Free art in London

You won’t find any grandeur or pomp in this concise exhibition of 15 muted and unflashy works, but you’ll experience an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility portraits in the adjacent rooms. Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land. 

Frieze Sculpture returns for another year, transforming Regent's Park, one of London's prettiest green spaces, into a massive outdoor gallery. Expect massive sculptures curated by Fatoş Üstek, on the theme of ‘In the Shadows’, which means they'll be engage with the idea of darkness from many perspectives, whether that's inner darkness or the interplay between light and obscurity. The exhibition will be complemented by a programme of performances and talks, all free to the public.

Video games are the medium for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The young artist uses them to ‘imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories’ - this isn’t just point-and-shoot, slack-jawed gaming for the sake of it, this is one of contemporary society’s most important cultural forms being used to give voice to marginalised identities. 

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.

How many people does it take to put on a solo exhibition? When I visit akâmi-, the Omaskêko Ininiwak artist Duane Linklater’s show at Camden Art Centre, three technicians are packing up their tools as a photographer takes installation shots. The show was curated by this year’s New Curators fellows, a group of 11 aspiring exhibition makers. It includes work by Linklater’s son and grandmother as well as his wife, Tanya Lukin Linklater, with whom he works under the moniker Grey Plumes. As we approach twenty contributors, I wonder whether the term solo exhibition might be inaccurate.

Throughout the show, Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His message, uniting the three disparate bodies of work on show here, is as clear and simple as it is defiant. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show; it takes a village.

The first room contains a series of arresting, moody canvases awash with the colours of plums, sand and sunsets. Though spartan, they provide plenty to look at. Many are irregular in shape and comprise multiple sheets of linen sewn together. Some are painted with disembodied ornate window frames while others contain rorschach-like splatters. You might imagine Linklater alone in his studio, mixing the colours that make these haunting images, but you’d be wrong. They’re painted with natural materials including tea, sumac and tobacco: in other words, made in collaboration with both the land and the now-anonymous people who extracted and packaged them. The architectural features reference a chapel in Ontario, built using forced indigenous labour. In material and subject, they needle the idea that an image or object can be created by one individual.

You’ll find yourself lost in the beauty of this installation

Next door, this line of questioning is brought to bear more explicitly. On plywood plinths that emanate the smell of the workshop they came from, Linklater has arranged a disparate cast of objects. Garments made by his grandmother and a stop motion video by his son sit alongside tobacco flowers and cigarette packets, all arranged on concrete and metal armatures made by Linklater himself. You’ll likely find yourself too lost in the beauty of this installation, both delicate and brutal, to wonder who made it. That’s just as well, because there’s no clear answer to that question.

Entering the third room, which contains a series of clay vessels by Grey Plumes made to resemble a 500-year-old pot excavated in 1962 from Tanya Lukin Linklater’s homelands in Alaska, I imagine myself surrounded by everyone who, in some sense, ‘made’ this exhibition. From curators to craftspeople, artists to artisans; credited and uncredited, visible and invisible. The room is filling up quickly.

If you’re looking for a cohesive narrative or point of view, you won’t find it here. akâmi- isn’t a solo exhibition at all. It’s an open-ended assemblage from which a commentary emerges on what’s lost when we try to assign an object a single maker or owner. It’s a pertinent point made powerfully by a diverse chorus of voices.

Part of an ongoing exhibition series of group exhibitions featuring artists not represented by the gallery, this show will see three painters – Koak, Ding Shilun and Cece Philips – fill Hauser & Wirth’s vast Savile Row space with windows into imagined interiors. All taking domestic architectures as their starting point, each artist’s work becomes a meditation on the psychology of space.

‘Instagram face’, CGI influencers and AI sex dolls are all going under the microscope in the new Somerset House exhibition, Virtual Beauty.  

Through more than 20 works, this pay-what-you-feel show explores the impact of digital technologies on how we define beauty today. The exhibition traces the origin of the digital selfie from the first flip phone with a front-facing camera, to today’s minefield of deepfake pornography, augmented reality face filters and Instagram algorithms. It’s primarily concerned with the ‘Post-Internet’ art movement, a 21st-century body of work and criticism that examines the influence of the internet on art and culture.

In the first room, we encounter early artworks that comment on society’s gruelling beauty standards, like ORLAN’s disturbing 1993 performance that saw her going under the knife live on camera, and taking recommendations by audience members over the phone. Famous celeb selfies like Ellen DeGeneres’ A-lister packed Oscars snap are shown on a grainy phone screen, then we’re taken on a whistlestop tour of digital artworks, each one providing some sort of comment on beauty, society and the online world.  

There’s a lot in Virtual Beauty that is pretty on the nose. We are shown a Black Mirror-style satirical advert for a pharmaceutical company called ‘You’, that offers people the chance to alter their appearance without plastic surgery – simply have a chip inserted into your brain, and the technology makes you appear different, essentially like an IRL TikTok filter. It’s amusing to watch, but not particularly original.

fans of Black Mirror will be entertained by this unsettling and sometimes beautiful exhibition

In the same room is a 3D-printed handbag resembling a womb; a deep reddish-pink sack with snaking silver veins crawling across it. Accompanying the bag is a video of a faux fashion advert – a comment on how technology might one day allow prospective parents to make ‘designer’ babies, selecting their hair colour, eye colour and the like. Again, you’d think that an artwork about designer babies could have taken the word ‘designer’ a bit less literally. 

There is good stuff in here too, though. One of the best pieces is a work by 3D makeup artist Ines Alpha. We see a video of her face, she looks like a geisha from the future, pale-skinned with bright pink cheeks, eyelashes, eyebrows and a smattering of beauty spots. An alien-like mask begins to emerge, with pink and silver tentacles snaking around her eyes, forehead and cheeks. Next to the video is the 3D-printed real mask, and then there’s an augmented reality (AR) video where I get to try this wacky-but-beautiful thing on virtually. That this is the only interactive element of the exhibit seems to be a missed trick – for a show entirely focussed on the digital age, I wish there had been more opportunities to get involved with the tech myself. 

Virtual Beauty also looks to the future with the beguiling ‘Virtual Embalming’, a 2018 video by Frederik Heyman that considers how people want to be remembered after their death. The piece imagines its subjects in a virtual shrine, surrounded by paraphernalia they want to sum up their life. It’s haunting and beautiful – model and musician Kim Peers is suspended in bondage ropes over a bed in a decaying ‘abandoned Asian hotel room’, while fashion designer Michèle Lamy stands on a sandy plinth in the Gobi desert, lions at her feet. 

Many topics are touched on, but not fully delved into. At once, Virtual Beauty tells us that cosmetic surgery is bad, that we are slaves to the algorithm, everyone is just one AI-augmented selfie away from becoming a bodily dysmorphic wannabe cyborg. But it also suggests that technology can free us by allowing us to take control of our digital image. There are lots of complex ideas at play: verbose gallery text tells me that we are in a post-internet, post-facial and post-physical age. One artwork highlights how AI tools have a racial bias, another reclaims technology used in deepfake pornography to make a gender-defying portrait of a woman with a bodybuilder’s physique in skimpy black lingerie. There’s a lot going on, but I don’t feel a strong point of view coming through. 

Sure, fans of Black Mirror will be entertained by this unsettling and sometimes beautiful exhibition. But I’m still left wondering what the whole thing is trying to say.