Plinth

Ajani's painting features the only full figure here. By placing her at the entrance and confronting viewers directly, curators Lincoln Dexter and Charlie Nia Dunnery McCracken, create the sense of bringing her along with us as we explore the rest of the exhibition. For example, when turning to Mike Silva’s work nearby, Martin’s Room (2023), which also happens to feature brown curtains – here, they frame a view out a window onto the opposing houses of a residential street – it’s almost as if Ajani’s figure haunts the frame, as if the viewer could be taking up her position on the bed, looking out. The bleached light coming through the window is evocative of a humdrum, hopeful British day. Yet I cannot remember the last time my mind was bored still enough to find such beauty in such ordinary brightness.

Hangama Amiri’s Late by Myself (2021) is more literally a portrait in the first-person: that said, the outline of a hand – ours, Amiri’s – around the oversize wine glass was one of the last things I noticed, despite the chic red nails… and I am only now, at the time of writing, noticing the female face in the wine. What hits more readily is the work’s range of textiles woven together on a double duvet scale and the cartoonish, giant drops of wine. The patterns of a rug, the tiled floor and the woodgrain of the careening table complexly interlock; each of the three objects occupies its own perspective. By rights this should be queasy-making but in fact it feels reassuring: the threat of a full cubist caper, with its shards and angles, only reinforces the composition’s softness, and nothing bad happens before the cheeseboard has even been touched. The suspense, the suspended knife, weirdly anchors the scene – come on, tuck in!

What’s more, Amiri’s work is quietly, quietly – whisper it – political. Employing predominantly textiles, a medium that has its historic associations with women’s labour, Amiri’s late night wind-down glass of red might seem sensible to some, but of course for the majority of Muslims alcohol is forbidden – significant given the artist’s focus on the lives of women in Afghanistan and the diaspora.

On the opposing wall, Alessio Bolzoni’s photographs are close-ups of cut flowers. Recording them each day as they decay, over the course of days and weeks, the larger series ABUSE (2016) marks a variation on the exhibition’s theme, presenting an intimate relationship with one’s own routines and processes. Dying flowers are of course a memento mori throughout art history, an ‘Oh yeah, remember death?’ It is fear of that existential voice piping up that no doubt makes me swerve quietness, refreshing social media, keeping the noise on nice and loud. As for the memento mori trope, maybe it was more tolerable to consider one’s finite existence in a Renaissance court, but this is the UK in 2024 and all the fancy cheeseboards slid off the table a long fucking time ago.

From the inevitable end to routine beginnings, Asta Gröting’s First Drink (2018) sees eight different people preparing their first drink of the day. With its low key, Rembrandian light lending drama to the insignificant – plus the exacting observation of many, many cups of tea and coffee – First Drink reminds me of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autofictional novel series My Struggle. Both works turn the Ordinary Reality in art up to 11; your impulse afterwards might be to balance the scales and turn the Art dial up a notch when facing ordinary reality – (here I’m riffing on Mark Grief) to let your next cuppa immerse you like a low key oil painting.

Certainly, the work of Helena Foster delights in the interchange between art and life, depicting scenes from Nigerian cinema (Nollywood) as readily as family photo albums. ABSENT PRESENT (2024) offers the viewer an empty chair against a heady orange backdrop, all painted on copper. Compared to canvas, ‘it’s not porous in any way,’ says gallerist Sid Motion, ‘so you can start to layer up, but it’s much harder to do. It’s much more direct, perhaps.’ For sure, there is a contradiction between the neglected, forgotten corner depicted and the immediate, heavily saturated way it is painted.

Now comes the part where I’m expected to wrap up with a few yogic-sounding idioms and bromides: It’s not the what, but the how, dude… Art has the power, dude, man, to help you live a calmer life. But I won’t. Unlike the neat tiles stitched into Amiri’s textile work, I won’t be imposing an order on proceedings, I’ll just be letting it all unravel. At Sid Motion Gallery, there are six different versions of intimacy and quietude or at least six different artists looking for it; these states are all too often hard-won. Personally, I’m giving up the search and going for a walk – with a podcast on, obviously, lest I be alone with my own thoughts.

By Sammi Gale