A strong element in Rosenfeld Porcini’s curatorial approach is a sense of the continuation of the traditions and history of art, and that is certainly felt in this exhibition. Draughtsmanship was, of course, the very foundation of art training and education for hundreds of years. Drawing is the first artistic endeavour of every child, at play and at school. It was also the first skill learned, laboriously and thoroughly, by any professionally trained artist.

While most of the great art innovators of the first half of the twentieth century were exceptional in the quality of their draughtsmanship and revered that skill (Picasso and Duchamp particularly spring to mind), things began to change in the second half. Conceptualism arrived and with it came the startling assertion that technical skill was unnecessary and irrelevant to an artist. As time passed, the enfants terribles of the conceptualist avant-garde inevitably became part of the art establishment. How far this had progressed became clear in 2011 when Tracey Emin, best known for her controversial art installations, was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy, to the consternation of some who questioned her suitability for the appointment. Emin does make drawings, but that is not really the point as the aesthetic and skills of drawing as such are not part of their intention or appeal. When conceptual artists make paintings, drawings and sculptures, they frequently do not express themselves through those media, but rather on and about them. They do not continue a tradition so much as appropriate it in order to critique and subvert it; for example, in Damien Hirst’s spot and spin paintings, he relies on their lack of painterliness to make a conceptual point about the medium (one which I suspect has been lost on many of his “collectors”).

In this group exhibition, however, the importance and relevance of traditional draughtsmanship skills to significant strands of contemporary art practice are givens. It features the work of eight of Rosenfeld Porcini’s international roster of artists: Enrique Brinkmann from Spain, Lu Chao from China, Antonis Donef and Marianna Gioka from Greece, Lanfranco Quadrio and Nicola Samori from Italy, Marcel Rusu from Rumania and Eduardo Stupia from Argentina.

Two fine examples of art emphasising traditional draughtsmanship skills are Marcel Rusu’s works on paper, inspired by Georges Méliès’ 1902 silent film A Trip to the Moon (considered by many to be the first ever science fiction film). In these, he uses charcoal, pastel and acrylic in heavy and grainy monochrome tones to create drawings resembling blow-ups of old movie stills.

Acrylic, oil, pastel, graphite and pen on both paper and canvas are used by Lanfranco Quadrio to create powerful and dynamic images which successfully convey mood and movement. In some of the works here, he reimagines horrific scenes from the myth of Diana and Actaeon in which the huntsman Actaeon, who happens upon Diana bathing, is transformed into a stag in revenge, and is torn to pieces by his own hounds. These works echo and develop the theme of several paintings inspired by this myth over the years, most famously Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, and later in Giambattista Pittoni’s Diana and Actaeon (where the bloody action is just a background detail) and Turner’s The Death of Actaeon, with a Distant View of Montjovet, Val d’Aosta, where the landscape predominates. Here, Actaeon’s suffering and the violence of his death are emphasised in a manner reminiscent of Goya and, perhaps, Francis Bacon.

Antonis Donef uses pages taken from antiquarian books in various languages as a surface, on to which he draws fantastical figures using ink. The artist’s mark-making blends effectively and harmoniously with the yellowing pages; the synthesis of the two elements takes on the appearance of an alchemist’s cookbook or a manual for some esoteric and archaic mechanical invention.

Eduardo Stupia is a painter of powerful semi-abstract “landscapes”. Marianna Gioka also paints abstracts but these have a delicate, ethereal quality which, with their muted sepia tones, remind me of Zen symbolic figurative painting. Both artists’ working methods are clearly rooted in draughtsmanship and both use drawing materials to add surface details in their paintings (Indian ink in Gioka’s case and a variety of materials, including pastel, graphite and charcoal in Stupia’s).

A particular highlight of the exhibition was an introduction to the work of Lu Chao, a Chinese artist, still only in his mid-twenties, who graduated last year from the Royal College of Art’s MA course in Painting. Traditional Chinese ink drawing is a strong influence in his painting, although he uses oils, making precise and expressive brushstrokes.

Five works by Chao are included in the exhibition, of which two are large oil paintings on canvas, while the others, still using oils, are on paper. The unifying subject matter is crowds of people; in China, much of daily urban life is lived among crowds. In two of the works, the crowds appear to be unwillingly but powerlessly corralled by some invisible force into cake-like shapes. In one, the crowd cake is under a glass cover; in another a number of them are shown on shelves in a cake shop, with spaces where slices have been cut out.

There are also some smaller works in oil on paper which look like they could be details from the larger ones. One just shows a hat on the ground, but in the context of the other images, one imagines it has been dropped or perhaps knocked off someone’s head. For this reason, that simple image of a hat creates great pathos. One cannot help but feel vast empathy for the hapless owner of that hat.

