brecht: fragments, the Raven Row exhibition curated by Phoebe von Held, with Tom Kuhn, Alex Sainsbury and Iliane Thiemann, and held in London over the summer, has been included in Artforum’s global Top Ten art shows of 2024: Best of 2024: Claire Bishop’s Top Ten.

Claire Bishop writes:

“Raven Row does the kinds of shows that London’s public institutions should be doing but aren’t. In this two-parter, folios from Bertolt Brecht’s scrapbooks, some never before exhibited, featured images of social unrest and the gestural language of dictators—plugging the historical (and conceptual) gap between Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, 1924–29, and Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, 1962–. Through them, Brecht’s compositional process was itself shown to be a form of collage; this insight was reiterated in the show’s vivid second half: daily performances of four unfinished theatrical fragments. Der Brotladen (The Breadshop, 1929–30) was the strongest, presented atop a scruffy floor of cardboard Amazon boxes. Brecht still punches hard; The Breadshop left me in tears at the dehumanization endemic to capitalism.”

See the entire top 10 here.

For more information on the exhibition check out the documentation on the gallery’s website and see E-CIBS’s review: brecht: fragments, at Raven Row Gallery – by Jeremy Spencer.

(Feature image: brecht: fragments performance, ‘The Breadshop’ with Lucas Albion, Antonia Ganeva and Osa Audu, Raven Row, 2024
Photograph by Anne Tetzlaff)