We Contain Multitudes, Dundee Contemporary Arts ★★★★
Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtor’s Portal, Cooper Gallery, Dundee ★★★★
In December, Glasgow-born Nnena Kalu made history by becoming the first artist with learning disabilities to win the Turner Prize. Although Kalu’s work has been presented elsewhere without any back story, the fact of her disability dominated the discussion around the prize.
In her first exhibition since the Turner win, We Contain Multitudes, Kalu joins three other artists at DCA in a project funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation which aims to “create systemic change in the Scottish arts sector for disabled visual artists, arts professionals and audiences”. All four artists “are working from a position of disability”, although their lived experience of it is clearly quite different.
It makes the word “disability” into an awkward umbrella term. Not all of the work addresses it: Kalu’s arguably doesn’t. There is a school of thought which says that drawing attention to an artist’s disability is in itself “ableism” and the opposite of inclusion. Nevertheless, in this project, this is the light in which these practices will be seen.
The show is beautifully installed, with the works mixed throughout both gallery spaces, allowing them to talk to one another. Kalu’s Hanging Sculptures – more various and strange than the ones in the Turner Prize show – are immediately eye-catching. Bold, colourful, unruly constructions bound with ribbon, netting and coloured tape, they claim their space decisively.
Her drawings have a more focused energy, echoing in repeated lines some of the forms of her sculptures. This work is not about metaphor or concept, nor really about form or meaning. These are works of pure instinct, pure process, a revelling in colour and shape and making.
Edinburgh-based Andrew Gannon makes work which engages directly with his limb difference. He makes plaster casts of his left arm – echoing the process of the making of prosthetic limbs – then groups the forms together into sculptures which hang or sit. There are a lot of these, and they make me wonder when repetition becomes repetitive.
His screenprints made at DCA’s print studio, however, are vibrant and fresh. The silhouettes made by exposing his body on the screen, then printed using a bright Yves Klein-esque blue, have titles like ‘Reclining Semi-nude’ and ‘Goofing on Elvis “Hey Baby”’. They are not only visually strong, they have a welcome dash of spontaneity and humour.
Jo Longhurst’s lens-based work is the most conceptually rich. Her recent body of work, ‘Crip’, references “the way disabled, neurodivergent and chronically ill people encounter time and space”, though she prefers not to say what her own relationship is to all this. The central metaphor is bindweed, a weed – or wild flower – which clings on to other plants in order to grow, thrives in derelict spaces and is, when one puts judgments to one side, quite beautiful. The densely spiralling photo collages in ‘Crip (We Contain Multitudes)’ “grow” up the walls of the gallery much like the plant itself.
As well as a film, ‘Here, Now’, referencing photographic portraits of women diagnosed as ‘hysteric’ in 19th century asylums, Longhurst shows ‘Pinnacle’, a photo series featuring images of the legs of athletes from the Vault finals of the 2009 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. While these gymnasts were clearly aiming for perfection, the photographs draw attention to a misshapen knee, or the (many) places where skin-coloured tape has been used to conceal flaws or injuries. The images themselves are “imperfect” by the standards of professional sports photography, yet they are moving, vulnerable and human.
The fourth artist, Daisy Lafarge, is best known as a poet and writer, though she is an alumnus of Edinburgh College of Art. Her paintings, relatively small in scale, made on the floor using watercolour and kinesiology tape, are a response to living with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, a tactic for managing pain, or coping with long waits incurred by punitive bureaucracy.
Semi-abstract and drawing on the imagery of William Blake’s sick rose, they are accompanied by a booklet of new (and very good) poems. The paintings have a quiet intensity. They might be the rawest expressions here of pain or emotion, but they suffer somewhat from not matching the other works in the show on scale or boldness.
Taken as a whole, it’s a strong and visually impactful exhibition. The visitors I saw seemed to be energised by the work, and that included a number of families with children. These are works about human limitations, living with them and sometimes defying them. Sometimes they are poignant, at other times loud and bolshie. Is it a show about disability? Yes, but sometimes it’s also just about life.
If there is something experiential at the core of We Contain Multitudes, Bahar Noorizadeh’s show The Debtor’s Portal, at the Cooper Gallery is, by contrast, coming from a place of research and the intellect. This is the biggest show to date in the UK by the Iranian-Canadian artist, writer and filmmaker and is co-curated by the Cooper Gallery team with London-based Otolith Group, who showed here in 2023.
Noorizadeh has a particular interest in economics and a commitment – as do the Otoliths – to use art as a lens through which to critique the times in which we live and put forward alternatives. She does this using the language of gaming and sci-fi, as well as history and analysis. There is a group of works to explore, and a substantial reading area.
In the Lower Gallery, we are plunged into a game-like universe of ‘Teslaworld: Economics at the end of the end of the future’. Made using the games software Unreal Engine, the film emulates a racing game in which an avatar of Elon Musk (this is 2022, pre Trump) races through a desolate landscape to reach a shareholders’ meeting accompanied at times by a driverless car. Noorizadeh’s clever text appears as tweets, memes and in-game commentary.
The theory being posited is that “Teslaism” is the successor to Fordism (or Post-Fordism). The car – perhaps the ultimate individualist consumer object – will recur throughout the show, and the soundtrack to ‘Teslaworld’ is Detroit techno, the post-industrial sound of the US’s Motor City.
Upstairs, the centrepiece of the show is a ‘Free to Choose’, a 40-minute “sci-fi opera” made in 2023 in which Philip Tose, a former racing driver whose investment company went bust during the Asian financial crash of 1998, time-travels forward to the Hong Kong of 2048 in his Lotus Esprit to request a loan from his older self.
It’s a multisensory experience which comes at you thick and fast: constantly shifting melty CGI graphics married with some excellent singing (the score is by Rudá Babau, the singers from London-based experimental opera company Waste Paper Opera). The ideas come thick and fast too: Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher and McDonalds all feature. Young people campaign for equal access to time travel. A key take-away seems to be that free-market economics is stranger and more random than an sci-fi you care to name.
For all the wackiness of ‘Free to Choose’, this work is underpinned by a weight of research and knowledge and needs a chunk of time to absorb. If it has a weakness, it is in focusing more on the problem than on presenting alternatives. Without this, there is a danger that the work will speak mainly to those who already agree with it, and leave us confirmed in our fears that there’s plenty wrong with the world, but not much we can do about it.
We Contain Multitudes runs until 26 April; Bahar Noorizadeh: The Debtor’s Portal until 11 April
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