When I first visited Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) a couple of years ago it was to see Daniel Kitson in the Grand Hall, which looks somewhat different now than it did back then after flames engulfed it last March. 

BAC was adamant that the building would get back to its former glory ‘brick by brick’, and this resilience will see the new Hall opened in 2018. Until then a more temporary space is in use; after all the show must go on! 

Theatre Ad Infinitum’s ‘Light’ went down a storm at The Barbican last year, so I was keen to bag tickets when I heard it was returning to London at BAC.

​It is fitting that such an immersive, ground-breaking show was to grace the stage at a venue where the mission has always been to ‘invent the future of theatre’.

The Saatchi Gallery is toasting it’s 30th Birthday with ‘Champagne Life’, its first all-female exhibition. It was the gender-specific promise which inspired me to visit; Saatchi and his crew successfully made enough of a point about it to fool me into thinking it would in some way inform what was on show. Critics have thus far collectively noted that the show had no real theme or curatorial arrangement, and that the all-female element was nothing more than ‘tokenism’...and on the whole I’d have to agree. Very little information was to hand to suggest reasoning behind the chosen artists or work, leaving nothing but the knowledge of shared gender to guide you through the show.

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I searched for meaning on these grounds, and found it to be lurking in the domesticity implied by Maha Malluh’s ‘Food For Thought’ pans, the mundane yet essential objects signifying the nurturing mother figure; the tenderness in Seung Ah Palik’s ‘Maitreya', bare flesh touching bare flesh; and Alice Anderson’s giant bobbin ‘Bound’, just waiting for a giant woman to pick it up and begin making and mending. This is, however, where it stopped.

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Such meanings were ascribed by myself as a way to make sense of the combination of works bundled together. Shellie Sojhanvari’s taxidermy horse ‘Moje Sabz’ and Mia Feuer’s ‘Jerusalem Donkey’ seemed at odds with the theme I was trying to build, serving instead as a sign to stop looking for something that really wasn’t there.