Wales is a divided nation, physically. The mountainous interior that makes it so beautiful creates more distance than you might expect between south and north. I spent the first 18 years of my life in north Wales but never saw the capital Cardiff until I lived in London. My dad used to rage at the Cardiff “crachach” down there monopolising culture.
Artes Mundi, an international art prize whose shortlist this year boasts “six of the world’s most important international contemporary artists”, appears to have given in to this localism by devolving itself throughout the land. At the National Museum Cardiff, the artists have mini-displays stuffed into one long room, but to see the rest of their work you have to visit their larger shows in four other galleries dotted across Wales. Who is going to do that? And the National Museum show is not exactly appetising. I instantly fell out of love with all the artists, who did not seem to care whether they engaged visitors emotionally, intellectually or aesthetically. Their assumed audience is experts, collectors, cognoscenti – because these, after all, are the people giving the prizes.
Sawangwongse Yawnghwe is a painter whose works I seem to have seen before, though not by him. His paintings of the history of Burma/Myanmar, based on black and white photographs, echo everyone from Warhol to Richter. But he has a surprise personal twist: his grandfather was independent Burma’s first president. Yes, that’s interesting – but the art is not.
Nor is Anawana Haloba’s sound installation, another artwork that seems utterly familiar. A contemporary cliche, its sad ruminations lack anything to make you share the emoting. Sancintya Mohini Simpson shows a deliberately (I trust) childlike painting of plantations and European sailing ships that doesn’t tell you anything specific. It’s a gesture towards the history of empires rather than a detailed, meaningful analysis. Equally vacuous is her archaeology-style display of clay vessels that’s got something to do with the sugar trade. She may as well have just written “colonialism” on the wall.
For the few … Kameelah Janan Rasheed at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. Photograph: Polly Thomas
The best artist here really has printed words on the wall. Kameelah Janan Rasheed shows a huge stuttering display of broken sentences, repeated phrases and annoying punctuation marks. “i am not done yet – i am not done yet – i am not done yet” runs part of it in black type on the white wall. And it turns out she really isn’t: this troubling presentation continues on to black columns where enigmatic photographs add to the chaos. Communication is difficult, she may be saying. She deserves to win the prize if any of these artists do, I suppose, but her art is for the few not the many.
Is Artes Mundi just telling the truth about art now – that it has lost touch with a mainstream audience? I headed to the other end of Wales to find out. Mostyn is a modern gallery in an unmodern place: Llandudno. For me as a child, the town meant doughnuts, a rickety ghost train on the pier and finding mermaids’ purses on the beach. Now it means watching a video of some guy slowly demolish Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 artwork Bicycle Wheel. Obviously not the long-lost original, or one of the valuable replicas owned by museums, but a mock-up the artist Antonio Paucar made himself. It isn’t hard: you just fix a bike wheel on to a stool. In what looks like a farmyard, Paucar first buries the wheel, then piles up logs around it and douses it with accelerant before setting it alight.
This is a dry little joke that means less than it thinks. According to Artes Mundi, Paucar champions Andean indigenous culture, but how exactly? A performance attacking an icon of western art only makes sense to those in the know, can only communicate to someone familiar with Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and its place in modern art history – and smug enough to be tickled by the “reference”.
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Half-baked … Jumana Emil Abboud at Mostyn. Photograph: Rob Battersby Photography
In the other gallery, Jumana Emil Abboud gets her solo showing. Her work is an assemblage of half-baked, hackneyed tropes, from cod mysticism – she’s a water diviner! – to ironically awful paintings. One space is dedicated to her collection of small mysterious objects, essentially splodges of resin, on tables or stuck against black walls with fey inscriptions and banal assertions: “Regardless of what you hear trust the voice in your heart.” OK. The voice in my heart is telling me this is nonsense.
Worse, it’s all stagey and false. But then the whole of Artes Mundi 11 is like this, at least as much as I could stomach seeing. “Six of the world’s most important international contemporary artists”? You could almost think the curators have tried to conceal the frailty of what’s on offer by dispersing it all over Wales, daring you to question them, when you haven’t even seen the show in Aberystwyth yet.
If only the ghost train on Llandudno pier still existed. Now that really was fuel for the imagination.
Artes Mundi 11 runs at National Museum Cardiff, Mostyn, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Chapter and Glynn Vivian Art Gallery until 1 March 2026
