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Whitechapel Gallery

  • Art
  • Whitechapel
  • price 0 of 4
  • Recommended
  1. Pregnant White Maid (Elmgreen & Dragset)
    Elmgreen & Dragset
  2. Guy Montagu-Pollock
    Guy Montagu-PollockWhitechapel Gallery facade, with the Tree of Life by Rachel Whiteread.
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Time Out says

This East End stalwart reopened in 2009 following a major redesign and expansion that saw the Grade II listed building transformed into a vibrant, holistic centre of art complete with a research centre, archives room and café. Since 1901, Whitechapel Art Gallery has built on its reputation as a pioneering contemporary institution and is well remembered for premiering the talents of exhibitions by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Frida Kahlo among others. Expect the rolling shows to be challenging and risqué.

Details

Address:
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX
Transport:
Tube: Aldgate East
Price:
Free
Opening hours:
Tue-Sun (except Thu) 11am-6pm; Thu 11am-9pm.
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What’s on

Zineb Sedira: ‘Dreams Have No Titles’

  • 4 out of 5 stars

Take a seat at the bar, or find your marker on the dancefloor – the lights have dimmed, playback has started, and someone is about to shout ‘action!’ You are now an actor in British Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira’s movie. Or movies, plural, actually, because she’s transformed the Whitechapel Gallery (just as she did the French Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale) into a series of sets based on classic films; there’s the dancehall bar from ‘Le Bal’, a home from ‘The Battle of Algiers’, the coffin from ‘The Stranger’. All films made in the wake of Algerian independence in 1962, all made between Algeria and Europe, all passionate documents of liberation, the radical potential of social upheaval and the power of militant cinema.  Sedira endlessly blurs lines. Are you, as a viewer of the work, an actor? The director? The audience, sat on rickety cinema seats? She builds illusion and breaks it. You can see the studwork holding up the false walls, the lights pointing at the sets, cameras left running. There’s a huge stack of film canisters, a recreation of Sedira’s own Brixton living room. Fiction and reality, audience and actor, all torn apart and muddled together. Ironically enough, the only thing that lets the show down is Sedira’s own films; a short documentary and a long, rambling conversation of questionable relevance (which also appears in documentary for some reason) between the artist Sonia Boyce and the Whitechapel Gallery’s director Gilane Tawadros. Both films are t

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