Our top picks of exhibitions together with cultural spaces and places, both online and in the real world.


All, Art, Auctions, Exhibitions, Travel & Hospitality, Initiatives

Viewing Electric Dreams Art and Technology Before the Internet at Tate Modern

Tate Modern’s newly-opened bonanza group show takes you back to a place unimaginable from where we are now: a time pre-internet. This long running survey of early era digital art moves from the psychedelic 1950s to the beginning of the internet era in the 1980s, taking you through the experiments of artists who wanted to innovate with the way we see and sense.

Tracing a trajectory through kinetic, optical and digital works, inspired by mathematical principles, and making use of new tech and industrial processes, artists this is an ambitious examination of how we got to here, and how visual language was pushing perception long before the network as we know it.

Look out for Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress, a sculpture, painting, installation and costume originally created for a performance in 1956. This wearable artwork crafted from hand-painted industrial bulbs and incandescent tubes was hot and heavy – and wearing it could have been fatal in the event of a short circuit. The Zero Group’s founder Otto Piene’s Light Room (Jena) is another unmissable work, a key piece in understanding artistic approaches to technology of the time. The installation comprises five light-emitting sculptures, each fitted with motors, synchronised to perform a theatrical light play or ‘ballet’.

Share story
Dates
28 November 2024 — 01 June 2025
The Bogota-born, Brooklyn-based María Berrío also returns to London this week with her solo exhibition, End of Ritual, opening at Victoria Miro. The artist has become known for her large-scale, laboriously-crafted collaged paintings, using the most delicate Japanese and watercolour. Her semi-fictional scenes draw on the familial and folkloric, often depicting women and children in fantastical and richly narrative scenes.

For the works created for this exhibition, Berrío collaborated with dancers from the New York City based GALLIM dance company, who improvised movements, wearing props and costumes from the artist’s personal collection. These sessions inspired the final works, where characters move through crowded interiors.

These scenes mark a distinctive new direction for the artist, with more urgent and immediate concerns for the enviroment, and the impact of geopolitical forces on women and children. “It’s almost aggressive – an interpellation. The tumult on canvas proceeds from a compositional method but addresses the tumult of the world,” writes Siddhartha Mitter in a new publication accompanying the show.

Share story
Dates
21 November 2024 — 18 January 2025
The American conceptual artist returns to London this week with a new solo exhibition at Pace’s London gallery showcasing a new body of retroreflective collage pieces. Thomas has long been interested in the medium and its ability to carry histories, fragmented forms articulating the experiences and impact of colonialism and globalism. Drawing on major figures from Matisse to Romare Bearden – the kindred creative souls for the work – Thomas lights his own path in the medium.

The collages incorporate images from the artist’s ongoing research into historical protests and activist movements all over the globe, as well as protest material from the UK, weaving a broad narrative that gives a soaring sense of interconnected struggles – another take on the ‘kinship of the soul’ that the show’s title alludes to.

Thomas’ use of retroreflective vinyl – usually found in road signs – is also worth noting. Thomas has been experimenting with the material for almost a decade, and they create an incredible illusory effect that has to be seen in person, the layers and light creating their own rhythms and dialogues between archival and personal records, and adding nuance to the artist’s explorations of figuration and abstraction.

Share story
Dates
20 November 2024 — 21 December 2024
READ MORE