This year’s New Contemporaries exhibition, a showcase of 26 of the UK’s finest emerging artists, opened at the South London Gallery at the end of January. The show includes themes of - and you may want to take a breath here - dystopian futures, the climate crisis, industrialisation, gentrification, displacement, critical approaches to systems of power, digital technologies, mourning, remembrance, and loss. Among others!
Highlights include a striking photographic work by Timon Benson depicting a group of young people congregating in an intimate, cramped party setting, a series of brutalist sculptures by William Braitwaithe, and a number of satisfying works on canvas by a collection of plainly virtuosic painters.
The absolute stars of the show, however, are located across the street in the gallery’s Fire Station building. On the first floor are two remarkable films. The first, by Chinese artist River Yuhao Cao, explores mourning in regional Chinese folk traditions. It’s a quiet, beautifully shot meditation that centres on a moving stage vehicle, which parks up in the middle of a forest at night. The curtains are drawn to reveal a lone dancer who performs for an audience of just one, presumably grieving, man who sits on the ground, transfixed by her movements. This moving film has a graceful, hypnotic quality to it, and it makes great use of minimal lighting to pierce through the dark, twilight hours during which it was shot.
What this exhibition lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in raw talent
Across the hallway is an altogether more chilling viewing experience in Bristolian artistic filmmaker Kat Anderson’s 30-minute horror film, about a young Black man who seems to be incarcerated in some sort of mental health institution. Projected across a split screen, the young man and the viewing audience bear witness to another patient, an older Black man, being tackled to the ground and strangled by the facility’s white staff. Despite these scenes being highly distressing, it is impossible to look away thanks to Anderson’s visually arresting style and some fantastic performances by the principal actors.
Surely A24 will soon be banging down the doors of both of these promising young filmmakers, whose work on show here justifies the trip to Peckham alone. Whilst you’re on this side of the street, just below, on the ground floor, you’ll find a compelling installation by Northern Irish artist Christopher Steenson which centres a slideshow and draws parallels between statements made about the corncrake, an endangered bird which is native to Ireland, and sentiments shared by Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland both before and during The Troubles.
What this exhibition (predictably) lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in the raw talent and ambition evident in each of these nascent artists’ work. The fact that it’s housed in what, despite its deep history, is one of London’s most underrated art spaces is a further incentive to pay it a visit.
