All posts tagged dance

Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

From the press photos I wasn’t anticipating too much but ‘Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary’ turns out to be a really interesting and rewarding exhibition, fully deserving the two floors of gallery space given over to it.

First room of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery

One of the problems is the promotion web pages and images just show one photo at a time and some of them look a bit meh, don’t feel that good, as a group they don’t add up to a unified look’ etc. It’s only when you get to the exhibition that you realise a number of key facts which transform your understanding.

1. Amateur Boris Mikhailov got into photography by accident, had no formal training, and so was free to invent and make things up. A lot of these innovations are really interesting.

2. Articulate Mikhailov is a very good explainer of his own work, so the wall labels which explain it are not only informative but his explanations of his innovations are unusually inspiring and interesting.

3. Bad photography One of these was the simple idea of bad photography. In the Soviet Union photography was a profession like any other, heavily controlled by the state with approved styles and qualities to promote uplifting images of perfect life in the workers’ state.

Mikhailov opened up a whole new world when he realised that bad, out of focus, poorly framed, damaged images were themselves a valid aesthetic, and a political statement. Badly printed, damaged or poor-quality productions were, he realised, the appropriate response to the shabby reality of Soviet life: ‘lousy photography for a lousy reality’. This explains why some of the images, when seen in isolation on a web page are only meh, whereas seen en masse, and accompanied by an eloquent explanation, they gain so much more power.

4. Sets It also explains why Mikhailov’s images are conceived and designed to be seen in sets and the sets don’t just represent a new subject, but the best of them embody an entirely new technique and way of thinking about photography. As he explains:

‘The idea that a single picture contains maximum information is a lie; I don’t believe in absolute truth. Exploring something from many different angles gives you a heightened sense of the truth. I need the sum of the images, the sum of the sequences in order to cast doubt on the correctness of one single, possible perception. The vibration between the images expands their possibilities.’

Biography

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1938, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Having trained as an engineer, he was first introduced to photography when he was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he worked. He took advantage of this opportunity to take nude photographs of his first wife – an act forbidden under Soviet norms – which he developed and printed in the factory’s laboratory. He was fired when the photographs were found by KGB agents. From then he pursued photography full time, using it as a subversive tool and operating as part of the underground art scene.

His work first gained international exposure in the 1990s with the series ‘Case History’, a shockingly direct portrayal of the realities of post-Soviet life in the Ukraine. Having learned of him via his post-USSR collapse photos, Western fans were then able to go back and review his subversive works from the 1970s and ’80s. This exhibition presents the complete body of his work in chronological order.

‘Ukrainian Diary’ brings together work from over twenty of Mikhailov’s most important series, including:

Slideshow: Yesterday’s Sandwich (mid-’60s to 1970s)

One day he threw a couple of slides onto his bed and they stuck together. When he held the stuck slides up to the light he realised they made a dramatically surreal image and hence was born the series ‘Yesterday’s Sandwich’. As he experimented with the technique he realised the juxtaposition of random images could be thought of as reflecting the dualism and contradictions of Soviet society.

His commentary is fascinating. He explains that the 60s and 70s were a time, in all the countries of the Soviet bloc, of hidden messages and secret codes. No-one took official propaganda seriously but all organs of free expression were ruthlessly suppressed. Hence codes and secret signs and hidden allusions. In actual fact no particular ‘message’ emerges from these images except a surreal subversion of the normal, logical, sensible everyday world.

Nearly 100 of these wonderfully funny, crazy, surreal images are here displayed as a slideshow projected onto the wall of a darkened space in the gallery. For some reason they are displayed to a severely edited version of the classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon’ which Mikhailov considers an ‘exaggeration of beauty’ conveying a kind of ‘paradise lost’. It makes it an even more surreal experience, watching images from a distant and vanished society accompanied by such a familiar homely soundtrack.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the composite images in the Yesterday’s Sandwich slideshow (photo by the author)

Black Archive (1968 to 1979)

‘Black Archive’ documents everyday life in Kharkiv, often revealing the disparity between public life and private life in domestic spaces. Under Soviet rule it was forbidden to photograph everyday life and so Mikhailov was forced to hide his camera in order to take furtive snapshots, often taken from behind and at odd angles. By contrast, the private sphere of people’s apartments was a space of freedom, most vividly expressed in the carefree nudity of many of his subjects.

