There is something appropriate about the piles of broken crockery that greet visitors to the autumn programme of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece, in which gallery visitors are invited to reconstruct teacups from pottery shards using glue, string and sticky tape, briefly captures a returning-from-lockdown determination to put things back together again (even while keeping a sanitiser bottle to hand).
Ono first presented this piece in 1966 at John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery in Mayfair (she met John Lennon when he came to a preview of the show). If things felt like they had fallen apart and needed fixing back then, that need only feels amplified just now, 55 years on. With that repair shop spirit in mind, I sat at a white table along with a few others and tried ham-fistedly to piece and stick and tie together something that might once again hold water. “Mend carefully,” the artist instructs, “think of mending the world at the same time.” If the cup is anything to go by, that process might be a little harder than even Ono could imagine. After a few concentrated minutes, I placed my wonky vessel on the adjacent shelves alongside the rest of the tragically optimistic teaset.
Ono’s tables and shelves are outside the upstairs gallery space at the Whitechapel that houses Ida Ekblad’s This Is the Night Mail. Ekblad is the first of four artists to create an exhibition from the private treasures of Norwegian collector Christen Sveaas – the founder of the Kistefos Museum, Oslo’s answer to Tate Modern, a cavernous exhibition space housed in the old wood pulp mill that made his family’s fortune.
Ekblad, now 41, is a polymathic artist, best known for her high-wattage, colour-saturated painting, but also a maker of site-specific sculpture, drawn from skip-dives and rubble-sifts in whatever city she happens to be exhibiting. That kind of free play of chance and invention informs her selection of Sveaas’s works. The result is loosely organised around ideas of nocturne and night-time, and apparently specifically inspired by WH Auden’s Night Mail, the poem rote-learned by a postwar generation of schoolchildren and originally written for the 1936 documentary produced by the General Post Office film unit, in which it featured along with Benjamin Britten’s cacophonous soundtrack, and which Ekblad has playing in a side room.
The main space is divided into three “carriages”, each freighted with wee-small-hours significance. You are reminded, wandering among them, that Norwegians know far more about long nights of the soul than pretty much anyone else on earth. In the winter months they have plenty of time to work out how to paint the moon. Ekblad’s exhibition, hung floor to ceiling like an 18th-century wunderkammer, wants to lead you into a rooky wood, with roots snagging your feet and senses heightened for adventure. The tone is established by the barely illuminated canvases of the Norwegian realists Harald Sohlberg and Adolph Tidemand, whose paintings of grey weather and night fishing might have you reaching for your phone torch.
The central space is dominated by a couple of pieces designed to put you in the right frame of mind to make sense of the gloom. The first, which fills one wall, is the Polish artist Paulina Olowska’s painted homage to La Galcante, the Parisian news clipping depository: a young trompe l’oeil woman climbs a ladder to pull down box files marked variously “peinture”, “punk” and “propagande”, “communisme”, “Brigitte Bardot” and “Serge Gainsbourg” – invoking the original city of the night, and Ekblad’s own curatorial project. In front of these painted shelves is a rough handcart – a “migration rickshaw” – made by Theaster Gates, piled high with timber and children’s wooden blocks and a rolled mattress, a pushable conveyance “for sleeping, building and playing” – the three graces of the curator’s art.
Several of the pieces Ekblad has chosen embody the witchy fears of childhood imagination. Most of these are provided by the 19th-century Norwegian artist and illustrator Theodor Kittelsen: Skogtrold, a wide-eyed forest troll, is only the beginning. There are also two series of gothicky prints, the second of which, Do Animals Have Souls? – all ugly bug balls, hungry crows and bulbous toads – looks like the more nightmarish family tree of Beatrix Potter. They gesture to the more macabre elements of the selection, not least Isa Genzken’s three mannequin children, with lipsticked mouths, who stare at them a little unnervingly in their travelling clothes.
In among these curios are some paintings to stop you in your tracks and have you rubbing your eyes. A trio of Edvard Munch canvases includes a soulful portrait, The Boy from Warnemünde, and two streetscapes, where the palpable Oslo drizzle and murk makes lit windows appear rectangles of impossible warmth. Specks of fiery light are elsewhere apparent among the midnight blue notes. Christian Krohg’s 1912 painting Woman Lighting a Cigarette finds an unnerving companion piece in Sigmar Polke’s Totenkopf, in which an Edwardian lady applying makeup in close up takes on the memento mori outline of a skull from a distance.
Ekblad’s packed rooms are full of such surprises, and once your eyes adjust to her way of thinking, you start to see more symmetries and connections. Martin Kippenberger’s Night Table sits nicely beside Steven Parrino’s recently vacated bed Death in America #3, for example, and though it is harder to find a workable link between Rosemarie Trockel’s prone bronze Drunken Dog, out for the count in a party hat, and Louise Bourgeois’s pendulous blue painted breasts overhead, it’s not for the want of trying. Does the show satisfyingly illustrate, as advertised, Auden’s evocative overnight rail journey, through “dark glens, beside pale-green lochs” to the cities where “thousands are still asleep/ Dreaming of terrifying monsters/ Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston’s or Crawford’s”? Not exactly. But it’s on the right track.