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ICA

  • Art
  • The Mall
  • Recommended
© Rob Battersby
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Time Out says

Founded in 1947 by a collective of poets, artists and critics, the ICA moved to its current location on the Mall in 1968. Here it offers exhibitions, arthouse cinema, performance art, philosophical debates, art-themed club nights and anything else that might challenge convention. In a scene awash with controversy-seeking work, its status as art's rebel institution faltered in recent years, but with current director Stefan Kalmár – whose CV includes stints at New York’s Artists Space and Munich’s Bonner Kunstverein – having joined in 2016, the ICA has started once again to deliver. This is the place where pop art was invented, and if you catch the right show here, you just might spot the next big art movement.

Details

Address:
The Mall
London
SW1Y 5AH
Transport:
Tube: Charing Cross
Price:
Admission free Tue; varies Wed-Sun
Opening hours:
Open noon-11pm Tue-Thurs; Fri-Sat noon-12am; Sun noon-11
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What’s on

Aria Dean: ‘Abattoir’

  • 3 out of 5 stars

Civil society – according to French philosopher Georges Bataille, as quoted in American artist Aria Dean’s ICA show – can only be maintained if we ignore the existence of abattoirs. Dean, though, has no intention of ignoring them. In fact, she wants to drag viewers, kicking and screaming, through a slaughterhouse’s blood-slicked walls.  The film at the heart of this exhibition is a CGI tour through a glistening, industrial abattoir. There are no carcasses, no animals waiting for the chop, just gleaming metal hooks and endless wipe-clean surfaces. It’s a machine left idling, waiting to fulfil its ultimate, morbid purpose. Throbs of synth noise bring emotive power to the scene, and then an instrumental cover of Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ eases through the air. It’s all gross and grim, but humorously absurd too. The accompanying text, which includes a glossary, says the work is premised on the idea that ‘structuralised death’ is a ‘cornerstone of modern life’. Which sounds great, verbose, grandiose: but it’s a point that’s badly evidenced by the work itself, it’s poorly argued and ahistorical. And by trying to relate everything somehow back to all of Foucault, Ford, Nazism, colonialism, slavery, modernity, Hollywood, Le Corbusier and the Napoleonic era, it feels like an attempt to bamboozle viewers into realising that the work’s just not that deep.  Which is a shame, because even though the empty vitrines in the next room are entirely forgettable, the film itself has a

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