ARCHIVE
RECORDS AND MATERIALS by series
Events delivered in partnership with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Nils Röller
Cédric Maridet
RYBN.ORG
Amy Hale
Cédric Maridet
RYBN.ORG
Amy Hale
Rindon Johnson
Alice Gale-Feeny
mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson
Alice Gale-Feeny
mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson
Barby Asante
Jenna Collins
Emma Hart
Bill Leslie
Joey Ryken
Daniel Shanken
Stephen Sutcliffe
Steven Warwick
Matt Williams + MOBBS
Jenna Collins
Emma Hart
Bill Leslie
Joey Ryken
Daniel Shanken
Stephen Sutcliffe
Steven Warwick
Matt Williams + MOBBS
N. Katherine Hayles
Daniel Shanken
Steven Warwick
Daniel Shanken
Steven Warwick
Dennis Cooper + Zac Farley
Stephen Sutcliffe
Ros Murray
Stephen Sutcliffe
Ros Murray
Laura Mulvey
Anne Bean
Georgina Starr
Goshka Macuga
Anne Bean
Georgina Starr
Goshka Macuga
Cosey Fanni Tutti
David Burrows + Andy Sharp
Chad McCail
Anthony Davies + Benedict Seymour
David Burrows + Andy Sharp
Chad McCail
Anthony Davies + Benedict Seymour
Before a book begins. A visual essay in 7 parts.
Nils Röller (2022)
Before a book begins. A visual essay in 7 parts.
Nils Röller (2022)
For this lecture, Nils Röller has developed a visual essay in 7 parts. He discusses (muses on) the transition from note to book. In the situation between reading, writing and perceiving, disturbing noises from the environment emerge. Nils relates the book to the ship and the tram, to vehicles for "experiencing the world". In a reflection on Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil, a question arises: how does the "core" of a book differ from the notes? This leads to the discussion regarding how the decision is made as to whether a book can have a core content when it addresses multiple events with the aim of discharging them, i.e. taking away their tension. The visual essay recapitulates the making of Nils’ book Alpentram (Vienna: Klever, 2021).
Nils Röller is a professor at Zurich University of the Arts. His research focuses on the relation between text, image and philosophy (Iconography of Philosophy). He has published experimental texts in collaboration with artists and poets in the Journal for Art, Sex and Mathematics since 2006. Nils is a member of the editorial team for the platform Text-Image Parergon of the Shared Campus. Recent publications in English and German include Alpentram (Vienna: Klever, 2021) and “Interfacing Philosophy”, "Oswalds Hubble" on Dieter Roth and Oswald Wiener, and more.
He built up the Vilèm Flusser Archive together with Siegfried Zielinski and Silvia Wagnermaier. He also directed the festival Digitale (with Siegfried Zielinski). This led Nils to research at the interface of art, science and philosophy (Ahabs Steuer – Navigationen zwischen Kunst und Naturwissenschaft (Berlin: Merve, 2005). His literary work on Dieter Roth, Roth der Grosse, was awarded the Schiller Prize of the Zürcher Kantonalbank in 2014.
www.instagram.com/n_roeller
In addition: Dimensionen des Buchs by Nils Röller (German language text)
In: Medialität Historische Perspektiven - Newsletter Zentrum für Historische Mediologie Universität Zürich 23/2021, https://www.zhm.uzh.ch/de/newsletter.html
(pdf version)
ACTS 2022
The ACTS programme was established in 2020 to explore how artists might conceive of staging speculative events online.ACT VII (25/02/22) Nils Röller, ACT VI (28/01/22) Cédric Maridet, and RYBN.ORG
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Amy Hale (03/03/2022) online lecture, Anne Tallentire (08/03/2022) open studio event at the ICA, Joanna Walsh (08/03/2022) Book launch.
Phainologies, sound composition in 2 parts and 6 pentads, 25’ with text
Cédric Maridet (2019)
Phainologies, sound composition in 2 parts and 6 pentads, 25’ with text
Cédric Maridet (2019)
Phainologies explore alternative relations with nature and epistemology with different forms of writing through sound and text. The work is composed of a few pages taken from an unrealized fictional screenplay, a sound composition that stands as a soundtrack from that film. The text relies on scientific facts about the possibility to archive data in DNA. The sound is composed of archived field recordings from various locations (South Africa, the Arctic Circle, etc.) and synthesized sounds. It is linked to the solar calendar (yushui) with its 24 terms corresponding to the position of the sun that are each divided into 3 pentads. This work points at two positions of the sun (330° and 345°) and their interpretations (rain water and the awakening of insects). The 6 pentads in this 2 moments are referred to within the composition with Chinese sayings associated with the 6 pentads.
Cédric Maridet is an artist based in Hong Kong. His work explores the act of listening, collecting and archiving as a departure point for a possible reinterpretation of knowledge and fiction to construct alternative landscapes in the forms of video, installations, photography, sound compositions and works on paper. His works are presented internationally through residencies (Asia Art Archive), group and solo exhibitions (Blindspot Gallery, Art in General, Tate Modern, Para/Site, 2P Contemporary). He currently holds a position of Assistant Professor and Director of the PhD programme at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Global Finance Walk Radio Report
RYBN.ORG (2021)
Phainologies,
Global Finance Walk Radio Report
RYBN.ORG (2021)
This sound piece is a report from the “Global Finance Walk” workshop, held in Berlin on the 21st of august, 2021, led by RYBN.ORG together with Laura Calbet on the invitation of Supermarkt Berlin and ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin) (1). The workshop took place a few weeks before Berlin's referendum against real estate speculation ("Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co.") (2), held on 26th September 2021.
Participants of the workshop were invited for a psychogeographic dérive in the newly constructed residential neighborhood of Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. For their walk, the participants were equipped with a GPS loaded with geolocalized information on the urban developers of the neighborhood. The audiotour exposed to the participants the private equity investments, development funds and corporate networks in charge of the extreme financialization of the urban area. After the walk, participants gathered in a park and discussed together of the transformation of the urban landscape under extreme financial pressure, and in the perspective of the coming referendum.
The sound piece presents excerpts of the workshop conclusive discussion, mixed with phone messages let by the participants on a dedicated voicemail. The piece was broadcasted on the day of the referendum on Berlin's community radio RebootFM, 88.4 FM (3).
Workshop participants: Alejo, Estefania, Doma, Bernd, Caroline, Diana, Inke, Karen, Gerry, Laura, Pekko, Stéphanie.
(1) http://www.skulpturenpark.org/re-turn/ & https://www.zku-berlin.org/nc/de/timeline/global-finance-walk-offshore-tour-operator/ (2) https://sites.law.duq.edu/juris/2021/10/18/berlins-housing-referendum/
(3) https://reboot.fm/2021/09/26/global-finance-walk-radio-report/
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RYBN.ORG is an artistic, experimental and independent research platform created in 1999, and based in Paris.
http://www.rybn.org
Dr. Amy Hale
Esoteric Art, Women Artists: Evolution and Confluence
Hosted by Dr. Dean Kenning and recorded on 03/03/22
This talk will explore the changing category of esoteric art from the “Occult revival” of the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on the women who have pioneered and innovated within the genre. I will be addressing women’s visual art, performance and installation in exploring the different contexts in which esoteric art has emerged and how it has been received, ranging from early movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism, to the impact of Theosophy and Spiritualism. We will look at artists such as Florence Farr, Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, Ithell Colquhoun, and a wave of contemporary artists such as Tai Shani who are reconfiguring the boundaries of this exciting and fluctuating genre.