But in the series Mikhailov also deploys his concept of ‘bad photography’— the deliberate production of sloppily printed, blurred, and low-contrast images full of visible flaws — as a metaphor and a tool for social critique.

Red (1968 to 1978)

The set ‘Red’ brings together more than 70 images taken in Kharkiv in the late 1960s and 1970s, all of which contain the colour red. From the wall labels we learn that red was a powerful symbol of the Russian Revolution (1917) and of the Soviet Union (1922 to 1991). Its presence in these varied photos indicates the extent to which communist ideology saturated everyday life. As usual Mikhailov explains all this in his vivid and fascinating way:

‘The word “red” in Russian has the same root as the word for beauty, it also means revolution and evokes blood and the red flag. Everyone associated red with communism. But few people realised that red had permeated all our lives. Demonstrations and parades are an important part of this series. It’s a place where one of the main images of Soviet propaganda—the face of happy Soviet life, secure in its future—was created. They became absolutely kitschy and vulgar… I sometimes felt that I was surrounded by a herd of cynics, victims, and fools, followed by people wearing red ribbons as if they were policemen. As if the regime was using the people’s desire to celebrate for its own ends. And it was important to me to photograph them in such a way that you could tell the “Soviet” from the “human”.’

From the series ‘Red’ by Boris Mikhailov (1968-75) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Luriki (Coloured Soviet Portraits) (1971 to 1985)

After losing his job as an engineer, Mikhailov managed to make a living as a commercial photographer, sometimes working on the black market, enlarging, retouching, and hand-colouring snapshots of weddings, newborns or family members lost in the war.

In what is considered the first use of found material in contemporary Soviet photography, Mikhailov then appropriated and reworked these manipulated photographs for his own practice. Often using vibrant or exaggerated colours, he made them more ‘beautiful’, staying within the law while simultaneously mocking the way Soviet propaganda glorified mundane events.

By means of these simple techniques, Luriki comically undermined the absurdity of the iconography of Soviet life. Grouped together, the pictures are like a Soviet family album, a collection of surreal, ridiculous situations.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing one of the Luriki images (photo by the author)

Dance (1978)

Apparently open-air dancing was a popular activity in Soviet Kharkiv. Mikhailov has a lovely set depicting people of all ages, sizes and shape, in 1970s Soviet clothes, sedately dancing, quite often women dancing with other women.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Dance photos (photo by the author)

Series of Four (early 1980s)

One wall is covered with these images grouped into sets of four. This came about by accident. Mikhailov set out to wander the streets of Kharkiv and take photos of nothing, of non-events, designed to capture the boredom and emptiness of Soviet life. But when he came to make contact prints he realised he didn’t have small-format paper so he put four images together on one sheet. At a stroke he realised he’d created something: the multiple points of view of the same scene creates complex effects. Suddenly a boring scene becomes part of a fragmented, multi-angled world. Presented in this way, they can also have a cinematic effect, telling a story in snapshots. And another effect is to create out of a mundane non-space a kind of cocoon, creating a compression of space, imbuing an anonymous nowhere with strange fugitive meanings.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Series of Four photos (photo by the author)

Crimean Snobbism (1982)

Mikhailov went to Gursuf, a seaside resort on the Crimean Peninsula and took portraits of himself, wife and friends frolicking by the seaside, adopting holiday poses etc. As with many of his sets, Mikhailov gave them a sepia tone, making them feel historic and detached from the present, and also suggesting their subversive intent. Because the entire set is intended as a parody of the kind of carefree, bourgeois lifestyle then associated with ‘the West’ and far beyond the reach of your average Ukrainian citizen, and which he satirises in phrases: ‘We’re so happy. We’re so beautiful. We’re so in love etc’.

