Upon entering the subterranean, white-walled gallery space, I am immediately confronted by Mona Hatoum’s ‘Hot Spot’ (2016). The outlines of each continent on the cage-like globe glow neon red, and this imposing sculpture emits a persistent buzzing that permeates the gallery. Rather than referencing specific border disputes and wars, Hatoum suggests that ‘the whole world is caught up in conflict and unrest.’ An urgent energy radiates from the weight of global conflict writ large. Its light creeps over my shoes and my back as I move between artworks. Even when I look at other pieces, the audible hum and brightness of ‘Hot Spot’ creep into my periphery, setting a tone of unease for the exhibition.
The artworks in We Grown-ups Can Also Be Afraid at the Attenborough Arts Centre are drawn from the private collection of David and Indrė Roberts. The exhibition title is lifted from a 1978 song written by Bjarne Jess Hansen, a Danish folk singer/songwriter, as an answer to his then six-year-old daughter’s question about whether adults get scared, too. This deceptively simple phrase about adults openly navigating their fears in front of children naturally raises other emotions, such as overwhelm, anger, despair, and helplessness in the face of seemingly insurmountable situations.
I sit on a bench to watch Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s four-minute video ‘We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid’ (2007), which also takes its name from Hansen’s song. Their video plays on a vintage television, reminiscent of languid school afternoons watching old films. The visual footage of an empty playground is overlaid with the sound of a group of school children being taught to sing Hansen’s verses: ‘I am afraid of nuclear power plants […] the black ugly smoke coming from the factory.’ As primary school children of the early 1980s, Beier and Lund learned this song as part of Denmark’s national curriculum. Thirty years later, they put themselves in the role of teachers. When one of the artists asks the group, ‘Shall we sing the first verse again?’ a child replies, ‘No,’ and others echo his refusal. The audio is lively, full of scraping chairs and an off-beat cough that punctuates the children’s somewhat lethargic performance. Their boredom is inadvertently humorous, but raises questions about intergenerational transference of Cold War-era anxieties, classroom dynamics, and fear as a learned response.
Several more works by Beier and Lund create a classroom corner of sorts. Three wooden frames contain second-hand peace posters folded over themselves, deliberately concealing the messages. The back of one poster has faded sellotape marks along its edges, and another has long-dried stains. The works are collectively titled ‘The Archives’ (2008), and each has an individual parenthesis giving clues as to the content that we cannot see: ‘Chile’, ‘Es Gibt Wichtigeres Als Frieden’, and ‘This Vacation Visit Beautiful Vietnam’, respectively. The German phrase translates to: ‘There are more important things than peace’. The artists’ presentation of the posters’ blank reverse is ambiguous, acting as an empty Rorschach test for the viewer to decipher. Through their act of concealing the past, do Beier and Lund suggest that former peace movements are lost causes? Later, I read online that Archives is ‘still in an active process of acquisition’, so perhaps this horizontal folding gestures towards a peaceful sociopolitical horizon that we are yet to achieve.
I move to the far wall, where Ayan Farah’s three canvases hang. Formed of polyester cotton blankets affixed to wooden frames, ‘Eldfell’, ‘Red Storm’, and ‘Nuuk’ (all 2011) are each dyed with natural substances; from a volcanic region in Iceland, an undisclosed desert, and Greenland’s capital, respectively. Undeniably tactile and gently weathered, these muted pieces form alternative, rooted portraits of specific geographies. Through exposing man-made materials to the elements, Farah’s process speaks to embodied time passed across diverse locations. The resulting impressionistic snapshots act as a visual invitation to the viewer, unlike the absent destinations in Beier and Lund’s more abstract ‘Archives’.
Continuing towards the back corner, I watch Jacco Olivier’s ‘Saeftinghe’ (2006), a short looping video of an animated painting. The piece is named after a former agricultural and peat-burning town in the southwest Netherlands that was reclaimed by the North Sea and Scheldt River in 1584. Olivier’s dream-like reimagining pans from left to right, as a woman walks along in a yellow hood. The sky darkens, uprooting houses and hurtling everyday objects towards a rainy vortex. When the video resets, Saeftinghe is briefly reborn until the rain begins anew. By placing the tragedy of Saeftinghe in a contemporary age, Olivier warns us of the devastating impacts of climate change, doomed to repeat unless there is a seismic intervention.
