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Things to do in London this Weekend

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Things to do in London this Weekend

by conceptual artist and blogger Things to do in London this Weekend.

A curated moment in time, best consumed with a flat white you don’t enjoy

Cinema

Get down to the river to see The Thames, Reimagined (Dir. Anselma Krohn-Weiss)

A six-hour, dialogue-free meditation on the emotional life of river water, screened once nightly beneath Waterloo Bridge. Shot entirely on expired 16mm film stock “rescued” from a Lithuanian attic, the film explores liquidity as a metaphor for late-stage desire. Audience members are encouraged (but not required) to cry quietly whilst wearing biodegradable ponchos. Interval kombucha provided.

Rom-Com (Technically)

A re-edited version of Notting Hill in which every smile has been removed using AI. Hugh Grant remains, but joy does not. Showing at a members-only microcinema in Dalston that doesn’t list its address online.

Art Galleries

“Soft Architecture for Hard Times” , Purple Cube Bermondsey

A room filled with foam replicas of brutalist buildings that slowly deflate over the course of the exhibition. By Sunday afternoon, the Barbican has fully collapsed. The artist Plinkett Havers describes the work as “a comment on municipal grief.” Visitors nod gravely.

Unnamed Exhibition (Because Naming Is Hierarchical)

A pop-up gallery in a former vape shop in Soho presents 43 identical canvases painted in “variations of off-white trauma.” Each is priced differently. None are for sale to you.

Theatre: Performance as Endurance

Someone Reads Their Google Search History Aloud

A sold-out immersive theatre experience in Peckham where a lone performer recounts ten years of private searches (“how long is too long to grieve,” “is it weird to feel nothing”). The audience sits on yoga mats. There is no applause.

Shakespeare, But Wet

King Lear performed knee-deep in reclaimed rainwater at an undisclosed Hackney warehouse. The storm scene lasts 47 minutes. Critics have called it “unavoidable.”

Ballet & Movement

Stillness No. 4

A ballet in which nothing happens for the first 20 minutes. Then, one dancer blinks. Choreographed by a former neuroscientist who insists this is the point. At Sadler’s Wells, obviously.

Pilates Swan Lake

A reinterpretation of Swan Lake performed by eight dancers and one rowing machine. The swan is capitalism. The lake is core strength.

Walking Tours: Moving Through Space With Intent

The Ghosts of Pretend Poverty

A guided walk through areas of East London “before they were interesting,” led by a former lifestyle editor who remembers when oat milk was ironic. Includes stops where something used to be authentic.

Silent Disco Psychogeography

Participants walk through the City of London wearing headphones that play conflicting academic lectures on dérive, while a guide occasionally whispers, “Notice how this makes you feel.” Nobody knows what they’re feeling, but they’re feeling it deeply.

Bonus Event

Ceramics & Grief Brunch

A two-hour workshop in which you mould a bowl while discussing loss, followed by eggs Benedict, which by tradition you don’t finish. Everyone leaves with something slightly misshapen and emotionally unresolved.

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis Crowned Supreme in the Vasinsky Award for Art in the Abstract

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Ptolemy Bognor-Regis Crowned Supreme in the Vasinsky Award for Art in the Abstract

In a decisive victory Ptolemy Bognor-Regis, the wünderkind represented by the Pimlico Wilde Gallery, has claimed this year’s coveted Vasinsky Award for Art in the Abstract. The judges, who say they deliberated for all courses of their tasting menu dinner at the Arudelie restaurant , declared Bognor-Regis’s entry A Monologue in Beige #4 to be “the only work this year that truly understood the futility of understanding.”

“Frankly, the others entries were just colours on canvas,” said chief judge Dr. Fenella Morose, swirling a glass of mineral water from the Carpathians. “Ptolemy’s work, on the other hand, was colours on canvas that knew they were colours on canvas. The self-awareness was palpable. You could almost hear the paint sigh at the low intelligence of its usual viewers.”

