The Guardian : Yoko Ono: Mend Piece for London; This Is the Night Mail – review

By Tim Adams

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Ono invites visitors to repair the world by reconstructing broken teacups, while the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad conjures surprises from a huge private collection, with a little help from WH Auden

‘Mend carefully’... Yoko Ono, Mend Piece, 1966/2018. Photograph: Kyle Morland/Image courtesy the artist

There is something appropriate about the piles of broken crockery that greet visitors to the autumn programme of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece, in which gallery visitors are invited to reconstruct teacups from pottery shards using glue, string and sticky tape, briefly captures a returning-from-lockdown determination to put things back together again (even while keeping a sanitiser bottle to hand).

Ono first presented this piece in 1966 at John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery in Mayfair (she met John Lennon when he came to a preview of the show). If things felt like they had fallen apart and needed fixing back then, that need only feels amplified just now, 55 years on. With that repair shop spirit in mind, I sat at a white table along with a few others and tried ham-fistedly to piece and stick and tie together something that might once again hold water. “Mend carefully,” the artist instructs, “think of mending the world at the same time.” If the cup is anything to go by, that process might be a little harder than even Ono could imagine. After a few concentrated minutes, I placed my wonky vessel on the adjacent shelves alongside the rest of the tragically optimistic teaset.

Ono’s tables and shelves are outside the upstairs gallery space at the Whitechapel that houses Ida Ekblad’s This Is the Night Mail. Ekblad is the first of four artists to create an exhibition from the private treasures of Norwegian collector Christen Sveaas – the founder of the Kistefos Museum, Norway’s answer to Tate Modern, a cavernous exhibition space housed partly in the cavernous exhibition space of the the old wood pulp mill that made his family’s fortune.

Article published in www.theguardian.com