Dr. Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, and culture. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave Macmillan).
www.medium.com/@amyhale93
www.amyhale.me
Dr. Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, and culture. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave Macmillan).
www.medium.com/@amyhale93
www.amyhale.me
2021
The 2021 iteration of the Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme continued our programme of ACTS, inviting selected practitioners to consider what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge.
ACT IV (15/11/21) Alice Gale-Feeny, and mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson, ACT V (13/12/21) Rindon Johnson
Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)
Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)
Edited by Alice Gale-Feeny. Performances and writing included by Manuela Albrecht, Svenja Buehl, Michaela Gerussi and Alice Gale-Feeny.
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‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’ is thirty minutes long. About the length of the performance practice ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ (2021). It is a work that uses recursion as a method of writing and re-writing a framework for being with objects, and with each other.
Recursion is about addition and recalibration. New knowledge destroys a previous model, and writes a new one. 'Speaking through events creates new starting points'.
Through a practice with objects, the work asks what becomes of us as we practice writing about and with, a series of containers, that we spill in and out of.
I wanted to work on a series of live screen recordings where I (re)compose a series of videos that were made to accompany the performance 'Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)', as well as retrieving earlier recordings from the studio when the work began on my own body, working solo. I bring the live performance documentation next to the videos - creating loops within loops, densifying a practice that is already about the emergence of material between bodies objects and voices - and I am testing how they operate in a flattened compositional space of the screen. Trying to broaden that space to include my own body when editing.
In the original performance we were dealing with edges and boundaries. But edges and boundaries mean different things in the context of the online space; within screen(s).
I am also dealing in some way, with an archive of live performance documentation. I’m trying to think through what an online ACT may be in relation to the multiple time periods in which these documents span, and the editing process itself; looking at multiple videos at once as a form of accumulation and recalibration, asking what 'forms' emerge when I do this.
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Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist and writer working with performance, dance, facilitation and video. She is interested in devising frameworks for emergent processes to take place; where language and material form, construct and transform realities and build fictions, leading towards live outcomes that continue to recalibrate through their presentation. She draws from perspectives within the fields of New Materialism, Posthumanism, Somatics and Semiotics to think through bodily and linguistic relations.
Her most recent performance ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ was presented at Seventeen, London in August 2021 on the invitation of David Hoyland, as part of Performance Exchange, curated by Rose LeJeune. Alice is a Lecturer in Ba Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. She lives and works in London.
www.alicegale-feeny.com
Performers in ‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’
Manuela Albrecht @manualbrecht
Michaela Gerussi: @mgerussi
Svenja Buehl: @svenjabuhl
How to be Afraid?
mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson (2021)
Excerpt from 'How to be Afraid?' online performance by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson with collaborators Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Amy Voris from May 28, 2021. Video edited by George Maund.
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‘How to be Afraid?’ investigates the afterlife of the transatlantic slave in relation to body, time and space. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in in a number of international contexts.
This iteration explored somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of the past year and how it has shifted perspectives and realities.
The project revolved around the nature of fear itself. How do we navigate this time when political and societal pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from a fear of intimacy, if we are afraid, after a year of lockdowns and physical distancing?
Due to pandemic circumstances, this project was delivered transatlantically in hybrid mode, with mayfield brooks based at Center for Performance Research in New York and Mary Pearson and other collaborators at Siobhan Davies Studios.
This iteration of How to be Afraid? was co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), The Bluecoat (Liverpool) supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust.
mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are faculty at Movement Research NYC and Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. brooks is also the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award in dance granted by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black (IWB).
Mary Pearson is a performance maker and dancer/researcher working with Contact Improvisation and related dance practices, comedy, visual art, voice, and devising. Her solos FAILURE, The Sand Dog Cometh and FoMO, mofos! have toured internationally. Fascinated by collaboration as a complex and coordinated practice in survival, Mary is co- curator of Con|VERGE, REMIX collaborative performance residencies at Ponderosa Dance (DE). She teaches improvisation as a FAILURE Lab in universities and art contexts such as Improspecjie festival (Croatia), contactfestival Freiburg (Germany), WCCIJam and PADL West (CA, USA), Ponderosa P.O.R.C.H. summer school (Germany), and Live Art Bistro (UK). As a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, she facilitates release of trauma held in the body.
George Maund is a cross-discipline artist, performer and broadcaster based in Liverpool, north west Europe since 2005. His most recent set of work is subtitled 'Psych Capital' and deals in subversive mixed-media interventions into and concerning the realm of neoliberal encroachment on 'the counterculture', taking inspiration (or lack thereof) from billionaire wellness retreats and late-stage capitalism's strange excesses and obsessions. In working life George has moved from touring musician to programming 'in-person' live music venues, to facilitating online iterations of performance and hybrid events, specialising in remote audio-visual broadcasts that retain an air of playful flair with room for creative manoeuvre for collaborators and audiences alike. George has been part of the team behind the Popular Music Show - UK radio's longest-running alternative music programme - at BBC Merseyside since 2017, currently presenting on a bi-monthly basis. He currently hosts and/or co-hosts several shows out of Melodic Distraction, Liverpool's internet radio station.
mayfield and Mary’s collaborators:
https://annegaellethiriot.tumblr.com
https://www.amyvoris.com
https://www.toussainttomove.com
http://www.sekechimutengwende.com
The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)
The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)
For the event, Johnson shared insights into the research process behind his new Chisenhale commission, The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, as well as some of his references and ways of working in an experimental online format. Recording made on the 13th of December 2021.
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Chisenhale Gallery presents Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, a new commission and first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Berlin-based artist Rindon Johnson. The first iteration of this commission — Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies — was presented at SculptureCenter, New York, earlier this year. Johnson’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter.
Moving between physical, object-based works and immersive, virtual space, Johnson’s work cuts through assumed realities and examines how virtual and physical spaces are intimately aligned. His work is couched first in language; in the ways that language fails, contradicts or empowers. Through modes of expression spanning publishing, virtual and augmented reality, to working with materials such as leather, wood and stone to create sculptures and installations, Johnson’s works explore the impact of capitalism, climate and technology on how we see and construct ourselves.
Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter, New York.
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Rindon Johnson lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Selected exhibitions include; Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies, SculptureCenter, New York (2021); Away with You, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; This End The Sun, New Museum, New York (both 2020); Circumscribe, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (All 2019); New Black Portraitures, Rhizome, Online; and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (both 2017).
www.chisenhale.org.uk
2020
The 2020 iteration of the Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme invited selected practitioners to consider what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge. For ACTS, our first online presentation programme, we invited a number of artists to consider formats of and approaches to virtual acts.
ACT I (7 Oct) Jenna Collins, Stephen Sutcliffe, Steven Warwick
ACT II (4 Nov) Bill Leslie, Daniel Shanken, Matt Williams + MOBBS
ACT III (2 Dec) Barby Asante, Emma Hart, Joey Ryken
Cymbeline (2020) Stephen Sutcliffe
Glasgow based artist Stephen Sutcliffe creates film collages from an extensive archive of British television, film sound, broadcast images and spoken word recordings which he has been collecting since childhood. Often reflecting on aspects of British culture and identity, the results are melancholic, poetic and satirical amalgams which subtly tease out and critique ideas of class-consciousness and cultural authority. Through an extensive editing process Sutcliffe’s works pitch sound against image to subvert predominant narratives, generating alternative readings through the juxtaposition and synchronisation of visual and aural material.