Chao’s interesting and original images express powerful ideas and ask important, and very contemporary, questions about the relationships between the individual and oppressive authority. It is extremely difficult to imagine such complex existential ideas being conveyed in the language of Conceptualism.

Throughout the great majority of the history of art, artists have responded eloquently to the questions posed by the human condition while valuing tradition and artistic skill and showing deep respect for the art form in which they work. Despite the rise of the conceptualists, many have continued to do so. This exhibition shows that there is still plenty of mileage in that approach.

Around Drawing is at Rosenfeld Porcini until 22 May 2015.

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Accumulate, clutter, collect. What is the line between these concepts? The exhibition Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector proposes—through 14 artist-collectors and about 8,000 objects—not only the relationship between the act of collecting and the artistic gesture, but also an analysis of this natural human desire to hoard. Unlike the São Paulo Biennial, the collections on show at the Barbican include artists’ work alongside the everyday objects they collect.

The exhibition recalls the sixteenth century wunderkammer, knows also as the ‘cabinet of curiosities’. Owned by aristocrats, such cabinets arose as a way of grouping and categorising subjects of interest such as botany, taxidermy or science; and also as a symbol of status.

The owners of these “wonder-rooms” seemed to take a great pleasure in lavishing attention upon their impressive collections for the audience of high society as a way to reaffirm not only their possessions but themselves as well. No wonder, when we look at a collection we might have the feeling that we are actually looking at the collector. As Damien Hirst stated: “I think of a collection as being like a map of a person’s life.”

The first artist-collector we face when entering the exhibition is the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. His elegant collection is marked by an interest in nature, mathematics and anatomy, including clinical prints by Gautier D’Agoty (1746), cabinets with surgical instruments, the classic book Opticks by Isaac Newton (1704) and animal fossils of the Jurassic period. Those objects would act, in the artist words, as “mentors” and “hints to the secrets of human history”.

Beside these, human skulls and vintage taxidermy like a Somali stuffed lion (c. 1880) are displayed. There is no doubt that this collection is owned by an artist whose practice hovers on the balance between life and death: Damien Hirst. His private museum of natural history gives us even more clarity about the origin of his work. His piece Last Kingdom (2012), acts like a glass cabinet filled with butterflies, moths, spiders and beetles aligned systematically. Arranged that way, their presence emanates a sumptuous aura like little immortal gods.

Sol LeWitt and his collection are arranged next. The American used to exchange objects with other artists whose work shared similar themes to his, such as the use of repetition. By acquiring works by Dan Flavin, Auguste Sander, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Katsushika Hokusai and music scores by Phillip Glass and Steve Reich; the artist sought a dialogue between his and those artists works and a way to financially support them.

Hanne Darboven, Sol LeWitt’s friend, presents a collection of a much more personal nature than the previous artists: the presence of friends’ postcards, family heirlooms (such as ceramics, clocks and furniture) and pet photos that, together, preserve her family history. They appear to be the museum of the artist’s memory, dominated purely by sentimental value.

Edmund de Vaal earned a collection of fossils and minerals when he was a child and began to gather these in a vintage glass vitrine: ‘‘I made my own museum,’’ he declared in an interview. His pleasure was in admiring, touching and rearranging those constantly. Years after, he would invite visitors to come to his studio to see his extensive collection that now includes rare things such as carved Japanese netsuke figurines inherited from wealthy Jewish ancestors.

Known for his sarcastic portrayals of leisure and tourism, Martin Parr’s collection is marked by a fetish for exotic and kitsch souvenirs. These include flying postcards and cigarette cases illustrated with Laika pictures, the famous dog sent to space in 1950 by the USSR.

Another collection that draws attention is the that of Andy Warhol. It becomes clear that consumerism drives his artistic practice as much as his personal habits by the fact that he had more pleasure in acquiring things than actually enjoying them. A childhood marked by deprivation has perhaps created in the artist some sort of insatiable hunger to purchase things, especially childlike and homey or domestic objects. Objects such as the cookie jars, so popular in American homes in the 20th century, seem to have acted on him as a form of comfort and compensation.

After walking through these universes full of glorious and obscure objects, it becomes clear that the impulse to collect is deeply personal. When looking at the wide variety of objects belonging to these artists-collectors, we realise a complexity of meanings and desires taking account of the exhibition. Behind each collection is a reference to their own artistic practice, a desire for status, fetish, or an obsessive impulse guided by a psychological fragility, a simple sentimental attachment to leave something of themselves, besides their own artwork, and remain in this world after death.

And as Oramas stated, it is difficult to generate definitive conclusions on the ‘subject’. However, I would venture to say that the collectors’ lonely impulse to keep things seems to be guided by some sort of fear of disappearance, mixed with an aesthetic pleasure. An obsessive attempt to organise the sense of their own existence and to leave their magnificent remains to immortality.

