NOT FOR ENTERTAINMENT
8 – 26 May 2012 |Whitespace
Regular opening hours: Tues to Fri 11-6pm | Sat 11-4pm
Artists include Andy Leleisi’uao, Niki Hastings-McFall, Pete Wheeler, Lauren Lysaght and Locust Jones
Few exhibitions in recent memory, save perhaps 2007’s Turbulence Triennial, have self-consciously assembled work that is so hard to look at, so challenging to think about, and so necessary. Doris Salcedo once said of her work that: ‘As an artist, I don’t have the opportunity to choose the themes that inform a piece. The oft-celebrated freedom of the artist is a myth.’[1]
Artists that address these themes do not simply choose to – they are compelled to engage with violent themes because they have to.
The artists that make up Whitespace’s Not For Entertainment – Andy Leleisi’uao, Ross Ritchie, Niki Hastings McFall, Pete Wheeler, Lauren Lysaght, and Locust Jones – share the impetus to create works that confront realities that we wish were not real. The themes of death and war, violence and abuse, would be shocking were they not so familiar. An exhibition of works of this nature is unusual; the prevalence of abuse and violence in ours – and indeed most of the worlds’ societies – is not.
