Nnena Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence. They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snaggling details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings. The closer you get to Kalu’s endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. Their containment is precarious. So full of life and energy, you think they might burst.
Kalu’s art is so embodied, so sensuous, so much a trace of her constant, physical engagement, so much a negotiation between the body that made it and the bodies she creates, it becomes …
Nnena Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence. They bulge and bifurcate and multiply. The viewer gets caught up in all the roaring, spilling, snaggling details, and you begin to wonder about your own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings. The closer you get to Kalu’s endless sinewy trails of old VHS tape, their spews of filigree plastic webbing, their bound-up, sometimes cable-tied suturings, the harder it is to know where their forms stop and the space around them begins. Their containment is precarious. So full of life and energy, you think they might burst.
Kalu’s art is so embodied, so sensuous, so much a trace of her constant, physical engagement, so much a negotiation between the body that made it and the bodies she creates, it becomes difficult to distinguish between the activity of making and the thing itself. This was true, too, in the figures Giacometti made in his room filled with plaster dust. But Kalu’s art is not reducible to anything we might call a technique, and comparisons with other artists are not much help.
Nnena Kalu’s work is the product of drive and urgency and intent. Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist and ActionSpace
As I wrote when I reviewed this year’s Turner prize exhibition, there is a horizon to what we can know: Kalu’s work has to speak for itself. We are left with the facts that Kalu is autistic, has learning disabilities, and limited verbal communication. All art is about overcoming difficulty in one way or another, in order to find a voice. Hers is a constant flux between objects and space, herself and others, and the boundaries that contain us. Her work is the product of drive and urgency and intent. With their spiralling, repetitive marks, their accretion of overdrawn layers, their adjustments and variety of touches, her drawings are all about the cumulative.
The smart money was all on Mohammed Sami’s paintings. Sami, who began his career painting official portraits of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, describes the aftermath of terrible events. The bigger his paintings get, the more concocted they seem. His images are more potent than the way they are delivered.
Rene Matić’s installation – including photographs, banners, music and a display of black dolls – captures a complex social world, mixing aspiration and desire, the private and the political, tantalised rather than delivered. It all got too complicated.
Zadie Xa’s overdressed installation of paintings, fabricated shells, ominous chants and tinklings, stage-dressing and theatrical lighting appealed to the spiritual, and to harmony with nature. More artifice than art, one painting even had bells on, dangling from its lower edge.
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From the beginning, I wanted Kalu to win. The Turner judges praise her “lively translation of expressive gesture into captivating abstract sculpture and drawing. Noting her distinct practice and finesse of scale, composition and colour.” They turn it into art like any other, missing its essential compulsion.