Stephen Sutcliffe (b.1968, Harrogate) is an artist who lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2019). Talbot Rice Edinburgh, Hepworth Wakefield (2017), Rob Tufnell, London (2015), Tramway, Glasgow (2013) Stills, Edinburgh (2011), Whitechapel Auditorium (2010), Cubitt, London (2009) and Art Now, Light Box, Tate Britain (2005). Group exhibitions include: Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Cubitt, London, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon and Gaudel De Stampa, Paris (2015). In 2018 he participated in the Manchester International Festival in collaboration with Graham Eatough on a film for the Whitworth Gallery, for which they won the Contemporary Arts Society Award.
He has been shortlisted for the Jarman Award twice and in 2012 he won the Margaret Tait Award. This year he has had two books published published, ‘at Fifty’ (Sternberg Press) a monograph and ‘Much Obliged’, (Book Works) a kind of autobiography. He has recently curated an exhibition of items from the Herbert Read Archive at the Brotherton Library in Leeds University with the arts group Pavillion, which is accompanied by a new video, 'City of Dreadful Something'.
Internal Dissolve (2020) Jenna Collins
Jenna Collins’ practice speculates on the impulses sublimated in small extracts of minor-speech and equivalent objects, encouraging them to flourish. Recent work has focused on the technological as a site of political, poetic and philosophical potential. The moving image, in all its current divergent forms (understood as a broad sphere of activity rather than merely a specific media outcome) is one such site, which the artist engages with in reflexive video, sound and text artworks.
Jenna Collins lives and works in London and Yorkshire. Recent solo, group and collaborative exhibitions, screenings and broadcasts include, September Garden with We Are Publication (WAP) at Camden Arts Centre, (2020). The Hold, with WAP at The Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2019). Technologies Of The Self, SUPERLUX, Aberdeen (2019). We.Are.Cut.Up. with WAP, Pratt Institute, New York (2019). Two External Light Sources with Alice Rekab Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin (2018). We Are the Road, London International Film Festival, London (2018). Late Junction, BBC Radio 3 (2018). Cafe OTO, supporting Heretics, London (2018). TLC with 0s+1s, Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba and the Gotland Art Museum, Sweden (2017). The Grand Alliance, Quick Millions, London (2016). Plague of Diagrams, with Rachel Cattle, ICA, London (2015).
Collins holds a PhD (AHRC) from The Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston School of Art and is currently writing, ‘One, 2,3’, a novel for Joan, a new publishing project supporting interdisciplinary artists' writing.
A Year Without Summer (2020) Steven Warwick
A Year Without Summer
When someone makes a statement, one must ensure that it is accurately communicated.
This can be ensured by articulating the sentence slowly, clearly, and at an audible volume
Sometimes a sentence is wilfully obscured, this leads to its meaning being altered.
This wilfully altered sentence could take someone’s words out of context
This sentence out of context could make someone appear to say something they didn’t intended to say
Or worse, they could be accused of saying the opposite of what they first uttered.
This can be construed as a lie or falsehood
This can be construed as a defamatory comment towards an individual or group.
This sentence in term could itself be a legal allegation of defamation of character
Or as it alternatively known, character assassination.
This wilful twisting of a person’s words can create a new perception of character of the now accused, in a positive or negative light.
This new found light or reading of the perceived character could lead to them being ostracized or excommunicated from a group or community.
Without a chance to defend oneself against accusations, the sentence can further alienate the accused inside or outside of a community.
Language and words can be used to convince and influence others in an argument of rhetoric.
In an argument or debate it is important to listen to the other side even if one doesn’t agree with what is being said.
Hyperbolic statements should be contested by the asking of further questions to verify a claim of a consensus of truth.
Without access to a variety of sources, it is difficult to make an informed choice or opinion.
Gossip is a transmission, a currency and an abstraction of a perceived set of behaviour.
Steven Warwick performs a text at a public bench in Berlin which allows sound/speech to refract along the perimeter of the bench in a similar way to the Whispering Gallery at St Paul's Cathedral in London. The Text concerns the viral transmission of language and it's accompanying mutations as it travels.
Steven Warwick is an artist, writer and musician based in Berlin. His visual practice constructs situations with interweaving narratives across various media such as performance, installation, sculpture, plays and films. He also has recently collaborated on projects including the “Mezzanine” musical performance series choreographed with dancers, the artist duo Elevator to Mezzanine which has produced exhibitions, artist books and recently a Western musical titled "Performing America (Iconic America)" . The audiovisual performance- lecture series “Fear Indexing the X- Files” was issued as a book by Primary Information.
Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze and Urbanomic. His visual work has been shown at KW Berlin; SMK, Copenhagen; Steirischer Herbst, Austria; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Lars Friedrich, Berlin ; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn; Beach Office, Berlin ; Balice Hertling, New York. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as "Heatsick", he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals.
Netmancer (2020) Daniel Shanken
Enter .NETMANCER
Please note, NETMANCER opens a new browser window.
Produced with assistance from telega.org
Produced with assistance from telega.org
Using keywords selected by chance, NETMANCER is a browser-based application that locates and plays random YouTube videos in real- time. Within its constructed window, floating videos drift off-screen to be replaced by more videos, a process that can be interrupted and manipulated by the user's mouse. As well as zooming in and spinning the video cluster, the user can unmute and play the audio, solo or in concert, building narratives derived from the search engines that advise YouTube's video hub. With every ‘refresh’ new videos appear, collide and multiply. If there is an overload of calls to YouTube, a video of a burning log appears and replicates instead; it might refresh right away but you may have to come back the next day when YouTube lets us in again.
Daniel Shanken is an artist living and working in Hong Kong and London. He is currently finishing his PhD at the Contemporary Art Research Centre at Kingston University and is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU. He works across disciplines to create installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. His practice examines relationships between technology and cognition, focusing on ‘in-between spaces’ with fluid definitions. He explores ways in which meaning and perception are generated and altered through environmental, cultural, and material interactions. In his work he aims to render these exchanges by examining the possibility of alternative readings and outputs. His work has been exhibited at venues such as ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, V Art Center Shanghai, and Kiasma Helsinki. www.dshanken.com
A4503.17.08.20 (2020) Matt Williams + MOBBS
Matt Williams is a curator and PhD candidate (AHRC) at Manchester School of Art. His ongoing research and curatorial projects exist at the intersection of art and society with an emphasis on contemporary sound art practices.
MOBBS is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London who specialises in sound design and music composition. He presents a monthly show on NTS Radio and has released an extensive body of work via various aliases. He has screened moving-image works as part of Camden Art Centre's offsite public programme at Cork Street Gallery (London), Spazio Maiocchi (Milan) and performed live at Tate Modern (London).
Score for Six Small Sculpture (2020) Bill Leslie
A series of small sculptures are placed in front of the camera. Each object was made in response to household objects used earlier this summer during lockdown, in a video made as part of a Digital Residency with Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center. The aim was to catch the spontaneity and playfulness of the original objects. The result, something like a set of odd instruments and children's toys which are played for the camera, creating an ad hoc choreography of movement and sound.
Bill Leslie puts sculptures in front of cameras to see what can happen. Often small, handmade and playful, his objects and films explore the relationship of sculpture, camera and person. The objects he makes are invitations for play and physical exploration using the camera as an onlooker, instigator and conspirator. A presence which changes the way we think and act towards sculptures.
He has shown work in galleries, project spaces including Tate, Barbican, Wimbledon Art Space, The Royal Standard, Arnolfini and ASC Gallery. He finished a PhD at Kingston School of Art earlier this year titled ‘Good Enough Sculptures: What Happens When Sculptures are Made to be Filmed?’