Viscidity (1982)

In another interesting experiment, in the early 1980s Mikhailov started combining text and image together in a conceptual way: he glued his photographs carelessly onto sheets of paper, then scribbled thoughts—banal, poetic, or philosophical—in the margins. His fragmentary thoughts were not intended as captions, nor to illustrate or elucidate the photographs; they were often utterly unrelated to them and intended to be equally important, a composite reflection on the social stagnation of the Soviet Union.

‘Viscidity’ is the word he used to describe the period the country was living through at the time — ‘a peaceful, quiet, featureless, dull life, a time of deep political stagnation, a frozen day-to-dayness. There was no catharsis, no nostalgia, just grey, everyday life. Nothing was happening, nothing was at all interesting.’ Hence ‘lousy photographs with these lousy texts’, ‘unchanging ordinariness and timelessness.’

Unfinished dissertation (1984-5)

On the back of the tattered pages of a stranger’s university dissertation found in a rubbish bin, Mikhailov pasted poorly printed black-and-white photos of inconsequential moments and then jotted down his thoughts about art and life in the margins. The photos don’t synch with the text, neither shedding light on each other, except obliquely.

Salt Lake (1986)

Mikhailov’s father used to tell him about a salt lake in southern Ukraine where people went to bathe in the 1920s and ’30s, believing that the warm, salty water had healing properties. When Mikhailov went to visit himself he found the crowds of people on the beach near to a disused old factory, washing themselves in the factory pipes and smearing themselves with mud.

He found it ‘the quintessence of an average person’s life in the Soviet context. Despite the horrible, polluted, inhuman environment, the people were relaxed, calm, and happy.’ To the modern Western ye, this looks like a gallery of grotesques in a grim, squalid environment.

Later Mikhailov toned his images sepia, like photographs from another era and explains: ‘There was a kind of an interplay there, a fusion between the old and the new. Old, because it was something my father had seen, and at the same time a reality that still existed… An elaboration of an idea I’d explored before: we’re both there and not there, it’s both today and a long time ago.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the Salt Lake photos (photo by the author)

By The Ground (1991)

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Mikhailov took to the streets with his panoramic camera slung low around his waist. While the panoramic format is conventionally used for sweeping vistas and beautiful landscapes Mikhailov captured bleak street scenes which captured the shabby poverty of the streets.

Mikhailov also devised a protocol for installing the series: the prints are hung low on the wall, forcing the viewer to stoop down to see the images, as if to bring us closer to his subjects. As with previous sets, he also treated the images, toning the silver prints brown, imbuing them images with a sense of nostalgia. As always his own comments on his process are fascinating:

‘I “aged” the images by toning them in sepia… embedding the photos in layers of time to trigger parallel, photo-historical associations, to show that photography has become as elusive as existence itself.’

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing some of the By The Ground wide-angle photos (photo by the author)

I am not I (1992)

A series of nude self portraits in which Mikhailov parodies traditional masculine stereotypes. The stereotypes he mocks are those promoted by the recently collapsed USSR but they are also recognisable as American stereotypes too. Thus he photographs himself in a range of comic or demeaning poses, wearing an absurd curly wig, holding a toy sword or, most strikingly, an artificial phallus. Like all the sets, these gain in meaning and humour when you see 20 variations next to each other.

From the series ‘I am not I’ by Boris Mikhailov (1992) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Green (1991 to 1993)

In the early 1990s Mikhailov produced a series of hand-coloured photographs known as the ‘Green’ series. The images are suffused with a lingering, toxic green tint to reflect the environmental decay and societal collapse following the fall of the Soviet Union. The series is represented here by a monumental triptych showing a decaying junkyard in an overgrown landscape. The colour green has a particular resonance for Mikhailov who says it is the colour of a swamp and indicates the moss which had grown on Soviet life, a metaphor for Soviet decay.

