Mariko Mori Williams College Museum of Art Finds a Director Inaugural Singapore Biennale in Full Swing

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The night before the really privileged collectors are allowed into Frieze for the pre-professional preview—so they can get the art they want before the hoi-polloi crush—London was a maelstrom of openings. Here are some of the highlights.

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Albion's Other Worlds

The Albion Gallery's handsome riverside galleries were full of the heavy collecting mob coming to see Mariko Mori's Tom na H-lu, an extraordinary, LED-lit, 4.5-meter glass obelisk which changes color as celestial bodies move about overhead—all done by ISDN from an observatory in Tokyo, according to the artist.

In a specially designed, 4,000-square-foot circular building, the obelisk was quiet when I saw it, so I guess no celestial neutrinos were bombarding just at that moment. But on the riverside terrace outside Albion, the art crowd was definitely lit up on a combination of excitement and champagne.

Inside the gallery, Mori is displaying three, six-foot-circular photomontages and four video installations. The photomontages, titled: “Beginning of the End: Past, Present and Future,” are composed of elements typical in Mori’s work, presenting meditations on the attainment of inner peace through a relationship with the environment.

In the photos, Mori presents herself within a clear-glass “isolation pod,” suspended in liquid, which has been placed in some of the most famous locations in the world (Angkor Wat, the pyramids at Giza, Times Square), providing a dialogue between the influx of cross-pollinating cultures and the attainment of a personal calm.

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London Goes Pop

James Rosenquist's pan-London exhibition, put on by Haunch of Venison, was another must-see for the art gang, who eddied between the three locations where the show is taking place: 6 Haunch of Venison Yard, 23 Bruton St. and the Z Rooms at the Old Truman Brewery.

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Canalside

At the Victoria Miro Gallery, the opening of its extraordinary new white space, architected by Claudio Silvestrin (and located next to the original gallery), drew many young fans of Conrad Shawcross' extraordinary sculptures. All were drinking champagne in Silvestrin's celestial white spaces under a clear London sky.

Conceived especially for the gallery spaces, Shawcross’ “No Such Thing as One” exhibition brings together a body of work that explores ideas concerning time and the essence of matter, taking the artist’s concerns for cosmology and harmonics to a decidedly more mathematical and epistemological level, according to the gallery.

Crafted in wood and rope, Shawcross’s mechanistic structures do nothing at all. They are objects that “aren’t moving but that have all the implications of movement”; they are sculptures which deny rationality but which are “built in the guise of rational, empirical machines.” Yet, it is precisely in this subversion of purpose that Shawcross’s works in No Such Thing as One reveal the possibility that the certainties of science may be fiction and not fact, the gallery reports.

Paradigm (Ode to the Difference Engine) (2006), for example, is a giant double-rope machine unraveling its rope as fast as it can ravel it. Comprising two identical machines, each made of hundreds of cogs, spools and pulleys, the twin structures turn in mirrored opposition to each other, countering all the other does. The artist has spoken of the work being reminiscent of Charles Babbage’s unrealized Difference Engine conceived in 1822 and widely regarded as the first computer, also imbued with the same tragic elements of the unobtainable.