.* On Saturday afternoon I enjoyed a wee stroll through Barcelona’s Barri Gòtic, refreshingly deserted as a storm… Read more »

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What’s On? Informe per a una acadèmia – A Report to an Academy

There’s nothing quite like the shocking finale of a football match, between two teams that you do not habitually support, to leave you floundering in contradictory emotions. On the one hand, you don’t give a toss; on the other, you do – and usually for a whole bunch of irrational reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with football. The paradoxical… Read more »

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What’s On? Richard MacDonald sculptures at Barcelona’s MEAM

Only in the heights of extreme physical pain can one feel relief from the constant emotional torture. I reckon that’s the whole point behind study, sport, really loud concerts and really long after-parties … and thank god (we hope) that something might do it! albeit for a very short time. In this spirit, Richard MacDonald creates small, life-sized and… Read more »

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What’s On? A casa (Kabul) by Tony Kushner, dir. Mario Gas

I’m pretty much convinced that life is a series of boxes. Boxes that we’ve made ourselves out of cardboard clichés and fantasy cement. We sit in one box – that we’ve furnished, perhaps, in the orientalist style, or done sparse and modern with white walls, plastic furniture and a hormone-boosted plant from Ikea that will never die…. Read more »

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