Review: Sorry I Can't Tell You

Current Italian, Alaskan-based Paola Pivi's projects are wide-ranging: unlikely photographs of animals, such as ostriches on a boat and an alligator clotted by cream; bead sculptures; a 1-1 scale photographic 'map' of the small island she once lived on; recordings of animal sounds; a thousand people screaming in unison; and a fighter plane shown as a sculpture (ten years, incidentally, before Fiona Banner's current display of fighter jets at Tate Britain). All the same, I was surprised by the two rooms of Massimo de Carlo's newly-modified but still modest space: in the first just one big black and white and somewhat Mapplethorpian photograph of a man masturbating; in the next five big photographs of ten men engaging in a hokey cokey chain of anal connection, as if to say that anonymous group sex is pretty much masturbation with other bodies. What I like is the humour plus how - paradoxically - it's the facial expressions of the orgiasts, and how they vary between shots, which draws you in: it's a social business after all.