Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery Celebrates 60th with Friends in Love and War
Luke Routledge, Strangelets (2024). Exhibition view: Friends in Love and War – L'Éloge des meilleur·es ennemi·es, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2 October 2024–23 February 2025). Courtesy Ikon. Photo: Tod Jones.
Ikon Gallery—an agile and ambitious bastion of contemporary art and culture in Birmingham—celebrates its sixtieth anniversary with Friends in Love and War – L'Éloge des meilleur·es ennemi·es, a multimedia, multivocal show notable for its inclusion of several particularly affective works and for showcasing local talent.
Ikon and Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon (macLYON) together present the work of 28 artists drawn from the collections of the British Council and macLYON along with the work of three Birmingham-based artists to explore the meaning and role of friendship in contemporary life. Co-curated by Ikon's Melanie Pocock, and macLYON's Marilou Laneuville, Friends in Love and War is literally an exercise in both personal and professional transnational relations demonstrating, too, how regional capitals and cultural organisations can continue to collaborate in a post-Brexit world.
Curated across two floors that separate the British Council collection works from those representing macLYON, the show features a selection of intriguing and impactful creations. On the first floor, these include Hetain Patel's deft, dynamic, and strangely hypnotic film Don't Look at the Finger (2017), which features actors of West African heritage performing East Asian martial arts while wearing costumes inspired by Japanese and Mongolian dress but made from Dutch wax fabric, commonly worn by West Africans on celebratory occasions. Also included is this year's Turner Prize nominee, Delaine Le Bas' similarly evocative mixed-media sculpture What We Don't Know Won't Hurt Us? (2006–2018), a multi-layered self-portrait, imbued with undoubtedly cryptic potential, that embraces totems, tassels, skeletons, skulls, and symbols of idiosyncratic and unexplained origin.
Sonia Boyce's Pillow Case (1990), a large-scale, multi-coloured assemblage of handwritten advertisements originally placed in newspapers by those seeking love and friendship, and Rose Wylie's Bagdad Café (Film Notes) (2015)—which draws on sequences from the eponymous 1987 film about a budding friendship between Jasmin Munchgstettner, a Bavarian tourist abandoned by her husband, and Brenda, the manager of a motel in the Californian desert—are equally absorbing, as are Markéta Luskacová's poetic pictures of children at play selected from the series 'Citizen 2000' (1986–2000), in which she documented a cohort of babies born in Britain in 1982 until their coming of age in the year 2000. One feels an instant and intense emotional connection with the photographed children and thus the desire to go on looking, to study what amounts, for Luskacová, to 'two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity'.1
On display on the second floor is Fabien Verschaere's epic Seven Days Hotel (2007). Rooted in the artist's childhood experience of long hospital stays, 60 captivating drawings tell the imaginary tale of an ill child's encounter with the world as seen through the eyes of a princess. Also included here is Lola Gonzàlez's simple yet entrancingly intimate video, Anouk & Lola (2020), which explores the connection between two female friends who debate experiential reality and question the nature of visual perception.
Finally, visitors to the exhibition are invited to participate by taking a seat at Niek van de Steeg's Structure de correction, table de débat (c. 2000)—a dialogic and discursive scaffold of sorts—and recording their reflections and exchanges on the nature of friendship.
Among the most visceral and emotive works featured are those by the three Birmingham-based artists—in order of appearance, Luke Routledge, Tereza Bušková, and Pogus Caesar—chosen to complement both institutions' collections. Routledge, author of multidimensional, fictional multi-verses populated by absurdist figurative sculptures, showcases, in the artist's own words, a 'living collage' titled Strangelets (2024).2
Consisting of a mix of anthropomorphic characters and hybrid forms and constructed from a wide range of materials—including an air-dry clay substance the artist makes himself, as well as coloured resins, silicones, painted woods, and fabrics—Routledge's Strangelets references theoretical particle physics and the hypothetical matter thought to be found within the core of a neutron star. On the move, Routledge's band of Strangelets search for community and friendship just as both Bušková and Caesar's work convey the importance of community and friendship in transcending cultural and political divides.
In recent years, Bušková has championed art for social change that is not only defiant but also symbolic, soulful, and celebratory by actively involving diverse, hard-to-reach communities in folk-inspired craft and baking workshops and processional performances. The resulting films made by the artist following the conclusion of participatory projects, such as Clipping the Church (2016), Hidden Mothers (2021), and Little Queens (2022), are at once nostalgic and mesmeric, each characterised by their liminality as well as by their haunting aesthetic and aural beauty.
Clipping the Church, for example, sought to revive an ancient and almost forgotten English tradition as part of which families would flock to local churches, holding hands with each other and encircling the building with open arms. More than 200 people were present at the artist's orchestrated re-enactment of the clipping of Saint Barnabas Church, Erdington, Birmingham, in June 2016, 13 days before the Brexit referendum. In combining Bohemian wedding celebrations with English rituals, Clipping the Church highlights contemporary folk art's role in addressing issues of identity and belonging, demonstrating its potential to unite disparate communities.
Caesar's series 'Schwarz Flaneur' (1983–2008) is similarly rousing. A selection of ten black-and-white photographs—several of which are shown in the U.K. for the first time—evidence Caesar's ease of engagement with people living not only in Birmingham, where he grew up, but also in London, South Africa, Italy, Spain, Tunisia, and Saint Kitts. Capturing both mundane and profound moments of being, closeness, and connection, Caesar's series expresses, in the artist's own words, 'my feelings about what love is'.3
The result not only of curatorial partnership but also of the twinning of Lyon and Birmingham in the aftermath of World War II—in 1951, to be precise—Friends in Love and War is an eclectic and arresting show that highlights the importance of friendship and fostering togetherness and understanding during what is a crucial time in human history. —[O]
