ArtHouse is a diverse and dynamic creative arts programme available exclusively to people accessing Single Homeless Project services. Working with professional artists and facilitators we design and deliver a range of creative courses across a broad range of mediums.
This year’s exhibition showcases fantastic work by Arthouse participants made in collaboration with exciting creative partners including Cass Art, the British Museum and internationally celebrated artist Nick Gentry.
We are excited to present artwork from group-work courses in mediums including sculpture, collage, photography, drama and creative make-up. Through these we have explored themes including ‘Identity’ and ‘Climate’.
We are also pleased to present our ‘Cass Art’s Artists’ section celebrating the 40th anniversary of ‘Cass Art’. This project showcases the fantastic creative talent of Single Homeless project artists selected by the ‘Cass Art’ team to independently create original work for this exhibition.
Led by our passion for equal access to the arts, Arthouse supports creative development and provides a space to share artistic ideas, skills and knowledge. We also build partnerships to increase access to some of London’s most renowned arts and cultural institutions this year these have included the Tate Modern and the Young Vic Theatre.
Our projects encourage participants to embark on the journey towards employment in the creative industries and provide platforms for unique artistic talent that exists across our organisation. Importantly, we also offer the opportunity for therapeutic creative expression and for participants to be part of an innovative creative community.
The University of Greenwich is excited to announce these exciting and engaging public exhibitions, showcasing the work and skills of students from the following creative fields – Animation, Architecture, Landscape Architecture & Urbanism, Film & TV, Graphic & Digital Design, and Media & Creative Arts.
Works by Graphic and Digital Design, Animation and Media students will be exhibited and open to the public Friday 14 June to Saturday 22 June. Works by Architecture and Landscape and Urbanism students will be exhibited and open to the public Friday 14 June to Sunday 30 June.
Meanwhile, in the ground floor Project Space, work by Film and Television, Drama and Sound students from the School of Stage and Screen is on display in ‘GRAFTAS’ which is also open until Saturday 22 June.
Both exhibitions are the culmination of the hard work and dedication of approximately 400 students who have pursued their passion for working within the creative industries. The exhibition – which takes place in the university’s award-winning Stockwell Street Building in the centre of Greenwich – aims to celebrate our students’ achievements, creativity, and excellence.
Opening dates / times The exhibition runs from Friday 14 June 2024 to Sunday 30 June 2024* (Monday to Friday, 12:00pm – 6:30pm / Saturday to Sunday, 11:00am – 4:00pm)* (*Please note that the exhibition is closed on Saturday 22 June; GRAFTAS, Graphic Design, Animation and Media runs until Friday June 21)
This exhibition brings together six artists, whose work seeks to map out and articulate the postcolonial experience through making processes that embrace and repurpose the material world. Each of the six artists represented take a hands on approach to the material evidence of cultures and histories, employing that materiality through techniques of reconstruction to ask questions about identity in a world impacted by the legacy of colonialism.
Emmanuel Boateng explores the stories and histories embedded in Ghanaian Kente cloth as a metaphor, making works that aim to challenge and disrupt existing historical Eurocentric influences and lineages in Western museums and art spaces. Kente, here, represents cultural and post-colonial identity, and is embodied in the artist’s making process, which explores repetition, pattern, colour, and geometric shapes, where repetition is one of the central themes. In these works, repetition found in Kente is utilised to shift between the boundaries of painting and weaving; from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional form process or concept.
KV Duong is an ethnically Chinese artist with a transnational background; born in Vietnam, raised in Canada, and now living as a queer person in Britain. He examines the complexities of Vietnamese queer identity, migration, and cultural assimilation through personal and familial history. During his MA studies at the Royal College, he has created works on latex, highlighting its historical connection to French colonial rubber plantations in Vietnam, while simultaneously embracing its sensuality and symbolic association with the queer experience. Laden with symbolism, this glue-like substance acts as a signifier and protagonist, fusing together materials of importance in his life to help shape and contextualize his identity and ancestral past. The recurring motif of a door or portal signifies access and the limitations imposed by societal constructs, particularly those associated with colonial and LGBTQ+ history.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Too Foreign For Home, Too Foreign For Here’ (Solo) (Migration Museum, 2022) and ‘No Place Like Home’ (Museum of The Home, 2023, co-curator and lead artist).
