Archeological Assemblages: inventories, welcome tables and bodied with(out) organs

Crates, bottle holders, feathers, rockets, wooden spoons, newspapers, tools, papier-mache, crochet; a polyphony of objects hover, float, erect and penetrate through the gallery walls. Things, no matter their value, surround us, they are made and consumed by us, and most importantly define us. . Countless thinkers, philosophers and art critics will remind us of the importance of the etymology of the word ‘thing’ (Old English þing, þyng, of Germanic origin Ding) when thinking about material culture. The etymology is defined as an ‘assembly’, a ‘meeting’ or an ‘inanimate object’. Undoubtedly, the gathering of things has made up the fabric of our world’s materiality, which Bill Brown announces as “the world of human artefacts”2. For me, two curatorial questions - which I intend to demystify in this thinkpiece - arise when thinking about assemblages and its role in material culture and exhibition making...

The suggestion of an echo traced by the touch of a capturing device

Evidence of the exile experience is often, to use Sontag's terms, unfurnished. These narratives map and recount the stories of migration, yet they frequently fall short of fully conveying the harrowing conditions endured...

Music Stars, Roleplay and the Great Place of Uduehi Imienwanrin’s practice

Rap's influence on painting is a testament to the power of cross-genre inspiration, where the rhythm and narrative depth of hip-hop culture intertwine with the visual expression of art. This is exactly the catalyst for Uduehi Imienwanrin’s practice where delving deeply into music and popular culture, particularly rap and hip-hop, enables him to take us with pride to a wondrous visual world filled with musical references, swag and joy…

Terms of Engagement: Affecting, Representing + Engaging

In Conversation transcribed between Joe Burgess, Juliette Buss (Photoworks) and Kate Watson as well as a commission for

'Body Conversations: listening to dysphoria, speaking raw bodies' in The Temperament Index, Melanie Jackson

Body politics will never cease to be a contentious topic. Raising questions of how bodies are owned, controlled or politicised are important when dealing with incessant waves of systemic subjugation by the hegemony. Exhibitions become portals for looking back at history and relating it to more contemporary discourses. It enables us to create space to find previous resistances against inequity and injustice. This is exactly what I would argue with Melanie Jackson’s ongoing body of work ‘Spekyng Rywbawdy: The Temperament Index’’, as it unfolds and slips into representations of sexual and social liberation, social and physical mobility, and dissidence…

Leylines

Landscapes have been historically documented by a white-cis-male gaze, so it becomes refreshing to undermine such a tradition in Eva L Jonas’ The Natural, The Rural and Remote and Fey Wen’s Through the Mouth of the River, which culminate in a reconsideration of who documents the natural world, to whom these images are for, and what it means to be enthralled by their romanticisation…

Dialogues from within: Bodies, worldbuilding, and the politics of impermanence

Muslin descends into the gallery’s entrance imbued in colour using foraged goods, remnants of a metropolis stretches over the space; blues, purples and maroons punctuate the room, in the backdrop a futuristic soundscape whispers within the gallery walls. Presence has never become more important in a world taken aback by isolation restrictions, epidemics, digital omnipresence and social disconnection. These issues are clearly reflected in the ways the selected artists for this year’s Platform Graduate Award at Aspex Portsmouth have engaged with the world around them through the themes, materiality and substance of their work…

Opening the Doors: Connection, Intimacy and the Power of Not Knowing

Curating is an intimate act of interdependence. Exhibitions and art invite me, and I hope others, to be in direct contact with something/one they don’t know. Group Show’s ethos and its public programme COMMUNAL, respectively explore who makes our communities and how cultural institutions can best serve them…

Tai Shani: Bodily remains

Tai Shani’s first major performance project since DC: Semiramis for which she was nominated and collectively won the Turner Prize in 2019 takes place in the underground chamber of Farringdon’s notorious nightclub: Fabric. The play featured an original live score composed by Shani’s long-term collaborators Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless (Death in Vegas) alongside digital animations by Adam Sinclair.

