'The Best Shows at London Gallery Weekend' - Frieze

1 June 2023

'Matter as Actor' at Lisson Gallery

This large-scale group exhibition, taking place across both of Lisson’s London spaces, unites work by 12 artists for whom materials are not simply resources but active co-producers of meaning. Emphasizing complex networks of relations (over modernist claims to autonomy), ‘Matter as Actor’ traces material histories within and across multiple cultural frameworks. For example, Otobong Nkanga’s installation Solid Maneuvers (2015) beautifully evokes the devastating transformations wrought by extractive mining in Namibia; Lucy Raven created her silver gelatin shadowgram series ‘Socorro!’ (2021–22) by exposing photosensitive paper to ballistics-testing events in New Mexico; and Yelena Popova’s elegant tapestries, such as Keepsafe I (2019), constitute speculative memorials for defunct nuclear power stations. Most evocatively, first nations artist D Harding has filled the gallery’s windows and skylights with politically loaded pigments, including earth gathered from the lands of their grandparents – washes of colour that, in places, have flaked and fallen to the floor.