Text by Regina Papachlimitzou

Setting the haunting installations of Berlin-based Korean artist Haegue Yang against the shimmering undulations of the work of late Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Sea Wall presents an intriguing conversation between the two artists’ distinctive practices. Employing domestic materials stripped of their everyday use is a common thread running through the works of both Yang and Gonzalez-Torres, unexpectedly obliterating the demarcation between the artistic and private realms.

Text by Charles Danby

There were momentary points of sensory poetic and visual intrigue within Ryan Gander’s Locked Room Scenario, the optical slightness of a darkened corridor that led to an unwitting approach of ones own shadow in a space indeterminate in scale, direction and makeup. Here there was an overwhelming sense that the ceiling was narrowing like an all too familiar cinematic illusion. Odd shafts of light, such as the thrown-back light of a slide projector, were all that illuminated the environment. The scenario was entirely compelling.

Text by Daniel Potts

In Mario Merz’s (b.1925) first solo exhibition in the UK for nearly 30 years, What is To Be Done? presents 12 works made between 1966 and 1977, many of which have been rarely exhibited in the last four decades. Merz was a leading figure of Arte Povera, a term referring to a loose grouping of Italian artists who turned their attention to their surrounding environment in the immediate post-war period. The title of the exhibition, echoing a speech of Lenin’s from 1912, relates to a time of great political, social and ensuing, artistic upheaval, drawing attention to Merz’s creative reaction to the dileama he faced as an artist of: what can an artist do in the face of a precarious future?

Text by Karla Evans

There is no question to the relentless speed at which technology and science are evolving; it appears in the palms of our hands in our ever-accessible phones and materialises before our eyes in our multi-tasking computers. See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception at Work Gallery takes on this Herculean topic and instead of playing on technology’s direct effect on the world around us, hones in on its more controversial impact on our very own bodies.

Text by Emily Bour

“This isn’t the right place, why are we at a funeral home?” To have driven the 30 minutes to go to visit Callum Morton: In Memoriam at the iconic Heide Museum of Modern Art, I must admit slight frustration when confronted with the imposing ‘Le Pine Funerals’ sign at our arrival. This was, of course, our first taste of Melbourne artist, Morton’s, part site-specific project, part mid-career survey show. Drawing upon almost 20 years of Morton’s work, and also presenting a number of exciting new projects, including Monument #25: Vortex, a glass-fronted shop constructed by the artist onsite, In Memoriam certainly lives up to expectation.

In 2008, the Department for Culture Media and Sport announced the Cultural Olympiad. A four year programme of cultural activity, it includes national and local projects as part of a UK-wide cultural festival. There has already been a lot of noise about the project from both sides. There’s the party-line suggesting that the Cultural Olympiad is a unique proposition, tracing a seamless path between sport, education and culture, and then the dissenters who are asking the age-old question – who is paying for it? What are the benefits in real terms?

Text by Kenn Taylor

Devised with gallery artist Matthew Houlding, this exhibition at Ceri Hand Gallery draws on a key text by Henri Lefebvre and the autobiographical writing of JG Ballard, reflecting spaces caught between construction, destruction and nostalgia. Each gallery artist was invited to select two artists in response to Houlding’s concept. The resulting exhibition includes 36 artists and over 100 art works, including film, photography, painting, sculpture, text and audio work – much of it seen for the first time in the UK.

Text by Regina Papachlimitzou

Structure & Material brings together three artists who, although engaging in distinctly different sculptural practices, share a similar preoccupation with the potency inhering in the ambiguous, almost taciturn nature of the materials employed in their works. Showcasing works by Claire Barclay, Becky Beasley, and Turner Prize nominee Karla Black, Structure and Material invites the viewer to consider the ethereal and the concrete no longer as two ends of a spectrum but rather as co-existing and interfusing traits.