"How many performance artists does it take to change a lightbulb?"
Based on the fomo-inducing reports I’d heard about George Rouy’s opening at Hannah Barry, it seems like London Gallery Weekend actually kicked off on a Wednesday this year. First up on my own tour the following evening was Dale Lewis, who had an exhibition of new paintings opening at Edel Assanti titled “Lost Illusions”: an explosive and ballsy “state of the nation” show. The diverse subject matter included nostalgia, immigration, gardening, English nationalism, and a self-portrait of the artist depicted as queer icon Saint Sebastian. That particular piece, Bad Day, 2026, featured four big blotchy squares of color that I was told represent shit, piss, puke, and tears—the perfect appetizer for the long weekend of art bingeing I had ahead of me.
A power walk across Mayfair brought me to Ames Yavuz, where the Australian artist Patricia Piccinini was showing her fantastical, hyperrealist sculptures, including some of the chimerical creatures she’s become best known for. I managed to nab the artist for a quick chat, and she explained the ideas behind her sculpture The Rescuers, 2021 (this one firmly rooted in reality, where two children nurse an injured koala). Other visitors stopped to listen, and an impromptu artist talk was soon in full swing. This concluded with an enthusiastic round of applause as we surrounded Piccinini’s Frankenstein-inspired piece The Couple, 2018.
My final stop that evening was Anne Imhof’s hot-ticket show at Sprüth Magers. Every scenester in London had descended on the gallery’s street corner facade; it felt like a Balenciaga show circa the Demna years. One of Imhof’s magnificently daunting crowd control barriers was on display inside, taking up the entirety of the gallery’s basement space. On the subject of crowd control, Sprüth’s Bella Bonner-Evans chaperoned me and some other guests around to the after-dinner at Bellamy’s. My table included writer Sofia Hallström, gallerist Adam Krupa, and poet James Massiah. The famed curator Sir Norman Rosenthal stood up to make a toast, while the guest to my left had brought along an expensive-looking bottle of red from the year of Imhof’s birth (1978). He uncorked it at his seat and we helped him polish it off, toasting the artist for the second time that evening.
Friday was performance-heavy. Palmer Gallery, an ambitious new(ish) space in northwest London, hosted a trio of folk singers called Alkanna Graeca who performed a haunting set among a sculptural installation by Carolina Aguirre, part of her current solo show “It Murmurs” (the artist herself gave a reading as part of the performance). Later, Ropac staged “The Red Lady,” which at first appeared to be a typical artist Q&A with Mandy El-Sayegh (as part of her show “Jewel Tones”) until an erratic, overbearing lady burst into the room and proceeded to gate-crash the interview. As someone who regularly encounters this type of person at art openings, I genuinely thought this was for real for a few tense seconds. Thankfully it was all part of the act, what the gallery described as an “interruption-based work,” the gate-crasher expertly played by artist Alice Walter.
My boyfriend and I then headed to the official LGW reception at the Serpentine Pavilion. I was supposed to have a plus-one, but according to the guest list I did not. I apologize that I haven’t provided photos of gallery directors standing with glasses of sponsored prosecco—I know this is the kind of content we all live for—but my friend Laurie Barron was in attendance, and he WhatsApped me a picture of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s keynote speech (please refer to the pic of Obrist obscured from view by a sound system).
Hans Ulrich Obrist’s speech at LGW’s official opening reception at the Serpentine Pavilion (photo courtesy of Laurie Barron)
Next, we had a “mystical wedding” to attend. For its off-site LGW presentation, Gallery Rosenfeld was staging a mock marriage between the Serbian artist Marta Jovanović and Italian curator Cristiano Leone, who heads up the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena. The proceedings took place in the Fitzrovia Chapel in what was a personal highlight of the weekend. Ninety-nine vows were exchanged over a two-hour period, supplemented with lots of communion wafers: “I vow to honor exile . . . I vow to remain a stranger to myself.” A select group of us were then invited to follow the happy couple (who maintained a deadpan demeanor for the entirety of the piece) through the streets of Soho and into a fourth-floor Airbnb.
We then silently observed the newlyweds get a Santiago Sierra–style line tattooed across both their hands, which “recovers continuity only when the performers join hands,” as the press release explained. Neither Jovanović nor Leone so much as flinched, finally breaking character once they arrived at the gallery dinner. Leone tried to persuade us to come back to Rome the following day for a party in his apartment, while Jovanović told me that famous joke about performance art (is it by Roselee Goldberg or Lynne Tillman?), which I’ll paraphrase:
Q: How many performance artists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: I don’t know, I left halfway through.
I might have skipped the final event in my diary and chosen to spend Saturday in bed, were it not for the fact that I myself was participating. Brave Projects’ Victoria Comstock-Kershaw had selected six writers—including Jessica Rowley and Martin Woodrow—for a reading at LBF Contemporary. This was centered around H. E. Morris’s solo show “Songs of War,” which dealt with the horrors of armed conflict, supplanting the war photographer’s lens with the artist’s own violent-looking abstract paintings, a hard feat to pull off.
The readings were a mix of new material written especially for the event and preexisting work that loosely aligned—all of it starkly different in tone and content. Reading aloud from a short story that my own editor called “utterly depraved” in an art gallery at 2 pm while sober was quite a different experience from the reading I’d done the week before (a music venue, at night, half-drunk), but it seemed to have gone down well. . . . I mean, some of the dark humor got a laugh. The other readers performed in front of Morris’s huge diptych The Edge, 2026. Since I myself was feeling on edge, I did my reading next to the open door with its fresh air. But as a friend later pointed out, I’d also made sure nobody could leave.
