At the back of Cell Project Space are two thick steel doors resembling walk-in fridges. Something small repeatedly flicks against their windows, sounding like a swarm of flies. Glimpsing though these portholes, you see a blizzard of paperwork inside a sealed-off back room: mounds of small paper circles rushed through the air by six industrial fans, their wind paths creating a funhouse maze of paths amidst the confetti tornado.
On the wall alongside Ruoru Mou’s installation Dirty Snow (2025), the most overt part of her understated and concise show “Fortunate,” is Collecting Fees Document (wash label) (2025), a long list, printed on a loop of cloth styled like a clothing care tag, that wryly details, in Italian and English, the contents of the paper storm: a foreigner’s permit of stay, birth certificate, cleaning bills, customs documents from the UK and Netherlands, application forms for arts funding grants, and so on. The culmination of a life in paperwork put through a blender and thrown to the winds, it’s a ready metaphor for a life buffeted around by bureaucracy. But there’s melancholy and a weird tenderness in there, too: on one wall of the sealed-off room we can see Prosperity, Protection, Purity (2025), three little mechanical arms detached from maneki neko cats and stuck on a row of brackets. They wave tentatively every once in a while in the gusts—part gesture to join the melee, part warning to run away, and part weary greeting to the fellow condemned.
The London art scene’s autumn effusion of exhibitions and events around Frieze art fair has, in recent years particularly, only heightened the crass surrealism of context vertigo—the lottery of what you choose to pay attention to, and why it should matter, whether that’s in a gallery or on a screen or in a school around the corner or a field a thousand miles away. But this year felt notable for artists choosing not to create new contexts so much as to remix, reinhabit, and reimagine those that already exist, building systemic portraits from found objects and artifacts as a means to understand, and perhaps move through, our own fucked timeline. Mou’s whirlwind factory sits alongside other heavies currently on show—like Stan Douglas’s fragmented retake on Birth of a Nation (2025) at Victoria Miro, Naeem Mohaiemen’s reordered media footage of the 1970 shootings at Kent State and Jackson State universities in Through a Mirror, Darkly (2025) at Albany House, and Kerry James Marshall’s recasting of the history of painting at the Royal Academy—in taking what was already there and breaking it open, to illuminate background structures and to find more in the parts than in the sum.
“I think we need to see the catastrophe, see how it enters and structures our lives. Fuckin’ hell man, what’s that about?” quips an interviewee in Daniel Ward’s patchy, fragmented documentary film Lonesome Ghosts (2025), an hour-long examination of the afterlives of activism. At the heart of the film, showing at Peer, is Ward’s response to this question in the form of grainy old footage of a funeral. In Chris Marker style, the segment is shown three times in a row: the first time silent, the second informing us through voiceover that this is the 1979 procession for teacher Blair Peach, who died after being struck by police at a protest against the National Front. You start to notice the repeating details: the 25 bus to Stratford waiting in the background, the lady smoking as she struggles to push a pram up a footpath. The third time, the narrator informs us the footage is from the archives of the UK’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), an undercover counterinsurgency unit.
Why exactly they were documenting the funeral of a man the police had killed, the narrator doesn’t know. All he tells us is that “the police made documentaries; the subject was misery.” One of Ward’s interviewees is the photographer Alan Lodge, who has long documented police surveillance at protests; another Marker-like echo arrives in a sequence of Lodge’s still images of cops with cameras and camcorders, some stern-faced, on the lookout, others gleeful to be capturing their prey. While Ward’s film mostly evades details or even coherence, his subject is also misery: the specter of resignation or defeat. The activists of Lonesome Ghosts seem pained but uncowed by efforts like the SDS, as the film is itself haunted by the history of surveillance.
“The work of ghosts and their ways of seeing look back at me,” Edward George intones in a new film at the Warburg Institute. “Whose ghosts are these and in whose bodies do these ways of seeing now haunt the present?” The institute hosts the “Image of the Black” archive created by Jean and Dominique de Ménil between 1960 and the 1990s, reorganized by George along the lines of Aby Warburg’s own associative Mnemosyne Atlas. The film and installation Black Atlas (2025) zoom in and skip through the historical depiction of Black people from classical art, through Renaissance tapestries and seventeenth-century book etchings to contemporary tobacco ads and photography. George assembles his own esoteric groupings to structure the film—“Dogs,” “Sex,” “Collar”, “Mirror”, to name a few—while quoting from Jacques Derrida, Fred Moten, Jacques Lacan, and Warburg himself.
The images range from the casually subjugating (a portrait of a white aristocrat casually resting his hand on a Black boy’s head) to the sadistic (endless pictures of Black slaves being punished), to the fantastical and exotic. Over a loose soundtrack of bumping noise and the occasional fluttering saxophone, George asks the following question: If the people depicted in the archive are projections of another’s imagination, then who is actually in there? Each image from the past asks something of the present: while images from previous centuries depicted Black people as animals, “Who now, in your time,” George asks, “is the human animal?” His psychoanalytic approach to the archive proposes an “eyeless visioning” and a “mute sonority” for those held within it.
The ICA has been transformed into a corporate war room: at its center is a large grid of plush black, white, tan, and baby-blue velvet rectangles across which dozens of paperweights have been distributed. Tanoa Sasraku’s Watchlist (2025) could be a game or a map, each piece marking a claim to ownership. The various clear resin paperweights are labeled with the names of companies in the US, China, Russia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and the Republic of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and each holds a small dark glob of crude oil. “1990: A Whale of a Year; 6 discoveries, 38% success,” proudly proclaims one from Alaska. Surrounding this, lining the walls of the gallery, are blank certificates bearing no qualifications but rusted and mottled surfaces. These six works are ostensibly meant to represent US military awards, but the “Subdued Morale Patch” (2025) series is more interesting when it steps away from militarized iconography and lets the ambiguities of its power plays settle in more. Geopolitics is not only a game played by militaries and corporations, but a laughably simple one. It begs the question: What is our role in this game room?
At Tolia Astakhishvili’s “a wound on my plate,” taking over the three floors of Emalin’s Clerk’s House space, we’re hanging out with those on the other side of the warmongers’ games. The house feels as if abandoned in a hurry, with junk lining the hallways and the edges of every room. Small sculptures are propped on windowsills and ledges, collages line the stairways, and the rooms are filled with alternately fraught and cutesy line drawings, incidental photos, and remarks scrawled on the wall in between (“Life is porridge”). In a boarded-up room on the second floor is between the legs (2025), a walk-in cupboard built of mottled plasterboard that in turn holds another space that traps you inside with an angled mirror. A few small, water-stained drawings sit within the structure, including one of a man holding a hammer and bearing down on a worried-looking child. The painting Delicate dump dusty all recently decorated (2025) depicts a dank and cluttered basement, while coiled-up hosepipe and rusted grating line the floor. This room feels both like a safe place to hide and an admission that nowhere is safe: we can rebuild this world from the old one. Fucking hell, man, what’s that about?
