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There is nothing new under the sun. Unless you’re an artist – and a student artist at that – overflowing with the inspiration that comes from days spent poring over the techniques of old masters and nights creating, shaping, thinking. To these fee-paying mavericks, everything is new. They ask questions. What happens if I reshoot David Cronenberg’s Crash from a queered perspective? What if I laser-cut newsprint plotting paper or stick yams in between mirrors or make an elderly man sit in a bag of compost and faeces while shouting “I think the fashion industry is a pile of shit”?
All these questions – and hundreds of others – are investigated thoroughly in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition. Now in its 70th year, the touring exhibition (it will arrive at South London Gallery in December) showcases the creations of 45 graduating artists from programmes in the UK. Guest selectors Rana Begum, Sonia Boyce and Ben Rivers were set the task of trawling 1,500 applications to find the best emerging artists of today.
The successful works are spread out across three rooms; with two entrance points and no curational themes, we are free to roam as we please. At first it feels like arriving at a party where everyone is deep in conversation with people they already know. I approach Jonas Pequeno’s Timeliner, an array of wires and chiming metallic instruments for electricity to play. I wonder if he is inspired by Haroon Mirza, if he is pointing out the silent forces at work in our daily lives or if the reference to “time” in the title is a nod to the fact the chimes make audible our seconds passed in the room. The title card reveals nothing but the artist, work and the materials; the years of studious thought that have presumably culminated in this piece remain obscured.
With little detail available, there’s a risk audiences will rush past works like Camille Yvert’s polystyrene-on-wheels sculpture and Zoe Radford’s monochrome printed cotton in favour of Liam Ashley Clark’s self-explanatory A House with Boobs for Roof Tiles. But the longer I wander, the more the works open up to one another. Emily Stollery’s curvaceous collection of delicate wooden shapes become bodies next to Jack Sutherland’s torso and Yulia Iosilzon’s legs.
Toxic masculinity surfaces as Clarke names the “man-tribe”, Taylor Jack Smith animates a bawling man and Klara Vith frames fragments of speeches made by Donald Trump. The process of collecting and curating is examined as Alaena Turner’s five painted squares face off against Katharina Fitz’s perfectly arranged plaster forms.
No longer the loner at the party, I submit to an afternoon of artistic enlightenment. There is intoxication on encountering Xiuching Tsay’s hypnotic painting of three nude women bathed in endless circles and fluorescent colours. There is revelation when Louis Blue Newby points to the pervasive heteronormative narratives in film-making by reconstructing Crash. Later, sadness pours out of Roei Greenberg’s silent, still image of a man-made forest in Israel, planted to erase the conquered Arab village of Ayn al-Zaytun that once stood there. The full range of emotions ends with laughter at Eliot Lord’s Boris Can’t Get Clean, a cartoonish painting of the prime minister with his head stuck in a washing machine that was “made in the EU”. It’s about as ridiculous as the political climate.
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