Discover our curator's top exhibitions to visit in London during May.
Last month, The Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition opened to the public. This year’s title, The Milk of Dreams, is taken from a children’s book by artist Leonara Carrington. It is set in a fantastical world where everyone and everything is in a state of constant flux: identities are not fixed and characters constantly re-imagine themselves and their surroundings. The Biennale’s curator Cecilia Alemani describes her exhibition as an “imaginary journey through metamorphoses of the body and definitions of the human”. For those of us in London - decidedly less enchanted than Venice - I hope that these three exhibitions that explore folk tales and fantasy might bring something of the sense of wonder at this year’s Biennale.
Once Upon a Time..., Flora Fairbairn & Co.
6 - 25 MAY
This exhibition’s press release describes folklore, myths and fairytales as examining the light and the dark in human nature. The number (55, if you were wondering) and variety of artists on show illustrates how well this description also applies to visual art. Drawings, paintings and sculptures all have the ability to communicate truths and feelings about the world in fantastically veiled ways. Like stories, the works in this exhibition employ invented characters and invented scenarios to consider very real subjects.
Two of the artists who I think do this best are Suzanne Treister and Paula Rego. Treister’s works feel like parodies of corporate presentations about emerging technologies. They feature painted or drawn networks of brightly coloured nodes displaying lofty but seemingly unconnected words and phrases: “SHAMANIC ALGORITHM”, “LUMINOUS DATA TRANSFER”, “CARL JUNG”, “KABBALAH”. The words are sensational, but lose their resonance when displayed in this saturated and nonsensical configuration. To me, Treister’s text-based science fiction world better represents the politicians and businesspeople who hold power in the real world than most purportedly non-fiction accounts.
Rego, whose work is also on show as part of this year’s Biennale, uses fiction to address political realities in a similar way. In her cartoon-like figurative works, she employs a cast of characters including anthropomorphised spiders, angels and dapperly-dressed frogs to obliquely reference abuses of power and violence towards women.
