Left Toronto Tuesday evening and on arrival Wednesday morning hopped onto the Piccadilly line into Bloomsbury and missed the traffic on the highway into London. Booked all day Tuesday so on arrival on Wednesday January 14, I got straight to my room, showered, grabbed breakfast returned to my room, took a cold shower and sorted wardrobe. Off I went on the number 14 bus along Great Russell Street and hopped off at Burlington House to attend exhibition number one!
What a dazzlingly brilliant Wednesday morning and infinitely more temperate than frigid Toronto of course. Membership to the RAA meant a quick ride up the glass lift to take in the most wonderful exhibition. A nice quick visit to London to savour all the art and culture my soul craves is just right. I can be away long enough to enjoy myself and not too long that my spouse back at home in Toronto on oxygen gets a break from me as sole caregiver and enough time without feeling alone overlong.
This was one of the most gloriously stunning exhibitions that I have attended in London. Quite remarkable.
What I truly loved about this art exhibition of African American Kerry James Marshall is the artist’s attack, which is unapologetic about blackness. Marshall seems intent on stabbing the middle finger at the gross colorism within Black culture and in particular within Black America. The jaundiced self-loathing colorism of Blacks immediately breeding to ‘improve’ the race on becoming wealthy and successful with others who have proven our most ardent enemy, is unmistakably alluded to in Marshall’s works. The allure and deception of light-skinned offspring as though somehow they in their outréness make anti-Black racism go away or somehow they will escape their Blackness, the artist addresses head on with his choice of portraying Blacks splendidly, unmistakably richly melanated. The arch obsession with being biracial, mixed race and anything but Black speak to the intense anti-Black animus that stifles colorism. Blackness, or is it massa, is a shame that must be eradicated. Humans, truth be told, are seven parts decidedly absurd.
One of the greatest discoveries on this short trip to London was a matinee performance of Akram Khan’s Giselle at the London Coliseum. A trip that was supposed to have been in November, 2025 but pushed back owing to considerable work on an art project, I finally decided to drop everything and rush to London to take in the Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts before it closed on January 18, 2026. Scouring the theatre calendar, I decided to pop into a Friday performance of this modern interpretation of Giselle as I had not been to an English National Ballet performance in ages. I chose not to research Akram Khan’s ballet and as is my wont, wanted to go into it without preparation. I was, if I’m honest, resigned to it possibly being yet another boring modern dance performance as so much of modern ballet is tedious at best as comparably was the case the following evening on taking in the Royal Ballet’s Woolf Works.
Boy was I in for a most rapturous awakening. Never before had I seen so revolutionary a work in the age old idiom. Here was a totally new and refreshing aesthetic. Ballet, thanks to Akram Khan’s visionary genius, was reinvented with daring style and spectacularly innovative movement – those hurried contracted rushes across the stage, and a set that was as if sentient and beautifully choreographed into the ballet. There were even elements of contact with extraterrestrial life alluded to as the set swung backwards to reveal seemingly extraterrestrial creatures as if disembarking from their alighted interstellar craft. Most of all, the music was a most soul stirring fusion of Dravidian sensibilities and spirituality. Moreover, the music was so powerful, though not oppressive, that it transcended the stage and pierced through to one’s cellular integrity. I have not been so richly inspired by sheer genius and vision, in the theatre, in long ages. What a towering work of genius!
While it has been a most hellish January winter in long ages, along came the Dior Spring Summer 2026 Haute Couture collection. Here was nature, art and architecture deftly realised as fashion most rare. The second dress, a white affair with bow at the hem, was nothing more than a gloriously inverted calla lily about to burst into bloom. All of blooming nature was architecturally reimagined and sculpted into truly great works of sartorial art. This show was true rapture. All hail Jonathan W. Anderson, creative director at Christian Dior, for being the most elegantly refined of spirit creative genius.
This glorious exhibition at Tate Britain was like becoming awake in the most gloriously sequential lucid dream where each masterful tableaux filled salon was a walk through past life memories. Truly rhapsodic.
Not since the Francis Bacon exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery in 2024 was I so thoroughly besotted by art. Astounding.
Valentino Garavani 11.5.1932 Year of the Monkey 19.1.2026. Sweet and blissful dream staggering titan…
Valentino creative director Alessandro Michele presented one of the most phenomenally ravaging haute couture collections in long years. Masterful tailoring, ingeniously theatrical and wonderfully spirited. Pure genius and an inspired tribute to the recently dearly beloved creative genius, Valentino Garavani. Bravi!
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Two rats during the course of eighteen months produce one million offspring. You’ve long transcended being a cultural infestation; you are a fucking plague and Karma, that most vicious of cunts, will yet dispense with you!
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©2013-2026 Arvin da Brgha. All Rights Reserved.
Dreams are the poetic expression of the soul. 