In San Francisco-based artist Josh Faught’s work, the histories of queer identity and activism are woven into textile collages and crocheted sculpture, along with the texts of commercial greeting cards, gay pride buttons and glitter. Faught often leaves his threads hanging, ready to be undone. These handwoven tapestries are joined by the work of Berlin and Tallinn-based artist Kris Lemsalu, in which animal parts and other found matter fuse with ceramic sculptures. Lemsalu often turns the gallery space into a blur of unending forms: the skin of wild pigs might hang alongside gowns crumpling into mounds of sand. In The Shop at Sadie Coles HQ, Madragoa presents an intensive enterprise in their group show ‘Approx.’: how can the flat, printed surface of the photograph take on new depths? There is a sensual night music in Renato Leotta’s tracking between photography and place-making – in the photogram TEMPO (Luna del ghiaccio) (TIME, Ice Moon, 2017), the artist has dipped photographic paper into sea water under a full moon. Other kinds of luminosity and tactility as well as a sense of discovery fill Buhlebezwe Siwani’s installation amaKhobokha (2016). Here, her lens falls on a brand of green soap which has multiple uses in South Africa (for cleaning clothes and the body, as well as the digestive system), capturing the vessels in which the soap’s leftover green sediment has collected.
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