2011
Sarah Kent
In 2013 the American artist, Noah Davis used a legacy left him by his father to create a museum of contemporary art in Arlington Heights, an area of Los Angeles populated largely by Blacks and Latinos. But his Underground Museum faced a problem; it didn’t have any art to put on display and none of the institutions approached by Davis would loan him their precious holdings.The solution? Davis set about creating clones of famous artworks that feature mass produced items. Collectively titled Imitation of Wealth (pictured below) they now occupy a gallery in his Barbican retrospective. Marcel Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The incendiary topic of Egyptian-American director Lotfy Nathan’s debut feature Harka is poverty and corruption in Tunisia a decade after the failed promise of the Arab Spring.The word harka in the local Arabic dialect means either “to burn” or “to emigrate illegally”, and both definitions refer to the sad story of Ali Hamdi (Adam Bessa), an unlicensed petrol vendor on the streets of Sidi Bouzid. This is the desert city where, in 2011, a real-life barrow boy by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi literally ignited the country’s Jasmine Revolution with a symbolic act of self-immolation following Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Charlie Stone
Keiichiro Hirano’s A Man has all the trappings of a gripping detective story: a bereaved wife, a dead man whose name belongs to someone else, mysterious coded letters, a lawyer intent on uncovering the truth. Together with a wilfully understated title, however, these features belie a deeply thoughtful novel whose mystery premise gives way to an examination of the most profound questions of identity and artistic creation. In a work so rooted in Japanese cultural history, the questions posed by the author become distinctly literary, moving ultimately to address the very practice of novel- Read more ...
Owen Richards
On 22nd July 2011, on a tiny island off the Norwegian coast, 69 young people were killed, with another 109 injured in a terrorist attack. It was the darkest day in Norway since World War Two, and one that is still evident in its news, politics and society today. But somewhere down the line, the victims became background noise to the circus around the aftermath and perpetrator. It was something that director Erik Poppe could not ignore any longer.Utoya: July 22 is his response. Working directly with the survivors and families, he sought to tell their story and remind people of what really Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Saxon Court joins the growing list of new plays tackling the economic collapse, and while lacking the creative innovation of work like Clare Duffy’s Money: The Game Show at the Bush or Anders Lustgarten’s If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep at the Royal Court, Daniel Andersen’s salty, astute debut proves a solid addition to the canon.It’s Christmas 2011 and the employees of recruitment-to-recruitment company Saxon Court are itching to trade work for partying. Boss Donna (Debra Baker) struggles to get into the party spirit: her co-founder is in hospital and a drop in Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
In the vein of My Left Foot, Inside I’m Dancing and Gaby: A True Story, Margarita, With A Straw focuses on living a full life with cerebral palsy. Laila (Kalki Koechlin) is a young woman who lives in Delhi with her supportive and loving family. Despite ructions between mother (Revanthi) and daughter, Laila’s life is pretty good. Growing up is another matter and after one particular embarrassment, she takes on an opportunity to study in New York City. There, she discovers physical love with blind activist and girl power proponent Khanum (Sayani Gupta).Well structured and intentioned, writer Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We laughed. We cried. We cursed. We gulped. Not at fiction. But at fact. At the real world. The year's best theatre? Murdoch vs Watson. Thriller? The hunt for Osama. Horror? The Japan tsunami. Finest comedy? The Beeb's year long genuflection. Best opera/installation? The funeral of Kim Jong-Il. This was the year that reality trounced art.News channels thrived as their bulletins played out these teeth-janglers. Some were short explosive little numbers; others seemed determined to become five acters. Narratives were complex, characters unforgettable, visuals motley. The world mostly huddled Read more ...
matilda.battersby
In the year that Kindle electronic downloads surpassed book sales for the first time, the influence of literature on the wider arts is still as pertinent as ever. Cinemas have been filled with titles first read on the bestseller lists, from Kathryn Stockett’s The Help and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, to the second instalment of J.K Rowling’s final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.In cinema I was most impressed by Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, a take on Michael Lewis’s book about baseball. I think it lives up to its reputation as the film of 2011. However, I must Read more ...
Jasper Rees
On Easter Monday, as the sun came down over the sea, a crowd of 15,000 – it’s not quite right to call them theatre-goers – followed Michael Sheen as he dragged a cross to Port Talbot’s own version of Golgotha, a traffic island hard by Parc Hollywood. The culmination of a three-day epic, The Passion of Port Talbot was street storytelling at its most transformative. The cast of thousands, including local am drammers and the Manic Street Preachers, were dragooned by WildWorks, National Theatre Wales and, above all, Sheen, whose year this was.His sectioned Hamlet at the Young Vic underlined what Read more ...
mark.kidel
In a year of mounting turmoil and uncertainty, it was easy to fall back on safe bets and comfort-zone reassurance. Addictive TV series offered a welcome haven from the angst of financial meltdown: Sarah Lund’s melancholy airs in The Killing offered a homeopathic cure for the gloom of double-dip recession. Breaking Bad, the saga of the cancer-struck physics teacher who takes to a life of crime was dark, funny and endlessly surprising. Downton Abbey, by way of a contrast, was well made and watchable, in a warmly soporific kind of way.TV continued to thrive on the cult of celebrity, spewing out Read more ...
Russ Coffey
For about an hour in Hammersmith last October it seemed that all 2011's new music had coagulated into some kind of supernova and was exploding on stage. There were two drum kits, nine musicians, and a nerdy, lanky man singing like an alien. The support act had told us to expect something special and was it ever: Bon Iver’s extraordinary live reimagining of their bucolic, eponymous album took in folk, prog, soul, metal and avant garde. It also pretty much embodied my review year.Decibel for decibel Justin Vernon's folkies were now up there with Queens of the Stone Age who'd brought the Read more ...