squirmelia | Exhibitions (Reply)

Night Watch.

Some of the exhibitions I've been to in the past few months:

Sleeping & Dreaming, Wellcome Collection. (Until March 9th 2008.)
Listen to music from a Japanese sleep concert, see videos of people with Fatal Familial Insomnia that keeps you awake and then kills you, find out that men dream more about men, wonder if tonight you'll dream of castles, and contemplate reading train timetables if you want to sleep peacefully.

Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, V&A Museum. (Until February 17th 2008.)
Paint splatters sewn onto dust sheets and hundreds of red cut-out paper figures feature beside unreal flowers jutting out from the edges of walls.

(Not related to the Out of Ordinary exhibition, but to the V&A: While studying ergonomics, I found the Great Bed of Ware was mentioned in Pheasant's Bodyspace. The Great Bed of Ware could apparently sleep 12 people, and currently resides in the V&A Museum, but when I saw it today, it looked like it would be quite cramped.)

Night Watch, Jubilee Park, Canary Wharf. (Until January 31st 2008.)
Eyes hang eerily from trees and float, lit-up at night, in water fountains, around Jubilee Park at Canary Wharf. The over-sized eyes are made of glass and are in many colours, mostly in pairs, and seem to appear in every bush you look.

The Evil Twins, Hackney.
Crawl in the dark through narrow passageways in the basement of Le Gun's Curiosity Shop to find sherry and cake with an "eat me" sign in a secret room after solving a riddle, and find fragments documenting the adventures of the Evil Twins on spooky wall-hangings and in the middle of strange old books.

Seeing is Believing, The Photographers' Gallery. (Until January 27th, 2008.)
See photos of ghostly shadows, ectoplasm, stereoscopic levitating rocks, auras and other weirdness. Also, photos from the Harry Price Library of Magical Literature, documenting ghosts, seances, and other supposedly spooky happenings.

Anri Sala - A Second Look, Hauser & Wirth. (Until December 22nd, 2007.)
Play drums at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, along to sections of Franz Ferdinand's new song, or just watch the trucks that altered radio broadcasts.

Exhibitions that have now finished:
Matthew Barney - Drawing Restraint, Serpentine Gallery.
The Serpentine exhibited vast lumps of vaseline and disturbing layers of shrimps, which were created on a ship. Outside, the helter-skelter like pavilion, designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen seemed like a pleasant distraction.

Taryn Simon - An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Photographers' Gallery.
Images of America, from confiscated produce at the border to a playboy translated into braille, and images that were far more disturbing.

Yukata Stone - Secret for Snow Leopard, Parasol Unit.
Miniature forests sculpted from seaweed, snowflakes crafted from crystal and winter towns made of marble.