Coal After Audre (2020) Barby Asante
Barby Asante’s meditation Coal After Audre, has been created in remembrance and reverence of the power of poetry for black women as expressed in Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay Poetry is Not A Luxury. For Lorde poetry is “the quality of light by which we scrutinise our lives”. Coal After Audre reflects on Lorde’s poem Coal from her 1968 First Cities collection and an Alexis Pauline Gumbs quote from her 2020 book Dub: Finding Ceremony, which asks “How do you write a poem about coal?”
Lorde’s Coal takes the metaphor of coal as black fuel to create the and express the words being spoken “from the earth’s inside”. Coal After Audre takes this metaphor and reimagines coal as a much-maligned and rejected fuel, in a moment when words are difficult to find, yet somewhere within the ancient wisdom of coal; within its compressed matter of everyday life, there is light. The light that is attempting to make itself seen through the darkness.
Barby Asante is an artist, curator and researcher. Her artistic practice is concerned with the politics of place, space and the ever-present histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism. With a deep interest in black feminist and decolonial methodologies, Barby embeds within her work notions of collective study, countless ways of knowing and dialogical practices that embrace being together and breathing together. Through collective writing, re-enactment and creating spaces for transformation, ritual and healing Barby has developed a practice of re-collecting, collating, excavating and re-mapping stories and narratives that are often unspoken, invisible or buried with the archival document.
Her recent exhibitions and projects include: Declaration of Independence: For Ama. For Aba. Diaspora Pavilion, Venice, 2017, BALTIC, Gateshead 2019, Bergen Kusthall 2020, Brent 2020: Black Togetherness as Lingua Franca with Amal Alhaag, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 2018 and Baldwin’s Nigger R E L O A D E D, INIVA, London, 2014, Nottingham Contemporary 2015, A Language to Dwell In: International James Baldwin Conference, Paris, 2016, GOMA/ Glasgow International 2018, Somerset House, London 2019.
Online Viewing Room Only (2020) Emma Hart
The lengths some people will go to, to get you to view their online exhibition is unreal. Also, switching from a real life exhibition, to an online viewing room is confusing. What are the demands being made on you now? Is it the sculptures that need your physical presence but can’t have it, or just the artist craving your attention?
This video is made with the documentation of Emma Hart’s exhibition Be Some Body at The Sunday Painter, 2nd Oct - 19th Dec 2020. Due to the changing restrictions brought in to combat the pandemic the exhibition opened and then closed and then opened again. The photographs are by Lewis Ronald.
Emma Hart lives and works in London. In 2016 she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. In 2015 she was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for Visual Art. In 2022 Hart will realise her first permanent sculpture for the public entrance of the UCL East, Pool Street West building, on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Hart received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2013. Hart is a lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders (2020) Joey Ryken
23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders is a video montage examining the artist's drawing series 23 Drawings to Muddle Magic, as well as dictation-drawings made in magical conversation with Antonin Artaud's drawings from some of his many notebooks. The audio is a fragmented montage of trance induction drones composed for drawing-based psychomagical rituals, or what the artist terms 'Octochronoplasmancy'.
This video is intended as an act of enchantment, and a perpetually imminent means to conjure apocalyptic ghosts. However, the artist takes no responsibility for supernatural anomalies that may occur as a result of viewing.
Joey Ryken (b.1976, Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist based in London, UK. Their art practice and academic research explore experimental approaches to occult magic and hallucinatory experience, using drawing, sound, moving image, text, and absurdist performance. Prevailing research themes include drawing as a process of magical invocation; audiovisual media as hallucinatory witness; and performance as abstracted magic ritual, exploring entrancement within music sub/cultures and intercultural subjectivities.
Ryken has recently completed a PhD in Art Research at Kingston School of Art, titled Bodies of Pure Intensity: Drawing as Magical Apparatus. They perform as guitar-noise avatar Me/Mi MôMo Mu, and is a collaborator in the speculative Boricua diaspora art collective De Nada Unidos. Ryken has exhibited, performed and produced events in idiosyncratic locations throughout the US and in the UK, as well as at major arts institutions in the UK, including ArtSway, Camden Arts Centre, Gasworks, Goldsmiths, ICA, Somerset House, and Stanley Picker Gallery.
2019
For 2019, the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolves around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These closely interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, events and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. Central to such enquiries is a sense of rupture that questions established assumptions about the production and reception of artworks. With content increasingly available on-line, the Stanley Picker Public Lectures programme seeks to explore innovative ways for the presentation and dissemination of contemporary art practice.01/05/19 N. Katherine Hayles
“Nonconscious Cognition” and Kathy Acker’s “Language of the Body”
For 2019, the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolves around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These closely interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, event and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. As part of this programme of events the Fine Art Department at Kingston School of Art is delighted to host N. Katherine Hayles’s presentation on “Nonconscious Cognition” and Kathy Acker’s “Language of the Body”.
In “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body,” Acker muses on her experiences in body-building and why it is so difficult for her to write, in “ordinary language,” about those experiences. This talk will explore convergences between her experiences with the “language of the body” and recent neuroscientific research on nonconscious cognition, as developed in Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious(2017). Acker’s exploration of the limits of language hints at the limits of consciousness itself as a representation of the world’s reality and opens a window on why we need art to say the unsayable and represent the unrepresentable.
N. Katherine Hayles, the James B. Duke Professor of Literature Emerita at Duke University and Distinguished Research Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angles, teaches and writes on the relations of literature, science and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries. She has published ten books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, and her research has been recognized by a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Rockefeller Residential Fellowship at Bellagio, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a University of California Presidential Award, among other awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her books have won numerous awards, including the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory in 1998-99 for How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship for Writing Machines. She teaches courses on media theory, experimental fiction, literary and cultural theory, science fiction, and contemporary American fiction. She has won two teaching awards, and has held visiting appointments at Princeton, University of Chicago as the Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor, and Institute for Advanced Studies at Durham University UK, among others. Her most recent book is Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).
01/05/19 Daniel Shanken
INTERNET AUTOSARCOPHAGY (2019)
HD application, infinite duration (excerpt recorded from 3:15 - 3:21pm on 16-03-19)Shown at ICA London, preceeding N. Katherine Hayles Stanley Picker Public Lecture Series.
Internet Autosarcophagy is a moving image platform that executes ongoingrenderings of "real-time" or "live" material with no beginning or end. It acts as a base skeleton to siphon incoming bits of information that self-organize around its frame, such as YouTube video search results and comments, live internet radio, BBC news feeds, local time, Google Image search, Reddit updates, and images from a webcam on the host computer. At its base is an autonomous first person shooter system that switches from a cell phone, displaying live Twitch chat messages, to different weapons, that initiate and react to incoming data using Natural Language Processing through machine learning to gauge the sentiment of the information coming in from its sources. The main character becomes more or less violent depending on the mood of the incoming data determined by the NLP algorithm, which also influences character actions, camera transitions, and the generative environment the characters inhabit, fluctuating continuously with the incoming stream of information.
http://www.dshanken.com/
07/02/19 Steven Warwick
"The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine"
For 2019 the Stanley Picker Public Lecture series revolve around notions of sound, collage and the digital. These strongly interrelated areas of contemporary art practice are at the heart of artistic research at Kingston School of Art and the Fine Art Department in particular. The series of talks, event and screenings will explore the entanglement of sound, collage and the digital as a key preoccupation for contemporary art practice. Central to such enquiries is a sense of rupture that questions established assumptions about the production and reception of artworks. With content increasingly available on-line, the Stanley Picker Public Lectures programme seeks to explore innovative ways for the presentation and dissemination of contemporary art practice.
