Skip to main content

Ibrahim Mahama: Parliament of Ghosts; David Lynch: My Head Is Disconnected – review

Whitworth Art Gallery; Home, Manchester
The Ghanaian artist resurrects the detritus of his nation’s post-colonial industry, while Lynch’s painting is predictably Lynchian

The central room of Ibrahim Mahama’s textured and provocative installation transports you 5,000 miles, and then some. A space is created at the heart of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery by tiered seats on four sides. The seats, in an unforgiving, utilitarian mushroom-coloured plastic, polished by countless backsides, each saw decades of service in the second-class carriages of Ghana’s railroad before Mahama shipped them here from the scrapyard. For the empty seats that was the last leg of a very long open-return journey: they were originally made in a factory either in Manchester or Leeds.

The émigré “ghost parliament” they now propose in the gallery is potent with debates: between their quiet, transplanted present and their rattling, storied past, between Britain and its former Gold Coast colony, between the repurposed port cities of Manchester and Accra, once twin engines of empire, and the people who lived and worked and died in them.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SKQi5z
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more