Backyard Biennial: East Review – this pointless exhibition gave me a migraine | Art and design

Met’s rare that a show is so bad you feel compelled to text your friend “you won’t believe the trash I just saw” right after you leave. And if you can navigate your way through a poorly described, disjointed, disjointed, ill-conceived show without getting a migraine, you have stronger rules than I do.

This is an East London show. Or maybe it’s British. Or moving. Or a weather problem. Or music. Or international trade. Whitechapel Gallery they don’t seem to know, so what chance do the rest of us have to find out? Artists would argue that it is all of these things; I would say it can be none of them.

This is the first iteration of the new summer festival, hosted and organized by the Whitechapel Gallery, made up of many outdoor exhibitions and events throughout the area, as well as an exhibition in the center of the building. The main show is called East of Aldgate Pumpso you can imagine it will be about east London, Tower Hamlets, a picture of the history of immigration, manufacturing, protest and all the information about the area. This is what the text on the wall says: “The exhibition presents east London as a place defined by movement, resilience and cultural interdependence.”

And some of them are, like Rachel Garfield’s film about the history of Jewish sewing in the city. But almost no pictures of Marwan Bassiouni are visible on the windows of the mosque Londonmany are not even in England. Susan Pui’s film San Lok is about Chinese people living in Dagenham. Adam Farah-Saad’s installation mainly covers the Brent Cross shopping center in west London and the Staples Corner flyover.

Well, they’re playing loose with their geography, maybe it’s all about London. Right? Wrong. Rehana Zaman’s dual film installation focuses on temporary workers and sharecroppers in Punjab and Scotland. Fozia Ismail’s atmospheric sculptures are about the weather blowing on traditional Somali weavings. Do you have migraines?

It feels like he came up with an idea and couldn’t get it off; it seems like an exercise in copying the coffers of Arts Council England without considering the audience or what makes the show work.

I don’t know how everything works. And it’s the artists that I feel sorry for, their work is connected to a meaningless, vague, visual that makes them look confused as managers, who somehow make the idea of ​​moving with the people of London unhappy. This is a painful, heavy, degrading show – and it didn’t have to be.

The wealth of individual work is good: Farah-Saad’s installation of Mariah Carey CDs under a large mural on the North Circular Ring Road is a sympathetic, poignant gesture to lost youth; Denzil Forrester’s music for reggae clubs is a wild and magical portrait of the heyday of soundsystem culture. But the idea itself, the actual show, is terrible.

I want shows related to migration and communities, climate emergencies and information; I just think the shows should be meaningful and not absorbing.

At the end, Laisul Hoque has created a stand full of tires Jhuri Bundiyathe artist’s childhood passion, creating a connection between Bangladesh and London. It is a work about cultural memory and community conflict. And it means that as you walk around trying to figure out what the show is about and who it is, you get a snack while you do it.