German-born, Mariele Neudecker lives and works in Bristol. She is best known for her vitrines containing landscapes of forests, lakes or mountains together with simulated weather effects. These often evoke other pictures or artists. Also using sculpture, film and photography, Neudecker creates a playful frisson between historical representations of the sublime landscape and our perception, imagination and memory of experience. This exhibition, first shown at Tate St Ives, presented her work in the context of JMW Turner and explored her interrogation of the cultural phenomenon of Romanticism and its elevation of nature and landscape into vehicles for emotional transcendence, philosophical contemplation and cultural identity.
Zardad’s Dog is a short film edited from live footage that the artists shot at the first capital trial since the fall of the Taliban. Filmed in the Supreme Court in Kabul in October 2002, the film depicts a crowded, rather run-down courtroom presided over by armed guards. Abdullah Shah, nicknamed Zardad's Dog because of his penchant for biting his victims before murdering them, is said to have killed three of his wives and five of his children. The video is simply edited, with only basic explanation provided. The introductory religious blessing, the prosecutor’s speech, the witness statements and the defence’s personal response, are all spoken in Afghan, yet we clearly follow the range of emotions, from fear to defiance to gravity to hope, and the significance of this historic event transcends language.
The Upper Room consists of thirteen paintings displayed in an environment especially designed by the architect David Adjaye. When it was first publicly exhibited in 2002, critics commented on the chapel-like qualities of the space and its lighting. The arrangement of twelve canvases flanking a thirteenth larger one suggests Christ and his Apostles, and the arrangement has an extraordinary sensory effect.
Each painting shows a rhesus macaque monkey, and each is dominated by a different colour, identified in Spanish on the elephant dung supports. In a text that accompanied the work’s first exhibition, a conservation biologist described the rhesus macaque as ‘loud, active, entertaining, fearsomely intelligent – the consummate cheeky monkey’.
With this work Ofili raises questions about the relationships between civilization and untamed nature, between the religious and the secular.
This exhibition surveyed the art of John Latham. In the course of a career that spanned more than 50 years, Latham came to occupy an important and distinctive position in contemporary art. Working in a variety of media he belonged to no particular artistic tendency. Nevertheless, the contribution he made to painting, assemblage, performance, book art, Conceptual art and film was significant. The basis for all his activities and ways of working was his world view, an outlook that exploded conventional systems of thought and was essentially visionary.
Latham saw the ills and conflicts that beset mankind as the result of differences in ideology. He attributed these differences to the absence of a single theory capable of explaining the universe and man's position within it. The theoretical framework he evolved sought to provide a unified explanation of existence.