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Today’s art has not yet been catalogued or tagged. It is yet to belong to a historical art movement or be defined by a masterpiece. These pieces of paper, ceramic and fabric in Contemporary Visions V at Beers Contemporary have already been considered a work of art by someone and I have to believe and accept this in order to write about the collection of nineteen works.

The title Contemporary Visions V indicates that there have already been four other versions of this exhibition. But, has the term ‘contemporary’ and its meaning evolved over these five exhibitions? Was the art featured in the first exhibition no longer contemporary by the second Contemporary Visions? Is this exhibition as contemporary as the first? Are the artists that have exhibited throughout the years as contemporary as one another? Is there such a thing as ‘more contemporary’ or ‘non-contemporary’?

I entered the exhibition without any expectations, not for any reason but simply because I did not know what to expect; after all ‘contemporary’ is an ambiguous term. Even without knowing it, we can go into an exhibition with preconceived ideas about art.  I have always had the idea that contemporary art equals modern media, often produced or exhibited in avant garde ways. See Sophie Calle’s exhibition Take Care of Yourself, which was made up of text and photographs, presented as both a film and an interactive performance for the audience.  Or Abraham Cruzvillegas’s objects, parts of which he lets decompose or explode, to contrast with the process of sculpting. Both of these artists seem to be responding to what is happening right now, to something in the environment that I can identify with. The present is used as an inspiration, a concept, a media or process, and because of this it looks contemporary.

If the word contemporary isn’t clear in the title, ‘visions’ isn’t either. There appears to be no justification for the artists selected for Contemporary Visions V to be exhibited alongside each other. Putting on an exhibition should involve a curatorial exercise of selecting pieces that although completely different,  have something in common, be coherent or tell a story. The fifth year of this exhibition lacks that story. With no clear logic or line to follow, the selection is confusing — the works are like tourists in a foreign gallery, isolated and too shy to speak to each other.

Restore to Factory Settings (2014) by Felicity Hammond  —  a striking, deep-blue photo collage of an industrialized city, with no traces of human beings except what they have left behind  —  was one of the most eye catching pieces of the exhibition. Hammond presents a portrait of East London in a chaotic and dehumanized way. However, without knowing the exact time or the place that’s represented, the landscape still feels familiar and not in a necessarily geographical sense. The criticism she makes of the human and urban chaos is something that I can relate to. Printed blue and on a massive scale, the artist isn’t shy with showing its results.

Besides Hammond, the rest of the works in the exhibition seem immature, muted and are easy to forget. They do not respond to the present, nor show a new way of producing or displaying art, or help me understand what’s happening in the art world. Produced with different media, belonging to different places and concerned with different things, with only the word ‘contemporary’ to join them together, this leaves me with no choice but to judge the works based on preconceived ideas.

If there is one question that pops into my head, it’s whether ‘contemporary’ is just an excuse to put works together without knowing what they’re about?

Contemporary Visions V is at Beers Contemporary from the 30 January until 7 March 2015.

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Her first solo exhibition in the UK at the Dulwich Picture Gallery comes far too late, as the popular artist from Canada died 69 years ago; nevertheless, it is a clear display of Emily Carr’s essence. Her landscape canvases are revelations. Their meaning is absorbed by their visual representation and vice versa. They deny any distance between the painter’s inner space and her spatial surrounding, the territory of British Columbia.

The show paves the way for a light and at times illuminating wandering among her faraway achievements. Carr’s preferred topics for discussion sit next to each other in the gallery: mostly oils on papers or canvases of the Canadian rain forest, its trees and undergrowth are hung above masks, ritual objects and reproductions of First Nations’ culture arranged on tables. For most of her life, her desire for human proximity was exclusively addressed to groups of Indians living on the West Coast of Canada. The second room of the exhibition is dedicated to paintings of totems and traditional Indian emblems. Born in 1871 in the newly formed Canadian Confederation from English parents, Carr’s practice sought asylum in the Haida society.

During her visit to the community of Ucluelet on the Vancouver Island, Carr received the name Klee Wyck, the Laughing One. Her playful side is shown buy her choice of a colorful palette and shimmering tones of blue and green. The 1912 painting Indian War Canoe is composed by fervent shades and evocative strokes that recall her encounter with post-impressionist and Fauvist techniques during her studies in France in 1910. Blunden Harbour from 1930 is placed in the same section of the exhibition and yet it conveys a divergent feeling with a more affecting effect: based on a earlier photograph, this canvas illuminates a dying culture. In this painting, Carr removed the native people of the photograph and let the totems of their village speak. Isolated in time and space, these monstrous statues loom out of the past into the present.

