Articles Available Online

Amidst the drills and concrete, white walls and big names of London’s Cork Street stands a new gallery, Nahmad Projects, hosting a few performers who crawl the floor, softly pawing their faces, on all-fours Dressed in comfortable basics, they’re determinedly imagining that they’re cats And that day, they were cats for six straight hours: emulating cat mannerisms, ignoring visitors, being aloof   I Am A Cat, the title of the piece, is the creation of Finnish artist Tuuli Malla, one of 30 performance pieces over 30 days that herald the opening of Nahmad Gallery, collectively titled ‘I Am Not Tino Sehgal’ It’s a brave move for a commercial gallery founded by two under-30s, Tommaso Calabro, formerly a project coordinator at Sotheby’s in Milan and London, and Joseph Nahmad, younger brother of London-based gallerist and collector Helly   Throughout the month-long exhibition – which, it should be noted, has no official affiliation with Tino Sehgal – there’s little that would be familiar to the old guard on Cork Street, which has for decades played host to the more exclusive of London’s contemporary art galleries in the West End When there aren’t cats, there is a performer scrawling the name ‘Tino Sehgal’ in various animal shapes into notebooks on the floor (Damiano Fina’s But I have him), an artist playing at gallery invigilator, sitting silent and unmoving, reading Ulysses next to a walkie talkie (Beth Fox’s This Work)   For Italian/French art collective VOO’s piece, Coined Situation, the artists placed a single performer in the centre of the room, surrounded by 1p pieces It’s a large mountain of tarnished bronze, but seems diminished when we learn that it amounts to £1,000 – the sum the collective receives for participating in the show The performer sits alone, moving the coins around, piling them into towers I ask what I’m supposed to do and little yellow cards are proffered, reading ‘1 MOVE for 1 COIN’ Eloise Lawson set the rules rather more clearly for her piece, What Is The Meaning of this Gathering? All participants were blindfolded and guided into a closed-off gallery space, where they joined other participants and the