The Role of Abstraction in Documentary Street Photography

Fish wrapped in plastic, drying racks set on a pavement, a desolate football ball abandoned on a patch of wet asphalt. The Wrong Side Of The Tracks documents suburban life spoken in metaphors. The series is an evocative project, built through performance and close collaboration with the artist’s subjects. This is done through a process of non-control and abstraction, whereby participants choose an object or action, to the artists hybrid process of staged documentation…

Alice Rekab: Family Lines

Clay moulded relics, scripture, tokens of the domestic and spectres of the past being conjured through archival material; ‘Family Lines’ devotes its energy to embodying every aspect of how we connect to others and ourselves. I speak in the plural as this exhibition invites it, as it surveys the various inextricable manifestations of one’s identities, experiences, and familial and national connections. Ultimately, to think in the singular is to neglect the complexities of the human condition.

Dignified Deaths; Abject Acts

‘Dignified,’ ‘harrowing,’ and ‘inquisitive’ are the words that come to mind when encountering Mandy Barker’s newest body of work, STILL (FFS). Joining scientists on Lord Howe Island—600 kilometres off the coast of New South Wales in the Tasman Sea—in April 2019, Barker began studying the horrific decline of the local Flesh-Footed Shearwater population: as plastic foraged by the fledglings’ parents was fed to them as chicks, an entire generation starved to death…

Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya: Escape From Alphaville

Science fiction is often an explorative journey in search of truth. After all, as the saying goes, the truth is often stranger than fiction. This is very much the case in Escape From Alphaville, a 2020 ‘remake’ of Jean-Luc Godard’s iconic 1965 film Alphaville by Indian artist-duo Madhuban Mitra and Manas Bhattacharya. Escape From Alphaville draws out dystopian science-fiction elements of the cinematic classic to create an allegory of totalitarian society very much set in the present day.

Photography’s Partial Gift

Photography is a gift. Those who have been luckily bestowed with cameras to capture the world have the power to disseminate the realities of this life. This is what Marilyn Stafford accomplished with her trusted 35mm SLR portable camera…

An Ode to Life: Down in the Forest, We Sing a Chorus (2020-2021)

Rocks threaded among waterfalls, spider webs rooted between wishbone-shaped tree trunks, the humus of fallen trees supplying nutrients and protecting seedlings: all these images come together in Down in the Forest, We Sing a Chorus (2020-2021), Stacy Arezou Mehrfar’s homage to the interdependence of the world. At the beginning of the pandemic, Mehrfar entered a forest in upstate New York to develop a body of work that transformed into a collective forest meditation. For her, these weekend treks became a family ritual, a much-needed source of renewal and of kinship with others and the surrounding world…

Belonging, being, bystanding: spaces for LGBTQ+ creatives

As queer folk, we can initially struggle to find a social footing in our immediate environment. Photoworks is aware of this and through its LGBTQ+ learning programme, aims to provide a safe space for learning, creating, sharing and socialising. In my role at Photoworks, as a Learning & Engagement Coordinator, I have had the pleasure to develop two LGBTQ+ focused projects alongside Eva Louisa Jonas, an artist that through her practice, conscientiously captures themes of belonging, being and bystanding...

Mitchell Moreno: BODY COPY

Hooking up culture has commodified and revolutionised the way bodies function in the internet age. At a swipe’s reach, anyone with phone access can consume, exchange and indulge in the oversaturation of the digitised sexualised body. BODY COPY, currently on show at Photofusion, in London, visualises how bodies, gestures and performances become aesthetic iterations for a capitalist driven society, and artist Mitchell Moreno (de)codes self-portraiture by capturing idealised versions of what men search for on same-sex hooking up apps. Satire, manufacture, and the grotesque are all products bought and sold within the parameters of this exhibition; which invite buyers into fetishising utopic images of idiosyncratic queer looks...

Chain Reactions

An invitation to artists, curators and collectives to select and speak about photographs produced between 1995-2020 for the Photoworks Annual 26.