CRITIC’S CHOICE

Perth Concert Hall is the venue for this first UK solo showing of pioneering Dutch video artist Madelon Hooykaas, who has been making innovative work since the 1960s. Hooykaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, trained in Paris and moved briefly to New York, before seminal travel in Japan which led to her first photographic book. Now in her 70s, and still very much active as an artist – she made a new work in Perth at the opening of the exhibition this week – her recent work is shown at the Threshold exhibition space in the concert hall. Hooykaas spent much of her career working with Scottish artist Elsa Stansfield, as part of Stansfield/Hooykaas, until Stansfield’s unexpected death in 2004. Her preoccupations as an artist are nature and memory, mindfulness, loss and abstraction, rooted in her own interest in Zen Buddhism. In 2017, she visited Perth to explore ideas of walls, real and virtual, rooted in the city’s fortified history. These recent works, much of which is inspired by the idea of walls and cities – many of which have been acquired for the Threshold museum collection in Perth – include her “performative drawing”, pictured below, in which in live performances, shown on a loop here, she draws in charcoal over projected film to “stimulate regeneration” and healing in cities in which the balance between the people who live in it and the people who visit it has become too strongly skewed towards the visitors. There is a vaporetto (water bus) tour of Venice seen through the hazing screen of the bus windows and a Zen Buddhist inspired documentary exploring light, memory, vision and mind. You can also buy your own limited edition print of her work, available exclusively at Horsecross.

Madelon Hooykaas: Virtual Walls/Real Walls, Threshold Artspace, Perth Concert Hall, Mill Street, Perth, 01738 621 031, www.horsecross.co.uk, until 26 July, Mon-Sat, 10am-6pm (late on performance nights), curator’s tours May 23 and June 6 and 27