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The Guardian
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Each shot feels like a private performance': Rene Matić, the Turner shortlist's only photographer
Rene Matić's nomination for the 2025 Turner prize was announced the week this exhibition opened. Only one photographer has ever been awarded the prize – Wolfgang Tillmans. Matić is not a technically masterly photographer, but a quiet observer of things, like Tillmans. Matić riffs on a documentary, diaristic style of photography, with snapshots of everyday moments and poetic juxtapositions, which are then used to create installations, grouping images to surreptitiously bring out buried tensions and paradoxes. Where those tensions have often been urgent and angry in Matić's previous exhibitions, this new show highlights another facet of their work. It is perhaps Matić's most personal exploration yet. Although these installations are evocative slices of life, it's the whiteness of the gallery's walls and ceiling that you notice first. Their sharp, stark white engulfs the contrasting small-scale obsidian pictures, scattered across the wall like dark gems on a pristine beach. The whiteness is overbearing and cold, but it also emphasises the lustrous quality of the black-and-white pictures. This plays symbolically into Matić's concern with the rubric of whiteness in British society, and how blackness lives within, alongside or outside it. Their images describe what many of us mixed-race people in the UK experience as being in-between, something Matić has termed 'rude(ness)'. The simple choice, to make the pictures small and place them sparsely on the white wall, makes you experience this 'rude(ness)' concept visually. Blackness and whiteness are important to Matić's identity. They are also important in making a photograph. These images are the result of Matić's first forays into the darkroom, developing silver gelatin prints. The care this involved was fitting for the pictures, which are all personal – showing the artist's inner circle. They portray a journey inwards and towards those closest, to the people and things that make a person who they are. As the title suggests, there are intimate images of family members, friends, partners, self-portraits. It is all explored with the feeling of being close enough to reach out to one another: in one, Touching Campbell's Face, Matić does just that. The portraits, particularly the one of a heavily pregnant friend, are about how bodies of loved ones can be entire worlds. There are also shadows, hinting at the absent, unknown parts of ourselves, made visible by the light. There are cultural objects that have shaped Matić's understanding of their own identity: a vintage first-edition copy of James Baldwin's Another Country reclining in a luxurious heap of rumpled bedsheets and pillows; a Nina Simone vinyl record; a lineup of Matić's collection of figurines by St Martin de Porres, the 16th-century Peruvian lay brother canonised as the patron saint of mixed-race people and all those seeking racial harmony. By formal standards, the photographs are mostly good. What makes them interesting is the way Matić arranges them, sometimes placed coming towards each other, sometimes heightening the tensions of difference, moving against each other. Some of the sequences are looser. Four images side by side portray a friend and frequent muse, the playwright Travis Alabanza, wrapped in a white towel; and another friend Grace, backstage before a performance at Ugly Duck, a LGBTQIA+ arts organisation in London. The Simone record. We see another friend, Mia, at the kitchen table, a nod to Carrie Mae Weems. Mia is surrounded by empty bottles – the air seems thick with the intimacy of a late-night moment. Each feels like a private performance for Matić's camera. In another image, another kind of implied performance, Matić's blond wig and black platform shoes are cast off, abandoned on the floor. The sensation is of Matić shrugging off the mask, feeling safe. Matić's body throughout remains only half-revealed, though: smoky, soft images of their legs, their shadows. In one image, we see the photographer's reflection in a mirror, holding the camera, an apparition above a clutch of cherished family pictures at their granny's house. A reconciliation of sorts comes in paired mother and father portraits, both shown holding cigarettes. At this point, you realise what else this show is telling you: it all begins with love. At Arcadia Missa, London, until 3 June.
