Portrait of the Sky

14/05/2026.

Things were dry when I emerged out of Peckham Rye station, which was a surprise considering a biblical storm was assaulting the city on the other side of the river. I wandered over to the multi-story car park on Rye Lane where Bold Tendencies were opening their 20^thAnniversary show called Euphoria. Halfway up the building I found myself in a room that was floor-to-ceiling pink. I got my bag checked by a security guard with a Hitler moustache. I tried not to stare as he waved me through with a smile.  

I went up some more stairs, also overwhelmingly and liminally pink. When I emerged onto the rooftop, my vision was temporarily rose-tinted. Fashionably dressed folk milled around, pondering the artworks dotted around the place. Most of them, however, seemed oblivious to the apocalyptic grandeur above. Clouds of a deep, uniform, and aggressive grey marched our way. It levelled the sky like a dissatisfied artist painting over their canvas to start again. I stared North towards the prickly horizon of central London which was being overwhelmed by a deluge. Sinuous shifts of rain fell from the clouds above the city, tethering them to the earth. The Shard, the Walkie-talkie, the Cheese-grater, the Gherkin, and all those other whacky buildings were gripped tight by these wet tendrils. Which were heading right this way…

I grabbed myself a paloma from the bar and ascended some more stairs to a platform overlooking the rooftop. Covering the entire floor – like the meanderings of a drunk snake – is a seemingly endless squiggly line. Made out of some silvery solar-reflective stuff, the snake glinted under the failing light of an anxious sun. A plane flies off into the storm and I wonder if the passengers can see this luminous animal covering the roof. Richard Wentworth has witnessed London evolve into something nearly unrecognisable. Maybe Agora, which sprawls like uncontainable suburbs, is his way of charting the city’s ever-changing trajectory. A voracious entity expanding vertically and horizontally. Gazing over the countless roofs and streets below, I spy; drainpipes growing up walls like vines; a crazy criss-cross of cables; furrows of some great rake carved into the land where one road meets another; a hive of beaten and unbeaten paths… Each has been carefully laid out by some plumber or electrician or urban designer or park planner or any other civic profession you can think of. But from up here, far enough away, even the most deliberate decision looks like randomness. Agora, in this way, speaks the language of the city.

Further down the roof I spotted some text crawling across an LED sign. There was one behind me as well, looming over me like an odd omen. I was possessed by the spirit of some AI because the text moved at such a pace that I found myself predicting the next word before it slid into view. Stooping down to its technological level to understand it, so to speak. The words themselves meant little, ranging from dull platitudes to subliminal vomit. The kind of stuff we’re exposed to on a daily basis through advertising, the ravings of authority, or things taken out of context. Jenny Holzer strips these messages from their usual mode of delivery and dishes them up in a way that exposes the diet of slop we’re all unknowingly consuming. By removing their usual distortion, these Bold Signs demonstrate that words are no longer fixed and stable things. The worst people are no longer contractually bound by them; whether it’s a president reneging on a peace deal or a friend snaking another. Words are slippery. Their meanings pass through walls like restless ghosts.

Petrichor laced the air as dense teardrops fell from the clouds and struck the dry concrete. In their hundreds and thousands and millions and trillions, black dots decorated the floor. There was no build-up; one moment it was dry and the next an entire ocean was falling out of the sky. Everyone ran for shelter underneath the platform on which I was standing, so I downed my paloma and did the same. It seemed like a good idea at first but soon enough the rain squeezed through the wooden planks above, dripping furiously. Dozens of umbrellas suddenly flapped open beneath this ineffective sanctuary. Someone noticed my notebook soaking in my hands and invited me under their umbrella. Thank you Josh, wherever you are. I got myself another paloma from the bar and pondered my predicament. I considered simply going home but I had an appointment with a friend later. And this was the only evening I could be here before a gridlocked calendar made attendance impossible. Realising that I had to see the rest of this through, I dashed into the downpour. Within seconds I was drenched through the skin. My paloma was overflowing with rainwater.