The neighbouring artwork is Fiona Banner’s ‘Mirror Fin, Jaguar’ (2006), a stripped and polished tail-fin from a British Jaguar fighter jet. The model, the SEPECAT Jaguar, is a British-French supersonic jet attack aircraft that was exported globally and used in several military operations and global conflicts, including the 1990 Gulf War. Banner’s transformation of an object that is ‘absolutely designed […] to kill’ into a fairground mirror is purposefully jarring. While I’m in the gallery, a family steps in front of the artwork. The youngsters jump and pull faces in its mirrored surface, while the man reads the caption. He does not explain it to them. Hatoum’s Hot Spot reflects in the panels of its dazzling finish, forming a pulsing link between the legacy of Britain’s imperial project and its contemporary commitment to an increased defence budget. By reflecting the viewer’s image within the fin’s frame, the dissonance of visitors’ responses reminds me that war and empire remain deeply embedded in day-to-day reality, whether we choose to look or not.
Several of the pieces are tactile and material-centric, speaking to the human desire to create and make meaning in a world that seldom makes sense. Phyllida Barlow’s ‘Untitled: disaster 5′ (2010) occupies a corner. The curious structure is set on casters made of wire-netting, cement, and plaster, coated in muted shades of spray paint. It resembles a horned lizard head, unceremoniously toppled from a larger, absent corporeal form. By using found materials to create an abstract sculpture, Barlow challenges traditional monuments by elevating a new structure born from ‘disaster’—one that is messy, chaotic, and democratic. This textural piece visually pairs with the roughly hewn totemic figure in Human Bhabha’s What is Love (2013), which evokes another lost—or found—monument. The deep lines carved into the cork and styrofoam create a fluid figure, with scorched facial features doused in white acrylic paint. There is a timelessness to the harshly etched form, like a sacred carving from a lost civilisation. It is the sole human-like being within the gallery, besides the viewer, left to bear witness to a burning world.
On the reverse of the dividing wall is Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s ‘Atrabiliaros’ (1996). Three niches have been roughly carved and, from left to right, contain a red heel, a pair of black heels, and a flat, pale yellow shoe. The old, worn shoes are obscured by a filmy layer of cow’s bladder, crudely stitched in place with coarse black surgical thread. Evoking Catholic street shrines found in Latin America, Salcedo’s installation serves as a memorial to unidentified victims. This piece was created at a time when DNA tests were not readily available, and many victims were identified by their footwear. Salcedo offers a space to grieve and honour the dead while placing the prevalence of violence against women and girls in Colombia in a wider global continuum.
To close, I move to Francisca Aninat’s ‘Interior/Exterior Field’ (2007)—a topography that seeps out of the gallery’s far corner. It is composed of coffee sacks, Latin American newspapers, and cardboard, stacked in soft-edged layers that give the effect of an eroded, mountainous cross-section. It slumps under the weight of itself. Loose threads dangle across the sedimentary layers, drawing out the often-overlooked connectivity in the global transportation and migration of goods and people, with the textual elements fragmented and obscured along with the origins of its subjects.
The accompanying exhibition text is thorny, and raises questions about the roles of the artist and viewer, the relationship between art and the responsibility to respond to global issues, and the ways we can respond to ‘globally important issues’ collectively and individually. The text doesn’t name specifics; instead, it focuses on emotional impact (‘the universal experience of fear’). While Hatoum’s or Salcedo’s works are the most direct and affecting, there is no fear or avoidance in the way any of these artists approach their subjects. Though the text reads, ‘This is not an exhibition about art and activism,’ the individual themes each work explores are inherently, some overtly, political, and this is emphasised by these works being placed in conversation with one another. The framing of political art as ‘being lectured to or told what to think’, attempts to neutralise the artists’ positions and links between their works, while simultaneously placing the onus on the audience’s sense of ‘responsibility’. Trusting the viewer with complex global themes rather than portraying them as ‘often too big and too difficult for us to think about’ provides the necessary context for collective engagement and action.
Jennifer Brough is a disabled, slow writer and workshop facilitator based in Nottingham.
‘We Grown-Ups Can Also Be Afraid: Creativity in Times of Crisis’ is on at Attenborough Arts Centre, University of Leicester, 18th July—19th October 2025.
This review is supported by Attenborough Arts Centre.
Published 25.08.2025 by Rachel Graves in Review
1,646 words
