Charlie Ratcliffe, Woman with the Hat, 2018

What lurks over the shoulder of this Otto Dix-inspired lady? Perhaps she stares back into the past with a sly smile. She was lounging around the Tabernacle in Bermondsey last night, accompanied by other works from Primordial Soup, a many-limbed collective of artists, writers and musicians based in London. Colliding the ancient with the right now, mythologies and rituals with the everyday, Primordial Soup create a cacophony of performance, video, poetry, sound, painting and sculpture. The evening was an extravaganza in celebration of their new Manifesto: First Form, in which the group acknowledge and accept the complexity and strangeness of contemporary life; whilst they “still helplessly believe in the act of searching for something to believe in” as we wade through this “age of mankind in distraction”.