Barbican Centre

The voice is a powerful weapon for Sierra Leonean artist Julianknxx. And in ‘Chorus in Rememory of Flight’, he’s assembled a whole arsenal. The three films here are filled with countless voices, all brought together into a chorus and singing as one. For his Curve installation, he travelled across Europe recording songs, dances and testimonies by Black singers, activists and performers and then weaved them all together with his own poetry to create a trans-continental chorus, a visual and sonic portrait of Black Europe.  The films take in ideas of diaspora, colonialism, survival and oppression. The voices he records talk and sing about shipwrecks and airplanes, colonial atrocities and slavery, movement and migration, pain and healing. The figures sing in Dutch housing estates, talk in Portuguese living rooms and libraries, perform in Spanish apartments and on the banks of English rivers. All these voices have different accents, different timbres and tones, but they are still European, still Black, still human.  This is the chorus as a metaphor for community, for history, for healing It doesn’t always coalesce into something tangible, though. At points, it’s a jumbled mess. It’s all full of mixed metaphors and awkward phrasings. The two shorter films don’t work especially well, while the longer one drags and jars, and do we really need another exhibition with a patronising reading room at the end?  But in its best moments, all these clashing elements come together into somethi

Just like facing the onrushing tide of our rising seas, London’s been absolutely drowning in ecological art recently. All of it has sucked, but ‘Re/Sisters’ at the Barbican is trying to be the first one worth the carbon emissions of its multiple video installations.Where the others have failed (‘Back to Earth’ at the Serpentine, ‘Dear Earth’ at the Hayward) is in making art that lectures viewers and sloganeers while actually doing nothing about climate change. But much of ‘Re/Sisters’ is about actual real life resistance. It focuses on how indigenous communities, women and gender nonconforming people have been at the centre of ecological activism, and how if anyone’s going to save the planet, it’s them. It starts with brutal exploitation of natural resources and destruction of landscapes. Simryn Gill and Mabe Bethonico document open pit mines like sores on the land, Taloi Haviini creates a moving portrait of life in the shadow of a copper pit in Papua New Guinea and Sim Chi Yin documents the building of luxury artificial islands. This is art as witness.  Then there’s active resistance: zines and images from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, JEB’s photos of anti-nuclear demonstrations in New York, pictures of women saving trees in northern India and protesting against contaminated water in America.  Throughout this first chunk of the exhibition, women are shown as essential to the fight for climate justice, ecological rights and the resistance to capitalism, extraction a

This ‘apocalyptic fever dream’ of a show from performance duo pj + emma was a cult hit at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe and now plays a brief but prestigious run at the Barbican’s Pit venue. It’s a visually souped-up storytelling show, in which the pair describe a road trip through an ending world.

This review is from 2022. ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ returns to the Barbican in November 2023 for a new four-month run. Lead casting remains substantially the same, with Mei Mac and Ami Okumura Jones returning as Mei and Satsuki. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece ‘My Neighbour Totoro’ is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature W