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Whitechapel Gallery, LondonOno invites visitors to repair the world by reconstructing broken teacups, while the Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad conjures surprises from a huge private collection, with a little help from WH AudenThere is something appropriate about the piles of broken crockery that greet visitors to the autumn programme of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece, in which gallery visitors are invited to reconstruct teacups from pottery shards using glue, string and sticky tape, briefly captures a returning-from-lockdown determination to put things back together again (even while keeping a sanitiser bottle to hand).Ono first presented this piece in 1966 at John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery in Mayfair (she met John Lennon when he came to a preview of the show). If things felt like they had fallen apart and needed fixing back then, that need only feels amplified just now, 55 years on. With that repair shop spirit in mind, I sat at a white table along with a few others and tried ham-fistedly to piece and stick and tie together something that might once again hold water. “Mend carefully,” the artist instructs, “think of mending the world at the same time.” If the cup is anything to go by, that process might be a little harder than even Ono could imagine. After a few concentrated minutes, I placed my wonky vessel on the adjacent shelves alongside the rest of the tragically optimistic teaset. Continue reading...