In earlier sets he had had photographed people living in poverty, drug addiction and social degradation using a disposable camera and cheap gelatin silver paper to evoke awkwardness and fragility. Here, he takes the concept further, using stains and drips of paint on the thin, crumpled paper as if to embody the worn, impoverished landscape and lives he saw around him.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing ‘Green’ (photo by the author)

At Dusk (1993)

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union Mikhailov wandered the streets of Kharkiv with a swing-lens camera that took in a 120-degree panoramic view, capturing the life of destitute people on the streets. He tinted all the images a heavy cobalt blue. Why? Several reasons: the colour (along with the title) indicate the transition from day to night. But blue also represents his boyhood memories of the Second World War, of fleeing with his mother on one of the last freight trains out of Kharkiv to escape the Nazi advance. Blue, he explains, is the colour of blockade, hunger and war. Tinting these images of street people the same colour a) indicates the severity of the crisis of poverty which hit his country and b) also produces images of intense and haunting beauty.

From the series ‘At Dusk’ by Boris Mikhailov (1993) © Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Boris and Vita Mikhailov

Case History (1997 to 98)

A few years after the collapse of communism, Mikhailov realised that in his hometown of Kharkiv, not only had a new ruling elite of millionaires emerged, but a significant part of the population had also been plunged into poverty. The mid-1990s produced a new group of people, the bomzhes or homeless.

So Mikhailov set about photographing these pitiful people, right at the bottom of society. He produced a series of 400 raw portraits. As with other sets, he deliberately transgressed the codes of photojournalism by paying his subjects, and he and his wife Vita also often offered them hot meals in exchange for posing. Some of the poses are stage in the manner of the Pietà or the Descent from the Cross.

This exhibition shows one image of one abject couple blown up on the wall and a display case of 100 small test prints from his archive. They are pitiful to look at.

Installation view of Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary @ the Photographers’ Gallery showing the one blown-up image and 100 test prints from ‘Case Study’ (photo by the author)

Reflecting on these images the next day, I realised that their abjectness is emphasised by their nudity. What I mean is that, unless you have a buff toned body, most of us already look a bit embarrassing when naked and caught in everyday postures, in the shower, getting out of bed etc. Many (half?) of the shots in the Case History exacerbate the poverty and squalor of the subjects by showing old, ugly, maimed or ill people, naked or half-clothed. What I’m trying to convey is how this nudity powerfully amplifies the general air of degradation and humiliation.

The Theatre of War, Second Act, Time Out (2013 to 2014)

Euromaidan or the Maidan Uprising was a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protests in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv. The protests were sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s sudden decision not to sign the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. Ukraine’s parliament had overwhelmingly approved of finalizing the Agreement with the EU but Russia had put pressure on Ukraine to reject it.

In late December 2013 Boris and Vita Mikhailov documented the protests, photographing protestors who had pitched their tents in the central square in Kyiv. Mikhailov comments that the situation was so tense that scenes felt like they had been staged. ‘The bonfires, the colours, the lights, the people sitting there exhausted — everything created a general feeling of tension. It was unclear how it would all end.’

The protests succeeded in forcing President Viktor Yanukovych to flee to Russia but soon afterwards, on 27 February 2014, Russian forces occupied the Crimea, starting the Russo-Ukrainian War which continues to this day.

Thoughts

Many of Mikhailov’s images are very strong in their own right, and display adeptness in an extraordinary range of styles, from the photojournalism of Salt Lake to the nostalgic surrealism of Yesterday’s Sandwich, the warlike intensity of the At Dusk series to the blistering poverty porn of the miserable Case Histories.

But as well as the appeal of individual images, or the impact of specific sets, the exhibition as a whole builds up into a powerful portrait of life in a Soviet state – to the shabby, unhealthy, stiflingly boring nature of life under communism – and then after 1990, to the catastrophic collapse in living standards for large swathes of the population in post-Soviet society.

It’s not only an impressive body of work by a consistently inventive and innovative artist, but a powerful portrait and indictment of life in Soviet and post-Soviet regimes.

Video

This is not the usual 30-second exhibition promotional video but an extended, 14-minute-long interview with Mikhailov which really brings over how articulate and interesting he is.

