Condo 2025 review: the “student exchange” of the art world

Saturday

It’s Condo weekend but I’m still observing an extensive period of mourning for David Lynch. I want to be tucked up in bed watching Eraserhead and Twin Peaks, but duty calls, and I must get up, get dressed and go live what Lynch called “the art life”. So, there I was in East London on Saturday morning at 10 am, shivering outside the entrance to artist Dani Marcel’s studio — he’d invited me to a brunch preview of new work, which he’d be showing later this week at The Residence Gallery. Since Condo didn’t officially begin until 11 am, I thought I’d start the proceedings off-grid. Three paintings were on display, my favourite one based on a durational performance Marcel undertook in 2023, riding every single London bus route to get a “snapshot of the whole city”, scoring each bus number off in his notebook: these bright orange pages had been blown up to form a huge painting. Marcel was fretting around with yoghurt and salad bowls, and I asked him if he’d seen anything crazy on any of his bus journeys. “I saw someone get stabbed,” he replied.

Opting to give public transport a miss, I then power walked up to Project Native Informant for my second breakfast of the day (third if you count the banana I scoffed at home). I and a few other punctual art writers had first dibs on the pastry spread. There was supposed to be an artist talk by Phung-Tien Phan, but I think she’d opted to chat to people individually instead. Other bleary-eyed art scene denizens had started to wander in and fill up the space. Outside on the street a woman was trying to drag her drunken mess of a friend back home: “You need to fix yourself up!” I kept being drawn into Phan’s fun, goofy video piece dog (2025), where the artist puppet masters a plush toy of TinTin’s dog Snowy as it larks around a home environment, peeing on plants and getting up to all sorts of canine mischief. The press release described Snowy as “a remnant of a colonial intellectual past”: bad dog Snowy!  

A couple of us wandered next door to where Native Informant was hosting Bangkok’s Nova Contemporary (this, by the way, is what Condo is all about: it’s like the Erasmus student exchange programme except with art galleries). Their group show featured some of Pam Virada’s sculptures using found trays and burning candles — it’s very rare you see a naked flame inside an art gallery and the sight provoked in me deep feeling of fire safety anxiety on behalf of the galley staff (I went to Glasgow School of Art, need I say more).  

Many of the galleries who weren’t participating in Condo had conveniently just opened shows (coincidence?): Tasneem Sarkez at Rose Easton and Alex Margo Arden at Auto Italia were both fab. There were also some big art world names bracing the cold and doing the gallery circuit. I’m pretty sure we spotted Matthew Slotover at The Approach, as well as someone who I heard say was from Modern Art Oxford. Rose Easton had mentioned to me that she was taking Sarkez out for a traditional afternoon tea, and I really fancied some carbolicious treats myself. It’s hard to find scones and cucumber sandwiches in Cambridge Heath, so instead I linked up with my boyfriend Eric and we stuffed our faces with chips, fish finger sandwiches and cheesy gözleme before cramming in yet more shows, increasing our step count to burn off the calories but then piling them back on again at our pub pit stops. 

Some of the Condo shows felt a little bitty: like the exhibitions had been brought over in the gallerists’ hand luggage. “Yeah, but the shows at %$!#* gallery always feel like that anyway,” someone later remarked to me. The preview weekend was also very much a Dry January affair, which is a shame as Condo would have been the perfect opportunity to play my newly devised Dean Kissick drinking game. The rules are simple: attend as many PVs as possible in one session, if at each exhibition you decide that politics has destroyed the art, you have to down the free booze before quickly moving on to the next show. This game can be played solo or with friends. The more woke the gallery circuit, the more pissed you end up. Oh well, another time… 