STV News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- STV News
Turner Prize shortlist includes artist who uses 'salvaged' antique dolls in work
An artist who uses dolls 'salvaged' from thrift shops and online in their work and another who uses VHS tape are among those on the shortlist for the Turner Prize 2025. Peterborough artist Rene Matic was among the four shortlisted artists announced at the Tate Britain on Wednesday for their first institutional solo exhibition, called As Opposed To The Truth, which touches on ideas of the rise of right-wing populism and identities. Alongside Matic were three fellow London-based artists, Glasgow-born Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, who first moved to Sweden after leaving Iraq, and Canada-born Zadie Xa. Matic, 27, was praised by the jury for expressing 'concerns around belonging and identity, conveying broader experiences of a young generation and their community through an intimate and compelling body of work'. PA Media Rene Matic (Diana Pfammatter; Courtesy the Artist and Arcadia Missa, London) Their work looks at themes including 'the constructed self through the lens of rudeness', which they have taken from rudeboy culture, a Jamaican subculture in the UK. It includes personal photographs of family and friends in stacked frames, paired with sound, banners, and an installation at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Berlin, Germany. They also have an ongoing collection called Restoration, which focuses on 'antique black dolls salvaged by the artist' and a flag quoting political leaders who called for 'no place for violence' in the wake of the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump. Kalu, born in Glasgow in 1966, is a resident artist at ActionSpace's studio, which supports learning disabled artists across London, at Studio Voltaire. She creates large-scale abstract sculptures and drawings that hang down from the wall or ceiling. PA Media Nnena Kalu's work at Manifesta (Ivan Erofeev/Manifesta) The items are made from colourful streams of repurposed fabric, rope, parcel tape, cling film, paper and reels of VHS tape. Kalu is nominated for her installation Hanging Sculpture 1-10, which Manifesta 15 Barcelona commissioned her to create at a disused power station, and her presentation in Conversations, a group exhibition at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The works contain ten large brightly coloured sculptures that hung among the grey concrete pillars of the industrial site, and a work in pen, graphite and chalk pen on two pieces of paper. She was commended for 'her unique command of material, colour and gesture and her highly attuned responses to architectural space'. PA Media Rene Matic's work in Berlin (Diana Pfammatter/CCA Berlin) Xa, 41, who studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and the Royal College of Art in London, is influenced by her Korean background and its 'spiritual rituals, shamanism, folk traditions and textile practices'. She is nominated for Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything (2025), which was created with Spanish artist Benito Mayor Vallejo and shown at the United Arab Emirates' Sharjah Biennial. It has a sound element inspired by Salpuri, a Korean exorcism dance, and a mobile sculpture inspired by seashell wind chimes and Korean shamanic rattles, which has 650 brass bells that make harmonised sounds. Painter Sami, 40, born in Baghdad, has studied at the Belfast School of Art and Goldsmiths College, London. PA Media Mohammed Sami's After the Storm at Blenheim Palace (Tom Lindboe/Blenheim Palace) He says: 'My paintings seek to capture the state of confusion that occurs because of the cut thread between reality and the imagination; between war narrated and war witnessed.' Sami was given the nod for After the Storm: Mohammed Sami at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which has 14 paintings that respond to the history of Sir Winston Churchill's birthplace, and contain 'hints and references to conflict in Iraq'. The paintings do not have human figures, while one shows the 'shadow of a helicopter blade over a table and empty chairs', and another appears to suggest body bags. An exhibition of works will be held at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery from September 27 2025 to February 22 2026 during the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture celebrations. The winner will be announced on December 9 2025 at an award ceremony in Bradford. Last year, Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur, who put a doily on a car, won the prestigious art prize, which awards £25,000 to its winner and £10,000 to the other shortlisted artists. Previous recipients include sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor (1991), artist Damien Hirst (1995), and filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen (1999). Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
Evening Standard
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Turner Prize shortlist includes artist who uses ‘salvaged' antique dolls in work
Peterborough artist Rene Matic was among the four shortlisted artists announced at the Tate Britain on Wednesday for their first institutional solo exhibition, called As Opposed To The Truth, which touches on ideas of the rise of right-wing populism and identities.
