The history of painting will be explored in a new exhibition of four contemporary artists whose work broadens and challenges our understanding of the traditional medium. All Men By Nature Desire to Know – at Bonington Gallery from Friday 13 January to Friday 17 February – will present a variety of works which examine the evolution of the art form and reflect how it’s been influenced over time. The exhibition – curated by Nottingham-based artist Joshua Lockwood – features works by Stefania Batoeva, Flora Klein, Audrey Reynolds and Alan Michael. There will be an accompanying text by Rachal Bradley.
“Painting is the world’s oldest art form and hasn’t died out by any means,” says Josh. “It has changed considerably through history and is used in different ways today than used to be. Today there are many ways to create an image, instantly and with more simplicity than by painting. Contemporary painters adopt these new modes of image making to inform their painting, opening up dialogues of their position within the present.
“Technological development, such as photography and more, has made painting more indefinite, allowing the movement of painting towards abstract art, transgressing Western painting historically of being the art of representation.
“Painting is quite a difficult medium as it demands your full attention. You can look at a painting for five seconds or hours in the action of analysis. As such it can be hard for viewers to unpack for we are used to seeing imagery taken through a lens.
“This exhibition brings together four contemporary practitioners who are working today, adding to the continuing narrative of the medium of painting. Influences from the past are absorbed and rejected creating a fresh reality for each painting.”
Here is a selection of artists and their works for our exhibition All Men By Nature Desire to Know
Stefania Batoeva (b. 1981 Sofia, Bulgaria) is a London-based artist who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2014. Her paintings cross between the traditional form of painting and sculpture – often created as site specific work.
Batoeva’s work also blurs the line between abstract and figure-based painting, exploring ideas around the subconscious and memory.
The paintings are difficult to categorise – as Batoeva captures moments in vivid colours which feel similar to distant memories; almost-recognisable figures obscured by heavy brush-strokes, smears and scratch – or the figures themselves represented through loose brush-stokes themselves, almost disappearing into the background.
Stefania will be producing new works specifically for All Men By Nature Desire To Know. Find out more:
Recent solo exhibitions include:
Recent group exhibitions include:
Audrey Reynolds lives and works in London and Folkestone, and studied at Bath College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art, London.
Reynolds’ work is a mix of sculpture, installation and painting – all of which incorporate seemingly random objects and materials including modelling clay and household paints, as well as fitted carpets, ribbons and brass letters.
Layers of paint are built up and scratched away, with the found objects embedded into the surface of double-sided paintings, creating sparse but carefully arranged compositions. On the other hand, installations of rugs and carpets blur the line between a functional object and an artwork. In her writing, Reynolds exposes fragments of everyday life, reflecting on the ordinary before slipping into more abstract passages where it isn’t clear quite who or what is being written about, while still conveying a sense of something personal… in a way, something quite similar to her paintings.
Audrey will be producing new works specifically for All Men By Nature Desire To Know.
Solo exhibitions include:
A collection of her writing will be published by AkermanDaly in Spring 2017.
Flora Klein was born in 1988 Bern, Switzerland, she currently lives and works in Berlin. She Graduated with a BA in Fine Arts at ECAL, Lausanne in 2013.
Layers of acrylics are used to build up abstract blocks of colour with contrasting strands spreading across the top of the base layers like ribbons. Although Klein’s work is easy to identify in style (the paintings often share a palette of bold oranges, browns and reds, and recurring lines and shapes can also be found between the works), none of the works have a clear subject or even a main focal point.
As a result, a lot of the meaning is left up to the viewer – the paintings don’t immediately suggest a clear emotion, are neither masculine or feminine, and the titles don’t give many clues either.
Find out more about Flora’s recent exhibitions:
For this exhibition, Flora will be showing new works which have not been seen in the UK before.
Alan Michael was born in 1967 in Paisley, Scotland, he now lives and works in London.
Michael’s paintings are often photorealistic renderings of everyday objects, taken from obscure reference photos – or film stills as is the case with his latest work included in All Men By Nature Desire To Know.
The other side to Michael’s work includes text-based paintings which also borrow from varied reference points – including brand names and pop culture references – as well as referring to other artworks and art movements.
All of Michael’s work seems to hone in on meticulous details, but the meaning behind the paintings is harder to pin down. The mix of text and imagery sometimes seem to be at odds with each other, or at least have little obvious links. Still, the works draw the viewer in; inviting you to try and unpick them and the intentions of the painter.
Alan Michael has produced new works specifically for All Men By Nature Desire To Know. Here are a couple of sneak peeks:
Recent solo exhibitions include:
Recent group exhibitions include:
Ahead of the preview of All Men By Nature Desire To Know next Thursday, check out some install shots for a sneak peek at the new work in the show.
As part of Krísis, artists Annie and Alessandra of Something Human interviewed many of the artists involved with the exhibition. Bellow you can find a selection of these interviews.
28 November 2016
As part of Krísis,Tuan Mami and Boedi Widjaja reflect on the state of ‘crisis’ in relation to movement in liminal spaces via their new performances and artworks.
Something Human: Both of you are visual artists and performers whose work utilise a form of ritual or “processual” approach that invites the audience to engage with the works. What does this process mean to your practice, and why do you seek to engage audiences with it?
Boedi Widjaja: Process means to me, first of all, a way to get into a dialectical state of mind. It is about finding unusual connections, thoughts and ideas out of conflicts, contradictions and contrasts. A good process tends to suggest new paths for navigating opposing histories and contexts. Process may be described as a series of methods that generate connective material, enabling forms, ideas or expressions to be made out of newly found relations between subjects. Process is also a space that the audience can enter, to experience the dialectical tensions that make up an artwork.
Tuan Mami: Actually, in my old works, I have used a sort of ritual setup or ritual approach but in something more like a normal daily activity. For example, I invited audience members to sit with me one by one in a private space and collaborate in sort of celebration for our shared moment, or I invited 100 old ladies to visit an art opening to create a shared moment of exploration. But recently I am working more with ritual as part of mythology, to present the relationship between environment/object which is closely intertwined with the relationship between human and nature in the world, where one could perceive on a physical level as well as that which exists in the imagination. For me, ritual is a sort of special moment or environment when I could focus on the meaning of my art, it is also the oldest form for our art. I get a lot of feeling in experiencing through the ritual form, me-my work-the audience we are all in the same level/same journey of experiencing the subject/object.
SH: You both hail from Vietnam and Singapore respectively, and Boedi, you also have a personal and professional relationship to Indonesia. These countries have witnessed different periods and outbursts of internal political conflict and debate within its borders, and are situated within same region that has recently seen an escalation of political tension. How do you think your practices address the recent socio-political issues?
BW: Southeast Asia is a diverse and politically complex region. The twentieth century saw countries in the region gaining independence hence nationalistic politics is de facto. The region continues to ring with echoes from the Cold War, as seen in the tension at ASEAN’s meeting with China over the South China Sea, America’s drive for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the U.S lifting its ban on weapon sales to Vietnam and Philippines’ rhetorical leaning towards China.
A series of works that I am currently developing is Imaginary Homeland—one that looks at Indonesian political history since the nation’s independence in 1945. The series explores nationalism, identity and memory, through mass media imagery. It inevitably looks at Indonesian military history, and how the Cold War has impacted the personal narratives of so many.
