This year’s Ruskin Degree Show was hosted at the rather odd SERS Building in Osney Mead, an almost derelict building with a large open space. The exhibits were mostly installation pieces, sculptures, and abstract paintings, the majority of which seemed rather esoteric, and because of a lack of signage (as in a traditional gallery setting) made the experience a slightly remote one. The main event was a showcasing of two shorts films by Andrew Kötting and Keren Cytter, shown in an old squash court darkened by a heavy, black fabric curtain. Andrew Kötting is a British filmmaker and artist who has been making films since 1980. Smark Alek is a short film about a family preparing to go away for their annual holiday by the seaside. The first half of the film is a brilliant depiction of an English family in the seventies, all argumentative and bickering whilst they pack the entire contents of their house for a short break, and it certainly brought memories back of my own childhood. The latter half is much darker, and although based on a true story, I felt what started as an acute portrait of Britain at the time, became somewhat soap operatic and gloomy toward the end.
Keren Cytter is a young Israeli visual artist whose short video installation piece, Nothing, depicts a young Dutch man who moves into a London apartment and begins to find traces of the occupants that lived there before him – photographs, videos, poetry. His fascination with them starts to take over his own life, as he recreates their music, reads their poetry, and even adopts their language (at the beginning of the film he speaks in Dutch). Exploring the theme of self and place, Nothing is a powerful reflection on how the self and memory is framed within the spaces we live in, therefore becoming part of us. The remainder of the showcase was given over to Ruskin students’ work, with Istvan Prem’s eerie piece Keyhole being the highlight. It really is worth seeing the degree show at the end of the Oxford academic year to see some of the cutting edge work that is being produced by Oxford fine art students.
See Keren Cytter’s Nothing here.
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