Rhythm, weight, space and force were the principles guiding Carr’s practice; today these qualities are joined by the fascination for her extraordinary story. The Dulwich Picture Gallery guarantees a thoughtful consideration of her work, without covering too many specialist details and thus avoiding the visitor feeling confused and disorientated, which frequently recurs in retrospectives. The show exhibits hints of beauty without satisfying the audience’s appetite, perhaps facilitated in this by Carr’s artistic activity.

If one section is occupied by her timid experimentation with drawing, illustrated books and cubist compositions, a larger part of the exhibition is enriched by her studies on her land, woods and especially trees. These paintings are the worthwhile pinnacle of her career and of this retrospective. “I ought to stick to nature because I love trees better than people”, the sulky artist famously affirmed. Works such as Wood Interior, Indian Church and Tree embody Carr’s restless yearning for reality. She felt empathy towards nature, towards the forest which she preferred for its unadulterated pureness and bounty.

Her landscape subjects appear to be put in motion by a supernatural force, perhaps Carr’s own desire to get closer and join them in their uncontaminated oscillation. Windswept Trees from 1934 is an oil and gasoline work on paper magnificently overwhelmed by a spiral of emotions. A blow of air takes over the central tree and spins around the whole painting; influenced by Van Gogh shimmering objects, Carr developed his style further and made her strokes longer. The browns, greens and yellows are not colour but tangible movement. Carr’s images excel because their dynamic nature suggests the passage of time. Despite being fixed in a specific space and time, her work illuminates a sequence of moments: the Canadian artist’s windswept creations allow what came before and after them to be seen.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery concludes with Carr’s paintings of the sea and the sky. While paradoxically her maritime artworks are static and inanimate, her skyscapes encapsulate her movement away from the human landscape, towards the transcendence offered by silence, isolation and the harmony of the earth.

From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery until the 15 March 2015.

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The audience are welcomed in to view the exhibition, but we’re not told when or where the performance will start. My anticipation distracts me from looking at the work. People mill from room to room, obviously a little uneasy too, anxious to see what will happen next, anxious to be in the right place at the right time.

When I’ve almost walked to the end of the exhibition, shouted commands and the stomping of feet sound out. These are alien, jarring sounds in a place where usually you would only hear hushed exchanges, the occasional, ostentatiously loud remark, or the chatter and squeals of school children. The exit doors swing open to reveal a battery of army cadets, aged between 14 and 17, each holding a pair of drumsticks and wearing full dress uniform with severe expressions to match.

The cadets march in, led by a stern Lieutenant, who punches out commands that coordinate their steps: left, right, left, right (although his forceful delivery makes it a more staccato: heftrite heftrite heftrite.) I’m mesmerised by the shining buttons, the braids, the epaulets, the fleur-de-lis detailing; the red, the blue, the yellow, the gold, the pomp and regalia. Half the cadets are in red, half in dark blue. I’m not sure what this means, different units, different ranks? The red uniform includes a knife hanging from the belt.

When the line passes a drum, the last cadet takes up position behind it. They start rat-tat-tatting in rhythm with their companions who are now marching away. This parade through the exhibition continues until each drum is occupied.

I’ve never been to a military tattoo, never seen the changing of the guards (unless by mistake, in passing), I don’t know the correct terminology for what I see. This world is unfamiliar to me, and I don’t know how to interpret this display other than with my gut, the way the shouted commands and drumming makes me feel. Nervous, on edge, a little excited.

The drumming is loud and monotonous, making it hard to concentrate on or even look at anything else in the room. Traditionally drums were used on the battlefield to communicate messages and synchronise firing, over the sounds of battle. Until the late nineteenth century young boys often carried out this role. The little drummer boy took on an almost mascot-like status for soldiers, and the appeal of being in this position of esteem would inspire young boys to run away and join the army. I wonder at the purpose of the drumbeat now. Usually these cadets would march drumming is unison. Here, apart, isolated, they continue the performance, a display of their discipline and skill.

A relay starts (there must be spare cadets waiting outside the exhibition to keep the loop going.) A drummer approaches, and begins to beat the drum already occupied. Four sticks tapping together one taught skin. There is a choreographed exchange; a shuffling of places and the first drummer is dismissed to march on to the next drum down the line.

The cadets are sponsored by the army, but there is no requirement that they enter the military when old enough. The description on their website make it sound like a fun afterschool club, or a way to keep young people ‘out of trouble’, giving them “access to fun, friendship, action and adventure…” and an opportunity “to learn more, do more and try more… to aim high, and gain skills, values and attitudes to go further in life.” They play sport, learn orienteering, get to go on a camp in the summer, but they also learn to wear a uniform with pride, march as part of a team and shoot rifles. Apparently 81 per cent of cadets join because of this last activity.

