... HOUNDED BY EXTERNAL EVENTS ... CURATED BY MICHAEL BRACEWELL

26 Nov 2016-29 Jan 2017

Overview

Kaye Donachie, Gareth Jones, John Kelsey, Nick Mauss, Lucy McKenzie, Andrew Miksys, Serban Savu. The title of this exhibition is taken from a passage in World Within World, the autobiography (published in 1951) of the English poet and critic Stephen Spender. He was referring to what he and many others at the beginning of the 1930s regarded as a portentous and anxious-making domestic and international situation. Every generation, it seems, rediscovers this sense of unease. In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism has been accompanied by a politics of paranoia. Surveillance, offence taken and demands for atonement abound; new technologies have seemed to corrode, simultaneously, the culture they once revolutionised. Caught in a certain light, the present can resemble science fiction, while reprising Biblical imagery. “…hounded by external events…” has been conceived within the mood of such perceptions.