The occasional scrivener

Listed in order of my visiting them in the building.

Hip-Hop: Conscious, Unconscious

Not my scene, because I’ve never been a big hip-hop fan and I didn’t even recognize many of the famous names portrayed. I enjoyed the late-70s — late 80s esthetic though.

Senay Berhe - A Familiar Feeling of Now

One of the smaller exhibits, did not grab me.

Erik Johansson - The Echo Chamber

Oh my, so conceptual. Around 3 or 4 works (digitally altered images, as is usual) the artist/museum had crafted rooms echoing them. So one of them was a person using a stepladder to peer over a maze. Adjoining it was a literal stepladder with the room painted the same way.

The exhibit text was exhorting us to break out of “filter bubbles” or something, which in the age of alt-right chuds infesting the internet feels disingenous.

Bruno Ehrs & Tom Wolgers - Stockholm – Stycken av en stad

Now this is right up my alley - cool (“svala” in Swedish) high-key B&W images of details in the Stockholm urban landscape, interspersed with portraits of young people in the photographers New Romantic milieu. Very 80s and thus very nostalgic.

Shirin Neshat - The Fury

I mostly skipped this, both because I wasn’t really in the mood for discourse around the violence to women’s bodies in contempory Iran, and because it was very crowded.

A good overview of the course of the war, with asides into the experiences of prisoners of war and (some) Koreans, mostly missing from the other books on the subject that I have read. For this reason alone I would recommend this book.

As Hastings is British and the book written for a British audience, there’s a focus on British (as opposed to Commonwealth) efforts in the fighting.

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A hugely enjoyable and readable overview of the ultimately futile attempts to restore the world before the Napoleonic wars. Lots of stories about a period that’s usually glossed over until 1848, which this author doesn’t rate very highly as revolutionary.