Now that the cadets have been left drumming alone in the exhibition, surrounded by images of the aftermath of war, they look vulnerable. One boy in particular has too-long sleeves and peers out from under the too-low peak of his hat, his cheeks flushed—a tin toy-soldier hanging from the Christmas tree. For some the drums seem to be positioned too high, and their arms are raised awkwardly at the shoulder in order to strike.

I’m fascinated by the imperfections of the performance. When the switchovers get a bit messy, when the back is not quite held straight enough, when the drumming goes a little out of sync. Some eyes dart nervously around the room. Blank expressions break, revealing discomfort and self-consciousness in front of this art crowd who are staring and taking photos.

I notice the mother of one girl (a large portion of the audience is formed of proud relatives) follow her to each new position taking photos. The mother beams with pride and the daughter squirms in teenage embarrassment, slowly shaking her head “No” as the mother’s phone is held up for one more shot.

The performance is a manifestation of War Primer II, an artist book produced by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in 2013, which inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s 1955 publication War Primer. The artists screen printed images of the War on Terror sourced from the internet over the original photographs narrating the Second World War which Brecht had collected from the illustrated press. Under each of the photographs Brecht wrote four line epigrams that were left unaltered by Broomberg and Chanarin. In 1957 a selection of these epigrams were set to music by Hans Eisler, a composer who often collaborated with Brecht, as the beginning of a War Primer opera. Never completed, this work was the inspiration for this performance. Here, rather than choosing images from the press or the internet, the drums are positioned next to, or nearby, photographs within Conflict, Time, Photography, which Broomberg and Chanarin have selected to be newly activated by Brecht’s epigrams.

The lieutenant returns, marches to stand beside each drummer and deliver a four-line stanza. He barks them like they are commands; it’s hard to discern the words above the racket of the drum. They are also printed in a leaflet alongside the photographs Broomberg and Chanarin want them to be associated with, and reading them more effectively prompts a critical consideration of the relationship between photography and language, one of Brecht’s aims in War Primer.

I’m reminded of another work by Broomberg and Chanarin, made whilst they were embedded with the British army in Afghanistan. In The Day Nobody Died, 2008, they co-opted the army into carrying a cardboard box containing a large role of light sensitive paper. This paper was exposed to create abstract photograms at moments that traditionally would be considered ‘photo opportunities’. (One of these photograms is displayed in the exhibition.) Throughout the trip they filmed the cardboard box—being carried by soldiers, loaded in and out of vehicles, waiting in mess tents—and this documentation reveals what they describe as an absurd performance. By inviting cadets into this exhibition to perform, Broomberg and Chanarin remind us of the ceremony and the tradition, but also the spectacle integral to the military, and the increasingly dominant role the creation of spectacular images plays in the way war is fought.

Conflict, Time, Photography is at Tate Modern until 15 March 2015.

War Primer II: One Way Song, a performance by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in collaboration with the Army Cadet Force took place in the galleries of the Tate Modern on 26 January 2015.

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Which, conversely, actually brings me back to maps; navigational tools that summarise, provide information and to an extent, conquer. Mapping is a military reconnaissance mission and a map is a logistical system and potentially, a weapon. The map, the plan, is a birds-eye-view of the city, while the person navigating its innards has a very different, rather more messy experience. Even attempting to trace that journey is just one personal story among the crushing throngs of lives that pass each other everyday. As the attempts of the late twentieth-century ‘psychogeographers’ showed—to whom, not unsurprisingly, many of the exhibitors in Mapping the City owe differing degrees of inspiration—trying to systematise the ground-level experience of urban life into a scientific and objective approach is to create overly confident, artificial categorisations and silence the ongoing narrative of sleepless cities.