Bognor-Regis’s victory will catapult him into the gilded inner circle of global abstraction. Already, famed institutions from the Grand Musée de l’Incompréhensible in Paris to the New Rotterdam Institute of Shapes On Canvas have expressed interest in acquiring A Monologue in Beige #4. The Svalbard Polar Contemporary has reportedly offered to exhibit it alongside their permanent “White Period” collection, which famously contains 14 works indistinguishable from the walls on which they hang.

When asked how he felt about winning, Bognor-Regis offered the following statement:

“It’s not so much a personal triumph as it is a validation of my ongoing dialogue with the concept of form as a social construct. That said, I am delighted to be demonstrably better than everyone else in the room.”

Algernon Pyke, director of Pimlico Wilde Gallery and tireless cultivator of Bognor-Regis’s career, was less restrained in his praise:

“I told Ptolemy years ago that he would change the way people misunderstand art. Today proves I was right. All other artists should frankly go back to their studios and contemplate whether or not to give up art.”

As the Vasinsky Award confers both prestige and a large bronze medallion shaped like a question mark, Bognor-Regis’s future seems secure. He is rumoured to be working on his next project, tentatively titled Study for Beige #5, which sources say will explore “the audacity of subtlety” through an even more restrained palette.

For now, the art world waits, poised between awe and bafflement.

Meet the Artist: Jane Bastion

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Meet the Artist: Jane Bastion

Welcome to the first in our Meet the Artist series, where we step beyond the canvas, the stage, and the studio to explore the people behind the art. Today, we begin with someone whose creative output seems to live halfway between shadow and sound: Jane Bastion.

Jane doesn’t walk into a room,she drifts in, like a question you’re not sure how to answer. Known primarily for her evocative silhouette portraits and haunting musical tone poems, Jane’s work often lives at the intersection of quiet intensity and unresolved wonder. But who is she when she steps away from the paper and piano?

Outside the Frame

Despite the introspective, even brooding quality of her work, Jane herself is surprisingly warm and a little wickedly funny – she’ll quote an obscure 19th-century diarist in one breath and deliver a deadpan joke in the next. She lives in a small stone house tucked behind a row of beech trees somewhere in Dorset (though she refuses to share the precise location, joking, “Some of us need mystery the way others need vitamin D.”)

Her home smells faintly of beeswax and old books. There’s usually tea steeping,always black, never herbal,and something baking, though she claims not to enjoy cooking. “I cook only to avoid starving or speaking to strangers in supermarkets,” she says with a shrug.

She dresses like she was born in another era but has no interest in vintage trends – long linen skirts, heavy cardigans, and always something black. Never white. “White feels too loud,” she once said. You’ll never catch her in anything synthetic; she claims it interferes with her thinking. Most days, she wears soft leather boots and a tiny, tarnished silver pendant that no one has ever seen her remove.

Likes & Dislikes

She loves fog, fountain pens, and the sound of distant train whistles. She’s been known to stop conversations mid-sentence if a bird flies by – “Did you see that wingbeat?!” She’s fascinated by dreams, moss, shipwrecks, and the way light moves through stained glass.

She dislikes harsh lighting, hashtags, people who call art “content,” and when toast is sliced too thick. “Bread has a structure, you know. There’s a ratio. You can’t just ruin it with a dull knife.”

Where She Goes

Jane is a nomad of very specific destinations. She doesn’t travel broadly, but she travels deeply. She returns almost obsessively to the same handful of places: an abandoned pier in Whitby, a salt marsh in southern France, a graveyard in Prague, and an unnamed hill in Wales where she once saw a fox vanish as if swallowed by the earth.

She sketches constantly, not just in charcoal or pencil but in phrases. A phrase from her journal might later become the title of a musical piece, or the backbone of a new silhouette series.

The Art Itself

Her silhouettes often feature individuals in quiet tension with their environment: a child holding a lamp in a forest of swirling birds, a woman at a table, her shadow sipping tea without her. Her tone poems, composed for small ensembles, lean into ambiguity. They don’t crescendo,they hover. They don’t resolve,they disappear.