Funmi Lijadu is a writer and collage artist, energised by boundless experimentation. With a surrealist sensibility and a contemplative approach, she is deeply invested in humanity, the histories that led to our present, and imagining better futures. Her collages featured in Layered and Interwoven reflect this interest in history, especially The Nation Project and Black Brit(ish): Locating History. These are two collages that contemplate the complexity of how colonisation shapes national and ethnic identities profoundly, in the form of a strange ‘hybridity’, in scholar Homi Bhabha’s words. Having exhibited at the Shape Arts Open in 2021, Funmi is interested in community engagement related to art, and has run collage and zine workshops at Tate Modern, Barbican Centre and partnered with organisations such as The Young Women’s Movement.
Tova McKenzie-Bassant is showing work from a recent series: Perspectives, in which she investigates the multi-layered processes involved in coming to terms with, and understanding, the perpetuality of personal growth, where we are all in states of continuous internal motion, inside bodies and minds made up of shifting layers and unceasing fluidity. Printed onto reflective aluminium, these works, which started life as small collages, invite the participation of the viewer into this contemplation on shifting identity, further complicating the matrix of how we see ourselves, and how we are seen, without final resolution.
Anh Nguyen‘s Echoes of Identity explores the intricate tapestry of historical and cultural influences shaping contemporary Vietnamese identity. This video delves into the rich mosaic of Vietnam’s past, highlighting the diverse cultural threads woven into the fabric of its present. From ancient traditions and colonial impacts to modern globalization, each element contributes to the complex and dynamic understanding of what it means to be Vietnamese today. Echoes of Identity invites you to reflect on the colonial impacts on Vietnam and its role in forming the nation’s evolving identity.
Divya Sharma‘s work has been deeply influenced by the intricate tapestry of her personal experiences, cultural heritage, and post-colonial identity. She focuses on place-making and reimagining vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. By weaving myths into her ideas of past and future, she seeks peace with her colonial shadow. Migration, a key part of her family’s history even in India, shapes her perspective and stories, reflecting on current political issues. The diasporic experience highlights the interplay between past, present, and future, evoking nostalgia, belonging, and displacement. The work explores alternative spaces, creating imaginary universes that mirror our potential and offer new perspectives on reality, reimagining life in both past and future
A founding member of the Neulinge Collective, Divya has co-curated six shows in the UK and internationally. In 2022-3 she was selected for New Contemporaries and the 17th International Lodz Textile Museum Triennial; she also participated in NAE Open, CroydonBID, and received ACE funding. She has been selected for the Wells Contemporary (August 2024). Divya hosts the ARTiculate podcast.
This exhibition is held in association with Culture&’s festival: Time, Space and Empire
Students from Unit C, Masters of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism at University of Greenwich, have curated an exhibition of their in-progress designs. Projects explore the coastal landscapes of Landguard Point, Felixstowe, and they question what is lost and gained as these landscapes go through designed and unplanned change.
Helena Rivera and Ed Wall have worked with students over the last three years in Unit C, developing techniques of making tapestries to tell stories of landscapes going through change.
The tapestries are layered to portray complex urbanizing landscapes of infrastructures, processes and operations. Their three dimensions reveal spatial forms and sectional thickness. And their multiple scales connect human interactions with material, political and more-than-human contexts.
The New Coasts exhibition presents a curated work-in-progress through tapestry prototypes and working drawings. Students develop individual projects through generous collective practices. Their endeavours build on three years of in-depth research, design experiments, and evolving discourse between students and tutors in Unit C.
The landscapes going through change that students have examined over the last three years include those told through myths and land injustice (2021/22), future coasts and climate (2022/23) and working coastal landscapes (2023/24).
The tapestries are thick and heavy, designed to be hung, and read as narratives that connect specific histories of places with designed futures. They tell stories of everyday landscapes, challenged by processes of shifting sands, complete urbanisation, rising sea levels, extractive dredging and global container ports, layered with extraordinary designs of more equitable, shared and possible futures.
