Focus Week: Barbican and Museum of London

Shirana Shahbazi @ The Barbican & The Window Gallery.

On an evening last week whilst walking back from Oxford Street along Charing Cross Road I came across an art gallery called The Window Gallery. Sited opposite a bus stop, the window is screened off with performing artists behind it, only showing the shadows and silhouettes of their movement. Passers by are intrigued to watch the event to see what will happen next and how the two performers interact with each other, as they both try to seduce one another. It is part of a series of events being held at The Window Gallery titled “Seduced” created by graduates at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. It is running in conjunction with The Barbican’s exhibition “Seduced Art and Sex From Antiquity to Now” that looks at the representation of sex in art through the ages with works spanning some 2000 years including works by Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso. However, I did not go to that exhibition in The Barbican, as it was too pricey. Instead I went to see Shirana Shahbazi at The Curve Gallery within the same building.
The last time I visited The Curve Gallery there was a London cab with a large hole drilled all the way through it and a rotating caravan so I wondered what would be happening there now. Inside the curvy space there are a series of large-scale paintings on the subjects of fruit & flowers, portraits of a young woman and a landscape. The paintings are produced in collaboration with billboard painters and artists from her native Iran. Each painting is painted from a photo, which she has previously taken. After painting the image she then tries to replicate it again, but by trying to copy an existing image the scale ends up changing and the over all image differs from the previous.
Museum of London.

The museum of London seems to be going through a bit of a refurbishment as the bottom gallery for world war London and post-war London was not open, but the rest of the exhibitions were still open :) The museum of London takes your through the entire history of the city, from early settlers, to Roman Londinium, to the great fire of London. There are lots of exhibitions and displays showing how Londinium was organised in the Roman times and the size of London and how it has expanded through the ages. With Londinium being where the heart of the city is and then in the Saxon times another settlement was set up further down stream where Charing Cross is now. Westminster and the Houses of Parliament was constructed on what previously once was a marshy island and the majority of current day settlements would have once been completely under water, as the River Thames was constantly changing it’s path through the ages. Another exhibition currently on display is about the Great Fire of London in 1666 showing some of the original artifacts that survived the fire and how Londoner’s fled to the banks of the Thames to escape the flames taking only their most valuable, but not always their most useful or important of belongings.