TM: My works are based on research, which takes place on a certain topic or in an area between human and its reactions, between daily life and imagination, so I look at socio-political matters as a central point in my exploration. But I get into the issues in indirect way. I often adapt the ephemeral senses to create a moment, which presents an ambiguous reality, the one you could experience by yourself by traveling between the past-present-and the future. I see socio-political matters as basic human matters, looking at it as a researcher to review or reveal in a poetic dialogue.
SH: For this exhibition you have been invited to reflect on the notion of ‘crisis’. Could you please tell us more about how your artworks and performances reflect on this condition?
BW: I am presenting 2 works in Krisis: (Post) Path.7, New Ground—a documentation of Path.7, New Ground, a live art work that I performed in London in 2015—and Imaginary Homeland: 谢谢你的爱, a new live art work.
Path.7, New Ground indirectly addressed the migrant crisis in Europe, as I contemplated my own diasporic experience. I walked from east London to the Barbican, lugging a 30kg bag of lump chalk with a 1.5m helium balloon tethered to me, culminating in a performance by the Barbican lake. The work was visceral—the weight of the chalk and the balloon’s movement resisting my forward trajectory, speaking of the weight of motherland and the disorienting force of nostalgia. (Post) Path.7, New Ground looks at the abstraction effect that media has when representing a live event. I wanted to draw out the camera—the primary device that tracked my durational walk and through which we comprehend all forms of crisis today. I did this by arranging individual frames from the documentation videos, cropped tightly around the balloon’s movement, in a regular grid.
Imaginary Homeland: 谢谢你的爱 is a new work from a series that looks at the impact of mass media images on memories and personal narratives. The work is about the dialectics between image and corporeality—bodily movement complicating the image surface even as the latter choreographs the former.
TM: I’ve been invited to make a second chapter of my last research-based project which I had been working on in the area between the Cambodian and Vietnamese border. I had researched about the long controversial history of the relationship between the two countries and also the conflicts that exist nowadays. For the ‘Krisis’ exhibition, I’m going to create an ambiguous notion of the “Border”. On one hand, it is a construct based on human forces that create man-made borders for protection, which in turn, becomes a threat. On the other hand, it is about human instinct and its memory. Since border issues are getting more intense in the world recently, my work is an ironic voice to twist the matters into a playful game or a ritual moment where everyone could join in to de-construct the material issue into an ephemeral moment of peace and respect for all kinds of people and nature. I want to create an experience for people go through time, space and sharing together of the imagination of freedom geographically and spiritually.
Images credits: Boedi Widjaja and Tuan Mami
25 October 2016
Something Human: As an artist who has lived and worked in the UK and Singapore, and have had the experience of both the European and Southeast Asian regions, what are your thoughts on the recent states of crisis in both places, and as an artist, how has this impacted your practice?
Nicola Anthony: The current moment in time seems to be on a precipice, whether we look at things socio-politically, environmentally, or on a very human level; our time is certainly one filled with crisis. There are so many troubling things in our world, and yet people go on: trying to adapt, many suffering, and others denying. This is a classic reaction to trauma – on an individual or mass level. Somehow human beings are wired to continue through adversity however they can, when instead we logically could be telling ourselves (as the Auden poem goes):
“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun”
Through my artwork, I do not try to make political or cultural statements. Instead, I try to get to the essence of the issues, and somehow imbue my artwork with something of that feeling, that experience of that moment or emotion.
SH: For the Krísis exhibition, you will show 50 skies : 50 scars, a large 6 metre aerial installation, as a reflection on the notion of ‘crisis’. Could you please tell us more about how your artwork reflects on this condition?
NA: Crisis is ineffable. It is frequently repressed or erased from our minds as our meddlesome brains clear paths to allow us to move forward. It is not a condition which can be summed up neatly. It is varied, difficult, and individual. After much consideration I decided to find a symbolic way to blend together the elements which can be experienced during crises – ruptures, scars, a cycle of time and duration, resulting in the repetition and normalisation of crisis.
Waving my arms and my nostrils around, I took my time to use my paper burning technique, for which I use incense sticks. (These to me are already heavily scented with ideas of spirituality, prayers, or simply freedom and hope). With this method I created ‘scars’ on the paper skin rather than writing a story as one might usually do on chinese calligraphy paper.
In some cultures, burning is the way to send offerings to the Gods or to the dead. In other cultures burning is synonymous with destruction and loss.
To hint towards time, I created the scars to exist in a linear progression, suspended overhead with their blue colour referencing the sky. I wanted to go a step further and actually capture some of the sky, as well as the movements of the sun (so significant in the daily cycle, the passing of time). To do this I crafted sunlight lenses inside the artwork, which filter beams of light through the glass window to create a shimmering patina on the paper surface.
SH: 50 skies : 50 scars is described as hand-burned incense drawing, watercolour ink on calligraphy paper, charred paper, charcoal, embroidery hoops and handmade sunlight lenses. In your work, you frequently use techniques that are time-consuming, delicate and require prolonged periods of concentration, could you please tell us why you are drawn to create work with this kind of painstaking process?
NA: That is a good question and one that I frequently ask myself… I can say with certainty that I am drawn to that working process: it’s not a conscious decision, more an instinctive one. I am constantly looking to bring meaning and significance to my materials and artworks. I feel that they should undergo a transformation whilst becoming an artwork – and in some cases the artist goes through a transformative process too. Even though my art is most often sculptural, there is a big element of performance in what happens behind the scenes in the ‘the making of’.
The burning technique takes patience, can result in loosing sections of drawing, setting my hair on fire, or scorching my wooden desk. The flame needs to be controlled. But the process of burning the paper skin can be almost meditative: synchronising with the breath; and filling the art studio with the redolent scent of sacred spaces; controlling the perforations.
Image credit: Nicola Anthony
21 October 2016
On Friday 28 October, as part of the Krísis public programme, there will be a one-day symposiumtitled Krísis: critical interventions organised by Prof Duncan Higgins, Dr Roy Smith and Dr Anna Ball (Nottingham Trent University) in collaboration with Something Human. The symposium brings the international network of artistic practices and narratives from the Krísis exhibition and public programme into a day of talks, presentations and performative lectures.
Something Human: The state of ‘crisis’ and its corresponding terminologies have certainly entered our common vocabulary in the last decade. With your research interests in the diverse fields of visual arts and the social sciences, how have you been thinking about this contemporary state?
Duncan Higgins: For me ‘crisis’ is always going to be a very relative question, ‘crisis’ in relation to what? Where? When? Who? And how? My own motivation is to try and avoid any generalisation of such issues; this question feels too big without more context. In respect to research, education, visual arts and social science I suspect each generation has always indicated or described ‘crisis’ as a condition of practice. For example, in my experience the art school has always described itself to be in a state of ‘crisis’ for one reason or another and not always out of necessity.
Roy Smith: ‘Crisis – what crisis?’ highlights both the widespread use of the term, plus the fact that what may be perceived as a crisis scenario for some may be barely noticeable to others. Media reports of numerous humanitarian crises, environmental crises, refugee crises et cetera run the risk of producing what has been described as ‘compassion fatigue’. With the huge expansion of media outlets, including increased use of social media and citizen reporting, audiences are at risk of feeling overwhelmed and disempowered by the enormity of these issues. Whilst not underestimating the situation for those directly impacted by crises, for example in Aleppo or Haiti, for many observers these are issues that are happening in faraway places and with little or no immediately apparent consequence for their daily lives. Such an attitude appears, for some, to be reinforced by a retreat from internationalism and a global outlook to more inward-looking attitudes of ‘taking back control’, as demonstrated in the recent EU referendum debates and the current rhetoric of the Donald Trump campaign.
