The teeming wildness of Huyghe’s garden installation from Documenta 13 infected the hollow soundscape of the gallery.
YOU DONT NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS FREE
Cammock’s film weaves a compelling narrative of race and belonging through the prism of family life, with day-to-day experience appearing quite desolate when presented next to the gloriously free world of the squatter birds.īut Cammock’s quiet, contemplative film was agitated by the sounds of Pierre Huyghe’s A Way to Untilled (2012–13), which played in a nearby alcove. In Helen Cammock’s The Singing Will Never be Done (2011), a two-screen video installation playing in the gallery’s cavernous first room, the community of parakeets – which may or may not have originally escaped from the set of The African Queen in 1951, the voiceover explains – are interspersed with snippets from Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, recalling a political climate of embittered xenophobia, which returns now as depressingly familiar political rhetoric. The exhibition, named after a line in Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965), and inspired by his call-to-arms to America’s youth to fight for their own counter-cultures and revolutions, was an assembly of art works which drew on animal life to disturb ideas of contemporary culture and politics. Pierre Huyghe, A Way to Untilled, 2012–13, HD video projectionĪ flock of brilliant green parakeets who made Wormwood Scrubs prison in North London their unlikely home are the opening metaphor for immigration, belonging and identity in ‘You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows’, at Hollybush Gardens, the third show in the gallery's spacious new Clerkenwell premises.