Our pick of this week’s art events: 5 – 11 June
Our pick of this week’s art events: 5 – 11 June
RA Recommends
By Sam Phillips
Published 5 June 2015
From live art performances directed by Lu Kemp to James Turrell’s high intensity illuminations at Houghton Hall, we guide you through this week’s top shows.
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Lu Kemp: Have your Circumstances Changed?
Archway Mall, London, 3 – 28 June 2015
The commissioning agency Artangel has set the bar for site-specific art in Britain, enabling interesting artists to present new work in unusual spaces. This month sees theatre-maker Lu Kemp present a series of intimate performances in the former FADS shop in a derelict shopping centre in Archway, London. Three works staged at midweek evenings and weekends spotlight the daily routine of elderly men, exploring the realities of growing older and society’s duty of care.
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Fig-2: Eva Rothschild RA & Joe Moran
ICA, London, 8 – 14 June 2015
London’s ICA is the venue for Fig-2, an ambitious curatorial project involving 50 week-long exhibitions throughout 2015. This Monday sees the 23rd show staged, a collaboration between the sculptor Eva Rothschild RA and choreographer Joe Moran, part of the Block Universe art performance festival. In true multidisciplinary fashion, the two present film and video works simultaneously in the ICA Studio, while the recently elected Academician makes sculpture for the ICA Theatre, as the setting for Singular (2011), Moran’s performance piece involved two pairs of dancers, one male, one female.
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James Turrell Hon RA
Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 7 June – 24 October 2015
As well as one of the most mesmerically beautiful beaches in Britain, the north Norfolk coast is home to Houghton Hall, seat of the Marquess of Cholmondeley, a man with a love of contemporary art. The revered American artist James Turrell, maker of exemplary light installations that play with our perceptions of colour, atmosphere and space, is spotlit this summer in a major survey exhibition across the house and grounds. As well as representative works across the Honorary Academician’s career, Houghton presents a new site-specific piece that illuminates the entire west façade of the building at dusk.
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Triumph and Disaster: Medals of the Sun King
British Museum, London, 4 June – 15 November 2015
The decadent reign of Louis XIV saw incredible patronage of the arts, its expression perhaps most memorable in the grand Baroque and proto-Rococo decoration he commissioned for his vast Palace of Versailles. But a new free exhibition at the British Museum looks away from the Sun King’s vaulted ceilings to an ambitious project on a smaller scale: the series of medals commissioned to celebrate Louis’ various virtues and triumphs – a history, real and imagined, of a monarch, produced in exquisite detail on small roundels of metal.
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International Trust For Croatian Monuments Concert
Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Square, London, 9 June, 7.30pm
The International Trust For Croatian Monuments protects and restores Croatia’s treasures of art and architecture, following their damage by war and years of neglect. Fans of Wagner and Strauss can help support this good cause this Tuesday, when singers from the Croatian National Opera, Dubravka Šeparovic Musovic and Ivana Lazar, and the Australian pianist Piers Lane, perform in a fundraiser at Holy Trinity Church. The church is worth a visit in itself, for its beautiful stained glass designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones; tickets are £25 and can be booked through the Cadogan Hall Box Office.
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Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RAMagazine.