Anna Ball: My current research is concerned with creative representations of refugee experience, particularly in the context of the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe. Today, refugees from Afghanistan and Syria comprise some of the largest populations of those fleeing violence and terror, but their encounter with Europe is itself a site of crisis: a point of contact at which the forms of biopower and necropolitics exerted by the State, and by more illicit sources of power – human traffickers, for example – render those subjects supremely vulnerable. In turn, the encounter with European subjects – one which is often mediated (and reduced) by visual representation in the media – becomes a site of disjunctive and often alienating exchange, whereby the humanity of those seeking refuge is racialized and politicised in ways that are dehumanising and unjust.
Within my current research, I’m particularly interested in mobilising a materialist, corporeal and haptic critical lens that pays attention to the suffering, feeling, tangible, beating body – particularly the bodies of women and children, which are often reduced (visually and in other representational terms) to figures of the radical subaltern, though they in fact experience very particular modes of biopower and bodily suffering. (Women’s ‘flights’ may, for example, have been prompted by forms of sexual violence or indeed maternal vulnerability that may drive them to seek refuge.)
I’m interested, therefore, in how intimate, personal crises, experienced in tangible, material terms, can be represented and felt against the vast backdrop of dehumanising political crisis that currently marks the contemporary Middle Eastern refugee crisis in Europe. My project is a drive towards recovering the presence of the human, and humanity, in terms that are necessarily attentive to smallness and individuality.
From an Arts and Humanities / Social Sciences perspective it is clear that the impacts of crises are felt and experienced very differently by various groups and individuals. In part this can be determined by the randomness of being born in a particular part of the planet, into differing socio-economic and cultural contexts where attitudes towards race, class, gender, sexuality, age or numerous other factors may be relevant to how likely you are to be involved in a crisis situation. This also relates to what support mechanisms are available to you and how resilient you and those around you are to manage and survive a crisis. Increasingly the factors that will determine how a crisis is addressed and, hopefully, resolved are often beyond the control and agency of those at most risk from such crises. The nature of many processes of globalisation means that they bypass local and even national authorities. Trans-boundary pollution and the free-flowing of capital around the world is now more representative of contemporary life than the ongoing state-centrism being focused on by most mainstream media outlets and, understandably, national politicians. At one level the ‘taking back control’ agenda mentioned above can be seen as a direct reaction to certain aspects of globalisation and the sense that they are the cause of many locally experienced problems. However, the risk of reverting to such narrow-minded worldviews is that this emphasizes difference rather than commonality.
The challenge for Humanities / Social Science disciplines, and related fields of the visual arts, is to acknowledge andcelebrate what makes individuals and communities different while at the same time showing that difference does not mean opposition. It has been said that crises can bring out the best in people and communities. Maybe so, but this is more likely to be the case when they can see commonalities between them. Taking back control to meet the many crises that are evident around the world is something to be welcomed. The danger is that by thinking and acting only at the local level this will overlook, and probably exacerbate, the international and global processes that are leading to the very crises that these locally-determined policies and actions are trying to address.
SH: The Krísis exhibition and public programme, which is a culmination of the MOVE W I T H (OUT) project that took place from 2013-2016, aim to unravel multiple perspectives on the notion of crisis and possible futures. Why did you think this project and its themes were relevant to Nottingham?
DH: What Something Human have set out for the exhibition and programme is I feel a desire and ambition to listen to others and be heard by others, for me this is an essential route of knowledge exchange and for me defines intercultural dialogue. That this is a ‘doing thing’ rather than an ‘owning thing’, where uncertainty and not knowing become creative principles of discovery. For NTU this is essential and consequently it is the creation of new opportunities to see and listen beyond what is known that has the potential to lead to the creation of new knowledge both personally and culturally. For NTU to be a place for creative knowledge exchange is my firm belief and understanding of the fundamental role of universities and art schools to host, facilitate, frame and enable exchange. So to bring the themes, questions, examples and creative practices to NTU and Nottingham is part of a necessary dialogue we all need.
RS: Nottingham is a vibrant multi-cultural city with a long history of engaging with the wider world, not least in terms of the many international students studying here. Yet at the same time the city of Nottingham voted to exit the European Union, albeit by a very small margin. It would be too simplistic to say that those voting for Brexit did so solely due to immigration issues, although mainstream media portray this as one of the key factors in determining voting preferences. Despite the ‘leave’ vote the city is known to be generally welcoming to migrant communities and whenever groups such as the English Defence League have attempted to hold demonstrations in the city they have always been met by much larger counter demonstrations. There are multiple support networks among the many communities that share Nottingham as their home, both newer arrivals and longer-term residents. Resistance to austerity measures and related cuts in public sector spending highlights another potential set of crises, but also creates spaces for creative and positive future visions.
AB: One of the reasons that I find the exhibition to be so pertinent is because it operates at the levels of both the international and the local, and seeks to draw connections between, as well as find specificity within, particular places. In my work, I am interested in trying to recover a vocabulary of ‘small’, personalised experience that is local as well as international in nature. To me, that is indicative of Nottingham as a site of cultural crisis and international exchange. In some senses, Nottingham is no different from any other space: it, like most major cities, has a significant population of refugees and asylum seekers, who render the refugee crisis local, as well as international. What makes Nottingham significant, though, is the network of international and inter-organisational connections that create their own maps and structures of support around this community. The work of the Nottingham Refugee Forum, for example, or Nottingham Beyond Borders, along with the annual Refugee Week events, which often enter into dialogue with organisations such as the universities, the New Art Exchange, Nottingham Contemporary, Five Leaves Bookshop, or the Nottingham Festival of Words, construct crucial sites of personalised, local exchange and encounter that are mobile in temporal and spatial terms. They invite people to engage with alternative maps of crisis-ridden experience and community that also exist within the city, and to engage with them in terms that are affirmative and constructive of solidarity. The central motif of the Move With(out) exhibition – the act of dragging a trunk containing a mobile exhibition within it around the city – in some senses therefore serves as a microcosmic metaphor for so many of the activities that already take place within the city.
SH: The symposium offers a mix of perspectives from academics, artists and activists in order to explore the Krísis exhibition’s themes and encourage a rich dialogue on art as a transformational tool for research on contemporary societal matters. What place do you think art can occupy in relation to academic research?
DH: It is fundamental to academic research.
RS: Various forms of art have long been associated with conveying political messages and assertions of identity, either repressed, struggling or liberated. Just as crises are experienced differently by various stakeholder so is art variously presented and interpreted. The Krisis exhibition and related presentations, performances and discussions offer a striking example of how different disciplines can collaborate and produce multifaceted approached to understanding and commenting on aspects of crises and their potential solutions. As a public exhibition this is also likely to draw in people who might not normally engage with some of the themes and issues raised by the artworks and various media linked to the exhibition.
