The show’s opening gambit is both amusing and intelligent, inviting the viewer to meet the exhibition on the following terms:

Most contemporary artists are familiar with the cycle of one group show after another in the seemingly endless number of underfunded, leaking, artist led spaces that have crept rhizomatically into every provincial town and run down London suburb. Always optimistic that something more rewarding will happen, that somehow it will all be worthwhile, the solo show will follow, the uber curator will take notice, or the mega dealer will snap you up, the artist cheerfully plays the game. Then, when it does come, the creeping realisation that still no one is actually looking begins to ache and the artist has no choice but to turn their critical gaze back upon the very world they inhabit.  Shit Show bring the understanding of the exhibition as authentic experience through a questioning of its very fabric. The works in Shit Show use the generic stuff of exhibitions as their material: invitations, adverts and posters have been recycled and remixed; artworks reused, borrowed, stolen and danced in front it; the curator is parodied, and the artist led space lampooned. Highlighting the habitual practice of what exhibiting constantly entails in the insular world of the art production and presentation, here artists respond in an ironic, muted or even slapstick, manner. Using installation, video, sound painting and graphics their critical irreverence to the exhibition form that they so often occupy, the artists have still produced the works in shit show without straying too far from its exhibition manifestation – a subtle comment on its parodied self in a kind of  meta-exhibition.

Laden with wit this curatorial manifesto is something of a well-aimed kick in the sometimes all too worthy balls of the British art milieu. On entering the show, I am struck by the way in which the gallery space echoes the tone of the spaces described in the above manifesto. Yet while this reflects these conditions it is not parody. Rather, it is more a recognition of the conditions the curator has to work with. A making the best of what one has, not only in terms of material but also in terms of how others conceive of it. In this way the show contends with many of the much wider experiences of the current UK art world: artists contending with poor materials simply because it’s all they have to work with; curators contending with less than desirable spaces for similar reasons. Yet in both these cases – and when at their best – artists and curators manage to make something that is more than the constituent some of their parts, producing artworks that transcend the shoddy in shows sown together in such a tight conceptual manner that one often forgets the difficulties of the space within which they are exhibited. This show is an ambitious stab in this direction and it is therefore worth reciprocating the efforts in its construction through diligence in ones viewing of it.  
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