To Saatchi Gallery. There's often a good exhibition, but today there are several that are really fun. The dominant theme is the age of the selfie, and there's a lot of wit and playfulness. Some, perhaps, happily accidental, like Victor Obsatz's portrait of Marcel Duchamp, a striking double exposure resulting from the camera's failure to advance.
There's humour, as in Antoine Geiger's Mona Lisa, a satirical view of rubbernecking selfie photographers in front of da Vinci's painting in the Louvre. And there are, appropriately, interactive works, drawing the viewer in and playing with the resulting image. Like Mirror No. 12, which makes use of a small camera and the manipulation of straight lines to create a blurred image of the viewers, or Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose project,
This Year's Midnight also draws in the observer. Here are a series of three frames where the viewers are not only filmed but become characters whose eyes are consumed by smoke. Disturbingly, "live and recorded eyeballs extracted from the video accumulate on the bottom of the display."
While many of the displays deal with self portraiture (and not always photographically - there is the full frontal nude painting of Lucian Freud) there are a few other exhibits. One that is both surprising and moving is a series of photographed sculptures of refugees produced by Cypriot students, their link with the sea central to the portrayal.