Jane is rumoured to be working on a novel,something fragmented, lyrical, and strange. She’s also begun recording field sounds,wind through shutters, owls calling across fields,and using them as compositional texture in her music. (She once performed a piece live using nothing but cello, whisper, and the ticking of a 1910 pocket watch).

When asked if she considers herself more musician or visual artist, Jane Bastion just smiled.

“I’m mostly a listener,” she said. “To shadows, to echoes, to things people don’t think are speaking.”

Stay tuned. Next month, we meet an artist who paints sound using color frequencies and refuses to own a phone.

Want to suggest an artist we should profile? Get in touch.

Rucks Among the Rodins: The Inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament in Berkeley Square

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Rucks Among the Rodins: The Inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament in Berkeley Square

There are few sights as glorious as Berkeley Square, that bastion of Georgian serenity, transformed into a makeshift rugby pitch for the inaugural Inter-Art Dealer Rugby Tournament. Organised by the indefatigable Roberto Andretti of Hogge Spike (the same Andretti who has made a cottage industry out of rediscovering neglected sculptors like Ferkin Wykes), the day felt at once anarchic, historical, and curiously elegant,a microcosm of the fine art world’s capacity for grandeur.

One had to admire the logistical chutzpah. Benches were shifted, temporary posts hammered in, and the teams changed into their kits in a selection of obliging Mayfair galleries. (Lattern Brothers’ mid-season Giacometti show was, for a morning, dominated not by attenuated bronzes but by the sight of mud-spattered dealers wriggling into compression shorts beside a £2.3 million Standing Woman.) The juxtaposition was perfect: white-walled sanctity colliding with the slap of Velcro and the smell of Deep Heat.

The art world turned out in force, half for sport, half for spectacle. Teams ranged from the meticulous Crantjirot & Hawkins of Hanover Square, whose forward pack looked as if they had been selected for their resemblance to Flemish wrestlers, to the Lattern Brothers, all wiry speed and auction-room guile. There were French contingents (Galerie de Saint-Amant fielded a scrum as precise as their Art Deco catalogues), and a fearsome transatlantic squad from Kitteridge & Crane, New York, whose pre-match warm-up felt like a Sotheby’s sale at double speed.

The matches themselves were unexpectedly brutal. Andretti’s assertion that “Berkeley Square hasn’t been used for rugby for centuries” was more than just press-release embroidery; the ground was uneven, the turf springy, and the plane trees lent an oddly theatrical backdrop to the rolling mauls. In the opening fixture, Hawkins of Crantjirot & Hawkins was carried off with a suspected sprain after an audacious sidestep by Lattern’s youngest junior partner,Freddie Drear, only three months into the trade, now immortalised for having scored the tournament’s first try.

What made the day more than a novelty, however, was its sense of continuity with an older tradition. One could feel the echoes of Victorian park matches, of Bloomsbury cricket teas and the surrealist football games of pre-war Paris. Dealers accustomed to the cloistered jousts of bidding paddles and client dinners found themselves in a different kind of scrum. Rivalries that usually play out in whispers over consignments of Chagall drawings were resolved, temporarily, in tackles and rucks.

The prize,newly-discovered original Michelangelo prints of Goliath, unearthed in a Milanese burial chamber earlier this year,lent the event a mythic gleam. (Whether the attribution would withstand the scrutiny of a more sceptical connoisseur remains to be seen; one could already hear mutterings from the Crantjirot camp about “anachronistic sketch patterns.”) In the end, the trophy went to the muscularly pragmatic Kitteridge & Crane, whose forwards treated every ruck as if they were dismantling a consignor’s reserve price. They celebrated with champagne in plastic cups, beneath the plane trees that had watched centuries of quieter dealings.

