It’s getting warmer! Ok, not really. Lazy evenings lolling about in one of the city’s grand parks are still a ways off, so keep heading inside to galleries and theatres for your (heated) culture fix. This week’s cerebral theme? Attention-grabbing names. You’ll see. Onwards!
The film You, the Living opens this week. The film has received rave reviews and filmmaker Roy Andersson is being touted as the next Bergman. You know, nothing special. First shown at the London Film Festival, this film is now back in town to prove that Scandinavians do have a sense of humour, dammit (also, incidentally, proven to marvelous effect in usually obscenely dark auteur Lars von Trier’s latest knee-slapper The Boss of It All).
Head to the National Gallery on Wednesday evening for some free classical music with hardcore harpsichord and cello. The Royal College of Music players will be performing Bach, Handel, and Torelli from 6 to 7.15 pm.
It’s a crack in the floor! No! It’s art! Wait! People are falling in! And then the signs came, stuck every few metres along the crack, addressing the perils of the exhibit, which is all rather meta since the exhibit itself was designed to address the perils of racism. This week is your last chance to check out Columbian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, the provocative installation rupturing the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Fun fact: Shibboleth is the a language or practice indicative of one’s origins, and during the Battle of the Bulge, American soldiers used baseball knowledge to suss out the German spies cloaked in American uniforms. Because no one else cares about a sport that dull. Free.
This Friday, the exhibition entitled Reality? That thing that happens between cups of tea? begins its week-long run at the Red Gate Gallery. Young artists Richard Barton, Tyson Howard and Gavin Leesam challenge modern ideas of domesticity with film and sculpture installations. Free.
If it’s raining on Saturday afternoon, and it probably will be, since we live in London and all, duck into Voyages of Discovery film season at the National Portrait Gallery. At 2.30, the museum will be showing a fantastic Jim Jarmusch gem from ’91 called Night on Earth. Five taxi rides, five different cities. £4, £3 concessions.
by Kira Hesser
