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Profundity & Play: Anish Kapoor: Flashback, Edinburgh College of Art.

Text by Colin Herd

Following on from its first incarnation at Manchester Art Gallery in the spring, Anish Kapoor’s touring Arts Council-funded mini-retrospective Flashback is currently on show at Edinburgh College of Art as one of the flagship exhibitions of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. The exhibition takes place in the airy and impressive Sculpture Court, a space usually given over to displaying either the college’s collection of antique statuary, including casts of the Elgin Marbles, or occasionally, to the giddy, experimental work of mid-degree art students. It’s a liminal space itself, then, caught between two moods and aesthetics, and the perfect choice to showcase Kapoor’s trademark blend of profundity and play.

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Lyrical Images of Life by the Sea: Sea Creatures, Joseph Bellows Gallery, San Diego.

Sea Creatures, an exhibition featuring work from Joni Sternbach, Dana Montlack and Liz Lantz, examines life above, below and around the sea. Featuring tintype portraits of surfers, images of life beneath the deep, and the lifestyles of women surfers around southern California, Sea Creatures is on show at Joseph Bellows Gallery until 13 August.

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New Cinematic Experiences: Screen Arts Festival: Picturehouse Cinemas, Nationwide.

The Screen Arts Festival, a brand new cross arts initiative organised by Picturehouse Cinemas, opens this summer. Showcasing a wide range of arts content – ballet, opera, theatre, and concerts, both pre-recorded and live – the festival will also include a number of related films, documentaries and special events, including a satellite Q&A with Sir David Attenborough to accompany the first wide cinema screening of BAFTA winning documentary Flying Monsters – all programmed into a variety of themed strands.

A World-Class City of Bad Taste: Patrick Dalton Explores London’s Darker Side

Understanding and exploring the role of street photography as an agent for social reflection and expression is now more important than ever. However, the dissemination of street photography, facilitated by the web, has meant definitions are difficult to pin down. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, and allows photographers such as Patrick Dalton, the man behind Shit London, an arena for expression.

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Aesthetica August/September Issue – Without Limits

Text by Cherie Federico

The line between production and consumption is blurred. As a society we yearn for more; of what, we’re not sure, but it could be anything. As a result, we create more and more. It’s a complex dynamic, one which needs to be considered. On a recent visit to Amsterdam, I saw Willem Popelier’s Showroom Girls; it was a fascinating exhibition, which made me think about the past and the future, but more importantly the now and how all this production and consumption is forging a new identity.

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Unpicking the Social Language of Music: A Fire in the Master’s House is Set, Chapter, Cardiff.

Text by Luke Healey

A Fire in the Master’s House is Set, named after a lyric that is repeated hypnotically throughout Rage Against the Machine’s 1999 song New Millennium Homes, feels simultaneously like a pet project for its curator Simon Morrissey, and a sensitive barometer for a particular type of approach to artmaking, based around the perennial themes of music and rebellion.

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Japanese Modernism:Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting – Ikon, Birmingham.

Text by Matt Swain

The Art of Connecting is the first solo exhibition in the UK by Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005), one of Japan’s most renowned avant-garde artists. Tanaka was a member of the Gutai group which was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara (1905-1972) in Japan and comprised diverse artists who had all undergone traumatic experiences in World War II. The artists and particularly Tanaka employed a radical, conceptual approach, expanding the notion of painting and sculpture into space and actions, pioneering an approach that was picked up much later by other artists in the US and Europe.