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Edel Assanti London 18 January to 9 March
It seems impossible, but it's real. The TV on the wall is emitting white light, but when you look through a glass disk positioned in front of the screen, it is revealed to be playing the 2010 WikiLeaks video of US airstrikes in Iraq, Collateral Murder. This piece, Emmanuel van der Auwera's White Noise, 2018, exploits LCD TVs' reliance on polarising filters to make their images visible. Van der Auwera has removed the TV's surface filter and instead applied one to the glass disk, hence the seemingly magical effect. The work refers to state control of imagery (see Francis Frascina's feature 'Gaza' in AM325) and the idea that the viewer who consumes broadcast media is no longer passive; it is the most concise piece in this compelling show of international political work.
The exhibition's opening couple of works, being fragments of larger projects, are less immediately engaging. Ann Jermolaewa's Political Extras, 2015, is presented as a video documenting the original action at the Moscow Biennale when the artist recruited 'protesters' to take part in demonstrations for and against the biennale. While the video reveals additional details - soon-to-be protesters ask what a biennale is - it obviously lacks the tension of the original performance. Similarly, Victoria Lomasko's epic Other Russias, 2008-17, is represented only by a dozen textless drawings. Lomasko is a graphic artist and activist, and her extraordinary work of 'graphic journalism' documenting Russia's varied social strata more properly exists in the form of a 300-page book (perusable at the gallery desk). These two works do, however, introduce themes of populism and political agency, the central tenets of the exhibition.
Things start to get real with Nikita Kadan's Tiger's Leap, 2018, a 2-metre metal spike that simultaneously suggests flagpoles, bayonets and lightning rods; apt, perhaps, considering the form is derived from...