Mapping the City (At Somerset House) was probably my favourite: street and graffiti artists map different cities in numerous creative, challenging and sometime beautiful ways. The influence of the Situationists, psychogeography and the dérive was very evident in many of the exhibits. Shepard Fairey's 'Berlin Tower' was arguably the most beautiful - and also seemingly conventional - image. Nug and Pike's trilogy of films, particularly 'King of the Line' were weird and hard to watch at times, but worth it. In between and beyond there were all manner of maps - sculptures, flags, photos, videos... Amazing stuff presented in the perfect space: 'Graffiti and street artists have an intimate relationship with the city. Through producing their work on this living canvas, inhabiting the streets, they come to understand and engage with the urban landscape in unique ways - through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance.'
Conflict-Time-Photography is amazing and very geographical, but it's also vast and there's an awful lot of reading to do if one is to be able to relate to the images: most visual exhibits do not stand alone so very well. An exception is Don McCullin's portrait of shell-shocked marine, one of the earliest images in the exhibition and surely one of the most powerful: the marine is a statue, grey and frozen and horrified. The short video on the Tate website by Dan Snow picks out some of the other highlights (sic) very well. One of the most moving for me, though was 'shot at dawn', Chloe Dewe Mathews' photos of places where a soldiers were executed for cowardice and desertion in WW1 - taken almost one-hundred years later, and poignant for the absence each landscape seems to lament so physically.
Both these exhibition will stay with me for a long time.