CRITIC’S CHOICE

This latest exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts is rooted in the work of the brilliant Ursula K Le Guin, whose 1969 novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness”, also lends its name to the show itself. The ideas in this work of feminist science fiction, set on an ice planet whose name translates as “Winter”, revolve, amongst other things, around the shifting gender of the inhabitants of Gethen.

Curators Eoin Dara (DCA) and Kim McAlese (Programme Director at Grand Union, Birmingham) use Le Guin’s ideas – from politics to environmentalism and feminism – as a springboard for this international exhibition, which reassesses ideas brought up by Le Guin’s groundbreaking works in a group exhibition that will continue to change and shift as the winter passes. The line-up is truly international, from Abel Rodriguez, an elder of the Nonuya ethnic group in the Colombian Amazon, and Victoria Sin (Canada), whose video installation “BCE” proposes two creation myths from the deep past and the far future. Amongst all the contemporary work, a selection of artefacts from the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum in Dundee, which looks at exceptions to standard conceptions of gender, sexuality, bonding and kinship across the animal kingdom.

This exhibition, DCA tells us, has at its heart artists who are “crafting alternative spaces and worlds that hint at ways in which we all might better live, love and care for one another,” - and that is a rather fine concept for us all to hold on to in the small hours of this brave New Year.

Seized by the Left Hand, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 152 Nethergate, Dundee, 01382 432 444 www.dca.org.uk,

PHOTOGRAPH: RUTH CLARK