My standout exhibition of Condo was Being John Smith, a joint presentation by Tanya Leighton and Kate McGarry, hosted at McGarry’s Old Nichol Street space. John Smith is a national treasure. He should be Sir John Smith, for services to droll experimental video art. A new 27-minute film explores Smith’s fraught relationship with his very common name: there are over thirty-thousand John Smiths in the UK, making it easy to confuse the artist with John Smith, Customer Success Director at Bedford Consulting, or John Smith, Managing Director at Pacific Food Trading Limited, or indeed John Smith the cartoon character from Pocahontas. The ending features Smith’s footage of Pulp performing Common People at an outdoor gig. After the credits rolled, we stumbled out of the viewing room to be confronted with Jarvis Cocker himself, who had obviously shown up in support of his former CSM tutor. I tried to covertly snap a pic, but a member of his posse clocked me, so I had to swerve my iPhone towards a framed print instead. 

Eric left me to go to a birthday party, so I headed into Clerkenwell, saw some of Janet Olivia Henry’s amazing Juju Boxes at Hollybush Gardens, who were hosting New York’s Gordon Robichaux. Then it was off to meet Plaster-alumni Laurie Barron for a drink and a gossip in Soho. He was doing Dry Jan, I’m doing dryish-Jan, in that I don’t drink wine alone at home. We then met some art world lovelies in Soho House for food. I hadn’t been here in years; the membership fee is a little out of my tax bracket (I’m more of a SET Social kinda guy). The crowd included PR gurus Fabian Strobel Lall and Jennifer Kibazo, bleach-blonde curator Fergus Wiltshire and the writer Sofia Hallström, who was also covering the weekend’s proceedings. We then headed across the street to the official Condo party at The Union Club, one of the easiest events I’ve ever gatecrashed. I simply surfed the wave of guests filing through the door, smiling and nodding at the girl with the clip board as if my name was obviously on the list. I had a little reunion with chums/ former housemates Francesca Mollett and Antoin Sharkey. I was introduced to artist Haroun Hayward, Isaac Simon from South Parade (I promise I will swing by your show next week), as well as another artist who, 30 minutes into our conversation, kindly invited me to her wedding reception (RSVPing yes). After multiple vodka, lime and sodas I decided to make a French exit and slip out into the night, as there were yet more shows to see tomorrow. 

Sunday

My stamina on Sunday was much lower. Standing in The Shop at Sadie Coles, listening to Donald Duck quack quack quaking away in a sound installation by Diego Marcon, it dawned on me that I really needed some paracetamol and a tray of stodge at Farmer Jay. Eric joined me in Mayfair, we did a couple more exhibitions before marching over to Holborn. Amanda Wilkinson was hosting Glasgow’s Kendall Koppe, and the two galleries had put on a strong and smutty exhibition of work by Sevina Tzanou and the late, great Jimmy DeSana: a match made in Heaven. 

It was now 4.30 pm and we needed to head to Ginny on Frederick. They were hosting Chicago’s Good Weather gallery, with another duo show I wanted to see: Raque Ford matched with paintings by Kiki Xuebang Wang. The plan was then to plonk our arses down on Ford’s dance floor installation and watch the poetry readings by Adult Entertainment, who Ginny would also be hosting at 5 pm. Except I got my timings wrong and the event had already kicked off at 4 pm. Who’d want to stand in the cold and listen to a poetry reading on a Sunday afternoon, you may ask? Well, everyone, as it turned out. In typical Ginny fashion, 75% of the crowd had spilled out onto the pavement and then onto the road. We were at the very back. We stayed for a bit, listened to some verse, but I was freezing and groggy and worried we might get run over. Ginny should commission Jack O’Brien to construct some sort of queer gazebo thing for their future events.  

We agreed it was time to call it a day. My friend Josefine Skomars from Luncheon had planned to join us for the reading, I texted her to say change of plans, meet us at Cafe Kick. She managed to catch some of the event on its live stream instead. I knocked back a Negroni Bianco and debriefed Josefine on my weekend. I like Condo, it’s a good excuse to go out and cram exhibitions, but maybe a few more event type things dispersed throughout the weekend would make it even more fun. Anyway, I was struggling to stay awake: it was time to head home and fall asleep watching Inland Empire.