Ali Smith reads Tove Jansson at Gay’s the Word
Tove Jansson is most famous for her Moomin books, which are probably the best, most sinister children’s books ever written, but she also wrote books for adults. The most recent to be translated into English is “The True Deceiver”, which is set in the usual Jansson-esque Finnish landscape but deals more transparently with sexuality. It’s had good reviews and you can hear Ali Smith read from the book at excellent niche bookshop Gay’s the Word this Thursday.
And here, even though it’s not totally relevant, is a picture of some Moomins:
Shake It: An Instant History of the Polaroid
The Polaroid: generations of fun to be had, with its pleasingly artistic quality and expensive film. Everyone’s a photographer with a Polaroid camera and I once reduced someone to tears by giving them one. You don’t get that effect with a digital camera from Dixons. Attend this exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery to mourn for the days when you made instant photographs or, if you are a young’un, to find out what the phrase “shake it like a Polaroid picture” actually signifies.
Sophie Calle @ The Whitechapel Gallery
Sophie Calle is one of those artists who really live their work. She has invited strangers off the street to share her bed, which is taking discomfort to a whole new level if the average streetwalker in her area is anything like in mine. On the topic of other people’s personal space, she asked homeless people to take her to their favourite places and photographed them. Her work is all not only observing others but getting right into people’s insides, and exposing her own in return.
The Truman Brewery hosts this smorgasbord of street art, influenced by thingies as varied as dubstep and the half-timbered Liberty building. in keeping with the “gritty” nature of the exhibit’s name, there is plenty of the visual vocab of modern life to be seen: skulls talk on phones, jolly multi-coloured blood spurts from wounds and stark prints of weaponry sit next to sweet cartoon saplings sprouting.
Tags:
Ali Smith, Gay's the Word, Lava Collective, Old Truman Brewery, Polaroid, Pumphouse Gallery, Sophie Calle, street art, The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson, Whitechapel Gallery
