Everyone dreams about it but it will always remain beyond our grasp… Utopia, Sir Thomas More’s blueprint for an ideal society, celebrates its 500th anniversary this year. Artists, performers and architects have made new works inspired by More’s impossible vision in collaboration with academics based at King’s College London (Paths to Utopia—Inigo Rooms, Somerset House East Wing & King's College London, until 2 October). The artist Caitlin Shepherd has created a House of Discord, a property viewing with a difference devised in partnership with James Wood, a researcher with the European & International Studies department. Meanwhile, Night School on Anarres, by the artists Onkar Kular and Noam Tora, focuses on 20th-century anarchism (the quirky piece is described by the organisers as “part sci-fi set, part classroom, part roundhouse theatre”). Crucially, Paths to Utopia, part of a year-long festival, seems even more potent in light of the recent Brexit vote in the UK. Professor David Green of the department of geography says: “We will need to exercise even more our imagination and creativity to map a way towards an uncertain future. This exhibition is a chance to extend that imagination. It’s an opportunity, an invitation, to reimagine our country and our place in the world, and to explore the values and issues that matter to all of us.”
