Art Show: Fiona Tan - Bon Voyage

Not as comprehensive as her 2005 Oxford show, but still worth going to keep track of her recent development. Fiona Tan's works engage the traditional dialectic between the claim to objectivity of unprejudiced witness and the personal travelogue as the search for the subjective. She draws on photographic and filmic footage and combines the two in expanded film and video installations.

Crossing the threshold of early 20th Century missionaries' and travellers' reportages, which served to reinforce the sense of 'place' of Africans and Asians in the colonial hierarchy of power, Tan interlinks personal and social formations of identity. The centrepiece in this show are projected vintage photos of Japanese girls (looking all the same) at one end of the room and the same photo of one single girl (looking the same as all the others) with voice overs on the other end.

Yes, it sounds boring at first glance, but once you have accepted its banality, it can get quite exiting in terms of broader conceptual questions regarding socio-geographical identity.

Frith Street Gallery, until 28 October, 2006

Art Fair: Zoo

Last year I was disappointed by Frieze - this year I thought I'd learn from my mistake and don't see the mainstream craze but sneak into the alternative stuff. Puhh, how shall I put it without hurting anyone: edgy and up and coming doesn't neccessarily translate into quality.

Sorry, crap, was out in 20 minutes. Spotted Uncle Saatchi though, the third time in 4 years. He was busy on the phone giving instructions to somebody, so I couldn't ask for collecting advice (Joke!) Being a small micro-scale collector myself for about 15 years now, I find the (commercial) art world more and more annoying and frustrating.

Concert: London Soloists at St John's Church

What to do with a solitary Saturday evening while your fiance is visiting friends & family in USA for Thanks Giving and your mates are out on dates?

Going to a concert at St John's church on Smith Square and listen to the finest young musicians this city has on offer at one of the most picturesque and pre-christmassy churches at stone throw away from Westminster Abbey. On the menue was Mussorgsky Night on a Bare Mountain, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto and Dvorak Symphony No.9 (From the New World) - one of my all-time Top 5 symphonies.

I made charming contact with an older lady who was honouring her son playing the oboe, and after two hours of distinguished behaviour and acustic delight, I drove home. No I didn;t take the regular rout along the embankment. I rather meandered through the Georgian Terraces of Pimplico and then Chelsea - while my baby was in the (her old) new world.

http://www.londonsoloists.com

Art Show: Leonardo Da Vinci

To cut through the crap: this might be a once in a life-time chance to see some of the most famous and history making drawings as originals, so go - but close both eyes and shut down your connoisseur's minds amidst this disastrous kind of curation and presentation. £10 per time-slot ticket for a single smallish room cramped with dozens of works is a joke to say the least. The V&A museum is not exactly short of space, is it. However, to see the ink with your own eyes that documented one of history's most radical inventor and inventive artist puts you in a state of silent awe and (sensuous) goose bumps.

V&A, until 7 January, 2007

Art Show: Miniature Worlds

The main reason why I pilgrimaged to this Southbank art space is to see Tessa Farmer's fairy cosmos again. She describes her work as ‘a tool to realise imaginative possibilities that might otherwise linger unseen, just beneath the surface'.
These tiny fairies and hell's angels are created from plant and tree roots and their scale is determined by the insect wings sprouting from their backs. Of course the most natural question is how on earth are human hands capable to produce something that small (we talk milimeters rather than centimeters here. But I guess the most important question is what the hell is going on here? Cute death? Do insects secretely rule the world and Tessa's fairies are the translaters into humanoid information which she in turn scales up through her own person...

I can go back again and again, I have no logical explanation why I am so in love with these pieces - apart from knowing that when she was in the New Contemporaries exhibit in the Barbican in 2004 the then installation cost £4K, and I seriously intended to buy it until I realised that it was (still) to much dosh for someone like me. Today she is worth three times this amount...recently picked up by Uncle Saatchi.

