RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (15 – 20 June)

Posted: 14 June 2012 by Sam Phillips

Oil boom, Delta burns: photographs by George Osodi
15 June 2012 to 2 June 2013
Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum has a commitment to contemporary human rights issues and the legacy as well as the history of slavery.

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From Friday the Lagos-born photographer George Osodi presents his six-year project that vividly documents the living conditions of Nigerians on the Niger Delta, an area exploited for oil by multinationals since the 1950s. The 37-year-old artist’s focus, in his words, is ‘the duality of life in the region: children playing football in a field with gas flaring in the background, women fishing in polluted waters.’

Leah Gordon, 'Blanche', 2011. © Riflemaker gallery and Leah Gordon Leah Gordon: Caste
Until 14 July
Liverpool-born photographer, filmaker and curator Leah Gordon expands her impressive body of work with a series of new photographs entitled 'Caste', which appropriate the classification system for skin colour created by French colonialist Moreau de St Mery, while he was living in Haiti during the slave plantation period in the eighteenth-century.

On display at Riflemaker, Soho, Gordon presents nine black-and white portraits representing de St Mery’s nine classifications, from ‘Blanche’ to ‘Noir’, casting herself as the former and her partner, Haitian sculptor Andre Eugene, as the latter. The subjects are all posed to simulate Renaissance portraits.

Barbara Rae RA: New Paintings from Ireland and Spain
16 June – 7 July 2012
*Following on from her London showing, Adam Gallery, Bath, stages a show of Academician Barbara Rae’s vibrant recent paintings on paper from Saturday - although a number remain on view in Cork Street for Londoners. Rae’s kaleidoscopic palette and energetic mark-making capture the glorious West Coast of Ireland, as well as the countryside around Casarabonela – close to Spain’s Sierra de las Nieves national park – as the sun rises and sets.

Barbara Rae RA, 'Alozaina Terraces', mixed media on paper. 57 x 63 cm.

Gillian Wearing RA, 'Dancing in Peckham', 1994. Colour video with sound. 25 minutes. © the artist. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Gillian Wearing RA
LAST CHANCE: Until 17 June 2012
This Sunday see the doors close at London’s Whitechapel Gallery on a major survey of Academician Gillian Wearing’s photographs and films.

The Birmingham-born, London-based artist’s series spotlights the dissonance between public appearance and private selves, most famously with the series Signs that say what you want them to say, and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992–3), photographic portraits in which people she approached on the street held up their hand-written thoughts.

She readily turns to herself as subject matter in unorthodox ways, for instance in Dancing in Peckham (1994), where Wearing dances to sounds in her head in the middle of a London shopping centre as passers-by look on confounded.

Work in focus – Invisible Art: Art about the Unseen, 1957–2012
Until 6 August 2012
Instead of an obvious crowd-pleaser, London’s Hayward Gallery has bravely opted for a complex, firmly conceptualist exhibition this summer: ‘Invisible Art’, on the subject of immaterial artworks or pieces that explore invisibility, absence and the unknown. An example is Invisible Sculpture (1985) by Andy Warhol, which was originally ‘installed’ in a New York nightclub. The American artist stood on a plinth for a short time before stepping off, in the words of Hayward director Ralph Rugoff ‘presumably leaving traces of his resonant celebrity aura orbiting in its airspace’. Visitors now just see the empty plinth and the wall label. Could there be a better exemplification of the insubstantial, chimeric nature of fame?

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine