There are ticker-tape machines spewing out people and wasted landscapes failing skyscrapers

There are ticker-tape machines spewing out people and wasted landscapes, failing skyscrapers and statues of the oppressed which come alive.And there’s much representation of violence. Demonstrators are shot and lie dying on the ground, the drawn blood-flow from their wounds focused on, slowed down for pathos. Other bodies are subjected to inventive – and graphically inventive – tortures in police stations. And with any animated treatment, even Kentridge’s, the depiction of such things will be more of an enactment of them than it would be in a still image. I kept thinking that Kentridge must, somehow, be using the resources of his distinctive animation-technique to do something with this business, to register or resist the problems of straightforward depiction. But I couldn’t see that he was, and it made me think of that church mural, and all the other art and atrocity stuff.Meanwhile, back at the Yugoslav war: a few nights ago, on a TV-discussion programme, someone said that the refugees in Macedonia were living in “Breughel conditions”.Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2; till 30 May; every day; free.

Review

HANNAH STARKEY
CORNERHOUSE, MANCHESTERIT’S DIFFERENT for girls, Joe Jackson pointed out in a song many moons ago And so it is in Hannah Starkey’s photographs. Like Jane Austen long before her (Austen never wrote a scene with only men in it; one of her sharp heroines was always present), Starkey is a chronicler of women’s lives, stating bluntly in interview that women are just more interesting to look at. But “chronicler” suggests total truth-telling, and this young photographer cheats a little, using actors in posed scenarios, more film stills than documentary. Starkey fakes it to tell it like it is about femininity, girls’ stuff, women’s things.In this, Starkey’s first solo show at a British public gallery, eight of the large colour photographs feature pairs of women – a mother and daughter on the Tube after a shopping spree, drunk teenagers in a pool hall, two strangers on the upper deck of a bus – while the remainder are all structured around women looking at reflections or out of windows. The exhibition is touted as a survey of Starkey’s career to date.What may come as a surprise, then, is that the show seems so slight: a small room of photographs, several already well-known. This is in part due to the fact that Starkey is a precocious (but prodigious) talent, having graduated only two years ago from the Royal College of Art and immediately catapulted to one-to-watch status But less truly is more in this instance.

These achingly familiar but still mysterious tableaux take time to savour.One, a shot of two teenage girls, maybe sisters, captures the boredom and the anxiety of Saturday afternoon clothes-shopping. The older girl tries on a camisole top next to a headless, but otherwise physically perfect, curvaceous yet bra-less mannequin wearing something very similar.Behind the girl, a trendy red chair flaunts its curves, too. Her gaze is fixed firmly on her own small cleavage, her bra straps showing under the top. The younger girl, not yet having to worry about such things, looks on bored, ready for a long afternoon in the changing-room.Nostalgia, cringing, smiles, empathy flood in as you gaze at the scene – well, for the female of the species they do – even though you know it’s a gorgeous bit of fakery. As we all know, that dressing-up ritual is all about fakery too.But these are not cosy images of a caring, sharing sisterhood of women. Starkey is superb on the dynamics between women, often (let’s face it, girls) shaped by curiosity at best, envy, paranoia and competitiveness at worst.

She uses the film stills trickery of Cindy Sherman but the stills Starkey creates are more like scenes from Mike Leigh films than Hitchcock or film noir. Not comfortable – with loneliness, boredom and unreadable stares throughout – but compelling, Starkey’s stills make her a promising young pretender.Elisabeth MahoneyTo 13 Jun (0161-200 1500). ANDRAS KALMAN, that dapper, elderly Knightsbridge art-dealer, lets his hand come to rest, with infinite tact, upon my forearm “And now I am going to be very indiscreet,” he tells me I bend an ear. We are standing in front of a large oil painting by Graham Sutherland, one of the 40 canvases in a mini-retrospective at the Crane Kalman Gallery, the first major showing of Sutherland’s work in this country for a decade and a half The painting, Thorn Head, is dated 1947. It is one of his characteristically spiky plant forms, with heavy religious overtones.

“I am not really supposed to say who owns what, but I shall tell you that this one” – he points towards it, with a decent glass of red wine in his hand – “belongs to Richard Attenborough. It was just after Gandhi, when you could get a Sutherland of this size for, well, pounds 16,000-pounds 18,000. Dicky was in the money just then, and he said to me, `Darling, let’s see what goodies you have.’ This was one of them. He bought it.”
Andras Kalman, who fled to England from Hungary in 1939, has been dealing in Sutherland since the Fifties He gave him a show in Manchester in 1956 “The atmosphere was so much easier and friendlier then. There were no such things as contracts…” The sudden decline of Sutherland’s reputation since his death in 1980 has saddened Kalman. (The Picasso Museum at Antibes put on a full-scale Sutherland retrospective last summer It was offered to England The catalogue had been written, the show already curated.