What to See Across the UK and Ireland This August

Nat Faulkner​​ | Brunette Coleman, London | 13 July – 14 September

In the afternoon, an uncanny light bathes Brunette Coleman’s small, two-room gallery in Clerkenwell. In its slight movement, the glow creates shadowy apparitions that shift from one side of the space to the other, dancing freely across the four sculptural and two photographic works in Nat Faulkner’s solo exhibition, ‘Albedo’. The title – a scientific term referring to the fraction of sunlight diffusely reflected by a body – perfectly encapsulates the interplay of reflection and transition examined within the show.

Faulkner has enclosed one-half of the gallery behind a glass partition (Interior, all works 2024). The sealed space beyond the barrier, which is held in place with a neat aluminium border, evokes an interrogation room or a laboratory: a situation of controlled investigation. Within the enclosed cell, a borrowed painting on canvas hangs on the glass’s reverse surface, its front facing the bare wall opposite. By showcasing the painting’s verso and concealing its recto, Faulkner deftly reframes our encounter with the work. Inviting us to imagine its face by drawing only from the title, Clair de lune sur la Pointe du Raz (Moonlight on the Pointe du Raz), which appears written on the back, the artist renders the painting a subject of speculation rather than of passive observation. – Alexander Harding 

Dominique White | Whitechapel Gallery, London | 2 July – 15 September 

A ship’s wake marks its traces as they slowly dissipate into the history of the sea. Within the histories of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, these ephemeral remains cause difficulty in reckoning with the lives of the dispossessed. The hauntology of the slave ship – a relic that infiltrates the memory of both the living and the dead – remains in the hold of history’s wake. Grappling with the unresolved, still-unfolding present of slavery’s history, artist Dominique White’s sculptural reimagining of four shipwrecks in her exhibition ‘Deadweight’ at Whitechapel Gallery opens the vault of the sea and throws you directly into this wake. – Jamila Abdel-Razek

‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ | The Pumphouse, Dublin Port | 6 July – 27 October 

According to one well-worn anecdote, the writer James Joyce was approached in Zurich by a young man who asked permission to ‘kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses’ (1922). Joyce refused. His hand, he said, ‘did a lot of other things, too’. This witticism is indicative of a philosophical outlook that takes the sacred and the mundane as inextricable cross-contaminants: the same hand that produced exquisite prose was also responsible for hammering nails, masturbating and wiping between two cheeks. Taking its title from a line in Ulysses, ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ contains two coinciding solo shows by Yuri Pattison and Liliane Puthod. Both practices reveal a shared desire to explore the profundity lurking within the most prosaic of objects. – Tom Lordan

Agnes Scherer | Sadie Coles HQ, London | 25 June – 17 August 

Undergirding ‘Woe and Awe’, Agnes Scherer’s first solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, is an unfailing devotion to spectacle. Replete with angelic tales of genesis, whimsical puppets and their overzealous masters, the exhibition relishes in the panache of performance while also gesturing towards the often-hidden institutional mechanisms that determine who is allowed to produce art and how. 

In the multimedia installation tbc (all works 2024), a mammoth folio spreads its cardboard pages before us. Its sequence of surrealist dioramas is periodically activated during programmed performances. When I visited, delicate scenes of carnival joy leapt into life: a ferris wheel, white-water rapid rides and a lone mechanical bull rider. According to the exhibition text, this landscape aims to showcase capitalism’s exploitative ‘transformation from industrial to emotional labour’. The implication is that artistic production is no longer solely inspired by creativity and curiosity; rather, having been adversely impacted by increased demand, it’s become a mechanised, for-profit endeavour. Scherer playfully distorts the traditional pop-up book design. Her fables, laced with ambiguity, include three celestial figures suspended from the ceiling above the folio. Do they herald annunciation or damnation? Their sharp, geometric bodies – restless in their contorted physicality – loom, omen-like over the scene. – Ivana Cholakova 

Marlene Smith | Cubitt, London | 22 August – 18 October

For a while, I’ve been trying to make work with fondant icing that is as delicate as possible without breaking. I want to imprint it with some crochet pieces that belonged to my mum. It occurred to me that, if I got myself a mangle – an old housekeeping device used to squeeze the water out of wet laundry – it would help me to manipulate these slabs of icing. I want every piece to look uniform but also to be highly individual and to have a personality, to be a kind of embodiment of a woman. I’m placing a lot of demands on this material.

There are days when I think: ‘This is so brilliant, what a great idea!’ Then there are other days when I ask myself: ‘What the hell do you think you are doing with this stuff? You’re going to have all this work that’s made in icing sugar, which is not going to last forever, so who’s going to buy it? Should I be making more sculptural works? Should I do more drawing? Should I, should I, should I?’ –Marlene Smith

^{Main image: Nat Faulkner, Sculpture (detail), 2024, chromogenic print on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, optium acrylic and plywood, 90 × 120 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Brunette Coleman, London; photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards}