No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990

No Colour Bar: Black British Art in Action 1960-1990 at the Guildhall Art Gallery takes an innovative look at Black British cultural identities, heritage and creative voices - and the struggle Black British artists faced to have their voices heard - from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The focus is on the life works of Eric and Jessica Huntley and the Bogle L’Ouverture Press, a publishing house and pioneering bookshop and cultural hub that they founded in 1969. Bogle L'Ouverture's output and work promoted, and was shaped by, decolonisation and the fight against discrimination. Bogle L'Ouverture's bookshop has been physically recreated in the Gallery to provide a multi-sensory, interactive installation alongside works by notable artists of the period, including Eddie Chambers, Errol Lloyd, Denzil Forrester, Sonia Boyce, Keith Piper, and Sokari Douglas-Camp.

Through the exhibition I was interested to come across The Crucifixion by Ismith Khan. Told in two voices, one standard English, the other Creole, The Crucifixion is an ironic fable of a tragi-comic self-deception. In exploring the popular folk archetype of the self-crucified preacher, the novel takes the balladic form of the calypso to greater depths. It encompasses the folk history/archetype of the Preacher/Prophet who calls on his followers to crucify him, and one episode draws on the folk narratives of the 1937 Trinidad uprising, particularly the actual event when a deeply unpopular police sergeant was burnt to death by a crowd. It also develops in a more symbolic way the issues of the dialectic between freedom and order in Trinidadian society.

When Manko arrives in Port of Spain from his country village to begin his divine mission, he discovers that he has the gift to touch the raw nerve of other people's needs, hopes and guilts. But when he becomes enmeshed in the lives of his fellow yard-dwellers without understanding the different crosses they bear, he sets in train events which teach him too late that there are temptations and responsibilities in being a servant of the Lord for which he is ill equipped. Khan portrays the tensions between authority and freedom, law and love in Trinidadian society through Manko's fate and the stories of the other yard dwellers. 

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Linton Kwesi Johnson - Sonny´s Lettah.

Newspeak: British Art Now Part II

Earlier this week I was at the Saatchi Gallery to see Part 2 of Newspeak: British Art Now. Having appreciated the first part of Newspeak, it was encouraging to see that the standard of work remained high in part 2 and that painting continued to feature strongly. These are the artists that caught my attention:

• Juliana Cerqueira Leite: Leite's work is driven by an investigation into physicality and how we interact with the physical world. Oh came from thinking about physics: what would our bodies look like if time didn’t separate our actions? She traced the area around her as far as she could reach without moving her feet and made an object that would materialise that space. She sees it as a volume defined by the potential of touch.
• Jonathan Wateridge: Wateridge thinks of his work in relation to cinematography; composing realistic but fictional images. These are paintings that play on a sense of the familiar - our understanding and consumption of archetypal or generic images - by way of a B-movie aesthetic meeting the Sublime.
• Tessa Farmer: Made from desiccated insect remains, dried plant roots, and other organic ephemera, Farmer’s Swarm references Damien Hirst while envisioning the purveyors of mischief and magic (fairies) as an actual species, as animalistic and Darwinian as any other to create a microscopic apocalypse.
• Dan Perfect: Perfect says that his paintings are like imagined interiors or psychological landscapes; stage sets or dramatic scenes from video games. They are re-imagined experiences, a decayed science fiction where tumultuous change and biological entropy is intervened and radically altered. Everything is partial in these paintings: masks, costumes, body parts, animals that are human, humans that are animals, things are taken apart and exploded.
• David Brian Smith: Smith's Great Expectations - Wow takes a picture of a Shepherd tending his flock found in a newspaper from the 1930s and uses the image to jump between different styles of painting to reinvent the space, light and palette within the picture. 
• Anne Hardy: Hardy’s photographs picture depopulated rooms that suggest surreal fictions allowing our relationship with them to be in our imagination.
• Anna Barriball: Barriball covers the surfaces of everyday objects so they become seductively sinister husks of their former selves unveiling a mystery in the domestic and familiar. Door is a drawing that assumes the qualities of a sculpture. Its burnished graphite surface captures every subtle detail of the original object, while the paper warps and fluxes through repetitive handling to gain a solidity of its own. Black Wardrobe becomes a monumental void connoting absence and memory.
• Idris Khan: Khan compiles single super-images by digitally layering and super-imposition of multiple images of industrial subjects giving the effect of an impressionistic drawing or blurred film still. The effect is of a soft ethereal energy conveys a sense of time depicted in motion. They exude a transfixing spiritual quality in their densely compacted details and ghostly outlines.
• Clarisse d’Arcimoles: d'Arcimoles' series consists of a photograph from her family album and a picture of the same person taken in 2009 in a scene that’s been exactly reproduced creating a way back to childhood, even if just for a short instant. d'Arcimoles says, "We were all children once, and that is something that is always current within us ... By creating these kinds of comparisons, or rather confrontations, I felt like I was exploring time in its oddest form – as if there was a dialogue between the past and the present moment."

Confessions of Dangerous Minds, showing at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries at the Saatchi Gallery in London, features 19 established and exciting up and coming artists to explore the breadth, depth and diversity of Turkey’s visual arts. Here I particularly liked:

• Yasam Sasmazer’s works feature figurative sculpture of children or ‘little people’. Made to confess something seemingly naughty, there is something uncanny in the fantastic world the artist creates, a feeling that we all remember from our childhood.
• Ebru Uygun embraces a minimalist and abstract approach to painting; concentrating on colour, form and space. The artist adopts a technique by which she combines torn strips of canvas into a new single work, each strip forms a piece of the work in an dazzling accumulation of colour and pattern.
• In Ramazan Bayrakoglu's works, the viewers’ first impression comes from the image seen through the use of satin cloth or plexiglass. As viewers visualise the material and the subject together, the meaning of the work is ultimately understood; the result is a comparison of various works and the different feelings evoked in the audience.

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Arcade Fire - Ready To Start.