Il Tempo del Postino reviews

Anri Sala, 4 Butterflies

“Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler created a post-interval performance of such glorious self-importance and inanity that I hesitate even to describe it.”
Tim Adams, the Observer

“The best work was that which was at home in these surroundings and showed an awareness of the challenge presented, most succinctly expressed by Tino Sehgal, who made the dusty, underused red velvet curtains dance to an orchestral Daft Punk number.”
Richard Perry, BBC Manchester

“Shocking as some of this is, nothing that goes on in Barney’s dream-like, surrealistic performance is gratuitous. He is meditating on the psychic catastrophe that is Islamism, whereby men who possess power over women express their fear and disgust at the sight of the female body by forcing their daughters and wives to cover themselves completely. Drawing on Freud’s writings, he shows that women who are made powerless express their rage in the only way they can - by using their own bodies to urinate and defecate. (…) At the end of Il Tempo Del Postino, I felt I’d been present at a historic occasion when the ambitions of the curators were perfectly matched by the quality of the art, and when we saw the première of one of Barney’s most profound and powerful works.”
Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph

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