The first Stanley Picker event of 2019 will be the premiere of a new work by Steven Warwick to be presented at the ICA on 7 February 2019. Warwick’s practice is paradigmatic of an interdisciplinary approach which encompasses, amongst other areas, music, fine art, writing, DJing and theatre. His work is disseminated on a multitude of platforms including records, galleries, the internet, nightclubs and print-publications. Warwick’s is a prime example of contemporary practice that seeks to re-define how we navigate various spaces through experiential events.
The latest iteration of Warwick’s mutating Mezzanine series, ‘The Riddle of the Imp on the Mezzanine’ is part platform as performance, part live event reflecting on how forces of social evils and religious undertones of retribution or redemption manifested themselves in popular culture and folklore, be in the Lincoln Imp (the county symbol of where Warwick grew up), Pinhead from ‘Hellraiser’ or popular literary sleuths such as Poirot.
Steven Warwick is an artist, musician and writer based in Berlin. His solo practice constructs situations and activates a space with interweaving narratives across various media such as performance, installation, sculpture, plays and films. He also has recently collaborated on projects including the “Mezzanine” musical performance series choreographed with dancers, the artist duo Elevator to Mezzanine (with DeForrest Brown Jr) which has produced exhibitions, a look book and recently a Western musical titled "Performing America (Iconic America)" and the audiovisual performance-lecture series “Fear Indexing the X- Files” with writer Nora Khan, recently issued as a book by Primary Information.
Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, Spike and Urbanomic. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as "Heatsick", he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Trouw in Amsterdam; Bergen Konsthall; LAMPO/ Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals. His visual work has been shown at KW Berlin; SMK, Copenhagen; The Modern Institute, Glasgow ; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn; Beach Office, Berlin ; Balice Hertling, New York.
Steven Warwick will participate in Reading International and will present another performance on Saturday, 9th February 2019.
2018
To mark the 70th anniversary of Antonin Artaud’s death, this year’s Stanley Picker Public Lectures will invite artists and writers whose practice is compelled by Artaud’s work. The series of talks is a continuation of the Artaud-themed day of readings and presentations held at Cabinet Gallery on 24 March 2018 and extends the collaboration between Fine Art and its Contemporary Art Research Centre and Kingston’s Visual and Material Culture Research Centre.14/09/18 Dennis Cooper + Zac Farley
A screening of ‘Permanent Green Light’
CABINET London
4th floor, 132 Tyers Street
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
London SE11 5HS
The screening with be preceded by an in person conversation between Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley.
8:00pm Doors open
8:15pm Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley in conversation
9:00pm Screening of Permanent Green Light
PERMANENT GREEN LIGHT, a film by Dennis Cooper & Zac Farley
Producer: Local Films/ Nicolas Breviere
Director of Photography: Michael Salerno
www.cabinet.uk.com
29/05/18 Stephen Sutcliffe
On Tuesday, 29 May artist Stephen Sutcliffe will give a presentation of his film and video work with particular focus on the role of collage for his method of production. Glasgow based artist Stephen Sutcliffe creates film collages from an extensive archive of British television, film sound, broadcast images and spoken word recordings which he has been collecting since childhood. Often reflecting on aspects of British culture and identity, the results are melancholic, poetic and satirical amalgams which subtly tease out and critique ideas of class-consciousness and cultural authority. Through an extensive editing process Sutcliffe’s works pitch sound against image to subvert predominant narratives, generating alternative readings through the juxtaposition and synchronization of visual and aural material.
Stephen Sutcliffe (b.1968, Harrogate) is an artist who lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include, Talbot Rice Edinburgh, Hepworth Wakefield (2017), Rob Tufnell, London (2015), Tramway, Glasgow (2013) Stills, Edinburgh (2011), Whitechapel Auditorium (2010), Cubitt, London (2009) and Art Now, Light Box, Tate Britain (2005). Group exhibitions include: Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, Cubitt, London, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal, Gaudel De Stampa, Paris (2015). In 2018 he participated in the Manchester International Festival by collaborating with Graham Eatough on a film for the Whitworth Gallery, for which they won the Contemporary Arts Society Award. He has been shortlisted for the Jarman Award twice and in 2012 he won the Margaret Tait Award.
17/05/18 Ros Murray
In 1923 Antonin Artaud wrote, ‘The cinema involves a total reversal of values, a complete revolution in optics, perspective and logic.’ Artaud appeared in 23 films, including Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc(1928), Abel Gance's five-and-a-half hour epic Napoléon (1927) and Lucrezia Borgia ;(Lucrèce Borgia) (1935). He wrote several theoretical texts on film, as well as a series of film scenarios, before abandoning the cinema in 1935, writing that it was ‘dead, illusory and fragmented' and 'a closed world, without relation to existence.’ Nonetheless, Artaud's film writing has had a lasting impact, and his onscreen presence permeated his entire body of work. This lecture by Ros Murray explores Artaud's engagement with film, discussing themes of vibration, contagion and shock as they pervade Artaud's acting, gesturing and writing body. It looks in detail at his abandoned film scenarios, gesturing towards a cinema that never came into being.
Ros Murray is a Lecturer in the French Department at King’s College London. Her current book project focuses on feminist film and video in post-1968 France, and she has published articles on the French avant-garde, feminist video, queer film and transgender documentary in Camera Obscura Journal, Film-Philosophy, Feral Feminisms and ;Studies in European Cinema. Her book Antonin Artaud: The Scum of the Soul was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.
2017
In 2017, artists and practitioners Laura Mulvey, Anne Bean, Georgina Starr and Goshka Macuga speak about their work in response to the following:INTUITION
Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without proof, evidence, or conscious reasoning, or without understanding how the knowledge was acquired.[1][2] Different writers give the word "intuition" a great variety of different meanings, ranging from direct access to unconscious knowledge, unconscious cognition, inner sensing, inner insight to unconscious pattern-recognition and the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.[3][4]
FEMININE
Femininity (also called girlishness, womanliness or womanhood) is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Femininity is socially constructed, but made up of both socially-defined and biologically-created factors.[1][2][3] This makes it distinct from the definition of the biological female sex,[4][5] as both males and females can exhibit feminine traits.
07/07/17 Georgina Starr
Moment Memory Monument (2017) is Georgina Starr’s most recent work. It is a large-scale sculptural performance installation where visitors are chosen by 'The Sun' and 'The Moon' and offered a chance to return to a lost memory. This lecture is a guide to the voice of the central time machine known as 'The Sphere’ –while the audience is able to experience the mystery of the temporal shift. Beginning with Starr’s history of encounters with ‘The Voices’, heard and experienced in many forms and from an early age, this lecture attempts to map out the journey revealed by the strange companionship of these fragile and elusive others.
Georgina Starr is a British artist working with video, sound and performance. Her works are known for their complex and fragile emotional narratives, in which she explores female identity, history and fiction to create multi-layered theatrical events and installations. Starr often appears in the artwork, either as a performer or narrator. The inherently speculative truth of memory and biography are endlessly transformed and explored through her work—“Everything happens as if it were experienced twice, as though recorded, listened again and rewritten, once for herself and then again for the stranger inside her.”
Georgina Starr has exhibited widely over the last 25 years in galleries and museums both in the UK and internationally, from the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney and Tate Britain to Kunsthalle Zurich in Switzerland and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A major survey of her work, Hello. Come here. I want you., opens at Frac Franche-Comté in May 2017 and runs until September.
