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REVIEW | Objet Dada at Edel Assanti Project Space | An exhibition of sculptures individually provocative, robust and intriguing… but about that name…

Objet Dada at Edel Assanti is an exhibition which draws together eight provocative and interesting sculptures. Running until 20th August, the show is well worth checking out, particularly if you haven’t visited Project Space (a building housing Edel Assanti and its equally excellent downstairs neighbour, Jack Bell Gallery). But, about that exhibition name…


Benedetto Pietromarchi Untitled, 2011 (Detail) Seven glass spheres with metal filaments Dimensions variable Copyright and courtesy Edel Assanti, London

For the current exhibition, Edel Assanti posits that each of the eight artists drawn together undertakes “their own conceptual legacies of the once controversial notion of the ‘readymade'” and that, in doing so, they are “extending the intellectual underpinnings of Duchamp’s ideology”.

That is a grand statement, entering into an even grander realm of debate surrounding the amorphous Dadaist movement. This felt like a move which, at worst, sets these eight very different pieces up to be misconstrued and, at best, made the experiencing of viewing them uncessarily fraught with a contextual milieu that is complex and, fundamentally, obscures a lot of what each of the pieces are about.

Viewing the works through the lens of the Dadaist movement, the plane which the gallery invites the viewer to interact with the works on, diminishes both the extensive debates each piece individually engages with, and that nebulous group of artists who loosely affiliated with Dadaism. Granted, there are parallels which can be drawn, but the artists in the Objet Dada exhibition have less in common either with each other or Dadaism than the exhibition’s name would have you believe. They are eight fascinating pieces, but it felt almost as if the works were saddled with what became a frustrating and reductive kinship to Dadaism.

That said, the pieces are individually provocative and fascinating and entering the fantastic Edel Assanti space, a little haven of culture which feels far from the sterile clutter of endless Pizza Express / Pret a Manger et al that makes up the vicinity of Victoria station, and which, since it opened consistently provides exhibitions that juxtapose important burgeoning and established talents from across the world.

So, to begin again, had I approached this exhibition as a passer by who had wandered in from the street, I would have encountered eight astonishingly interesting and striking sculptures. The exhibition guide eloquently explores the wide ranging effects and issues the works explore, of which have some parallels with the concept of the “readymade”, but I struggled to interact personally with the sculptures because I spent a lot of time trying to position them in relation to each other and to Duchamp and Dada. The works are simultaneously robust and delicate and, ignore my gripe with what I felt to be the forced demand to contextualise, this is a very good exhibition indeed.

Check out the Edel Assanti blog, featuring interviews with the artists involved in Objet Dada to learn where they felt their works fitted within the heady debate of the Dadaist and the readymade.

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