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by Simon on January 12, 2026  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 12, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/01/12/boris-mikhailov-ukrainian-diary-the-photographers-gallery/

Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Tate Modern

‘I paint my plant, the one I am named after… I am Kam.’

I fell instantly in love with contemporary Aboriginal art when I saw my first big selection of a range of artists at the British Museum’s Indigenous Australia exhibition back in 2015. Examples are on permanent display in the Museum’s Room 24.

What makes this exhibition at Tate Modern different from the BM shows is that it focuses on just one artist, Emily Kam Kngwarray. I expected to enjoy it but wondered whether one artist could justify having an entire suite of Tate Modern galleries devoted to her. The answer is a triumphant and eye-opening Yes!

Ntang Dreaming by Emily Kam Kngwarray, (1989) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025

Background

Emily Kam Kngwarray (born around 1910, died in 1996) was an Aboriginal Australian artist from Alhalker, in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory. The exhibition opens with a map and a detailed explanation of the tribal group she hailed from, along with some explanation of their traditions and languages, before going on to explain how Kngwarray’s paintings transmit stories and knowledge about the land and its peoples and flora and fauna which have been handed down over countless generations.

Kngwarray began her career in art relatively late: she worked with batik in the 1970s before transitioning to painting on canvas from the late 1980s. It was only in 1988 that she painted her first acrylic work, ‘Emu Woman’. Thus she was in her late 70s when she began painting in earnest, and for the next eight years until her death she painted prolifically, producing a substantial body of work that continues to make impact today. According to Wikipedia:

In 1996 Kngwarray died and in 1997 she posthumously represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. Her work has made an immense impact in Australia and globally, and has inspired many new generations of Aboriginal artists from Australia.

Her work is rarely seen outside Australia so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see now fewer than 80 works collected in one place, and it feels awesome. To quote the curators:

Over half a century ago, Aboriginal artists from Central Australia began experimenting with new ways of expressing their ongoing cultural traditions. For millennia they had drawn on the ground, etched designs into rock and wood, and painted on the body for ceremonies. They then started to create art using watercolour and acrylic paint, and techniques such as batik. Emily Kam Kngwarray was at the forefront of this artistic revolution. Her unique style and powerful creative vision gained international attention, redefining the scope of contemporary art across the world.

Her works initially feel abstract but are laced with figurative motifs derived from the distinct wildlife and geology of the desert ecosystems around her. In among the abstract fields of coloured dots you can make out schematic depictions of vines, seeds, lizards and emus.

Not titled by Emily Kam Kngwarray (1981) National Gallery of Australia © Estate of Emily Kam Kngwarray / DACS 2024, All rights reserved

Two types of information

The facts come in two flavours: 1) one is the extensive explanation of the Aboriginal culture Kngwarray was raised in and expresses in her works, quite a lot of information about a culture so different from ours that it’s sometimes quite challenging to process and remember all of it.

2) The second category is information about the shape of her career, above all the way Kngwarray evolved her style over her last few decade and experimented with different media, namely acrylic painting and batik. The shape of her career can be summarised as:

  • early batiks on silk or cotton
  • the first paintings on canvas
  • large-scale canvases
  • later, gestural works

From the early detailed batik dots to the later gestural lines, her colour palette broadens over time as the scale becomes steadily more monumental.

Aboriginal culture

Here are some of the key points about the Aboriginal culture she came from and depicted:

Dreamings

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, the concept of the Dreaming or Creation time is fundamental to their social, cultural and spiritual practices. Ancestral beings, popularly known as Dreamings, manifest themselves in Country and its many diverse life forms. Plants, animals and natural phenomena, such as wind, fire and rain, travel across Country, shaping landscapes as they go. Important places and their Dreamings are celebrated in songs and ceremonies. Of special significance to Kngwarray are ankerr (emus) and anwerlarr (pencil yams). Emily was herself was named after kam, the seeds and seedpods of the pencil yam.