Frantically, I made for the nearest artwork, a vehicle which looked like a cross between a go-kart and a NASA rover. It looked unnervingly friendly with its lime green chassis, headlights, and front grille twisted into a smile. One wrong move and the last thing I’d see before getting atomised is those twin beams turning red and that smile upside down. Thankfully it was armed with no such weaponry, featuring instead an array of sensors to study the weather. Its bright orange wind meter was spinning out of control in this tempest. A strange score issued from its speakers, the work of an AI sound engine conducting weather data into harmonies. I’m ok with AI supplementing the wider piece rather than being the whole thing itself. When it’s not docked to its charging station, Louis Morlæ’s Euphoria Rover apparently wanders around the rooftop like a curious animal. His piece embodies that thin overlap between consumer electronics and government-grade tech. NASA did, after all, use a modified PlayStation chip on their New Horizons probe to Pluto. Often, the technological leap between kitchen appliance and killing machine isn’t a huge one. And if the thing looks cute enough then few will care about the bloodstained minerals from illegal mines that went into its circuitry. Such is the schizophrenic nature of the technological industrial complex that it’s perfectly normal for the founder of Spotify to start investing into AI drone research. Or how Oculus VR got overtaken by Meta so its creator founded Anduril and pivoted to AI-powered defence tech. The lure of military contracts is too appealing to these losers. Euphoria Rover, thus, is a playful representation of these contradictions; how the social cost of technological advancement is invisible on the product level.

My glasses were so streaked by rain that it was easier to see without them. I sprinted to the next sculpture which resembled something out of Alien. A chrysalis of concrete and steel, big enough to enclose a human. Iridescent armour ran up its back like scales, converging on a membranous window through which I could see nothing but my own reflection. The wet concrete appeared slimy. As rain whipped off this thing, I imagined being safely cocooned inside it. But it would not reveal its secrets to me. Tarek Lakhrissi calls this Rêverie. Much like a daydream, a metamorphosis is an internalised state. A withdrawal that facilitates some kind of transformation. More and more people are walking out of this senile political theatre that defines our current affairs. They’ve tuned themselves out of the news to focus on their lot in life. And who can blame them? An avalanche of alienation pours forth from every phone, TV, newspaper, and radio – for both sides of the political spectrum, might I add. But just because you’ve recused yourself from engaging with it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. You paid the price of admission by being born. In a similar sense, whatever’s inside Tarek’s chrysalis might be far removed from the world but it’s still a part of it. Which is the essential nature of transformation, because it can’t occur in a vacuum. The process of becoming is never clean. Change is fuelled by ugliness. But eventually this cocoon bursts with the beautiful realisation that powerlessness is an illusion. You have agency; use it or lose it. And if things don’t work out, at least you weren’t a passive audience member who didn’t even bother heckling these idiots off the stage. 

Mother Nature’s mood turned ever wilder as she started pelting me with hail. Icy shards bit into my skin like cold mosquitos. Light refracted through my wet glasses like cars skidding out of control on a slippery road, hitting my eyes at odd and dangerous angles. Amidst this optical confusion I spotted a strange monument towards which I ambled in hopes of shelter. I was greeted by a small shop window where the picture of some radiant woman stared at me from the other side of pink shutters. Dozens of padlocks with initials carved in them festooned this façade with tender mementoes. Looks like a high-street beauty parlour shrunk to the size of a shed. Images of lips and eyes, all done up in makeup, were framed by glass privacy blocks in the side walls. I wandered round back and found a door next to a window looking in. The place looked like it hadn’t felt habitation for a while, evidenced by the fingerprints of disrepair. The air inside dry and musty. Patterns drawn and messages written on a window so dusty. Some cheap and faded tropical scene plastered the walls. A jaundiced yellow lightbulb radiating its energy away. It wasn’t much but it was paradise. The door, however, wouldn’t budge.

“LET ME IN!” I screamed, wrestling with the handle. After an amount of time I’m too embarrassed to admit, I stopped trying to get in and continued inspecting Athen Kardashian and Nina Mhach Durban’s creation. This architectural collage is a building made from the walls of several others. I have often walked down this street before but the pavement always stayed beneath my feetcelebrates the material culture of the British high-street. In all its vibrantly over-stimulating, noisy, and tacky beauty. The identity of a place often resembles a décollage. Traces of existence accumulating layer by layer over a long time. Like advertising posters being plastered over old ones for god-knows-how-long. Tearing pieces off reveals the messy vibrancy underneath, collected over generations. Disarrayed details – so ubiquitous so as to seem insignificant – which are the markers of community. Details worth protecting against homogenising influences like gentrification.