AB: For me, as a ‘postcolonialist’ who functions in a very interdisciplinary framework, art and visual representation more broadly are powerful tools through which to intervene in dominant modes of ‘knowing’ and ‘seeing’. Thinking about the refugee context specifically, visual media is often employed in a way that seems to offer a reductive immediacy in the way that we access human identity. Even when images incite an extreme emotional response (the photograph of Aylan Kurdi, for example, the little boy fleeing Syria whose body was washed up on a beach in Turkey, prompted international political outcry) their isolated and repeated representation has a tendency to conjure a limited spectrum of ‘types’ of refugee (‘innocent’ or ‘deserving’ refugees) that limit the human complexity of identity and experience.
In stark contrast, more reflective artistic practice has the potential to unsettle and complicate these kinds of immediate media snapshot. I would even venture that the time required to reflect on art, in all its forms – the ambiguity that circulates around it, and the necessity for active, engaged interpretation that sometimes might prove impenetrable or inconclusive, but is necessarily so– operates as a powerful alternative mode of apprehending the individual. It is this kind of slow, considered, deep engagement that I think we need to seek in academic research across the forms – textual as well as visual. It offers a vital counter-discourse to immediate and reductive media discourse in particular, and fosters more intimate dialogues and exchanges as we seek to forge meaning through collective interpretation rather than isolated response. This is why I am particularly excited about the interdisciplinary aspect of the Symposium.
Image credit:
Sama Alshaibi, Al-Tariqah (The path), 2014
Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery
17 October 2016
As part of the Krísis public programme, Collective Creativity will be facilitating a free workshop, titled ‘Surviving Art School’. This is based on the publication of the same name made in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, which will also be launched during the symposium on 28 October 2016.
Something Human: Evan, Raisa, Rudy and Raju – as Collective Creativity, you are an ‘informal non-hierarchal collective space’ that has been formed ‘out of necessity, to carve collaborative space outside of the institutional framework where a specific Black QTIPOC voice and experience could be nurtured’. When did you start your collaboration and how has your work developed so far?
Collective Creativity: Collective Creativity is a group of QTIPOC (Queer, Trans*, Intersex People of Colour) artists who have been working together since 2013. It was initially set up by Raju Rage and Evan Ifekoya, and later extended to Raisa Kabir and Rudy Loewe as a core group with many other participants. We have run roundtable sessions that nurture intergenerational dialogue, conducted extensive research into countless archives and generated discourse in our collective voice that draws from collectivity but also our individual practices, creating a knowledge that responds to legacies and archives of Black British art in the UK through a feminist and anti colonial lens. We do this work by creating a middle ground between lived experience, radical practice and theory and rendering the historical as an encounter in the present, specifically in how our current practices connect to our legacy beyond the white canon, and critically negotiating and navigating institutions and the art industry as queer and/or transgender artists of colour.
SH: You were in Nottingham previously, and you worked in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary. Could you please tell us more about your work in this city and how you think the audience responded to your critical provocations then?
CC: We worked with Nottingham Contemporary in 2015 around the Glen Ligon exhibition ‘Encounters and Collisions’ facilitating a workshop with local art students of colour entitled: Politics of the Art School: Black Arts Movement Then and Now. We also held a panel with key members of the 1980s Black Arts Movement such as Keith Piper, Said Adrus and Claudette Johnson, and ourselves as part of Collective Creativity, offering critical reflections on this history and the contemporary circumstances under which students and other people of colour experience contemporary art school curriculum from the perspectives of QTIPOC creative practice. We engaged in a critical conversation both on the panel and in the workshop and created some textual, oral and visual responses that have been edited into a publication ‘Surviving the Art School’ that will be launched on Oct 28th 2016.
SH: Crisis can be thought of in terms of the personal, societal and institutional. How do you interpret the term ‘crisis’, and how do you think your practice related to the notion of crisis?
Raju Rage: We are truly in a moment of crisis, globally and locally, economically, politically, socially and personally. Whether we are connected to institutions or not, we are impacted by this crisis in every aspect of our lives; what we eat, how we live, how we move around inside and outside our racialised, gendered and classed bodies in the world and how we basically survive on a day-to-day basis. My work creatively responds to this urgency of being in crisis by exploring the body, intimacy and everyday life experience to uncover and unpack in what ways we are impacted in our everyday lives, how we struggle and survive and as an attempt of resistance to the crisis we genuinely face.
Image: Collective Creativity
12 October 2016
The Krísis project brings together two other ongoing Something Human projects: the performance programme, Cross-Cultural Live Art Project (CCLAP) and MOVE W I T H (OUT), the travelling exhibition and performance programme. CCLAP was a three-year project aimed to connect the live art and performance practices of artists from the UK/Europe and Southeast Asia, and MOVE W I T H (OUT) brought its explorations of migration and movement to multiple cities to connect with local artists, who would create new performances in response to its themes and their local topographies.
Artist Lynn Lu worked on the 2015 edition of CCLAP, and Marija Milosevska was the artist for MW Skopje in 2015. We spoke to them separately about the work they will be presenting in Nottingham.
Something Human: Lynn, you brought to the 2015 edition of CCLAP a socially engaged live art intervention built around the notion of care and post-natal depression. This year in Nottingham, you will be responding to the notion of ‘crisis’. How have you approached it? What does crisis mean to you?
Lynn Lu: For the Nottingham exhibition, I will present an interactive installation, a live performance for the opening event, and deliver a performance lecture for the symposium. Reflecting on the current refugee calamity as a starting point, the three separate works explore ideas surrounding migration, nomadism, the attraction of unknown regions, topophilia, and the ‘homing instinct’. In the performance lecture in particular, I examine the impetus for migration across species and the accompanying precariousness. As David Welcome describes in No Way Home (2008), the migrant travels without any knowledge of what may happen to her homeland, or what might await at her destination. . . “ Migration is an act of faith after all, a hardwired belief that there is somewhere to go, and a way to get back”.
SH: Distance, memory and the ephemeral are evoked in your work, ‘The Friction of Distance’. How do you feel these are explored in the stories and journeys of refugees you are bringing into our consciousness, if only briefly?
LL: The Friction of Distance will be a live performance, during which – over the course of several hours – I bring to light the names of perished refugees inscribed on the brittle pages of Homer’s Odyssey.
SH: In your practice, you address human and societal conditions that affect people and community both intimately and in the public sphere. Do you see your work as socially engaged? Do you think art can help during ‘crisis’?
LL: I seek to create experiences that will be personally relevant to my audience, often by using their individual histories and/or the specificities of our shared context as content for the work, and the resulting performances or installations themselves frequently draw my audience out of invisible spectatorship and into active (if absurd) collaboration. So on an intimate level, yes my work tends to be socially engaged. And yes, art – especially during crisis – can absolutely be therapeutic and cathartic.
SH: Marija, you are a visual artist and performer whose work utilises a form of ritual that invites the audience to engage with the works. What does ritual mean to your practice, and why do you seek to engage audiences with it?
Marija Milosevska: Ritual, for me, is the very process of learning and creating through which I get to know the audience with the being of my work through expression of the current/temporal perception of living in the broadest sense, starting from the individual origin and culture, collective heritage, which is then incorporated in a new era of art – filigree. The original manner of fitting the filigree work into the context of tradition found its expression in the cult. The unique value of a work of art is based on the ritual, where the work got its initial and first usable value. My jewellery is the undiscovered in me, part of the ‘collectiveness’. It is a conductor and it is a reaction. It can be an installation or a performance whose completeness is obtained through the contact with the audience.
SH: You hail from Macedonia, where there has been a recent escalation of internal conflicts and precariousness both within its borders and in the context of its related region. How do you think your practices address the recent socio-political issues?