But the true pleasure of the day was not in the winning. It was in the spectacle of art world hierarchy temporarily flattened: a Sotheby’s veteran wiping mud from his cheeks with a Damien Hirst catalogue; a Lattern brother sharing orange segments with a rival from Lane Fine Art; a crowd of dealers, collectors, and curious passers-by roaring approval as if Turner himself were streaking down the touchline.

Berkeley Square is unlikely to host rugby again soon,its grass bore the scars of scrummages with the same battered dignity as a post-fair Frieze stand,but for a few chaotic hours, it reminded the Mayfair set that sport, like art, is at its best when it manages to be both competitive and communal.

And, as one tired yet elated participant was heard to remark, clutching a muddy Michelangelo print to his chest: “This is the first time I’ve left a fair with something truly priceless. Not this Michelangelo print, but the friendships I have deepened on this great sporting occasion.”

The Catalogue Essay for Stillness in Orbit: The Slow Modernities of Ellinor Cade

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Dr. Penelope Voss, Reader in Temporal Aesthetics, University of Lowestoft

“We do not dwell in time as much as we loiter beside it, occasionally brushing the hem of its garment.”

, Ellinor Cade, notebook fragment, undated

To approach the work of Ellinor Cade is to enter an architecture of deceleration,a perceptual corridor where the modernist impulse to propel forward is reversed, turned inside out, and folded gently over itself like soft paper. For five decades, Cade has devoted herself to the study and expression of what she calls “slowed agencies”: phenomena that resist urgency, elude spectacle, and enact duration as a form of defiance.

Her work belongs to no school. It resembles the output of no other artist. While she was once loosely affiliated with the Anodic Materialists (an obscure Essex collective devoted to “non-conductive sculpture”), Cade has consistently eluded categorisation. Her practice occupies a unique interstice between kinetic minimalism, speculative astronomy, and what I have elsewhere termed chronoscepticism,the aesthetic suspicion of time’s supposed direction.

I. On Motion Without Movement

In Stillness in Orbit, Cade draws us into the cosmology of the barely perceptible. The title itself encapsulates a contradiction: to orbit is to be in constant motion, yet stillness implies an ontological fixity. Cade thrives in such contradictions.

Consider Satellite I: Holding Pattern (1994), a suspended bronze sculpture that rotates imperceptibly via ambient air currents generated by visitors’ breath. The piece, though tethered to Newtonian logic, refuses spectacle. It is not so much “seen” as it is gradually understood. One curator described it as “the sensation of watching something change while being unsure it ever has.”

This is Cade at her most assertive: unhurried, quiet, unbending.

II. The Liturgy of Dust

Dust, for Cade, is not detritus but data,evidence of time’s sedimentary drift. Her series Chrono-Palinopsia (2008,2012), comprises photographs taken at three-month intervals of a single empty shelf in her garden shed. Presented in a 6-metre row of grey matte prints, the piece is a slow cinema of accumulation.

Cade writes: “Dust refuses to perform. It cannot be posed, sculpted, or rushed. It is the patron saint of neglected surfaces and undervalued minutes.”

In a world addicted to velocity, her work demands a contemplative stamina bordering on the monastic.

III. Lamps, Moths, and the Gravity of Small Things

Perhaps the most psychologically resonant installation in this exhibition is Aphelion Interior (with Moth) (1999), a 12-minute video showing a single moth endlessly circling a chandelier in a disused Georgian laundry. Filmed in real time with no cuts and projected at 70% speed, the video creates a temporal vertigo,an exquisite visual tic that recasts the insect not as pest, but as pilgrim.

In Cade’s work, the humble moth becomes a metaphor for persistence without progress. “To circle,” she reminds us, “is not to err. It is to rehearse belonging.”

The setting of the laundry,a space of former cleansing, now abandoned,functions as what Gaston Bachelard might call a “poetic ruin.” Here, architectural decay serves not as backdrop but as collaborator.

IV. Resistance Through Retardation

Cade’s practice has, since the 1970s, articulated a political subtlety often overlooked in contemporary criticism. In her early “walkworks” (now sadly lost to entropy and budget cuts), she recorded herself walking backwards through train stations, mimicking the flow of the crowd while moving against it. It was, she said, “a kind of protest against chronological coercion.”

