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Articles / Art
by Melissa Ray, Helen Longstreth
January 19, 2017

About
From Lambeth to Peckham,
South London's galleries are
 explored in the latest
Menu instalment of our 3-part tour
Search

of Condo, the unique

international exchange
programme that offers an
alternative tour of the
capital

The second instalment of our 3-part review of Condo

takes a trip to its South London galleries. Set up in
2016 by Vanessa Carlos of Carlos/Ishikawa, Condo
is described as a collaborative exhibition.36 galleries
have been invited to display work across 15 London
galleries, in an international exchange programme
that sets out to shake up the art fair model.

Londons diversity plays a key role in Condo, and

each exhibition is shaped not only by the host
gallerys architecture but by its surrounding area.
About Visitors following the Condo trail will nd themselves
in Peckham, Lambeth, Soho and Whitechapel, to
 name a few.To reect Condos unique tour of
London, we have divided our review of the exhibition
Menu highlights by area. Last week, we visitedEast London.
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Next up, we review the highlights of South London.

Central London will follow.

Chewdays hosting Galerie

Max Mayer, Dsseldorf

As Vauxhall, Brixton and Elephant and Castle erupt

around it, Lambeth has been sitting a little quieter than
its noisy neighbours in the last few years
gentrication race. With a popular song from the
1930s and Cockney dance craze named after it,
Lambeth Walk now home to new gallery Chewdays
has a long history as a centre of working class
culture. However, after much of the area was bombed
during WWII, regeneration pushed out much of those
working class communities and now, with house
prices predictably soaring, the presence of the middle
About class in the area is threatened. Contributing to this
conversation from behind the former shopfront facade
 of Grace and Mercys Fashion Enterprise on Lambeth
Walks shopping parade is The Middle Class Goes To
Menu Heaven (2005-2006), a slide projection and audio Search
piece by Nicols Guagnini. It is this piece from which
this exhibition takes its name, provided by Chewdays
guest for Condo Galerie Max Mayer.

As fragmented images of brutalist architecture icker

by, a looped recording of voices in French, English,
Spanish and German intone familiar expressions
inherent to the modern middle class experience:
medium-term goals, long weekend, couples
therapy. On the walls alongside is a series of Jef
Geys pressed owers and photography pieces, whilst
these contemporary works are complemented by the
surprising inclusion of a number of ancient Egyptian
funerary objects, such as statuettes and pots, from
Chewdays collection of prehistoric artefacts.
Geographically sandwiched between Parliament and
post-war housing estates, the show takes a pertinent
but foreboding look at the future of the middle ground
in a space that is stuck between a sprawling city elite
and the shrinking average-income family. With The
About Middle Class Goes To Heaven positioned centrally,
surrounded by Geys owers and ancient ceremonial
 funeral objects, this small show shrewdly sets up what
can feel like an untimely send off. MR
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Greengrassi hosting
Proyectos Ultraviolet,
Guatemala City

Just a 10 minute walk from Chewdays and up a

narrow ight of rickety stairs, youll nd These
Architectures We Make, a small one-room group
show of international artists curated by Greengrassi
and Proyectos Ultravioleta of Guatemala City, who
will be hosted by the gallery throughout the month in a
collaborative exhibition that seeks to consider the
affective and physical architectures that human beings
construct. From the coarse surface of Karin Ruggabers
gently pastel coloured geometric cement tiles to the
playful renderings of water pipes in felt and fabric by
Johana Unzuela, the show elicits in the viewer the
desire to engage in a tactile way.
About

The urge to touch these representations of architectural

 elements subtly reminds us of the relationship between

Menu building and protecting, between the human and theSearch

inhuman. It is an impulse that reects the wider aim of
the exhibition, setting out to question how our energy
for building things ever-increasingly surpasses our
energy for caretaking. The enquiry into the ways in
which we maintain the very structures that protect us is
a poignant subject, especially when the rapid
regeneration of the urban landscape in the
surrounding area is considered. MR

The Sunday Painter hosting

Jacqueline Martins, Sao
Paolo; Seventeen, New
York/London; Stereo,
Warsaw

The popular Peckham gallery, situated inconspicuously

between a newly-opened tapas bar and the Brick
About
Brewery, consists of a small bright upstairs space,
which looks out onto the Blenheim Grove beauty
 shops and an evangelical church. For Condo, the
Menu gallery hosts a strong showing of work from an Search
impressive three galleries. One of the artists
representing Sao Paulo gallery Jaqueline Martins is
the artist Adriano Amaral. Interested in transforming
objects through physical procedures, he presents a
series of UV bulbs that have been melted into marbled
rods. On the adjacent wall are four sketchy charcoal
drawings of Warsaw apartment blocks by the Polish
artist and lmmaker Wojciech Bkowski. Their solemn
style is intriguing, with buildings and interiors skewed
and distorted behind repetitive dark lines so that the
structures and forms are barely visible.

In the corner of the gallery, Emma Hart brings a

lighter touch. In her sculpture INK LOW BUY MORE,
ceramic pages descend the gallery wall as if spewed
from a broken printer, forming into a pair of messy,
eshy legs. Beside it, a set of glazed black and blue
clipboards containing negative feedback are propped
against the wall. Here, Harts signature use of
ceramics brings an unusual beauty to the mundane. It

About is the transformation and reconguring of the

everyday, echoed in the other works by Bkowski and
 Amaral, that pulls together for a compelling show. HL

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Arcadia Missa hosting VI,

VII, Oslo

Just around the corner from The Sunday Painter, under

a railway arch and beside a car mechanics
workshop, is now well-established gallery Arcadia
Missa. Founded in Peckham in 2011 by Central St
Martins graduates Rosza Farkas and Tom Clark, it
serves as one of the few London galleries dedicated to
showing and promoting work that covers digital
experience in a socio-political context. For Condo,
they present a group show in collaboration with the
Oslo gallery VI, VII. Set in the central space and
representing Arcadia Missa is a series of hanging tent-
like silk paintings titled You Do Not Belong To You
(Universal Story) by the British artist Emma Talbott. In
a style that feels like a psychedelic graphic novel, she
paints scenes of menstruation, birth and motherhood

About over mystical star scapes and swirling patterns,

blending memory, mysticism and real life.
 Showing with Oslo gallery VI, VII are three other
Menu artists, including Than Hussein Clark and the British Search
artist and rising star Eloise Hawser. Hussein Clark
presents a series of two sculptures, made from a
concoction of blown glass, enamel, steel, led and
electrics, shaped into futuristic art-deco lampposts.
Propped up on the oor beside one of these sculptures
is Hauser's Circles, Dots and Gons, a woven polyester
work with a security pattern, that characterises
Hawsers use of industrial processes to repurpose
everyday objects. In Brad Grievsons multimedia work
Captive, torn coloured paper shapes are taped onto a
white canvas, creating a series of empty frames from
the blank surface. The works are diverse in their style
and form and yet somehow meld together as if it was
meant to be. Guided by Talbots central piece, they
form into a carefully constructed mish-mash of pastel
hues, geometric lines and contorted shapes. HL

Condo runs across London from14 Jan 11 Feb

About 2017. For more information, visit their website.