MM: My practice addresses the transformation of the barbed wire and I really want to transform it, not just in the contest of borders but in any kind of its association for separation. In Macedonia, everywhere there are barriers, borders, separation, crisis and the process is continuous and non-stop. We need something to change but we are powerless in the vacuum of space where culmination is looking for the exit. The world is shaking, the earth is opening, but the exit we should seek is inside us, and transforms us into human beings.
SH: For this exhibition you have been invited to reflect on the notion of ‘crisis’. Could you please tell us more about how your artworks and performances reflect on this condition?
MM: It was very challenging for me to make a connection with the theme of ‘crisis’ and my medium of presentation – wire. I create jewellery with the filigree technique. Sometimes the pieces are for someone’s need for protection from crisis or a something to remind us who we are, where we come from, and the impact that we made in society through our behaviour. It is a sign that represents and transitions between what we had been given in the past to keep us, and as what we are today. In my exhibited piece of crisis, the public can see 5 phases of ‘crisis’ and the performance will be the coupling of the transformation of ‘crisis’ through the filigree process of making the pieces of crisis.
8 October 2016
For the Krísis exhibition, we’ve been very interested to look at how the photographic image can depict very different notions of crisis, and then also thinking about how to show the image in different ways within the exhibition.
Something Human: How do you work with the photographic image as a medium? What is your creative process?
John Clang: It is interesting that you ask about the photographic image, rather than photography, as a medium. Photography, to me, is a recording and an archiving process of materials to form my thoughts. What I do next with the materials is my reaction/response to my thoughts. So, in principle, I always work on images created by me, not found images.
Sama Alshaibi: If I’m being honest, I don’t consider the medium first. I am more concerned with what I want to question and then I consider the possibilities of outcomes derived by various mediums. However, I’m quite comfortable with most cameras and the photographic image, or even the moving image (such as video) to aid me in asking such questions. The ideas I’m concerned with are already articulated in a puzzle in their final, visual expression. I’m not providing easy to read photographs to my audiences.
Photographs, as a mean of delivery, are second nature to me, because I have been making them since I was a child. Using the camera, instead of sculpture for example, eliminates irrelevant uncertainties and allows me to concern myself with the pressing issues that motivated me to make the work in the first place. I know how the language of photography operates, but that can be a trap in itself. I often ask myself, how do I remain sincere and authentic to what and who I’m hoping to be in dialogue with through a medium that is second nature to me? It isn’t an easy answer. In Silsila, the change of space and place that were so alien to me was humbling. It wouldn’t allow me to be complacent.
SH: In your works, you depict certain conditions of the world around us. What is your motivation for doing so? What do you think art can achieve?
JC: I’m interested to create a body of works that inform future historians or viewers of the mindset, the thinking process of another human being living in this specific period of time – somewhat similar to those cave drawings that’s being done 30-40,000 years ago.
We have no lack of images nowadays so my focus has always been about the recording of our inner mind rather than our physical world. Art can help us understand and tolerate one another a bit more.
SA: My motivations are simple no matter the complexities in achieving it through art. I’m driven to fight for justice, but I’m not naïve enough believe I could achieve that alone, by any means of struggle, let alone just through my art. But I do believe that artists, through their choices in art making, can strive for a “just” contribution – to bring balance, even within the horrors of the human and social conditions that are part of being alive. Whether through representation, contextualised through a visual argument of why that representation is lacking, or asking the early and meaningful questions society is not ready to address, art always contains the potential to surpass the status quo. It can do more than depict and inform. It can also inspire. It can tap into spaces and possibilities not apparent in the moment of suffering. While many live in conditions in which inequality have devastating effects, even if born from dissimilar causes that result in various suffering, in the end, it is still suffering. My art practice, at its best, is not about me, even if I’m the one that makes the decisions of what to produce. I haven’t produced the conditions we live in, but through my art, I can imagine other conditions and ask my audience to consider that too.
SH: Atmospheric backdrops/landscapes and anonymous humans are referenced in your works presented in the Krísis exhibition. How do you relate to the notion of ‘crisis’ in your practice? How do you think your works address this human and environmental condition?
JC: There are many angles from which to look at crisis. My focus is on ‘internal crisis’ resulting from the changes in our bigger environment, over which we have little control. I am not interested to create work just depicting the issues or crisis in the world. I’m interested in negotiating the nuances in our response to these crises or shifts.
SA: The “faceless” body is a strategy I use in my work to implicate all of our positions and bodies – the universal us – in a dialogue of crisis. Not just me, the artist, but all of us, as stewards of the planet in our current reality and what the future provides/condemns for those who will come after our own moment on earth. ‘Crisis’ could be perceive as a threatening term, but I hope it has the effect of demanding a confrontation with what we must deal with now. Especially the environmental catastrophe that undoubtedly shapes the conditions that humans will face politically and economically, resulting in the social and bodily impact. I ask myself, is it enough to just be aware of a crisis, or represent it through my work? My photographs in this exhibition are relics of testing my own body and its vulnerabilities in communities and physical spaces struggling in crisis. However, I can’t ever represent it in a manner that truly speaks to such difficult circumstances, no matter my favourable intentions. I aspire to communicate effectively with a sensitive audience willing to engage in empathy. The complexities and specificity of any topic addressed in my work is only compelling (by my own standards) if the audience realise it is just as much about them, albeit in a different context. Our environmental circumstances are interrelated, as are our personal ones, and all suffering is in the end, the same.
4 October 2016
Annie: Hello, we are Alessandra and Annie, and we’re Something Human. We’ll be “taking over” the Bonington Gallery blog as we are guest curators for the exhibition Krísis, which opens with a preview on Thursday 27 October 2016. In the following blog posts, we’ll be sharing some insights and reflections from the different artists involved in the project, and also some of our thoughts as we prepare to come up to Nottingham to install and open the show.
First off, a little about who we are. We’re independent curators based in London and we work together in partnership under the rubric of ‘Something Human’. Something Human was started in 2012 as a collective, based on the shared interest in the idea of “movement across borders”, and it sought to create cross-cultural collaborations and conversations with curators, artists, practitioners and thinkers. It was called Something Human because initially, it was a bunch of people from all over the world and we were struggling to find a name that could represent all our different aesthetics, ideas and principles – and somehow, we alighted on ‘something human’ as a commonality – and the name stuck!
Alessandra: I joined Something Human in June 2013 and I was thrilled about the idea of starting to work together on an open and independent platform interested in exploring movement and relationships across boundaries, through a multidisciplinary and experimental approach in collaboration with artists.
Since joining in June 2013 we have worked together on the stopovers of a nomadic project whose finale instalment has now brought us to Nottingham, three years later – the MOVE W I T H (OUT) project. This is a travelling exhibition project with site-specific performance interventions that has now taken place in ten cities: Berlin, London, Rome, Venice, Belgrade, Singapore, Budapest, Skopje, Lisbon and now finally, Nottingham. We’re very grateful for the invitation of Professor Duncan Higgins and Dr Roy Smith at the Nottingham Trent University for inviting us to bring the project to Nottingham.
