I was drawn to West Space’s current exhibition Inheritance with the promise of divination; artist Phuong Ngo guiding participants to ask yes/no questions to be answered by the French Indochinese coins of his maternal grandmother. While I don’t particularly believe in fortune telling or any other similarly woo woo aligned practices, I do however believe in using these exercises as tools of reflection to better understand the self. I sat down with Phuong and asked the coins my first question: Am I on the right path, right now? and got what Phuong described as a ‘sarcastic no’ from the ancestors. I’m choosing to take this as their concern for my chosen career path in the arts, including my upcoming graduation from my Master’s degree with no immediate job prospects or leads of any kind. (I want a job!! I’m simply begging at this point!!) But anyway … I asked the coins a second question, and it appears the ancestors seem to think my love life is on the right track, so that’s some kind of consolation prize at least? I guess??

I often find that curator’s texts that accompany exhibitions leave me more confused after reading them. Instead of making the vision clearer, I’m usually left with the feeling that the curator wants me to think they’re smarter than me, and that they see something in the work that I don’t. Maybe in part that’s my own insecurity about not “getting it” coming through, but also in part I think it’s a hatred for the over intellectualisation of art and the aptly named “art wank” of it all. BUT!!! Ava Leach-Absalom and Mia Lewin manage to avoid this and instead leave me with a text which “evokes a world of memory not as a linear archive but a flickering presence” - a piece of writing that truly pulls this show together. And! their writing mirrors George Trackl’s poem from which they’ve drawn their inspiration! Oddaný’s current show draws its title from George Trakl’s Memory (fragment); Silently, childhood’s crystalline paths sank in the garden. Memories and remnants of the past are threads that draw this exhibition together, as well as an aesthetic sensibility full of soft neutrals contrasting an industrial feeling.

Not to be a hater, but hearing that the artists for Blindside’s current Debut XXI exhibition were drawn from recent art school graduates, I didn’t have particularly high expectations. Maybe that’s just me being jaded from my own experience at art school, especially with our grad show that never really was (2020 lockdown grad here 😬). BUT! I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised by Debut XXI, but I was actually incredibly taken with the whole show. Curators Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Veronica Charmont have brought together work by seven artists and created an exhibition that not only works seamlessly, but even reflects back glowingly on art schools for shaping these emerging artists.