3 stars
Apocatopia is just that, positioned in the no man’s land between full blown apocalypse and the heady ‘no place’ of utopia, Castlefield Gallery’s latest exhibition is an unsettling take on our troubled times. The work on display follows a complex trajectory beyond simple representation, inspired by Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World and Sir Thomas More’s proto-communist Utopia, the exhibition muses on the innate injustices associated with capitalist culture in an altogether unfamiliar way.
Hemmed in by apartments and the railway viaduct at the far end of Manchester’s Indie art axis of Whitworth Street West, the artist led gallery showcases contemporary talent. Funded by various charitable bodies the gallery is stripped of the chains of capitalism giving it a freedom of expression and passion for experimentation often missing from other galleries. It is a place for critical pieces that you wouldn’t necessarily hang on your living room wall.
The exhibition features an eclectic mix of contemporary pieces by internationally celebrated London and Salford based artists including sculpture, film and painting. Though sparse, with a total of seven works by three artists and one collective, each piece illuminates hypocrisies and inconsistencies sprouting from current affairs including the devastation of the rainforest, climate change and economic chaos.
Ruth Ewan’s Le Gran Catastrophe de 1983, a book of the same name predicting the end of the world, embellished with a child’s scribblings, acts as a metaphor for apprehension and hope emerging from the unfathomable. Pil & Galia Kollectiv’s The Future Trilogy draws on the Ikea riots of 2005 for inspiration, a darkly humorous filmic interpretation of the chaos. The pieces all have a separate focus but have one thing in common, they don’t have a happy ending.
Apocatopia does not patronize the viewer by dictating how the works should be taken, which makes a visit to the exhibition liberating. Situated slightly separate from the other pieces is Evi Grigoropoulou’s Still Life of an Onion, to us it seemed the perfect epithet of the exhibition- as Marvin Gaye said “the world is just a great big onion”.
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