Annie: Over the different instalments of the MOVE W I T H (OUT) project, we had the privilege of connecting with the artists and arts scenes of different city centres, which led to many deep discussions regarding the arts and the city, and the different socio-political-economic factors as push-pull forces that instigate migrations of people to, from and across cities. As we were making this journey, it also became apparent that larger narratives of crisis were escalating across the world, whether it was the increasing representations of violence and conflict in the media, the humanitarian refugee crisis or social and political tension in different countries. It did make us question – how can art make a difference? Indeed, can art, and therefore, artists and art producers, make a difference?
Alessandra: Working on all the iterations of MOVE W I T H (OUT) made me feel that it has been impossible to avoid the term ‘crisis’. It forcefully entered the public vocabulary as well as my personal one with strength and as a constant presence, such that it was time to deal with it. What better opportunity than co-curating a show and public programme where we can involve artists to help address and respond to it? And if asked “why art?”, I would borrow Boris Groys’s definition of what the avant-garde’s role could be today: ‘Artists do not and cannot predict the future for us but rather demonstrate the transitory character of the present and thus – hopefully – open a way for the new’.
Annie: For Krísis, and indeed for the MOVE W I T H (OUT) project that has led up to this final culmination, we’ve been very fortunate to work with incredible artists from all corners of the world. For Krísis, our artists bring their practices from different national and cultural contexts, which have also been informed by their movements across the global contexts in their work.
They will bring their reflections via very different mediums and forms, from installation to video, photography to performance and participatory interventions. We’re also excited to be working with Professor Higgins and Dr Smith on the symposium where NTU researchers, visiting speakers and artists will all address the theme of the project with their different perspectives.
Alessandra: The invitation we received from NTU and Bonington Gallery to curate the Krísis exhibition and public programme as a final reflection on the MOVE W I T H (OUT) project came at a moment when we really wanted to map the lines of this incredible journey that has been shaping our understanding of both curating in public and private spaces, and the network built of relationships with interesting international art scenes.
Nottingham will be an incredible opportunity to share our experiences and the practices of artists we have met along the way, via a series of artworks, performances, workshops and a symposium free for everyone to attend. We do hope the local, national and international audience will join us!
For more information on Something Human visit something-human.org
A huge thank you to everyone who came to the preview of Krísis last night! It was great to see so many new faces. Special thanks to all the artists who came along and to all those who were involved in the performances! Here’s a selection of photos from the night – with more to come of the individual performances later (next week):
Here is a selection from MOULD MAP 6 — TERRAFORMERS showcasing parts of the screening programme and the #MounldMap6 competition.
13 September 2016
Mould Map and Landfill Editions invite NTU’s current students, staff, alumni and visitors to the exhibition, Mould Map 6 – Terraformers at Bonington Gallery, to design your very own Terraformers armour and enter into our online competition.
Background:
From Saturday 21 September – Friday 21 October, Bonington Gallery plays host to over 50 artists and designers whose work demonstrates a diverse array of comic and narrative art. Mould Map 6 takes the form of an exhibition / walk-through magazine and will include talks, film screenings, performances and open workshops.
Competition brief:
If you had your own armour, what would it be like?
What does it look like, what it is made from, what does it protect you from, and what world do you wear it for? Is it decorative? Is it utilitarian? Is it symbolic? What does it say about you and your world?
To create your armour you can use any materials of your choosing, it can be two or three dimensional, the choice is yours.
Everyone needs armour sometimes, and we want to give prizes for the most exciting, imaginative armour out there.
Prizes:
Judged by Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler, the winning entrant will take home the following prizes:
If the winner is 15 years and over:
A limited edition copy of Mould Map 5, Black Box; and either a copy of Mould Map 4 or Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Pure Shores.
If the winner is 14 years and under:
A copy of Will Sweeney’s Tales from the Greenfuzz 4
How to enter:
To enter, begin by following The School of Art & Design and Bonington Gallery on Twitter and/or Instagram (see below for details).
Use your wildest imagination, design your own armour and show us what it would look like by posting it on using Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #MouldMap6. Entrants are welcome to include a short description about their design (no essays please!).
The competition is open to entries from 10 am on Saturday 17 September until 12am (midnight) on Wednesday 19 October 2016.The winner will be announced on Friday 21 October via Bonington Gallery and NTU School of Art & Design accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Good luck!
Bonington Gallery:
Twitter: @NTUBonGallery
Instagram: @boningtongallery
NTU School of Art & Design:
Twitter: @NTUArtandDesign
Instagram: @NTUart
See the competition’s terms and conditions (PDF)
03 October 2016
Feeling inspired by the Mould Map 6 — Terraformers exhibition? We’ve teamed up with Landfill Editions to offer you the chance of winning Mould Map goodies…
If you had your own armour, what would it be like? What does it look like, what it is made from, what does it protect you from, and what world do you wear it for? Is it decorative? Is it utilitarian? Is it symbolic? What does it say about you and your world? Everyone needs armour sometimes, and we want to give prizes for the most exciting, imaginative armour out there.
To be in with a chance of winning, design and share your own armour with #MouldMap6 on Twitter or Instagram. Read the full details on how to enter.
Check out this great entry from bethanyhkelly on Instagram. What does your Terraformers armour look like?
03 October 2016
Join us on Wednesday for the first Terraformers film screening event, featuring Ericka Beckman’s 1983 film, You the Better.
DATE: Wednesday 5 October
TIME: 1.15 pm – 2.45 pm
LOCATION: BON 002, Bonington building
Ericka Beckman (b1951) is an American filmmaker who began to make films in the 1970s as part of the Pictures generation. Her films are concerned with the relationship between people and images and how images structure people’s perception of themselves and of reality. Represented by Mary Boone Gallery.
11 October 2016
Join us on Wednesday for the next Terraformers film screening event!
DATE: Wednesday 12 October
TIME: 1.15 pm – 1.45 pm
LOCATION: BON 002, Bonington building
First shown as part of Williams’ debut exhibition at Limoncello, and taking the form of a series of animated monochrome ink drawings, the video weaves a morose fable of a 39 year old man, The Big Scholar, who backs up his secrets to a hard drive in a cave for no-one to find. Probably ever.
13 October 2016
This Friday / Saturday!!! Mould Map 6 — Terraformers Events Series
FRIDAY – TERRAFORMERS / Landing Strip Bar with L-v-L at Syson Gallery 8 pm – 1 am.
SATURDAY – Exhibition open 10 am – 8 pm – Table selling books from Landfill Editions / Mould Map / Famicon Express and others all day.
10 am – 4 pm: Mould Map Workshop 2 — World Making in Visual Story Telling with Jon Chandler and Joseph Kelly.
4.15 pm – 5 pm: Rhys Jones & Ben Price – Post-Capitalist Architecture. Room Bon 002. Discussing projects undertaken as part of their 3rd year studies at NTU, Rhys and Ben will present speculative proposals for post-capitalist built environments followed by a Q & A.
5 pm – 5.45 pm: Hui-Ying Kerr – Magazines of The Japanese Bubble Economy. Room Bon 002. Going into further depth on the issues of hyper-consumerism and representation touched upon in her article within the Mould Map exhibition itself, Hui-Ying will be drawing upon her PhD thesis undertaken at The Royal College of Art and in collaboration with the V&A.