Jerwood Space, until September 2006

Photography: Dan Holdsworth

Dan Holdsworth's large scale photographies explore the limits of human knowledge. His extremely long exposures of the Arecibo Space Telescope (remember the movie 'Contact') document the movements this gigantic mirror that is listening into space is performing at dark.


Another stunning series is the Hyperborea where he captured the Northern Lights on Island. Filled with both time and timeliness, these photographs offer a window to another world, that feels literally alien to us mere mortals. You also see this in pictures of the European Space agencies, where the employees parking lot is framed by a rocket pointing to the main entrance. You feel like in a Bond movie, but this is real and the villain is not Dr. No, but probably you and I, not being able to grasp the many phenomena concerning the edge of space, and thus, reacting with further limiting aggression in our own little world.

National Maritime Museum, until 7 January, 2007

Art Show: Fischli & Weiss

Many of us know the 30 minute video 'The way things go' - the most inventive, bizarre and unique domino effect that humans could possibly create, where, based on chemical, mechanical and physical effects, household appliances and other gear sets themselves in motion in an empty factory hall. The sources of inspiration for this Swiss duo are endless, yet their art is shockingly mundane and plain in execution. However, what makes it stand out is this odd combination of aestethics and philosophy by two Alpenlaender Anoraks with a cheeky humour.You have to see it to believe it. However, you also should see this exhibition at Tate Modern, the best I have seen there since the Joseph Beuys Retrospective last year.The only major area of their work I haven't seen immediately turned into one of my favorites: an entire room full of little clay models, mostly left unfinished and unfired, capturing the most inportant events in human history filtered by the duo's own perception of what's important and what not, hence, the title of this microcosm 'And suddenly this overview' couldn't be more poignant. You see moments in technology, fairy tales, civilization, sex, religion, nature and entertainment, and the funniest in the latter category is the clay model of "Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing I Can't Get No Satisfaction"

Another room is filled by large scale photographs of flowers/plants and airports, beautiful and stunning. But perhaps the most intriguing room is "Visible World": three flat screens present an archive of 3,00 photos taken by the artists on journeys across the globe. It is not so much the material, but the curation and the way the images are fading into each other. Here is a lake. Now a boat emerges. Then the boat dissapears again, and the lake is joint by mountains in the back. Of course the boat and the mountains are not around the original lake, but another one somewhere else. Better than photoshop and digital imaging effects could ever be...

Don't miss it!

Tate Modern, until 14 January 2007

Art Show: Pierre Klossowski

"Claiming not to be a writer, philosopher, or even an artist, "but first, foremost, and always, a monomaniac," Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) has long remained a cultish figure..."

When you enter the ground floor of the Whitechapel gallery and gaze at the ginormeous drawings and their three-dimensional sculptural elaborations, your first association might be 'this must have been De Sade's artistic dream - interpreted by Freud on LSD: Stags do business with Robin Hood looking women, young pageants make out with old ladies, and above all and through out the show there is an eerie non-explicit athmosphere of erotic violence. You don't feel as observing an act, but moments before it happens, when one might pause to give his or her rationale a chance to win over dark desires in the hope to withold yourself and not do it.

Oh, what? Do I sound weird? Well, I somehow feel surrealised by this double-bill of phantasmagic art.

Whitechapel, until 23 November, 2006

Art Show: Hans Bellmer

Yeah - Finally! An art show of this (of course) German Maniac. I was waiting for this opportunity for almost 15 years. And now the great Whitechapel locked away in the East End displays the etchings, drawings and photo documentations of his famous dolls.What's all my raving about? Well, for those who didn't come across this hidden champion of Surealism so far (no he was never as accomplished as Dalior Ernst) this is the real surealist stuff, kinky, horrible, boundless, childlike, erotic and just a bit C-R-A-Z-Y. So if you think the Chapman brothers were revolting (in the 1990s!!!) and you would like to see how somebody was 10 times more pushing the boundaries of taste and conventions, then go and see what this man created as early as the - YES - 1930s before he had to flee Hitler and his Nazi cronies as an "Entarteter Kunstler".

Whitechapel, until 23 November, 2006