The air around me resembled a glassy bead curtain, that’s how heavily it was hailing now. After staggering cluelessly for what felt like fifteen minutes I found myself at the foot of a huge scene. A large-scale photograph wrapped around a corner depicting a rave. I was level with the crowd and warmed by the imagination of throwing myself around in there, soaked in sweat rather than rain. Towering over us was a wall resembling a beehive. Against this membranous backdrop of the now-closed Cocoon Club in Frankfurt, the dancers appear like a colony in sync. Despite their individual randomness, they swarm as one. Something akin to order emerges in the composition of this chaos. This photograph by Andreas Gursky presents a vision of communal transcendence and one of the many places it can happen. Like a gig or a library or the park or the theatre or a graveyard. You don’t need permission to submit yourself to something bigger. And the opportunity to do so is never far away. Sometimes you’re even roped into it without wanting to; instances like being trapped on public transport during rush hour. Nevertheless, nothing expands your identity more than dissolving it in a collective. And once you have your individuality back you can fit more inside it.

I was stunned when the rain ceased as quickly as it had begun. But who am I kidding… it’s called London weather for a reason. Exhausted clouds were laughed out of the sky by an exuberant sun. Everyone emerged from their shelter, umbrellas replaced by sunglasses. I was glad not to have the rooftop all to myself because the next artwork goes down better with a crowd. The embrace of a small, wraparound wooden bar pulled me into a party. Oh it was going down around me. Emma Hart distils the amorphous blur of revelry through her overlapping ceramic sculptures. I was so drunk by now that faces and hand gestures and comically oversized cocktail glasses were swooping and waving and diving all around the bar. A colour palette of fairy lights and sickly-sweet cocktails glistened through the glazing under a just-awoken sun. Standing in this artwork brought back a rush of memories from my time working at bars. This felt like one of those nights where you feel like you’re partying with the customers rather than fighting them off. As more people joined me behind the bar, that line dividing staff from customer lost its meaning. We all felt part of the same merriment. Even if you’re not in the mood, joy is an act of resistance – wherever it’s happening. Emma Hart’s Last Chance Saloon is an ode to this resilience. Let those clean-eating body-optimisation freaks like Steven Bartlett who hate wine so much live in their temples of boredom. It’s time to go get another drink.

With that accomplished I wandered around a bit more, feeling glad to be alive. My mortality, however, was challenged by a pigeon with a bomb strapped to its back. I almost leapt for cover behind the nearest artwork when I realised the terrorist-pigeon was actually a sculpture. This bronze bird is fabricated in explosive detail, right down to the buttons on its mobile phone detonator. Looks like a carrier pigeon turned kamikaze insurgent. Adel Abdessemed’s Bristow reminds me of a Japanese film called The Man Who Stole the Sun. Just a very normal tale of a woebegone high school teacher building an atom bomb in his garage. Both the pigeon and the film shudder at the unimaginable horrors unfolding behind kind facades. Cultures of fear extoll us to look for the worst in folks, especially those who are different to us. Misinformation, echo chambers, and abject stupidity hurls fuel onto this fire of distrust. Those who succumb to this rhetoric not just imagine but manifest other people being up to no good. Constantly on edge and patiently waiting for some catastrophe that’ll confirm their biases. In the meantime, the world continues spinning. Bills have to be paid and the bins need taking out. It’s no wonder then that Abdessemed’s pigeon takes its name from Frank Dickens’ cartoon strip about a dissatisfied office clerk. Resist oversimplified narratives peddled by those in power. Have some faith and go looking for the beauty they so desperately want you to believe isn’t there.

I considered a parting drink but the queue to the bar looked frighteningly long. Also I had someplace to be so it was high time I made an exit. On my way out a thought struck me. I appreciate that the artworks on this rooftop are made to withstand the caprices of London weather. What I would’ve appreciated even more is the inclusion of one piece that isn’t so resistant. A painting or a framed photograph, for example, degraded by the elements throughout the duration of the show. Soaked, scorched, and blown over and over again. Colour bleeding and its framed skeleton warping. Its deterioration is the art. But that would require someone to offer up a sacrifice. Any volunteers?

I was wet down to my socks – a most deplorable feeling. But the sky looked big and wide, its immensity reminding me that a boundless firmament sits atop it. What difference, then, does it make if I’m dry or damp?