Charlotte Posenenske
Galerie Mehdi Chouakri (Berlin) at Modern Art, Vyner Street
Hitherto Condo has privileged living – and often early career – artists. At Modern Art however, Galerie Mehdi Chouakri has chosen to bring over from Berlin three bodies of work by the late German artist Charlotte Posenenske. With a biography as fascinating as her work – the revolutions of May 68 made her withdraw from the artworld, frustrated at what she saw as the discipline’s political impotence – here Modern Art will show her early abstract drawings as well as the better-known minimalist industrial-feeling sculptures (which, as a clever pairing, finds echo in the work of Nicolas Deshayes, showing in the gallery’s groundfloor space). Oliver Basciano
Bedwyr Williams
Frutta (Rome) at Southard Reid
A friend this morning sent me the trailer for a film called Velvet Buzzsaw in which, as far as I can gather, Jake Gyllenhaal plays an art critic who discovers a suite of paintings that literally murder people while the scriptwriter, having perhaps attended one of those dinner parties where everyone drones on about The Square, attempts some excruciatingly weak satire on the artworld’s preoccupation with social media and trainers and so on. Much sharper takedowns of the in-crowd will be on view at Southard Reid, which hosts Rome’s Frutta and a selection of the character-assassinating caricatures that Bedwyr Williams has recently been posting on Instagram. Finally, an exhibition in which to find yourself. Ben Eastham
Vanessa Safavi
The Breeder (Athens) at The Approach
The female bodies in Vanessa Safavi’s Uterine Furies (2018) series are both minimal and overblown: a pair of pastel silicone circles punctuated in the middle make for a schematic pair of breasts, while a large bucket, its bottom part stuck to the wall, spills out its various, amorphous contents. But while their contours are quite simple (these bodies could also make up ‘wow’ emojis), the associations they weave are manifold; from the evident stereotyping of women and their bodies to Marie Antoinette’s ‘Bols Sein’ (a set of breast-shaped milk cups in Sèvres porcelain) and their connection to the titular ‘uterine furies’ as a nineteenth-century term for sexual hysteria – said to be cured, notably, by injection of milk into the woman’s vagina (and, you know, marriage). Louise Darblay
Donna Kukama
Blank Projects (Cape Town) at Greengrassi
I’m looking forward to seeing the work of Donna Kukama, a South African performance artist whose practice engages with the rewriting and rethinking of historical narratives. She’s a founding member of the collective Center for Historical Reenactments and through the media of video, sound, texts, and the making of ‘alternative monuments’, Kukama’s work focuses its attention on national memorials and addresses the experiences of socially and economically marginalised bodies. Fi Churchman
Online exclusive published on 11 January 2019