6 pm – 6.45 pm: Dr David M. Bell and Dr Miranda Iossifidis – World-building and Utopianism. Room Bon 002. David M. Bell is interested in the possibilities of utopia(nism) as a form operating within, against and beyond this – and any – reality. He has explored such utopia(nism)s in and through art, fiction, music and education; and currently works on the ‘Imaginaries of the Future’ network at Newcastle University. His first book, Rethinking Utopia, will be published by Routledge in 2017. Miranda Iossifidis is a Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies at LCC. Her current research interests are at the intersection between urban studies, audiovisual culture and utopianism.
7 pm: Cocktails with Furgastro Bonington Gallery. Join celebrity chef and star of Stefan Sadler’s Dinnerplates, Furgastro for a refreshing drinks-based lucky-dip.
8 pm: Close & head somewhere in town for a drink.
Here is a selection of posts from the exhibition Mould Map 6 — Terraformers.
21 September 2016
Yesterday James Langdon and Peter Nencini ran a workshop for visitors on the mysterious science of Pataphysics, in connection with Mould Map 6 — Terraformers.
Below are a few photos from part of the afternoon, where participants were reorganising an existing text using alternative methods of paragraph blocking, led by James Langdon:
22 September 2016
Earlier this morning, Hugh Frost of Landfill Editions gave NTU Art & Design students an introduction to the Mould Map series.
20 September 2016
Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler’s magazine-turned-exhibition has been featured in Frieze and AIGA’s Eye On Design!
In the reviews you can read more about the origins and ideas behind the show, including: Hugh and Leon’s approach to editing and curating Mould Map, tying together such a diverse group of artists, tackling heavy social political issues, and possible plans for future editions of Mould Map.
Read the full article in Frieze here
Read the full article in AIGA – Eye On Design here
23 September 2016
For your Friday – here’s a great little review of the Terraformers exhibition over on It’s Nice That.
Don’t forget to enter our #MouldMap6 competition. Design your own Terraformers armour to be in with a chance of winning Mould Map / Landfill Editions goodies.
Mould Map 6 — Terraformers continues on Monday. Open weekdays from 10 am – 5 pm.
7 October 2016
For an exhibition that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously, my response to Mould Map 6 — Terraformers follows in the same vein. Not to say I haven’t found the work intellectually valuable (I actually found a lot to take from it), but the aspect of Terraformers I have found myself contemplating most is the description of the exhibition. Or really just one line of it; that for this show the Gallery contains a “group exhibition / walk-in magazine”.
There was once a time, before I came to Nottingham and began studying Fine Art, when I thought a publication had to be on paper. I thought it had to have lines of words. I thought it had to be carried in hands and found soggy in the rain. I thought it had to fit a category. Soon after my arrival in the city, and upon crawling out from the rock I had apparently been living under, I discovered zines. This opened up my world to self-publication and all the practicalities of the printed word that is no longer essential there. Ever since, for me, the confines of “a publication” have ebbed away in to the peripheral. Still, Mould Map 6- Terraformers, has once again been a revelation.
I never thought a publication could BE an exhibition. I never thought it could be this colourful, have a film piece, and a computer game. But the thing that stuck is I never thought a publication could be walk-in.
I was left considering the words “walk-in” above all else. To me, “walk-in” is a domestic term. You get walk-in showers, walk-in pantries. As a girl growing up having a walk-in wardrobe was a thing of envy. But never a walk-in magazine. The bright colours of the exhibition against the stark white walls of the gallery space remind me of the early 1990’s computer graphics, of the episode of Goosebumps when the protagonist was sucked in to the computer, and the stretching 3D shapes of early screensavers. It is as if a magazine was sucked in to a void and dissected but then frozen, suspended for us to encounter. As I walk around the exhibition and traverse the different surfaces of visual information I agree with those wardrobe ready preteens, everything is better when it’s walk-in.
Dominique Phizacklea
Fine Art, Year 3
For the opening of Krísis, several artists were invited to perform by Something Human. The opening performance was Tuan Mami’s In/Visible Borderline Project II: The Act of Ceremony & Game.
Tuan Mami welcomed guest to the preview, before handing over to Kittipanyo and Ven. Tuan, who led the audience in a moment of meditation, followed by a group reading of a prayer.
Tuan Mami then invited audience members to interact with a drawing on the wall, which he had prepared earlier. Now that the act of “ceremony” was complete, the “game” could take place.
Visitors and fellow artists took turns to shoot water at the drawing using water pistols, which began to erode and run down the wall – creating a visual parallel to the previous act of pouring water over the sculpture. The drawing / game remains in the Gallery as part of the exhibition, alongside work from Aida Silvestri, Dictaphone Group and other work by Tuan Mami.
To find out more about the artists involved in the show take a look through Something Human’s guest posts here on the blog.
Here is a selection of featured artists from Mould Map 6 — Terraformers.
2 September 2016
Terraformers opens in two weeks’ time. Starting from today – we’ll be showcasing a selection of the 40+ artists and designers involved. First up is Mould Map regular, Viktor Hachmang:
“The woodblock prints of Edo-era Japan depict a floating world, closed off to foreign influence. By contrast, while often informed by the formal elements of these masterpieces, the graphic world of Viktor Hachmang is anything but closed, drawing lessons from and gleefully combining visual vocabularies spanning the boundaries of time and space.
His skill as an illustrator lies in an ability to synthesize these references with succinct visual communication. His energy as an artist flows from the sense of universal human experience and culture his imagery invokes – at once contemporary but timeless – how does he do that?” – Hugh Frost, April 2015
Here is Hachmang’s contribution to Mould Map 5 — Black Box:
Visit Viktor Hachmang’s Website
5 September 2016
With a background in traditional graffiti writing as member of the PAL crew (going under the name Mosa), Alexandre Bavard has expanded his practice to include video and performances pieces and large-scale airbrush paintings similar to distant galaxies – and frequently reappearing as Mosa in a silk hood with sunglasses on top.
See more of Alexandre’s work here.
Follow Mosa on Instagram, here.
6 September 2016
Today’s featured Terraformers artist is Paris-based Antwan Horfee. Horfee, like Alexandre Bavard, is a graffiti writer and artist based in Paris. Pushing away from letters and tags, Horfee’s studio practice carries the same signature style, but pulls in observations and cultural reflections – giving the viewer a glimpse into the world as he sees it. See more of Horfee’s work here.
Daniel Swan is a visual artist who creates often creates worlds in the form of animations – producing music videos for Jam City, RL Grime, Django Django, and more – as well as exhibiting work in a gallery setting.
Swan’s animations are built up around slick, futuristic worlds, which gradually shift and change throughout the song to create very distinct moods:
Although a little different from the majority of his work, this found footage montage / mashup is well worth the watch – combining clips from well known movies to create a completely new universe and story:
See more of Daniel’s work on their website.
8 September 2016
C.F. is a cartoonist (and musician) best known for his comic series Powr Mastrs, which weaves together complex characters and bizarre story lines in a deceptively simple looking drawing style – all set in the fantasy world of “New China”.
9 September 2016
Ed Fornieles (b.1983, UK) makes work that charts the osmosis between online and offline realities. His role-play driven scenarios explore the psychology of behaviour and limits of subjectivity. Fornieles uses a Fox persona that smudges the line between fantasy and reality – a cartoon character who channels the artist’s point of view as well as operating as the face of his practice via Fornieles’s Instagram account.
12 September 2016
G. W. Duncanson is a native of New York. Along with a dozen self-manufactured limited edition art books, his work has been published by Kniv Komix out of Copenhagen, Tiny Masters out of Leipzig, Kuš! in Latvia, and by Landfill Editions in the United Kingdom. His work has been published and exhibited extensively in the United States most notably by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in their Best American Comics of 2014 where it stands as an exemplar of avant-garde picture story.