Georgina Starr, Moment Memory Monument, 2017. Photo Henrik Blomqvist
30/06/17 Anne Bean
A central and inspirational figure, Anne Bean, born in Zambia, is intentionally a difficult artist to categorise. Since the early 70’s, this ‘uncatchability’ has been a purposefully created strategy to question style, consistency, career and categorisation itself. Morphing between numerous contexts, materials, media, collaborations, ideologies and manifestations she challenged herself to follow a trajectory that allowed for fluid, direct and dynamic response, resulting in a huge range of solo and collaborative projects as well as curatorial enterprises worldwide. This range is apparent just from work within the last year, including performances at Whitechapel Gallery, Unlimited Action, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, Of Other Spaces, Humber St Gallery, Hull, City of Culture, Tempting Failure Festival, 5 Duets with Strangers, London Shuffle Festival, Waking the Dead(with Richard Wilson), Green Culture, Montenegro and exhibiting in group shows in Photo London, Bank Space Gallery, London, Sidney Nolan Trust, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York, Foundacion Joan Miro, Barcelona, DZIALDOV, Berlin, light/sound installations in Auckland Festival and a solo exhibition and performance/lecture EMIT at Coleman Project Space, Bermondsey.
In Anne's book Autobituary, the writer, Guy Brett captures this scope and reach:
Reading Anne Bean’s CV is like following a continuous performance, a continuous response to the world… a ‘magicification’ of the world. The panoply of places she has worked, times of the day or night, interiors, exteriors, seasons, publics, materials, concepts, tools, is astonishing: all shifting but all attuned to unique situation.
Anne Bean, Infinity in the Palm of my Hand. East Side tattoo parlour. Photo: Marketa Luscacova
22/06/17 Goshka Macuga
For this event, Goshka Macugainvites professors Nicky Claytonand Kathryn Abelto discuss memory and cognition from a scientific perspective, opening up questions about the relationship between how things are, how we perceive them to be and how we remember them – ultimately how cognition and memory interact to form individual and collective human knowledge. Historicising and visualizing connections between science, philosophy and new technologies, Macuga’s works are the culmination of lengthy, in-depth research activities, often carried out in dialogue with members of the scientific community. Memory and knowledge are topics of great relevance for Macuga’s artistic practice, which is often takes on the roles of an artist, curator, collector, researcher and exhibition designer. Many of her projects over the years have reflected on the experience of knowledge and the fundamental questions of how humans categorise material and information, often challenging interpretations of the validity of human perspective, especially since the fast evolution of artificial intelligence.
Goshka Macugawas born in Warsaw and lives in London. She works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, photography, architecture and design. Her artistic practice is often referred to as taking on the roles of an artists, curator, collector, researcher and exhibition designer. Her recent solo shows include To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scrollat Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016), Time as Fabricat New Museum, New York (2016), and Now this, is this the end... the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?at Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin (2016).
Nicky Clayton is the Professor of Comparative Cognition in Psychology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and Scientist-in-Residence at Rambert (formerly Ballet Rambert). Together with her tango partner Clive Wilkins, she is the co-founder of The Captured Thought, a science-arts collaboration which explores the subjective nature of memory and its implications for perception and cognition.
Kathryn Abel is (among other things) Professor of Psychological Medicine, European Research Council Science Fellow and Director of the Centre for Women’s Mental Health at the University of Manchester. She works in the NHS as an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist and has been involved with the SICK! Arts Festival since 2010 and with a number of artists and curators considering the nature of the spectator in art and the possible role of art in the evolution of human cognition.
Goshka Macuga, Olympe des Gouges, 2016, Rubber and resin. Courtesy of the artist
24/05/17 Laura Mulvey
Quotation, repetition, cinematic time (and beyond): thinking through some images of motherhood.
In the lecture, Professor Laura Mulvey discusses the privileged relation of film to the representation of time. Not only can it shift between the different temporalities of still and moving images but also, by integrating pre-existing footage into a newly configured text, film can layer time, creating a juxtaposition of a past and a (then ever-receding) present. But now, aided by new technologies, film images are, as never before, migrating from text to text. As always with quotation, the film image cites its origins while simultaneously relating to its new setting, confusing time through repetition and reference.
In order to think through some aspects of these issues, Mulvey uses examples of films that revolve around stories of motherhood and its related iconographies. Each of the films have, in some way or another, reconfigured images that already have a cinematic past or have found an unexpected afterlife, detached from their original settings. The questions raised by form (cinematic temporalities) have no immediate relevance to the questions raised by content (images of motherhood); on the other hand, perhaps they might…
Laura Mulveyis Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989; second edition 2009),Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996; second edition 2013), Citizen Kane (BFI Classics series 1992; second edition 2012) and Death Twenty- four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen includingRiddles of the Sphinx (British Film Institute 1977; DVD publication 2013) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti(Arts Council 1980). With artist/filmmaker Mark Lewis, she has made Disgraced Monuments (Channel 4 1994) and 23 August 2008(2013).
2016
In 2016, Ansel Krut, Nicole Wermers and Joshua Simon, and Sarah Michelson spoke about their approach to making work. 31/05/16 Sarah Michelson
The question is, is making art—and within that, I am a dancemaker—a self-congratulatory redundant practice, or—if there is a real pursuit of the nature of the beast to ground level, knowing there is no ground—a humble service? -Sarah Michelson
Sarah Michelson stays clinging to the ice mountain of dance. She has served as associate director of Movement Research, editor-in-chief of Performance Journal, and is currently an associate curator of dance at The Kitchen.
Whitney Stories: Sarah Michelson from Whitney Museum of American Art on Vimeo.Read more about Sarah's work in her interview with BOMB Magazine.
Photo credit: Annette Yoosefinejaard
10/05/16 Nicole Wermers + Joshua Simon
For the second of the 2016 Stanley Picker Public lectures, artist Nicole Wermers discusses her work and her practice, followed by a discussion by Joshua Simon on neomaterialism and how it might relate to Wermers’ works.
Joshua Simon is the Director and Chief Curator of MoBY – Museums of Bat Yam, Israel. He is a co-founding editor of the literary journal Maayan, of the film journal Maarvon (Western), and of The New & Bad Art Magazine, all published in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. Simon is a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School, New York. His book Neomaterialism was published in 2013 by Sternberg Press, Berlin. He recently edited the monograph Ruti Sela: For the Record(Archive Books, 2015) following the exhibition he curated of the artist’s works which was shown at MoBY and at Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include Factory Fetish(co-curated together with Liang Luscombe) at Westspace, Melbourne, 2015; and the retrospective Roee Rosen: Group Exhibition(co-curated together with Gilad Melzer) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2016, and The Kids Want Communism- a yearlong program of exhibitions at MoBY marking the 99th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Simon is currently working on a book titled Israel-Palestine: The Great Syrian-African Rift.
Nicole Wermers was born in Germany in 1971 and lives and works in London. She graduated from Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany in 1997 before completing her MA in Fine Art at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London, UK in 1999. In 2015 she was nominated for the Turner prize that took place at Tramway in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Infrastruktur, Herald St, London, UK (2015); The London Shape, Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston upon Thames, UK (2014); Manners, site-specific sculpture, Tate Britain, London, UK (2013); Spray, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA (2012); Hôtel Biron, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2011);Masse und Auflösung, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado, USA; Earring, site-specific sculpture, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2006); Chemie, Secession, Vienna, Austria (2005).
