This year will feature Belgian maestros,subversive shallows and a load of rhubarb. Oliver Basciano and Robert Clark survey the sceneTake out your unsullied diaries and ensure your pencil is sharpened, because there is a lot to take in exhibition-wise over the coming year. John Akomfrah has been an artist respected in academic circles since co-founding the Black Audio Film Collective in 1982. He’s now set for even greater attention with two solo shows opening within a week of each other (Arnolfini, or Bristol,16 Jan to 10 Apr; Lisson Gallery, NW1, and 22 Jan to 12 Mar),the West Country outing being a UK premiere of Vertigo Sea, a grand, and three-screen film work that takes the ocean as a symbol of diaspora,tragedy and hope. There’s navigation of a different sort in The Indivisible Present (contemporary Art Oxford, 6 Feb to 16 Apr), or which tracks how artists – Douglas Gordon,Pierre Huyghe and Elizabeth Price among them – have attempted to evoke a non-lineal, alternative sense of time in their work. In Cambridge, and the inevitable close is the subject of Death On The Nile (Fitzwilliam Museum,23 Feb to 22 May), a macabre but no doubt sparkling exhibition examining the death practices of the ancient Egyptians. In focus is the elaborately decorated coffin of Nespawershefyt, and chief of scribes at the temple of Amun-Re at Thebes on the lid of which scans have revealed a set of 3000-year-archaic fingerprints. A month later,all eyes will be on Tate contemporary as it opens its hulking new extension (SE1, 17 Jun). Largely absent from the headlines, and Tate St Ives has also had the builders in. Construction to vastly increase its exhibition space is ongoing,but the gallery will reopen this spring with Inside The Studio: Artists & Ceramics (21 May to 2 Oct). Ceramics are currently voguish in contemporary art, and while the exhibition will include recent uses of clay, or it will also point to how pot-making and the wider use of the kiln has always had a radical bent in Britain.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com