Anwerlarr (pencil yam) by Emily Kam Kngwarray (1990) National Gallery of Australia © Estate of Emily Kam Kngwarray / DACS 2024, All rights reserved

Landscape

‘Landscape’ triggers misleading connotations if we think about it in the Western sense, as a territory which is essentially passive, either having been tamed by agriculture and land management, or wild in a carefully curated scenic way. For Kngwarray and her people ‘landscape’ refers to a sense of the relationships between all the elements of a territory, of the plants, animals, ancestors, tracks, ceremonies, seeds and more.

Ankerr

In Anmatyerr culture emus – large, flightless birds – are highly respected and the people have developed a rich and extensive lexicon of terms exclusively for them. For example, there are specific words for young and old emus as well as particular terms for parts of their bodies – their necks, feet and feathers – that do not apply to any other bird or animal.

Emu woman by Emily Kam Kngwarray (1988–89) © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency. Licensed by DACS 2025

Batiks

Batik is a form of textile art, originally from Indonesia. Artists draw their designs on the fabric with hot wax, using a brush or a small spouted tool called a canting. They can also use a wooden or metal stamp called a cap to make imprints with the wax. A batik artist must work quickly, before the wax cools. When the fabric is immersed in dye, the wax resists the dye, so only the parts without wax take up the colour. After the fabric is dry, the cloth can be waxed and dyed again to create elaborate, multicoloured designs. The beauty of the batik is fully revealed after the wax is removed.

One of the rooms in the exhibition contains a series of these batiks suspended to form a succession of hangings. These are wonderful and I returned to them again and again to savour their lovely designs, patterns, swirling shapes and vibrant colours.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing a set of her batik works (photo by the author)

Mid-period: the Alhalker Suite (1993)

The Alhalker Suite is widely seen as one of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s crowning achievements. It represents the desert country of her birth and conveys the cycles of nature and the spiritual forces that inhabit the landscape. The 22 panels take up a big wall and describe the land in flood, celebrating the coming of rain after long periods of drought. After the rain, brilliantly coloured wildflowers carpet the landscape and the soft-looking spinifex bushes appear beside the desert oak trees and blossoming wattle.

According to the curators, the 22 panels of this work can be displayed in any order as she didn’t determine the sequence or impose any limitations on the overall configuration. Each display creates a new combination.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing the 22 panels of the Alhalker Suite (1993) (photo by the author)

As you can see, these mid-90s paintings have gone beyond the early ‘dot’ paintings to use much bigger washes of colour, bigger chunks or blocks or shapes of colour. The effect is very different from the earlier works, a completely different aesthetic.

Gestural works / lines

In the mid-1990s, Kngwarray started working with thick stripes or lines of acrylic paint on paper and canvas (see installation view below). They are displayed in a room of their own and walking into this space is to enter another visual world, quite distinct from the batik/dot paintings, and from the blocks-of-colour works. This is something else again. Cumulatively, the effect of walking into each new room, each with a substantially different look and feel, really conveys the sense of a major artist who went through a number of styles and approaches, creating lovely works in each of them.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing some of her line or stripe paintings (photo by the author)

These stripe-line-gestural works may look the most abstract of her work but are actually derived from real objects. Some derive from awelye, the designs which Anmatyerr women paint on their bodies to take part in ceremonies (see video still below). Others, like the network of black lines on the work on the left in the photo below, reflect the complex network of vines thrown out by pencil yams across the surface of the earth.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern showing some of her line or stripe paintings (photo by the author)

Portrait of the artist

Photo of Emily Kam Kngwarray painting at Delmore Downs Station in 1994, taken by Greg Weight. I was pleased to see that she’s a southpaw, like me.

Emily Kam Kngwarray. Photo by Greg Weight

The video

One room is given over to a video. In early 2023, a women’s camp was held in Alhalker and Anangker Countries as part of the community consultations for this exhibition. It was an occasion for remembrance, reunion and celebration. The women searched for anwerlarr yams (pencil yams), which were prolific after summer rains. They shared their knowledge of other plants and animals that inspired Kngwarray’s artworks. We watch them wash, then paint their torsos, then perform dances while chanting.