Recent group exhibitions include Quiz 2, MUDAM Luxembourg (2016), Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality, Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna, Austria (2015); Überschönheit,Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria (2015); A Singular Form, Secession, Wien, Austria (2014); Villa Massimo Stipendiaten, Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2013); Perspectives On Collage, Photographers Gallery, London, UK (2013); Re-generation, Museo d'Arte Contemporanea (MACRO), Rom, Italy (2012); The New Decor, Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2010), A wavy line is drawn across the middle of the original plans, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2012); Weltempfänger, Galerie der Gegenwart/ Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany (2007); Tate Triennale, Tate Britain, London, UK (2006).
Nicole Wermers, Untitled (snow), 2010. Collaged magazines. 48 x 37.5 cm / 18.8 x 14.7 in. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London
15/03/16 Ansel Krut
On resistance in painting:
“Personally I like the way that paintings can be so non-compliant - that it's in their material nature to behave badly. You could say that paint is resistant; it seems always to want to change to rules, upset the status quo, to resist fixed interpretation.”For the first of the 2016 Stanley Picker lectures, South African artist Ansel Krut discusses his latest series of works, in relation to the theme of ‘resistance’ and the contemporary relevance of flowers.
Dear Pascal
... I have made these paintings in a kind of white heat, throwing myself into painting more completely than I have been able to do for some years ... and I think that it has forced me into something more elemental in my own working practise. Perhaps something more fundamental to myself as an artist. All bar two of the images are of flowers. It is a theme I stumbled into... I have always painted flowers, maybe one or two paintings a year, but this is the first time I have settled on them as a theme for an exhibition. Historically I suppose flowers as a subject tend to be thought of as being slightly domestic, bourgeois, but of course if you look closely at flowers they are incredibly exotic, sometimes they are unbelievably so, almost to the point of seeming extraterrestrial. It is a strange thing for them to be cut and displayed as decoration, tamed as it were. I suppose I try to express this strangeness by juxtaposing them with the strangeness of their containers, vases that resemble bodies, or have something of the body about them. Sometimes the flowers are not in vases but bound together, another kind of forced relationship...
I have painted flowers that have personal meaning for me, some I grew up with in South Africa and some I got to know later.... With one exception I have not felt the need to have the flowers in front of me when I painted them... The 2 paintings that are not of flowers are both of books burning their own content. The idea of books being burned is so freighted and seems to me to touch on something of the current climate of cultural destruction - but that they should be destroying themselves seems even more ramped up and potent. The self-awareness that this implies is shared by the flower paintings, and ...there is l think ... a compelling overlap of interests.
All the best
Ansel
(From an email February 2016)
Ansel Krut (b.1959 Cape Town, South Africa) lives and works in London. Krut completed a BA Fine Art at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (1982), he then attended Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (1982-1983) and received a MA painting from the Royal College of Art, London (1986). Krut was awarded the Abbey Major Scholarship in Painting, British School at Rome (1986-1987). From 2006-2015 Krut was a Lecturer in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London and from 2005-2007 he was a Drawing Fellow at Wimbledon College of Art, London and Artist–lecturer at The National Gallery, London. Krut's recent solo exhibtions include Verbatim, Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, UK (2014); Ansel Krut, Modern Art, London (2014); Ansel Krut, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA (2013); Ansel Krut, Kade, Amersfoort, The Netherlands, invited by Robbert Roos (2011); Ansel Krut (solo presentation), The Armory Show (2011); Ansel Krut, Modern Art, London (2010). His recent group exhibitions include The Violet Crab at DRAF, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London (2015); Feels Like Heaven, Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv (2014); Live and Let Die, Modern Art, London (2014); The Tyranny of Grammar curated by John Strutton at Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton (2011); Art Basel Miami Beach, Modern Art (2010).
Photo credit: Ansel Krut, Roses, 2016. Oil on canvas. 130 x 110 c
16/06/15 Doug Ashford
Doug Ashford is a teacher, artist and writer. He is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art where he has taught three-dimensional design, sculpture, public art and theory seminars since 1989.
In 1981, Ashford became a member of the artists’ collective Group Material, his principal art practice until 1996. Group Material produced over fifty exhibitions and public projects internationally, using museums and other public spaces as cultural arenas in which audiences were invited to imagine democratic forms. Prominent in this history are the exhibitions: The Castle(documenta 8, Kassel, Germany, 1987), Democracy(The Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988) and AIDS Timeline(The Berkeley Art Museum 1989, Wadsworth Atheneum, 1990, The Whitney Museum, 1991). Group Material’s work in exhibition production, public cultural display, and the aesthetic mobilization of politics continue to affect the world of visual culture and other disciplines.
Since 1996, Ashford has gone on to make paintings, produce exhibitions and publish articles independently, with his creative labor primarily located in the classroom. His most recent publication is Who Cares(Creative Time, 2006), a book project built from a series of conversations between Ashford and an assembly of other cultural practitioners on public expression, beauty, and ethics. Recent exhibitions of paintings include the Sharjah Biennial 10, (2011) and Abstract Possible, Malmo Konsthall; Museo Tamayo and other locations (2010-12) and dOCUMENTA 13(2012). A collection of essays, Doug Ashford: Writings and Conversation, (Mousse Publishing, 2013), was published on the occasion of his retrospective exhibition at the Grazer Kunstverein.
Doug Ashford, NY Times 9.12.11, 2014
03/06/15 Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk (born 1967) is a British-born, international artist. His installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. Turk uses his signature as a recurrent motif through which to explore the way an artist's mark can embody aesthetic and commercial value.
In 1991, the Royal College of Art refused Turk a degree on the basis that his final show, Cave, consisted of a whitewashed studio space containing only a blue heritage plaque commemorating his presence ‘Gavin Turk worked here 1989-91'. Instantly gaining notoriety through this installation, Turk was spotted by Charles Saatchi and has since been exhibited by many major galleries and museums throughout the world.
Turk's work has been included in many seminal exhibitions including the ground-breaking POP LIFEat Tate Modern as well as the Venice Biennale 2009, the 46th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul in 1999; Material Culture, Hayward Gallery, London in 1998 and Sensation: Young British Artistsfrom the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, Saatchi Collection, London in 1995.
19/05/15 Sophie von Hellermann
Born in 1975 in Munich, Sophie von Hellermann lives and works in London. She studied at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf and the Royal College of Art, London. Her subject matter ranges from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heightsto Einstein’s revolutionary physics to the life of Nico from The Velvet Underground.
She portrays these subjects with the same token lightness, blurring public fable with romantic vision. In von Hellermann’s works, personal narratives and fantasies are the product of desire and partial perceptions, bleeding into one another within a figuration characterised by ambiguous moments and abstract spaces.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Firstsite, Colchester (2013); Le Consortium, Dijon (with Josh Smith) (2009); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2009); Vilma Gold, London (2008); Greene Naftali, New York (2007); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2006); Neuer Aachen Kunstverein, Aachen (2006) and Patrick De Brock Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2006). Sophie von Hellermann is represented by Vilma Gold, London, Galerie Hussenot, Paris, Greene Naftali, New York, and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles.
Sophie von Hellermann, Katherine, 2015
12/05/15 Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie(born 1934, Kent, UK) lives and works in Kent. Wylie went to Folkestone and Dover School of Art, 1952–1956 and later attained a postgraduate degree in Painting from the Royal Academy Schools London, 1979–1981. Wylie’s imagery references current affairs and the media, as well as a diverse range of sources including ancient wall paintings, art history and film, celebrity culture, even football. She predominantly paints on large un-stretched, un-primed canvases, working on a number of paintings simultaneously. In May 2014, Wylie exhibited new and recent work at Tate Britain and in 2010 she was included in the Women to Watch exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, which promotes underrepresented and overlooked female artists. Wylie’s work will also be featured in the 2015 Venice Biennale, a group inclusion (with Andy Wahol) in the Azerbaijan pavilion.