Her resistance is never polemic. It is gravitational. She slows the world not through confrontation, but through the invitation to linger.

V. The Orbits We Choose

The exhibition’s final piece, Lagrange Body (Waiting for Collapse) (2025), was created specifically for this retrospective. It consists of a delicate mobile made of mirrored acrylic, rust, and fragments of discarded notebook paper, suspended inside a glass column that visitors may enter one at a time. The structure is lit by solar fluctuations, making its cast shadows shift unpredictably throughout the day.

On one scrap of paper, placed deliberately just out of reach, Cade has handwritten: It is not the moving that matters. It is the manner of being held.

This final gesture encapsulates the emotional freight of her work. What appears passive is not inert. What seems still is orbiting.

Conclusion

To encounter Ellinor Cade’s practice is to be reminded of one’s own breathing, of the friction of dust beneath fingertips, of the unknowable distances between a hand and a shadow. Her work insists on temporal reconfiguration,not a rebellion against time, but a reconciliation with its gentler dimensions.

In an age continually subjected to velocity and performative attention, Stillness in Orbit offers something far more subversive: an aesthetic of endurance, humility, and durational grace.

It is not work that shouts. It listens, and it invites us,if only briefly,to do the same.

Dr. Penelope Voss

Reader in Temporal Aesthetics

University of Lowestoft

Author of The Slow Sublime: Time and the Unhurried Eye (Grendel & Clyne, 2022)

Fine Artists for Things to be Better: March in London for Things to be Better

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This Saturday, the streets of London were taken over by a colourful parade of individuals who call themselves “Fine Artists for Things to be Better.” The group, which had no clearly defined purpose except for general improvement in everything, marched for a cause so ambiguous, even the participants struggled to explain it.

The march, which started at 10 a.m. sharp, wound its way through the city, with artists wielding a strange mix of banners, sculptures, and cardboard signs that seemed to multiply every five minutes.

The Cause

At the helm of this colorful chaos was Sir Percival Pompington, an avant-garde artist and self-proclaimed visionary of societal improvement. When asked to explain the core objective of the march, Sir Percival offered the following enigmatic statement:

“We are marching for better things, you see. Things that can be better. In the future, things could be better,if we make them better. Sometimes you just have to ask politely.”

When pressed further, he mentioned something about “the inherent beauty of unresolved tension in society,” and how “better things” could include anything from cleaner streets to more chairs in cafes that actually support the human form comfortably for more than ten seconds. The crowd seemed satisfied with this answer, nodding vigorously and breaking into spontaneous applause.

The Marchers

The march was a spectacular display of the eclectic and unpredictable nature of London’s fine art scene. Artists from every medium, genre, and state of caffeination were present. Some carried enormous, abstract sculptures made of what appeared to be papier-mâché and old bicycle tires. Others walked with large canvases depicting entirely different concepts of “better,” ranging from an oversized abstract smiley face to a depiction of a slightly happier broccoli stalk.

“I’m marching for a better world,one where brunch lasts until 5 p.m. and everyone understands the true meaning of postmodernism,” said Jane Blivens, an experimental performance artist in a suit made entirely of cling film.

A group of surrealist painters wore giant clocks around their necks, all set to 3:15. “Time, man, it’s all about time. Things could be better, but not until the clocks tell us it’s time,” one of them explained, before doing an interpretive dance around a nearby bus stop.

The Soundtrack

In keeping with the “anything goes” spirit of the march, a brass band consisting entirely of kazoos played an avant-garde rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The music was frequently interrupted by random shouts of “More color!” and “*Everyone, be better!” from the crowd.

At one point, a small group of drummers began tapping on traffic cones in what can only be described as rhythmic spontaneous chaos. This, naturally, brought the entire procession to a halt for a full 20 minutes as the group debated whether or not this impromptu performance was truly “art”.