In this still, note the shape of the body designs, with half circles like necklaces under the neck and vertical stripes on the breasts. This pattern of a smiley curve above two sets of vertical lines recurs in a number of Kngwarray’s earlier works.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern with a still from the video showing women elders who have painted their chests in order to dance and perform (photo by the author)

A lot of the film looks as if it was shot using cameras on a drone to move very slowly in that characteristic droney, slow-motion way, above the landscape. And this has been done very deliberately because it really helps you understand the relationship between the shape of the land – with its bushes and scrub and rocks, see from directly above – and the dotting style of Kngwarray’s early paintings. There really is a very close relationship between the visual impact of the predominantly brown, mottled earth, dotted with scrub, and the browns and ochres and mottled dots of her early paintings.

Installation view of Emily Kam Kngwarray at Tate Modern with a still from the video showing women elders who have painted their chests in order to dance and perform (photo by the author)

I can’t find the exact film online. The one in the exhibition is only about three minutes long and has no news footage or voiceover from white people. This one was made by Tate, and includes many of the same shots (women painting and dancing, slow tracking shots of the earth) but is longer and, to be honest, a bit spoiled by the wordy commentary.

This is not only an outstanding exhibition, but a thought-provoking revelation that someone from such a poor, excluded, marginalised background could rise through sheer vision and talent to become such a powerful artistic force.

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by Simon on November 15, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Australia, Exhibition
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Posted by Simon on November 15, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/15/emily-kam-kngwarray-tate-modern/

Sleepless by France-Lise McGurn @ Tate Britain

Art Now is a series of free exhibitions at Tate Britain showcasing emerging talent and highlighting new developments in British art. It is generally held in the big exhibition room on your right, next to the rotunda, once you’ve gone up the stairs and through the main entrance to Tate Britain.

This big, white, well-lit room is currently hosting a site-specific exhibition by Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn (born 1983).

Figurative outlines of people

McGurn mostly works with paint, and draws people, slender outlines of people caught in various postures and actions, often dancing, leaping, twisting, turning. That’s certainly what the work here looks like – light and elegant drawings of naked people – in the detail below, apparently bending stretching walking sitting – and these sketchy outlines are treated with random washes of primary colours applied in broad brushstrokes or patches.

Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography

In a big white room

The room is big and light and airy. The walls are painted white and there are big skylights. I went on a sunny day. The overwhelming visual and psychological impact was of LIGHT and airiness. It felt lovely just to walk around the room, glancing now and then at the figures dancing on the wall. They felt like a sort of 21st century version of a Renaissance frieze except that the great majority of the wall had been left a pure and cleansing white.

Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography

Interplay between canvas and wall

A lot of the figures – dancing, bending, posing, sitting amid blotches and spatters of yellow and orange paint – have been painted directly onto the wall. Presumably this is what it means to say the work is ‘site-specific’ in the sense that, eventually, when it ends, they will all be painted over.

Except for the half a dozen or so canvases, ranging in size from medium to very, very large, which are stuck to the walls. These canvases partake of the bigger pattern i.e. they are composed of line drawings of people in motion, with washes of paint which start on the canvas and wash over onto the walls, joining them to the bigger configuration.

On the whole, though, looking closely, it seemed to me that the figures and compositions on the canvases were more densely drawn and painted. They felt like the nexuses of the composition, out of which, and between which, flowed lines of energy. Focal points.

Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography

Curators and sex

So the whole thing gave me the impression of light and airiness and dancing and happiness. Being in this room made me smile.

However, McGurn is a woman, and the curator of the installation is a woman, and so I was not at all surprised to learn, when I wandered over to the wall label, that the installation is actually all about sexuality and the body.

Much more so than their male equivalents, contemporary women artists are very often concerned with the body and sex, often with their own bodies, quite often with taking their clothes off to expose their own bodies, examine their own bodies, question their own bodies.