Selected solo exhibitions include Rose Wylie, Seoul Museum, Seoul, (2014), a major retrospective at the Jerwood Gallery, Hastings, Big Boys Sit in the Front (2012); Rosemount (2011), Regina Gallery, Moscow; What with What (2010), Thomas Erben Gallery, New York and Film Notes(2010), Union Gallery, London. Wylie is represented in numerous public collections nationally and internationally and is represented by Regina Gallery, London/Moscow, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York and Union Gallery, London.
Rose Wylie, Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win...), 2015
23/05/14 Fiona Banner
Fiona Banner lives and works in London. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002 and her installation Harrier and Jaguar, for which she placed two fighter planes in the neo-classical Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, was in 2010.
The artist’s work centres on the problems and possibilities of language, both written and metaphorical. From her ‘wordscapes’ to her use of found and transformed military aircraft, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing a complete cycle of intimacy, attraction and alienation.
Publishing, in the broadest sense, is at the heart of her practice. In 1997 she started working under the title of The Vanity Press. Under this imprint she has published books, objects, and performances.
Banner has exhibited widely in Europe and America. Her work is represented in many collections in the UK and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Arts Council of England, Tate Gallery, London and the Walker Art Gallery, Minneapolis.
Future projects include solo exhibitions at PEER, London (June 2014) and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, (July 2014).
16/05/14 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b. 1973, London) is a British artist whose practice intertwines performance, sculpture, painting, installation and video. Chetwynd’s performances and videos harness elements of folk plays, street spectacles, music videos and surrealist cinema. They generally employ troupes of performers—friends and relatives of the artist—and feature handmade costumes and props. Through meandering, improvisatory and often burlesque dramas, she has ranged across a panoramic range of subjects. Chetwynd’s performances strike a darkly carnivalesque note, and tread an ambiguous line between melodrama, arcane ritual, and pop-cultural spoof.
The artist was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012. Major performances include The Green Room(Nottingham Contemporary, 2014), Home Made Tasers (New Museum, New York, 2011-12), The Visionary Vineyard: Dreaming of Free Energy(Hayward Gallery, London, 2011, part of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet), and A Tax Haven Run By Women(Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, London, 2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Help! I’m trapped in a Muzuzah Factory(Le Consortium, Dijon, France, 2008) and Spartacus Chetywnd(Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland, 2007). Forthcoming solo presentations include those at Studio Voltaire, London, CCA Glasgow, and Cricoteka: Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor, Poland. lives and works in London. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002 and her installation Harrier and Jaguar, for which she placed two fighter planes in the neo-classical Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, was in 2010.
09/05/14 Katrin Plavcak
Katrin Plavcak was born in Gütersloh, Germany in 1970 and was raised in Zeltweg, Austria. The artist graduated from the Federal Academy for Social Work in Vienna in 1995 and from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1999, after which she spent several study periods abroad in Africa, the United States and China. She was guest lecturer in painting and graphic arts in Ursula Hübner’s class at the Linz University of Arts and Industrial Design, and taught in Antje Majewski’s classes at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. Painting stands at the centre of the artist’s practice. In her exhibitions, images and objects exist in dialogue with one another as if they are one work. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Solo exhibitions include Gallery Mezzanin (Vienna, 2014), Croxhapox (Ghent, 2013), Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri (Seggiano, Italy 2013), Dispari & Dispari Project (Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2012), Kavi Gupta (Berlin, 2012), Österreichisches Kulturforum (Prague, 2012), Städtische Galerie (Waldkraiburg, 2011), Galerie Mezzanin (Vienna, 2011), Secession (Vienna, 2009), after the butcher (Berlin, 2008).
02/05/14 Stephan Dillemuth
Stephan Dillemuth sees art and its distinct qualities as a tool for research and critical reflection of the circumstances of contemporary life. With its inherent methods of reflection, analysis, and experimentation, art, he believes, creates beauty, but it also has the potential to change society. His inquiry into recent changes in the idea of the public sphere takes place against the backdrop of our globalised, localised and fragmented publics. Here we can see historical trajectories of liberation, e.g. those of bohemia, lebensreform and self-expression intersecting with new technologies of surveillance and control in order to establish a new ideology of 'freedom' as a totalitarian rule. What are the conflicts at hand?
Stephan Dillemuth teaches at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts and he has shown all over the world including Bergen Assembly (Bergen, 2013), Secession (Vienna, 2012), Manifesta 8 (Murcia, 2010), Transmission Gallery (Glasgow, 2010), Galerie für Landschaftskunst (Hamburg, 2009), Reena Spaulings Fine Art (2008), Galerie Christian Nagel (Köln, 2007), American Fine Arts, Co., (New York, 2000), Friesenwall 120 (1990-1994), Sommerakademie Kunstverein München (Munich, 1990) and UTV (1995-1997). was born in Gütersloh, Germany in 1970 and was raised in Zeltweg, Austria. The artist graduated from the Federal Academy for Social Work in Vienna in 1995 and from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1999, after which she spent several study periods abroad in Africa, the United States and China. She was guest lecturer in painting and graphic arts in Ursula Hübner’s class at the Linz University of Arts and Industrial Design, and taught in Antje Majewski’s classes at the Berlin-Weissensee Art Academy and the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel. Painting stands at the centre of the artist’s practice. In her exhibitions, images and objects exist in dialogue with one another as if they are one work. She currently lives and works in Berlin.
Solo exhibitions include Gallery Mezzanin (Vienna, 2014), Croxhapox (Ghent, 2013), Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri (Seggiano, Italy 2013), Dispari & Dispari Project (Reggio Emilia, Italy, 2012), Kavi Gupta (Berlin, 2012), Österreichisches Kulturforum (Prague, 2012), Städtische Galerie (Waldkraiburg, 2011), Galerie Mezzanin (Vienna, 2011), Secession (Vienna, 2009), after the butcher (Berlin, 2008).
2010
SEX
11/03/10 Cosey Fanni Tutti + Andrew Wheatley
Legendary performer and musician with COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Chris & Cosey in conversation with Andrew Wheatley (Cabinet Gallery)
Publication: ISBN 0956378218
MAGICK
18/03/10 David Burrows, Andy Sharp + John Cussans
David Burrows (Plastique Fantastique, Andy Sharp (English Heretic) and John Cussans (Artist & Writer)discuss art and non-conformist magick, chaos magic, ritual and performance, creative occultism, and schizo-analysis in relation to their own work and that of other artists such as the Surrealists, William Burroughs, Robert Smithson and Austin Osman Spare.
Publication: ISBN 0956378226
UTOPIA
25/03/10 Chad McCail + Esther Leslie
Chad McCail (artist) and Esther Leslie (theorist) on visualized utopias, idealistic collectivist visions of freedom and equality, the authoritarian nature of propaganda, the links between sexual repression, violence and obedience, and the psychoanalytic theories of Wilhelm Reich.
Publication: ISBN 0956378234
MONEY
01/04/10 Anthony Davies, Benedict Seymour + Ian Hunt
Anthony Davies (writer & organiser), Benedict Seymour (Frieze & Mute) chaired by Ian Hunt (art critic) discuss art and its links to finance in the context of global economic meltdown: corporate sponsorship, speculative investment, and the un-productive forces of capital.
Publication: ISBN 0956378200