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Art

London,

All Tomorrow's Pictures

Description: Leading commentators and cultural representatives offer their photographic visions of the future.



Rating: 3 out of 5 Sue Steward's rating
Rating: 5 out of 5

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ICA Gallery The Mall, SW1Y 5AH

Phone: 0207930 3647

Website: www.ica.org.uk

Transport: Tube: Charing Cross Transport for London

The future is mobile

Helena Christensen
Trunk call: Helena Christensen's 'Tomorrow' is a cuddly affair
Helena Christensen The Chapman Brothers

By Sue Steward
30 May 2007


For the ICA gallery's 60th anniversary, 59 artists from around the creative industries were commissioned to make visual predictions of the future using state-of-the-art mobile phone cameras. The results make a perfect complement to Tate Britain's current retrospective of photography in Britain.

Optimism inspires most guests, including the ICA pioneer, Peter Blake, with a simple shot of a weed outwitting the paving stones in his garden.

ICA director Ekow Eshun presents a gloriously sensual, unusually close-cropped image of the heavily pregnant Jenny, one of several images using children to symbolise continuity, survival and optimism. Clichés include model-turned-photographer Helena Christensen's small son with a dinosaur transfer on his cheek but film director Gurinder Chadha's baby scan and Monica Ali's close-up of her son's head are both impressionistic studies.

Other close-ups include gorgeous-painterly spiders' webs by Blur guitarist Graham Coxon and timeless still lifes of a London window sill by Chinese writer and film-maker, Xiaolu Guo.

Predictably, narcissism abounds - in Beth Ditto's backstage indulgences, but disappointingly in Tracey Emin's self-portrait. It is startlingly reinterpreted through Webster & Noble's portraits of their anuses.

The Chapman Brothers' three images include a Warholesque, over-exposed, orgasmic face, and a beady-eyed rat squatting on a skull, close conceptual relations to the young taxidermy artist Polly Morgan, whose morbid triptych reflects on the symbiosis between dead birds and maggots.

Many follow a political route: the Minister of Culture, David Lammy, triumphing with a scene showing telephone boxes being towed away - killed off by mobile phones. Conrad Shawcross's computer monitor floating at sea is a lyrical warning, while Zac Goldsmith's cheese shop and longlife bulb snaps are literal ciphers. But Gordon Moakes (Bloc Party) shares tabloid tactics with Danny Wallace, whose mock Evening Standard billboards scream: "Watch out! The fear of Future."

An intriguing collection and a foretaste of the potential of this new democratic art form.
• 31 May-8 June. www.ica.org

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