Both women artists and women curators are often obsessed with sex and gender in a way the rest of the world is not and in a way which has the effect of narrowing and limiting and confining responses and ideas and feelings and the imagination. This is what the curator writes:

‘McGurn draws on a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which express notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness. The new body of work presented in Sleepless explores the experience of living in a city as one that is intimate and inherently sexual. The exhibition title itself evokes key themes in McGurn’s work, including partying, dreams, longing, motherhood and nostalgic popular culture, recalling the 1993 romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle.’

Hmmm it is mildly interesting to learn that the piece is named after Sleepless in Seattle – although what these perfect, mute, rather Greek god-like figures have to do with very non-Greek-looking Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks is not immediately obvious. But:

‘The experience of living in a city as one that is intimate and inherently sexual.’

Hmmm. As you crowd onto the Tube at rush hour, as you wait for a bus in the rain, as you walk past deafening roadworks, as you breathe in the toxic mix of diesel fumes and carbon particulates… does your experience of living in the city strike you as being ‘inherently sexual’? Or ‘intimate?’

My querying of these kinds of curatorial descriptions isn’t motivated by anti-intellectualism or anti-feminism. It’s that:

1. So often their descriptions of human existence seem wildly at odds with the experiences of myself, my family and everyone I know. I just asked my son if his experience of living as a student in the big city of Bristol struck him as ‘intimate and inherently sexual?’ I cannot reprint what he said. He thought I was mad.

2. More importantly, my view is that this kind of stock-in-trade obsession with sexuality, gender and identity, this kind of standardised, boilerplate rhetoric about sexuality and desire, actually conceals and masks the art itself. The art itself is made up of lines and patterns and colours. The ‘subject matter’ is an important part of it, no doubt (although learning that the title comes from Sleepless in Seattle narrows and limits and brings your experience of the wall paintings down to a very specific time and place and cultural reference with a bit of a thump).

But the art itself is a matter of lines and patterns and colours and surfaces which, as you follow them with your eyes, begin to make your imagination flow and bend and soar along with them. And as they spill over from the canvas you feel a lovely sense of freedom and unconfinedness, and as some of them dance up towards the sunny skylights you feel a wonderful sense of openness and freedom.

For me, far more important than any amount of guff about the inherent sexiness of ‘the city’ is the dynamic visual and tactile effect created by the contrast between the painted walls and the more composed canvases which stud them. That juxtaposition is visually and imaginatively exciting.

What irritates me about the way so many curators and wall labels and guides write about art is that they cramp and confine it by imposing narrow social definitions and ideas and fashionable ‘issues’ onto it, instead of attempting to explain how the art is made, and the effect it has on us. Not on our Guardian-reading social consciences, with their narrow Pavlovian responses to trigger words like gender and sexuality and race and refugees and equality and the male gaze, and the rest of contemporary art scholarship’s fantastically small and limited little box of woke issues.

But where art should and generally does work – deep down in the imagination, the soul, the spirit, the unconscious, the preconscious, on our feelings, on our feel for pattern and colour and the sometimes very fleeting moods and responses they trigger in us.

The actual art of Sleepless made me want to fly, I felt beguiled by the strange and unexpected whorls of lines and the dancing figures, which shimmer across the walls, some of them rising up into the sunlit sky.

The curator commentary on it brought me down to earth with a painful bump, thumping my mind with the worst kind of artspeak clichés.

I met a man at a dinner party the other day who goes to even more art exhibitions than me. He told me he has stopped reading any of the wall labels of any exhibitions of contemporary art, because he finds them so irritatingly narrow and repetitive and limiting. Although, by doing so, you risk missing out on important information, I’m beginning to think he’s got the right idea. That you should go to an art exhibition and just respond to the art without any interference from the curators and guides imposing their obsessive concerns with gender and race onto the visitor.

Demographics

This exhibition is FREE to stroll in, around and out of, and certainly isn’t worth going to Tate Britain just for itself – but if you’re going to Tate Britain anyway, you should make the effort to seek it out. When I went at about noon on a weekday, there was one other person in the room.

Related links

More Tate Britain reviews

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by Simon on July 20, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting
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Posted by Simon on July 20, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/07/20/sleepless-france-lise-mcgurn-tate-britain/