INSTALLATION
STEFAN NIKOLAEV - COME TO WHERE THE FLAVOUR IS
CCA, Glasgow, Sat 23 Jul—Sat 3 Sep
Paris-based Bulgarian artist Stefan Nikolaev's work explores the metaphors of time that we
use to map our lives. memories and imaginings.
In his first major show in Britain, the temporal folds that loop through his work will be made manifest in the art objects that take ‘cool nostalgia‘ (non-artist's ‘retro') sensibilities and iconography from 19703 and 803 Eastern Bloc. and meld them to cold war pseudo-Americana. Familiar to us through its pop imagery. yet removed due to its Slavic remoteness. his work is hip. yet not outdated. and stylish.
In the zone between timelines and borderlines. brands and logos. Nikolaev’s imagery references the hyper-realist liber- market of the duty free shop. the artist becoming a traveller with a suitcase full of booty. In the video installation 'The Screen Saver / The Hard Drive / The Disk', familiar pop classics from the 70s and 80s are sung in Bulgarian. We can hum along but something's not right. Without making the everyday nauseating. the everydayness of pop music is bent into something uncanny and we become strangers to ourselves.
A similar process takes place in ‘Extra Light‘, a ready-made advertisement for cigarettes. where the puns implicit in the neon sign are both enlightening and circuitous — a simulacral sign with empty advertising Speak saying everything and nothing. In ‘PosterPosterity'. specifics are erased from an advertising poster — all that remains is the memory of grimacing blonds on choppers. Good advertising, like good art. should be the same in any language. Warhol got it right with Coca—Cola: a Coke‘s a Coke in any language. (Alexander Kennedy)
MIXED MEDIA LOOKING BOTH WAYS
City Art Centre, Edinburgh, Until Sun 11 Sep .00.
Subtitled ‘Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora“. this show at Edinburgh's City Art Centre comes as a none-more-timely reminder of the culture that people were marching for. fighting for and trying to make heard during the carnival which surrounded the G8 summit. Most refreshingly, however. it doesn't offer simply a picture postcard view of the African continent. but revels in the new ideas and
viewpoints of the region's contemporary artists.
The particular twist is that. while the dozen artists exhibiting were all born in Africa. they all live and work in other parts of the world. So from France to Portugal and Scotland to the United States. the show offers a mature and international viewpoint. rather than simply an inward-looking one.
The centrepiece. in scale perhaps as much as the idea. is Yinka Shonibare's ‘Scramble for Africa‘ (pictured). It shows life-size wax models of European leaders at the Berlin Conference which divided the continent into colonised sections. each of them without a head yet gesticulating feverishly. As political comment on our
own times goes. it couldn't be more succinct.
Other work is equally politicised. such as Fernando Alvim's embroidered flags. One has white stars stitched onto a lush white background. yet each star features the name of a country the United States has gone to war with — again. not overly subtle, but precise and effective. Then there are simple ruminations on ideas of nationhood and identity, although Wangechi Mutu's Fungus series considers these in a fantastical. futuristic set of mixed media collages. Beyond the merits of the work. however. this show comes most recommended simply for the many
preconceptions it blows up. (David Pollock)
PHOTOGRAPHY JO SPENOE Streetlevel, Edinburgh, until Sat 30 Jul 000
Splattered in war paint and hooded with a balaclava, a naked woman gnashes her teeth ferociously, pulling back the string of a loaded children’s catapult and aiming it at us. This is Jo Spence and she’s not going quietly.
Coming to prominence during the 705 feminist movement, Spence is most renowned for her innovation of using the camera as a therapy tool. Her own eventually fatal experience of leukaemia and breast cancer provoked her into developing an informal phototherapy, in which her ability to control and produce images was also a personal expression of pain and identity.
This sense of self-definition filters through all the photographs here. One particularly poignant image appears like a film still — Spence’s mournful face in extreme close-up and lit with a transcendent glow. Just as powerful but perhaps too sensationalist are the images for which she is more famous, in which her large exposed breast is labelled ‘property of Jo Spence?’, or her whole body is branded with the slogan ‘monster’. Her
Visual Art f
role-play sometimes seems a tedious derivation of Cindy Sherman’s work. But this kind of confrontation is also didactic - Spence is interested in photography as an educational, experimental and political device. She spurns the myth of the ‘genius’ artist, often working collaboratively or within workshops, where the role of educator is just as important as that of the artist.
The final series in the gallery displays some of the early 90$ montages Spence was working on just prior to her death, and remarkably seem to predict the early directions of digital photography. Her symbolism is clear. Skeletons and skulls weave their way into images, and the ghostly memento mori is impossible to ignore as it casts long shadows over her work. Spence wrote ‘what can a woman do with a camera?’ She seems to have answered that very well.
Such a diverse body of images is hard to present, however. And the work here sometimes seems more like a heavily abridged chronicle than a concise display of the work of a photographer whose thinking was quite revolutionary.
(lsla Leaver-Yap)
amble for Africa’ by Yinka Shonibare
91 Jill 4 Aug) i’llllf) THE LIST 91