The Protest Signs

The signs carried by the marchers were perhaps the most unusual aspect of the event. Some were straightforward,“Make Things Better, Please” and “Art Should Fix Everything.” Others, however, bordered on the baffling:

• “I’m Holding This Sign for Future Generations” (held by a man dressed as a potato)

• “Better is the New Good” (scrawled in chalk on an abandoned piece of pavement)

• “Can We Talk About the Lack of Pineapple in the Art World?” (this one was particularly hard to interpret, though it was written very passionately)

• “Things Might Not Be Better, But We’re Trying” (a classic, truly representative of the movement)

When asked about the message behind the signs, one marcher responded:

“The meaning of the signs doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling you get from holding them.”

The Reception

Onlookers seemed unsure whether to cheer, clap, or perhaps call for the police. The general public’s reaction was mixed, ranging from enthusiastic encouragement to mild confusion. One passerby was overheard saying, “I don’t know what they’re protesting, but I’d like to join just for the free pastries they keep offering.”

A local café owner, who had been giving away complimentary croissants to the marchers, explained, “I don’t really understand what they’re fighting for, but they’re very polite. And they do appreciate a good almond croissant.”

The Grand Finale

As the march reached its final destination,an empty car park that had recently been converted into a temporary gallery space by a group of artists,a huge banner was unfurled reading simply:

“Things Can Be Better, But For Now, Let’s Just Stand Here.”

At this, the crowd stood in a silent tableau for 10 minutes, pondering the meaning of the march and the state of things. Some began to whisper about the deep significance of doing nothing and the collective power of inaction. Others debated whether or not the empty lot itself was a metaphor for society’s failure to improve things.

And then, just as abruptly as it had started, the march ended with a group hug. No one was sure why, but it felt right.

Conclusion

The “Fine Artists for Things to be Better” march was an inspiring, perplexing, and occasionally baffling event. While the precise cause remains unclear, it was, without a doubt, a better way to spend a Saturday morning,at least, in the eyes of those who value a good kazoo performance.

Please Stop Naming Things

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Five untitled objects (various materials), laminated labels (blank), an interactive naming station (non-functional), and a recorded apology.

Please Stop Naming Things is an urgent plea against categorisation, a direct confrontation with language’s futile attempt to impose order onto the unordered. The installation consists of five completely unidentifiable objects, each placed on its own pristine white plinth. They resist classification. They are not sculptures, nor are they functional. They are simply there, refusing to confirm or deny their own purpose.

Each plinth features a laminated museum-style label beneath it. The labels are blank.

At the far end of the gallery, visitors encounter what appears to be an interactive station labeled Name this Object. It consists of a touchscreen and a keyboard, inviting participants to define what cannot be defined. However, the touchscreen does not respond. The keyboard is not plugged in. The act of naming has been made impossible.

A soft voice plays over hidden speakers every six minutes. It simply says, “We’re sorry, but that name is already taken.”

“A thing does not need a name to exist. It does not need a category to matter. A chair is only a chair because someone pointed at it and said so. What if we stopped pointing?”

, Davos

This work operates in the liminal space between language and objecthood. Taking cues from minimalist sculpture, conceptual negation, and the failures of taxonomy, Please Stop Naming Things refuses to participate in the viewer’s desperate need for identification.

The five objects,made of unspecified materials,offer no clues to their origins or intended use. Are they industrial remnants? Sculptural gestures? Forgotten tools? Each visitor arrives with their own assumptions, only to be confronted with a complete lack of confirmation. The interactive naming station, a cruel mirage of participation, heightens the frustration. The recorded apology, played at irregular intervals, taunts those who attempt to impose meaning.

It is unclear whether the apology is sincere.

• The touchscreen is non-functional. No amount of pressing will change this.

• If you feel an overwhelming urge to classify what you see, please sit with that feeling until it passes.

Price: £540,000 (includes all five objects, blank labels, and a certificate that simply states “It Exists.”)