Living Cities Exhibition - Tate Modern: Ai Weiwei, Stephen Shore, Birdhead.

It's often better not to react emotionally to a situation but stand back and think before one acts rather than react impulsively. There are men in power who react like a child who has not mastered control of his emotions. The only thing for sure that happens when this type of personality gets in power is conflict, the only way they can truly be and feel is through creating antagonism, division and utter chaos. I was just thinking this when I read the world news. I strolled to the Tate to have a coffee and see the exhibition about Living Cities on level 4 of the new building at Tate Modern. Wouldn't it be great if such men could engage in art, the environment, helping others make the world a better place instead of handling their egotism and rage into creating more conflict and misery.

                                                               Photo Tate Modern

The exhibition shows a selection of artists from around the world and how they experience living in the city. It's a reflection on how the city can be a utopian place involving communal living, or a place of protest. Ai Weiwei has been a positive example of how an artist can create wealth for others through his work by creating  a studio where assistants worked on his projects in the city he lived in, Beijing. The studio space was an oasis but now he is living in Berlin as a refugee (but this was not mentioned in the video shown at the Tate which is basically now outdated, see link below).

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-artist-cities

In the show there is a video of him in his former city Beijing. At one point they are shown putting red lanterns around surveillance cameras in the street outside of his studio. Ai Weiwei says it to high-light them, to make it more clear that you are  under constant surveillance, that there is no freedom of speech. In the video the buzzing of a busy city, Beijing, is contrasted by a tour of his studio where they are seen working on a project involving surveillance cameras made out of marble and we see the courtyard that looks like an oasis of peace. The neighbourhood around is oblivious to what goes on inside of the studio space. He called his studio 'a station from outer space'; it's shut in, behind a metal gate, an art city within the neighbourhood  of Caochangdi the 5th ring of Beijing and he has created a similar environment in his current home of Berlin.

                                                               Photo Tate Modern

Another piece that interested me in the exhibition is the photography by American Photographer Stephen Shore, as I also take photographs of the ordinary and every day life. His photographs consist of his travels in different American cities in 1972, 1973. He photographs the ordinary, the every day in life. The photographs are displayed closely together and framed, this requires your attention as a viewer, it forces you to go close up to them to be able to see them properly, individually and not as a whole. They are photographs of ordinary people, walking by in their daily lives. He travelled across the USA, discovering Middle America as he had been mainly based in New York. His photographs are intuitive and they are to do with light and colour. He is a pioneer in colour photography see pics below, he also photographs the overlooked. They include street photographs, motels, basically what is right under our eye but that we do not see. The every day in his colour photography was not appreciated in the 1970's but his photographs became more appreciated later on. To be noted is that he used a view camera for documentary photography which was unusual. 

                                            Copyright Stephen Shore taken from Pinterest

Opposite his work are the photographs by Birdhead which is made out by Ji Weiju and Song Tong who work together and take photos of the every day in Shanghai. Their photographs are very different from Stephen Shore's, first of all they are monochrome and printed in large format on paper and hung not framed. There is no narrative in their photos but the subject of the photos creates their own narrative; like Shore they photograph people going about their daily life, the every day: potted plants, vegetation, tree trunks next to architectural subjects such as bridges, new apartments in Shanghai. They wander off and destroy the film after printing so it becomes a limited edition.

They use an analogue camera, the subject matter of a young person's Shanghai, directed by their own formative experience.
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The Parsons Green Bomb in London & Fahrelnissa Zeid 's Exhibition at Tate Modern.

I am trying to keep some sort of normality in a period which is not really normal, the day after the Parsons Green bomb I went to the Tate to discover level 4 of the new building. I asked a friend if she wanted to come and she told me she was too scared because of the bomb at Parsons Green. Another friend said the same, they didn't move from their areas. So I went on my own, because maintaing a normal way of living for me is the only way forward and I don't let such events put me off, I think one is still more likely to be run over by a car rather than anything else. We still have more people dying of depression and suicide due to the poor level of access one gets for mental health in this country. But yes, it wasn't a normal day with the anti terror police visibly deployed across London and on the tube the driver was shouting down through the intercom system at each stop: 'If you see anything suspicious contact the police' and gave the number. I was thinking that by the end of his run the driver would be voiceless. Myself and the people opposite each other were just staring at each other like lemons, hoping that it wouldn't happen, literally to be in the same compartment or in the tube with a bomb. I think the people on the Parsons Green train have been incredibly lucky because the bomb didn't detonate properly. It will take time for them to recover because burn wounds even if small are very painful. I wish them a speedy recovery but it will take time. I remember I went to a talk by a survivor of one of the earlier London bombings. I was really impressed by him and his own experience of the event and how it had affected him. I will never forget it. I was happy to see security at the Tate, checking bags equipped with a metal detector, they were everywhere. But it made me realise that we are rally going through a mad chaotic period, and it is important to stay calm and to keep going. It can actually make you more focused and present if you don't give into fear. Anyway it was great to see London busy as usual, people walking around like normal. It was the first time I momentarily enjoyed it as generally you won't see me in a busy place with lots of people. So I got to the Tate, no problems, I had a nice lunch and luckily this time I didn't get stuck in one of the lifts, and it wasn't busy. I saw the exhibition by Fahrelniss Zeid, the Turkish princess artist. She was married to Prince Zeid al Hussein of Hashemite Royal Family who were assassinated in a military coup in Iraq. She was educated both in Paris and Istanbul and was part of the Turkish avant guard of the 1940's. She was one of the first women to be taught as an artist in Istanbul.

All the paintings in the exhibition were large and made of vibrant colours, interlocked with each other, but not in a static way.  There is movement in her pure abstract works, see pics above and below, taken from Tate online. In the first room there were also her portraits, which were made in a more realistic style and were very different from her abstract work. Her portraits usually covered family and friends. In the second room, I saw her abstract paintings made of intertwined black and white lines and yellow and red lines as found in islamic Byzantine art or mosaics see pic above from Tate online. In the third room I saw her sculptural work. I find this particular work fascinating with the combination of completely unrelated elements - she was painting on turkey and chicken bones which at a later stage she cast in polyester resin. She also used to paint on stone. In her final years she turned her home into a formal art school.
Coming back from the exhibition, heading towards my friends' area, the journey was chaotic. Inside the train there was a fight between a group of drunken men. The train suddenly stopped, not moving at all so we were all thinking oh dear it's engineering works, leaves on the tracks, a body on the tracks..
Instead the conductor shouts down the speaker: apologies for the delay: we are waiting for the police to take away a group in first class?! Generally in first class there is hardly anybody, I mean you might see one person in the whole compartment nobody wants to pay extra for the privilege apart from a few wealthy people using it regularly. Suddenly the train started moving again  and we didn't see any police coming  on but we soon realised that all is not ok as a bunch of aggressive men shouting at each other walk through our compartment and stop near the main toilet and their shouting grows louder. Luckily I am sitting next to a nice, fit stranger, a guy who is looking out for me and he says: 'are you ok?' I reply 'yes I am thanks for asking'. He says: 'they are making a lot of noise at the back glad we got headphones to listen to music' which in a way made me laugh. They were having a fight at the back while we were listening to music trying to ignore them. What a trip!