Judith Hopf's UK Solo Show Testing Time Critiqued for Spatial Disconnect

Judith Hopf's first institutional solo exhibition in the UK, Testing Time, opened in December 2013. The show featured three distinct bodies of work: Lily’s Laptop, a 2013 film reinterpreting Romeo Bosetti's 1911 silent comedy Betty’s Boat; Flock of Sheep, sculptures of concrete cubes on metal legs with coal-drawn faces; and Untitled (Captchas), collages using machine-generated text. The exhibition's spatial layout was criticized for failing to forge relationships between these works, with a large black box housing Lily’s Laptop dominating the gallery. The film depicts a teenager flooding an apartment after being locked out of a password-protected laptop, intercut with slapstick scenes of drenched neighbors. Hopf's press release emphasized themes of environmental influence and exclusion, but reviewers found the film's critique of modernist architecture and feminist materials unconvincing compared to her earlier 2011 short film Some Ends of Things, which more effectively satirized modernist structures. The concrete sheep sculptures appeared awkwardly balanced, while the CAPTCHA-based poems echoed Tristan Tzara's aleatory methods. Despite Hopf's typically acerbic wit, the exhibition lacked cohesive moments where this sharpness was foregrounded.