Keynote panel talk at the Barbican’s ‘Dirty Weekend’ takeover

One panel member had been scared off being her real self due to the conservative push back, affecting how she ‘showed up online’ and had been forced to take twelve months out to do an art residency so that she could regain her confidence. She wanted now to make pieces (dildos?, I really don’t know) that people can really connect with. Honestly, the comedy writes itself with these people.

Meet the artist who documented her bilateral mastectomy

Garrod interjected to state that even though Top is essentially an information display, it didn’t feel cold, the artist didn’t feel absent, that you did feel the emotions and that Bowler had imbued inanimate body parts with meaning, i.e. about as arse-about-face as he could’ve got. Bowler responded that archives weren’t dead spaces, they were full of people! Why, every time she goes to Bishopsgate she’s always bumping into people!

Film Review: Afterlives

Normally I only write about the transgender issue, but in the case of Afterlives I’ve had to make an exception, because, although it might have its heart in the right place, its head in so many wrong places, it’s mind blowing.

On a positive note, director Kevin B. Lee, chose an interesting aesthetic for the film, using his desktop to interact with film clips and his chosen talking heads, which works. What doesn’t work, however, is his piss-poor analysis of why violence indoctrinates. He starts in the right place, looking at the example of ISIS’s ‘blockbuster’ recruitment video – Flames of War – analysing it frame by frame, creating entries in a spreadsheet.

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