Mapping the City is made up of these subjective maps, cartographic art works by 50 street artists from around the world coding and claiming their streets, their underground catacombs, their cycling accidents, their histories and their fictions. To write a review is essentially also to create such a map. I enjoy joining the dots, navigating from work to work, artist to artist, thought to leading thought, tracking mental markers, scribbled notes, all reviewed again while sat at a keyboard and sketched into something that hopefully can be followed. The review is, in some ways like giving the reader my map of the exhibition. Not literally though—you wouldn’t want it. It’s been annotated with weird, dramatic things like “the city is a god”, “payote”, “where is Allessandria?”, “bodies, microchips, gauze”, “tagging” and “Neverware”. Because, of course, like all exhibitions, Mapping the City, has a map. Each work is numbered, running in a sequential snake down the page while a series of colour coded arrows connect piece to piece, and artist to artist by medium and or/theme. On my map, I drew another set of arrows. One runs between number 11 and number 16— 11 being The Book of Bitumen: Chapter One, 2015 and Rubble Trauma Tower, 2012-2015, by Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ and 16 being Gold Peg’s London’s Burning, 2013. A journey between a video of ritual cultists ‘breakspraying’ on layered lino, chanting hip-hop prayers with symbolic, de-soled Addidas trainers strung around their necks, to a dark, autobiographical ‘Where’s Wally?’ map of London, where witches and hell hounds laugh at green vomit spewing hipsters in Shoreditch or toast marshmallows over the head of a three-eyed, tentacled monster clutching Selfridges and Top Shop shopping bags in the hell hole that is Oxford Street. From there my scrawled line navigates to 47, Susumu Mukai’s detailed pencil drawing, Regent’s Canal, East London, 2012-2014, 2014: a map of memory, a map from maps, from drawing, notes and countless navigations. A short hop over then to 50 lands in Will Sweeneys fantastical rendition of Cabott Square, Canary Wharf, 2014 complete with a Bull god, battery farm body enslavement, skull-stacked skyscraper towers in which skeleton men do desk-work and talk on the phone, monsters that slither in the Thames, alien invasions, some truly amazing looking ‘end of the world’ parties and, of course, ceremonial blood sacrifice. I then followed Tim Head’s heady night drive through London to the work of Nug, and Nug and Pike, and the adrenalin pumped performance of the graffiti artist, and a train obsession, to the quiet, lonely Parisian catacombs where Psyckoze has been secretly at work for many years. From here the line heads back up to number 13, to Daniel Gotesson’s Rational Disorder I & II, 2014, an abstract ink and spray paint diptych that channels the psychogeographic spectre that haunts all introspective city wanderings.

So that’s my map of Mapping the City and I hope that in this case, if you get yourself down to Somerset House lickety-split, and with other reviews and exhibitions, you have fun writing, crossing-out and drawing a new map over the top.

Mapping the City is at Somerset House until 15 February 2015, in association with collaborative arts organisation A(by)P.

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As you can read on our About page, until 2013 ArtSelector was a free, online network for artists—a place to share news, opinion, opportunities and promote events, as well as publishing regular reviews and a series of themed editions. The key element of ArtSelector that we are taking forward, beyond being a publishing platform, is the ideal of a critical artist community. ArtSelector is a group of artists and writers (among other things) that, through a written practice and many conversations, online and off, are exploring the role of the arts review. We have different concerns, voices and styles and as our community grows we hope to continue to challenge our assumptions, and yours.

We meet regularly to share ideas and discuss each others writing and are thankful to be supported by Platform Training, a provider of training courses in digital media, who, as well as hosting our online presence, have kindly furnished us with the occasional use of a space at Westland Place Studios, North London. We will be announcing the next meeting soon, so keep an eye out if you would be interested in coming along and potentially joining us as a writer. Also watch this space for news of our upcoming launch event. After all, what’s a launch without a party?

There’s a lot of things we want to do. We hope to be a resource for artists and writers and that interested parties will join us in this effort. We want to address the nature of our status as a non-profit, voluntary enterprise and the ideals, problems, ambitions and possibilities of that, going forward.

But for now, lets just concentrate on the reviews. Happy reading!

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Emma Charles is best known for Fragments of Machines, a work that investigates the materials that makeup the infrastructure of the Internet and the urban spaces where they are hidden. For her new project The Straightest Path Allowed by Law, Charles leaves the windowless data vaults of New York city for the Allegheny mountains in Pennsylvania, which underwent a secret $300 million construction to allow fibre-optic cables to connect New York and Chicago. Travelling the route of the cables, the artist looked for any evidence of their existence in the wilderness. Along the way, the photographs also show overhead wires, a water storage tower and a playground—relics of the city and its expansion.

Alicja Dobrucka’s series Life is on a High captures the conspicuous new high-rises in Mumbai, India. The images were taken by the artist and  reproduced from local property newspapers, each named by Dobrucka after the advertising slogans used to sell them. There is a disparity between the adverts and the reality—instead of lush river meadows, the “supertalls” (one of which was marketed as one of the greenest buildings in the world) are surrounded by slums. Dobrucka adopts a perspective that draws attention to the slums but cuts the tops of the buildings to contrast with the adverts that present the sky, and ones proximity to it, as luxury.

In both artists’ work we look down at the ground to see the ways technology and architecture write upon the landscape. But to what extent do we recognize their affect? You do not need to see photographs of Mumbai’s high rises to understand how wasteful such developments are. Although  Life on a High Line highlights the injustices of economic growth, Dobrucka equally illustrates how easily images can disguise the affects. Similarly, Charles shows how dramatic changes to the landscape can go unnoticed. The remnants she finds of the internet are not always obvious and while she has used the camera in Fragments of Machines to expose hidden networks, her photographs in the exhibition shows the difficulty of tracing the internet above ground.

Referring back to the title By Set Square, Compass and Eye, the emphasis in the exhibition is less on how we measure the changes around the world and more on how the eye and the camera can limit our perception of it. South Kiosk’s past exhibitions have all revolved around technology, whether new, alternative and forgotten, and the works that criticise it. Although this new exhibition seems at first to be a move away from this speciality, it investigates the problems with using a camera to document an increasingly changing world.