Along with being a creator, Duncanson organizes and acts as public relations officer for Brooklyn’s Ditko! Exclamation ‘zine library housed at the not-for-profit arts space The Silent Barn and co-curates the PaperJam Festival, its associated bi-annual small press event.
See more at their website.
Mould Map 6 opens this Saturday (between 10 am – 3 pm), and we can’t wait! Stay tuned for more updates throughout this week.
14 September 2016
Hannah Bays is a painter (b. London, 1982) who studied at the Royal Academy Schools. Interested in human drives and the construction of meaning in our lives, recent work has focused on desire – both as motivational force and something also open to manipulation. Bays’s work has a Pop lineage yet is insistent also on spontaneous painterly gesture, or ‘affirmation’. Colour is used seductively yet often to the brink of nausea. There is a push and pull between the abstract and figurative, the symbolic and the purely formal, with a personal iconography including elements such as plasters and puncture repair kits.
Bays has work in the Jerwood, Hiscox and Soho House collections, was awarded a Jerwood Purchase Prize in 2014 and the Agnes Ethel Mackay travel award in 2015.
See more on their website.
Jacob Ciocci is a US-based artist, most well known as a member of art collective Paper Rad (2001-2008). His work is concerned with the relationships between popular culture, technology and notions of transcendence. In his paintings, comics, performances, net art and videos, contemporary and recently forgotten cultural symbols confront one another inside a frenzied cartoon universe that is simultaneously celebratory and critical.
See more on their website.
In the run up to the opening of Mastered, we’ll drawing your attention to just a few of the artists and designers who will be exhibiting their work in the show – bringing together the best work from across Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art & Design postgraduate courses.
Project Distorted Lines: An Investigation into Anxiety
“Anxiety is a lasting feeling of unavoidable doom. Anxiety is a state of tension and expectation of disaster.” [1]
The MA project ‘Distorted Lines: An Investigation into Anxiety’ looks at the subject of anxiety and the ways in which it can be translated through the medium of knitwear. The project takes the contrasting ideas of restriction and comfort, contorting and altering the surface of knitwear to reflect the ways in which anxiety binds and restrains, creating physical and mental suffering. Against this, comfort is juxtaposed as a means of lessening these negative effects, brought through in the softness of the lambswool and the oversized, engulfing garment silhouettes.
The work incorporates handcrafted, dubied machine knitted techniques and crochet to create pieces that are at once unique and high quality. A huge importance is placed on sustainable design practices, from the careful sourcing of premium, organic yarns to the fully fashioning of all pieces to eliminate unnecessary waste.
[1] (Ed) Wolman, Benjamin B/(C0-ED) Striker, George, Anxiety and Related Disorders, A Handbook, New York, John Wiley & Sons, INC, 1993.
Images: © Fiona Nugent
Tong’s series of self-portraits explore the differences between oriental and western women in social status – the old society and the new society. The photos can be divided into 3 groups: playing the part of celebrities, self-expression and regional culture.
As an international student, Tong hopes to make oriental feminist culture known to more people through her works based on her experience and study overseas.
The composition is important too: the photos are all taken from the same angle, and there is a large space left above the top of the heads of the characters. This not only endows the photos with a sense of space, but more importantly, Tong hopes to express that there is a large space for women to improve their social status and pursue freedom in the future.
Images: © Tong Zhang
Ellen is an artist who is intrigued with the colour grey. She is inspired by traditional black Chinese ink, which when diluted and applied to rice paper, produces a variety of shades of grey – soaking into the paper layer by layer.
Ember- Floating space’ is a performance piece, in which Ellen attempts to make invisible space visible, through wax formations in water.
Something unpredictable and uncontrollable emerges in the process of conflict; and beautiful, mountain-like spaces are created as the liquid wax cools and solidifies in the water.
All images: © Yi-Ying Chen
Testimonial on the journey after graduating from BA Fine Art Student, Reece Straw, exploring the opportunities they encountered during their time at NTU:
That’s it, it’s over, my time here studying at Nottingham Trent University is done. The Fine Art Degree Show has come and gone and I am now an artist…maybe. That’s how it works isn’t it? I validated myself as an artist when I had my first public exhibition at The International Postcard Show 2014 at Surface Gallery in Nottingham, and this artist thing has snowballed ever since, now being a selected artist in the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2016. So I want to take this time to share and reflect on some highlights of my time here… as without it, it wouldn’t have all been possible.
Getting involved with the Nottingham art scene very early in my first year with my internship at 1 Thoresby Street (www.onethoresbystreet.org) through the university’s strong relationship with the gallery/studios as many of its alumni are based there. The internship provided me with an intense insight into how an independent space is run: meeting visiting and Nottingham based artists, realising a show and the behind the scenes of what makes a gallery tick. This experience and the opportunities it continues to provide me with are priceless and looking back I am glad I hit the ground running.
Working with Billy Craigan-toon (www.billycraigan-toon.com) (NTU Graduate 2013) towards the end of my first year and performing in his Degree Show work: ‘Painters’ lead to performing for Universal Works’ (www.universalworks.co.uk) London Mens Collection Autumn/Winter 2015 presentation: PASS in 2015. Three months of rehearsals and fittings later, twelve men took the journey to London to perform the piece and demonstrate the quality menswear of Universal Works through the passing of coats from one model to the other in perfect synchronisation. I remember being faced with at least one hundred camera flashes as I began and ended the performance with the passing and eventual dropping of the one orange coat that travelled around the circle of models. Without the widespread connections that Fine Art course has with the city of Nottingham in the varying creative disciplines and the nurturing of community within the Fine Art course, this would not have happened and I may not have been recently chosen to produce video work for 18Montrose’s (www.18montrose.com) store opening party.
Collaborating with Aaron Clixby, Alexander J Croft and Joe Morgan for our show at Surface Gallery (www.surfacegallery.org), Nottingham for our show ‘Scraping the Bottom of the Bargain Bucket’ was another experience that I won’t forget. Creating a fried chicken shop within the gallery space incorporated every medium from sculpture to video that was topped off with ourselves performing as staff and providing fried chicken to viewers on the opening night. The ambition of the show and the collection of ideas were very successful, and led to myself and Aaron Clixby returning the year after with ‘MAGICK LTD.’ That held the same level of ambition in the form of a week-long residency within the context of the exhibition. Surface Gallery’s ties to the Fine Art course enable this amazing opportunity with their NTU Fine Art Festival each year that has always been integral to the artists involved, as you can see it impacts their practice significantly towards the Degree Show.
Being a part of the Bonington Gallery for almost two years now and seeing its many changes in the shows and the appearance of the space has also been important to my development in my emerging art career. Having the opportunity to spend an extended time with the art and design work in the exhibitions has always been engaging and made me proud to be a part of it. The ability to encounter such a varying and rich program on the doorstep of the studios is to be envied.
So, as I think about graduating from NTU with the various exhibitions already in the pipeline and the hundreds of connections I have made through studying here I feel I have fertile ground to operate as an artist. The encouragement and network I have gained through three years of hard work have not been for nothing, this is just the beginning and I will be: ‘only makin’ the highlights’- Kanye West, 2016.
Reece Straw, 2015