The ground floor gallery spaces in Native Land’s new development, Burlington Gate, await their tenants, albeit one is being used for a short-term display of new artists, currently Jack Killick’s Collapse II in a collaboration between Native Land and the Royal Academy of Arts.  In this difficult climate for retail spaces generally, how long will it take to fill these spaces.

The vacant spaces leave a gap in the flow of galleries along Old Burlington Street which the Stephen Friedman Gallery helps to fill with its two spaces on either side of the street which provide the flexibility to have different exhibitions or, as over the past few weeks, have one which moves from one space to the other.

Yinka Shonibare has curated a wide selection of artists in the exhibition ‘Talisman in the Age of Difference’ which explores many different aspects of art related to Africa and to its traditions, talismans, struggles and achievements.  It includes work by African artists and by western artists who have a empathy with the country and its people and includes work by Thomas J Price whose three gilded heads watch over one of the galleries and statues by Jake and Dinos Chapman in line with Kendell Geers and Betye Saar in another, glass bottles by David Hammons, Hew Lock’s ‘Mummy’s Little Soldier’ in Murano glass and works by Zak Ove, Zanele Muholi, William Kentridge, Isaac Julien and others.