Art reviews: The Children Are Now | Charles Avery
Intended to challenge the “adultism” in much of society, the new group show at Talbot Rice is at its strongest when it’s showing us children as fierce, resourceful and creative, writes Susan Mansfield
The Children Are Now, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★
Charles Avery: The Eidolorama, Ingleby Gallery ★★★
Shifting the conversation about childhood is at the centre of The Children Are Now, the new group exhibition at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. In academic and legal circles, “childism” challenges the unacknowledged “adultism” in much of society, which affords children a lower status. It turns on its head the view that children need to grow up in order to have a voice in society. They are participants now, and deserve to be heard.
In 2024, Scotland incorporated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law - so far the only country in the UK to incorporate it fully - which affirms children’s human rights. Under the banner of the exhibition, a group of Child Human Rights Defenders, aged 10-12, from the Scottish Children’s Parliament worked with the artist Bob and Roberta Smith [one male person] to make placards about the issues on which they are currently campaigning.
They also provide thoughtful comments and observations about the works in the show which offer different perspectives on childhood by artists from Europe, the Far East, Australia and South Africa. Curated by Talbot Rice’s James Clegg across all the gallery’s spaces, the show is book-ended by two outstanding films, by Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen and Belgian artist Francis Alÿs.
Nguyen’s film The Boat People focuses on a group of five children exploring Bataan, the seaside resort in the Philippines which was one of the landing points for the people who fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the wake of the Vietnam war. The children explore an unpeopled world - perhaps the last survivors of some future disaster - visiting memorials, empty museums and abandoned classrooms, making carved wooden replicas of the objects they find, burning them and giving the ashes to the ocean. It’s a powerful picture of honouring the past whilst making a new beginning, but more powerful still is the children’s calm, purposeful demeanor, leaving us in no doubt that they are quite capable of remaking a world.
Reel-Unreel by Francis Alÿs, whose work on children’s games for the Belgian pavilion was a highlight of the 2024 Venice Biennale, was filmed in the streets of Kabul in 2011. Local boys play with a pair of film canisters, rolling them through the streets as the film spools and unspools between them.
It’s a powerful metaphor in a country where the Taliban has tried to destroy the national film archive, but again the most striking element is the children themselves. They are unstoppable, weaving down alleyways, across busy roads, through a market. We observe the war-torn city from their perspective: bigger events might be unfolding above them, but they are fast, smart, resourceful. The only thing that matters is the game.
Six text works by Bob and Roberta Smith intersperse the other pieces, speaking of the power and freedom inherent in art, and the importance of access to it, particularly for children. One is a letter written in 2011 to the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, protesting about the way the English Baccalaureate system steers children towards academic subjects at the expense of creative ones. Smith, who stood against Gove in the 2015 election, has now readdressed his letter to the current Labour government.
The question of whether educational institutions crush children’s energy and creativity is explored in a pair of films by Norwegian artist Ane Hjort Guttu. In Freedom Requires Free People, she follows the school experience of a child who, in another light, might be described as disruptive or badly behaved. Jens Flakstad Vold is an extraordinarily articulate eight-year-old, able to describe his struggles with an education system which “decides what we do and who we are”. The second film, made ten years later, is a conversation between Guttu and Vold in which he reflects, as a mild-mannered 18-year-old, on his mixed feelings about the first film.
Education is also the focus for South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere, particularly the Bantu system in which Black children were educated under apartheid, which channeled them into manual and unskilled occupations. He repurposes school desks into crutches, and uses bricks to create a kind of library of banned books; the particular irony is the banning of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty because the censors misunderstood the title.
Mai Nguyen-Long’s ceramic figures, based around an invented character, Vomit Girl, are a way of bringing back to life her connections with her Vietnamese heritage. Czech artist Adéla Součková dives deep into hopscotch, bringing it into the realm of the mystical, and even the political, with a series of grids on the floor, each stranger than the one before, on which visitors are invited to play. And Monster Chetwynd, whose anarchic spontaneity seems just right for a show on childhood, presents Hell Mouth 2, a glorious portal which subverts the language of medieval judgment, proposing instead a spirit of adventure in which the concept of “monster” is itself re-evaluated.
With such a broad range of styles and perspectives, there is no way this show can present a unified set of arguments about childhood. In truth, some approaches are more impactful than others. The show is strongest when it’s showing us children in all their raw power: fierce, resourceful, creative, strong-minded, seizing hold of the moment.
For more than 20 years, Charles Avery has been occupied with The Islanders, a kind of alternative world which has developed in detail and complexity as a container for his artistic ideas. At one stage, he believed that all the work he would make would sit inside this framework.
Now, however, he has departed from it, and the shift is significant. The new body of work at Ingleby Gallery is a series of paintings in which he presents precise arrangements of coloured shapes. Its concerns appear to be mathematical and abstract, about shape, colour, edge and surface. Everything is flat. After the more-is-more aesthetic of the Islanders, this work is so pared back it’s practically minimalism.
Or is it? The brain can’t help but make connections: is that shape a sausage, a broad bean? Do those shapes make up a human figure (one of the works is called Study for Reclining Nude OR Old Man)? Is this an Avery version of the Rorschach ink blot test? Could that be a pickled egg (a top island delicacy)?
The titles are puzzles in themselves: A World of Eight Things, Three Hundreds (this one features three wavy lines meticulously placed on a big canvas: sine waves, or Island eels?) One True Temple of Three Two-headed Snakes OR The City and The City and The City.
The title of the show comes from the Greek word “eidolons”, which refers to the spirit-images of people, alive or dead, and was the title of a poem by Walt Whitman: “Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics…” So there is probably more going on here than we can identity.
One can count on Avery to be doing something clever, and the sense of balance and poise in these works suggests that his aesthetic senses are as keen as ever, but now he’s using them in a different way. Is this a new direction, or a respite from world-building? Perhaps the answer will be revealed in time, along with some solutions to this new set of puzzles.
The Children Are Now runs until 7 February; Charles Avery: The Eidolorama until 19 December
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