By Set Square, Compass and Eye is on at South Kiosk from the 16 January until the 14 February 2015.

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Travel down to the third floor to sit before the looped screening of Ben River’s Creation As We Saw It, 2012 and look up: you’ll see the colourful, elephant-faced undercarriage of The Three Fold Law. Drained a little of its bright variety by the silvery ambience in the room, it nevertheless retains the characteristically kaleidoscopic quality of Harper’s painting: tunnel-visions through mutating organic forms, some natural, some imaginary. Smaller works by Harper can be peered at—sadly from quite a distance—in the adjacent stair well. Abloom and fading, the disorientating detail of the vivid, butterfly-print images of buds, branches, creeping stems and vegetable rot seem to keep metamorphosing into Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s portraits, tribal masks and hollowing animal craniums. Creation as we see it.

River’s film tells us sweet, sad creation stories over scenes of modern day life: a modern day that is a combined world of the old and the new, ancient and modern. Using purposefully archaic technology, Rivers’ hand-developed, 16mm film silently narrates the myth of a volcano’s birth on the island of Tanna of the Republic of Vanuatu, the bringing of fire and the beginnings of human life in one of the worlds oldest known settlements. A lasting interest in the forgotten secrets, the mothers of myth in pre-history appears to be the curational topic at hand, yet it is a messy, indiscriminate wealth of time that flows throughout the exhibition, overlaying the contemporary with the historical. A time before time becomes a forever present; something we reach behind the scenes for, underneath, digging fingernails into the basal mess. Time is just another ambiguous construct alongside the real and the imaginary, consciousness facing the ambivalence of the natural world.

The amorality of nature—the disinterested, essential and unifying force at work in many of the included artists work—underpins River’s interest in alternative ways of living that are neither utopia not dystopia; totally ordinary yet remarkable places. Often filming exceptional individuals or singular communities, Rivers is drawn to places that are distinctively authored and shaped by the people he films, documenting the reality and the possibilities of our fictions. Camera led, eyes rest on close up portraits of the island’s contemporary inhabitants—a boy rides a bike in circles; bare shoulder blades open and close as man claps—he swings his arms, unheard and walks along a tree-shaded path; another, older man, masticates in the doorway of his house, trying not to laugh self-consciously under his hat. Inter-cut by the fable of pig and man, their exchange of limbs, short and long, a woman rubs the belly of a blissful, dusty hog. In another shot, the curious curl of a human toe nested above the other detracts attention from the animal skull that hangs above the foot. Picking out detail within disarray; depicting creation as we see it.

Primordial or post-apocalyptic landscapes or both, strange fictions, organic and geological, continue to evolve throughout the exhibition: places bound by natural forms yet authored, manipulated and mythologised. Journeying further down towards the centre of the earth, the second floor displays sculptural specimens from the veins of volcanoes, the fungal growths and sedimentary build-up of wet caverns, and the pulsating ocean floor. Salvatore Arancio’s ceramics gasp hot, guttural names like Ah-ah, 2015 or the electronic rhythm of Ziwzih Ziwzih Oo-oo-oo, 2012; are called after tiny ancient crustaceans, living fossils such as Triop, 2005; or simply state their form as in Holes, 2015—sea-bottom calcite tubers popping open to extend modelling compound limbs. A graphic photo-etching on the wall states its subject: An active volcano summit in the valley of stones, 2011. While Arancio’s work dominates the room, the odd pairing with Caroline Achaintre textile work is less peculiar than it first appears. I can imagine them both pouring through books for curious images, editing and combining and elaborating their sources to create hybrid objects. The man-made fuses with the natural in Arancio’s sculptures, reinterprets found images using a combinations of new and ‘outdated’ techniques in his etchings, while geometric ink blots on printed paper transform natural geologies into something synthetic and strange. Achaintre’s woolen zebra pelt, Zibra, 2011, is a similarly re-sourced modern exoticism: the animal pattern crafted into an angular geometry of hand-tufted wool, zigzags of blue and gold invading the black and white regulation in a dramatic, and slightly absurd, combined order. Creation as we make it.

