Grace Wales Bonner @ Serpentine Gallery Grace Wales Bonner brought together works by those who had had influence on her artistic and personal development, with or without direct collaboration. Each artist built a kind of shrine, an altar, representing their engagement with Black experience, Black aesthetic, spirituality, transcendentality, even magic - lived, moved, meditated upon. …
You might as well dance
I. Beatrice Gibson's film I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead (2018) opens with jerky, smudged shots from the underground. A voice-over makes confessions about feeling a sense of panic; suddenly the barely recognisable underground is replaced with footage of street riots and the narrator - one that tells emotions rather than the plot - proclaims …
Reframed City
Reframed City: Canterbury Seen Through Rare Archival Images from the Canterbury Museums and Galleries Collection was an archival photography research project I carried out from autumn 2016 to spring 2017. The research focused on infrequently used visual material held in the archives in order to bring its richness to light. It was paired up with …
Metal. Metallic. Cinematic.
1. Visions in the Nunnery, Bow Arts E3 2SJ Visions in the Nunnery, a three-part presentation of artist moving image and performance at Bow Arts, started its last programme on 27 November 2018. After Tina Keane and Melanie Manchot, the tone and themes of the final exhibition will be drawn from the work of …
Lawrence Abu Hamdan @ Chisenhale Gallery
Lawrence Abu Hamdan is a familiar name on the art and biennale circuit, enlarged by solo shows at the daadgallerie (until December 2018) and Hammer Museum (Jan-May 2018), recent participation at Sharjah Biennale (2017) and Ballroom Marfa (2017) & nomination for the Jarman Award in the same year. He also often works for/with Forensic Architecture, …
Jade Monserrat @ SPACE
Jade Monserrat was selected as one of four artists to respond to the theme of Future SPACE for which she collaborated with curator Chris Rawcliffe. At SPACE Gallery in Hackney, she staged the next step in the evolution of her long-term preoccupation with dancer Josephine Baker, considered the first black celebrity with an unparalleled career …
Hazel Brill @ Turf Projects
Shonisaurus Popularis, the latest exhibition by the Slade School of Art graduate Hazel Brill presented at Croydon-based Turf Projects, will end in five days. Earlier this year, the young artist exhibited her piece Woke Up in Spring at Zabludowicz Collection and from what I read, she utilised a similar theatrical staging, combining installation, video and …
Al This Blisse
al this blisse was a site-responsive window installation in the main reception of the Horsebridge Arts Centre, Whistable. It took place during Whistable Biennale 2018 and was part of Whitstable Biennale Satellite programme. The work quotation means 'all this joy' and came from the oldest surviving poem in Middle English, Lenten ys come (Spring has …
Why do you never speak?
Why do you never speak? presents two art commissions informed by T S Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land (1922). Harriet Gifford’s new immersive sound installation draws on voices of the multiple characters found in Eliot’s text and layers readings by community members into a difficult, fragmented audio field. This methodology alludes to the almost impenetrable …
Here comes the who are you and what do you do bit. Hm... I have worked in the creative/cultural industry for four years. Having studied History and Philosophy of Art - Film at University of Kent, I developed interests that led me to carry out research projects for Canterbury Museums and support art events in …
Art Is Something Much More Dangerous
The exhibition presented over 70 submissions from practitioners based mostly in Kent but also in London, Oxford, Berlin, Lyon and Athens. Responding to an open call, they collectively reframed one of the most ordinary settings – the living room – into a complex domestic space in which identity, crisis, memory and matter richly interlinked. The …
Sophie Jung at Blain|Southern
Sophie Jung's Come Fresh Hell or Fresh High Water (29th November 2017 - 13th January 2018) is a small basement exhibition at Blain|Southern in London curated by Tom Morton. Without much beating about the bush, this is the most exhilarating assembly of sculptural pieces I have seen in a very long time. Sophie's characteristically …
Art From Around Town: 27 Guildhall Street
27 Guildhall Street in Folkestone is a temporary home to an exhibition laced with self-doubt ('Can I Not Do Anything Right?' asks a light piece on the entrance door), uncertainty and restraint or even pain, but also moments of personal discovery and spatial creation as determined by the body - the body seen through activist …
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Fictions and frogs of Dora Budor
Dora Budor (b.1984, Croatia) is a young artist living and working in New York whose work has also appeared in a few exhibitions staged in London. Her sculptures and larger installations are built from real film props, that is objects that were originally made for the camera eye and cinematic mediation instead of the naked human …
Art Piece(s) from around Town: DRAF
(X) A Fantasy was the last DRAF exhibition at its Symes Mews location. The show reinforced for one final time what has stood behind the curatorial vision of the organisation for 10 years - experimentation in exhibition making and programming, searching for yet unforged relationships in (art) theory and practice and presenting both, old …
Backward into Infinity
What we know for sure is that Robert Smithson, an established artist and critic by the mid-1960s, took a bus from Manhattan, New York to the suburb of Passaic in New Jersey fifty years ago. He spent that hot, ‘cobalt blue’ day visiting sites (or, equally, sights), photographing them with an Instamatic 400 and noting …
Art Piece From Around Town: SLG
Only 3 weeks left to see 'The Place is Here', a strikingly timely and (disturbingly) relevant exhibition of works by 25 artists interrogating race, gender and politics. The works installed at the start of the show provide the context within which and in response to which many of the pieces were generated - Margaret Thatcher's …
Excerpts on resistance, survival & solidarity
Afterall (Issue 43) looks into deep-seated capitalist and/= (neo-)colonial systems not from political or economic perspectives but by dissecting the issues of indigeneity. Obviously, these are all interrelated in very sad and disturbing ways until today when grass-roots initiatives to overcome this state of affairs both proliferate and face elimination. In her article 'Chronicle of …
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OSE: Tool Making for a Precarious Future
After today's workshop at OSE in Margate, it is abundantly clear that preparation for the future, especially from our contemporary standpoint, follows multiple paths - constructing weapons for protection, fashioning primitive musical instruments out of rubber bands and plastic containers so that a (post-apocalyptic) landscape is not devoid of culture/personal expression and turning a computer …
(Not) Getting Personal
For two days at the end of January, Flat38 Gallery in Margate will present works by eight artists selected by its owner and curator, Claire Orme. It is the first exhibition organised in the space that simultaneously serves as Claire’s residence and thus ties with production techniques tried and tested by curators in the past …
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