A Thursday in London

A spontaneous journey to London occurred on Thursday evening. Alison had a ticket for Origin, so I accompanied to view a couple of exhibitions. I took my recently acquired medium format camera to experiment.

First stop was the Whitechapel Gallery - my second visit since its refurbishment. I'm undecided on the benefits of the renovation, as the limited space of the previous incarnation lent a certain creativity to the exhibitions. Expansion has provided an extensive number of galleries, studios, cafe/bar, reading room, dining room and possibly some other mysterious spaces. It has been turned into a sterile and confusing multi-purpose venue. The original galleries were closed for installation on both of my visits. Yet there were still three other exhibitions open. Four if you count the Guernica/Dr Stranglove room.

I must have missed half of Faisal Abdu'Allah's 'White (Why Have I Told Everything)' show. Ten photographs: portraits of people from varied age groups and cultural backgrounds. Medium format, presumably. A group vocal offering erupts occasionally from a speaker. Faisal was my first year tutor at University (I understand that I may need to declare any conflicts of interest) and my expectations were high as a result of the 'Garden of Eden' Adjaye collaboration at the Chilsenhale Gallery. This takes me back to possibly missing half of the show, because despite the perfectly excellent photographs, I was somewhat underwhelmed.

'My Yard', Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's selection from the British Council Collection, brings together a variety of bleak and largely monochromatic works. It conjures a sense of the tension I recall from childhood in the late 1980s and what I imagine to be a post-war stunted economic development. This exhibition could be described with a sigh. An urban feel links many of the works: brick, traffic, streets, prison, bridges. Particularly taken with the Boyle Family's Study from the Red Causeway Series, a 1976 cast of a street in Shepherd's Bush which apparently was buried under the Westfield Shopping Centre, according to the exhibition guide.

Also on show at the Whitechapel is a summary of artists to have exhibited in the British Pavillion at the Venice Biennale, consisting of a timeline accompanied by a photograph per year.

Now, I have been looking forward to Robert Kusmirowski's 'Bunker' installation at the Barbican for several weeks. It's open to preview until the end of this week, before fully opening. My visit on Thursday was rather pointless as, instead of being able to see a space in which an artist is creating a replica of a World War II bunker, all I saw was a bit of scaffolding and a tensabarrier. And two members of staff charged with telling visitors that there was nothing to see until the 15th. Hugely frustrating.

The evening was capped with a meal at Pete's Express. Have you ever tried to cut a standard sheet of 80gsm A4 paper with a knife and fork? That's what their pizzas are like.