As the title suggests, this group exhibition has an awful lot going on. Housed in the paradoxically grand, yet industrial, Store X building on the Strand, ‘Everything At Once’ is a showcase of work by 24 artists held at the Lisson Gallery to mark its 50th anniversary.
Allora & Calzadilla, Shapeshifter
Curated by Greg Hilty and Ossian Ward in collaboration with Store X The Vinyl Factory, the show is both a celebration and an examination; the selected works offering a lens that “probes the multi-sensory simultaneity of contemporary life.” Indeed, whilst the show takes in half a century of art through 45 individual pieces, this is hardly your conventional museum-style retrospective.
Susan Hiller, Channels
Richard Deacon, Infinity & Ai Weiwei, Odyssey
Anish Kapoor, At the edge of the world
Firstly, the building itself is a hybrid beast made up of an either half started or half redecorated rooms (it’s hard to say in places). But to add to this, on first inspection it feels like there is no rhyme or reason as to how the works have been selected and curated. Turn one corner and you’re faced with a series of Ai Weiwei sculptures and an enormous wallpaper piece, another and you are tucked beneath an eerily silent and womb-like piece by Anish Kapoor, and then in another you are confronted by Susan Hiller’s countless flickering TV screens filled with once familiar static.
Tony Cragg, Minster
Dan Graham, Two V's entrance way
The maze-like warren of rooms that twist and turn across three floors serve to keep visitors intrigued, unsettled and enthralled – and they do so deliberately. The works on show, the space in which they are on display and the manner in which they are laid out serve to make a salient point – in contemporary life we are constantly bombarded, simultaneously and from all angles, on a daily basis. We are multi-sensory beings with ever-accelerated means by which to “live in the all-at-once”.
The seed is sown when first entering the building, as you are immediately submerged into darkness and quite suddenly overawed and powered by the flashing lights of Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s Test Pattern – but we’ll share that in a separate article, it’s too much to explain now!
Ryoji Ikeda, Test Pattern
Everything At Once takes place from 5 October – 10 December 2017 at Store Studios, 180 The Strand.
Showing:
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ – AI WEIWEI – ALLORA & CALZADILLA – ART & LANGUAGE –CORY ARCANGEL – TONY CRAGG – RICHARD DEACON –NATHALIE DJURBERG & HANS BERG –CEAL FLOYER – RYAN GANDER– DAN GRAHAM – RODNEY GRAHAM – SUSAN HILLER – SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY – ANISH KAPOOR – LEE UFAN – RICHARD LONG –HAROON MIRZA – TATSUO MIYAJIMA – JULIAN OPIE – LAURE PROUVOST – WAEL SHAWKY – LAWRENCE WEINER – STANLEY WHITNEY