Down, down on the ground floor, or the first floor, at the beginning and the end ,is another seemingly odd coupling between Jack Strange and Vidya Gastaldon. As much as Strange is sincere in his humour, poking fun at and through visual manipulations—how we visualise ourselves and our relation to the world around us through things, including art—Gastaldon has humour in her sincerity. Her allegorical drawings, inspired by sacred Hindu texts, are littered with pop references and drug culture, not least the acid smiley—a contemporary payote for the modern day mystic. Said by the artist to represent a non-duality or cosmic unity of good and evil, Gastaldon’s pale drawings hatch within papery voids like planets being born, cells growing in a Petri dish or terrine-like bubble worlds, evolving microcosms living and dying in the vastness of the universe. The elephant within Ulephant, 2006, is revealed in particulates of rock formations and tree-trunks, serially blossoming within the landscape: mountains and planet strewn skies divided by a horizon line that delves into a subterranean world. In Fire and Emptiness Flight, 2008, both ghostly spirits seem essential to the other, creating space underneath a densely buried but bejewelled cosmos. Such apocryphal binds of creation and destruction trail thematically throughout the The First Humans and yet, as in Gastaldon’s work, these binaries are subsumed by an overpowering ambivalence between them, like the entangled symmetry of Harper’s painting or the tragic birth of a volcano that forms the world: the dualism of beauty and decadence, life and death, utopia and dystopia, the sardonic or knowingly cliché, and a true, mystical sincerity. Ambiguity trickles down the inside of this re-purposed, post-industrial pillar like good-natured laughter.

There are a just lot of eyes in this first/last room, looking, grinning, laughing. From the spirits sketched in pencil and graphite in Gastaldon’s watercolour bled drawings to Strange’s series of paired tumble stones, each inserted into rectangular cardboard sheets, a deadpan host of level gazes from the back wall. Entitled, What do you want more of? (I)–(XXIII), 2010, each stone is supposedly imbued with different desirable characteristics. They remind me of birth stone earrings piercing cardboard backing in a craft shop: material, objects, on which to project ourselves and our meaning on, or take some meaning from and award it to ourselves. How easily manipulated have I been by the work in this psychedelic exhibition? Seeing faces, gods, archetypal myths, an exotic state of nature (neither Edens, utopias nor disinterested dystopias), and exotic, carnival incarnations: documented fictions of the pre-historical and primitive. The confounding cliché of creation as we see it, as we see ourselves in relation to the world: aliens, apes, cavemen—the bizarre characters that Strange rattles around dressed up as inside Lump Inside a Lump, 2012, a video set into a clumsy papier-mâché boulder.

On entering the Pump House, the wall text directs your thoughts downwards before you journey up through the four rooms of the exhibition, asking you to think about the grounds of London, the fertile muck of time and the swampy land that once was—that which fuelled the defunct power station nearby, a site currently undergoing phase of moneyed, metropolitan development and property speculation —from the equally repurposed art gallery in a city park. There is a hint of JG Ballard’s alternative Londons; psychedelic journeys through the looking glass of modern urbanity where civilisation becomes entwined with the primordial and we catch sight of ourselves growing, dripping with it, acting within a transformational landscape. Authored landscapes in metamorphosis. Creation as we see it, as we over-write it, as we see ourselves, at the beginning and the end: the first humans.

The First Humans is at Pump House Gallery from the 22 January until 27 March 2015.

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Paysage avec Poussin is a series of installations based on landscapes by the French 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin. Paysage means landscape, and in some way the installation does resemble a landscape. At once 2 and 3 dimensional, almost like a theatre stage set, you walk in between the plinths and walls on which the objects are placed. Seeing the set from the side or behind, each view is so calculated, the longer you spend in the space, the weaker your knees become. The exhibited objects — marble antiques, velvety fabric — are so carefully chosen from a pool of thousands, your attraction to them becomes fetishistic. In the process of fetishising the object we remove it from its social context, negate its agency; our attachment becomes immoral. Imagine the feeling of the velvet, its mossy Victorian green so exquisitely perfect you can barely stand it. The whole thing is so entirely perfect, so prudish, it is perverse. Ice-cold well-dressed volcano: sex under a delicate but impenetrable veil. The two videos in the upper galleries exacerbate this tension. Little brown flint stones and bank notes, just go so well together it’s obvious. Tableaus of weird Portobello Rd crap that you just love for no reason other than that they’re perfect. Vintage, tasteful, perhaps there is an element of aura, definitely of rarity. The camera lenses and the plate of glass, the stones and the figurines; they are so lovely, I want more, I want them all the time, but also, I don’t. It is the appeal of Snap Chat: the appeal of limitation, exclusivity, or the waves that only just cover the dick, the completely perfunctory sheer scrap that ensures Aphrodite’s in keeping with decorum. Overwhelmed with the infinite scroll of the everyday and allthetime, Cornaro’s tight selection is both titillating and an immense relief. The videos are remarkably short. I watch them on loop, go back into the installation, move my head close to the marble obelisks. My trousers at my ankles, desire in my eyes, Cornaro catches me fetishising her objects. In returning her gaze I am forced to question what it is that makes them so beautiful; what do they want and why do I love them?

Isabelle Cornaro: Paysage avec Poussin is at the South London Gallery from 24 Jan until 5 April 2014.

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