Archive for the ‘Stephen Lawrence Gallery’ Category

HOUSE OF REASONED TRUTHS

Tuesday, February 20th, 2024

Recent video art from Africa:

Works by Halida Boughriet (Algeria); Cesar Schofield Cardoso (Cape Verde); Djibril Drame (Senegal); Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia); Harold Offeh (Ghana); Minnette Vari (South Africa); Haythem Zakaria (Tunisia).

Technological advancement and interculturalism have transformed contemporary African art, introducing a broad range of new forms of expression along with new perspectives on culture and society to Africa’s thriving art scene. With particular attention to contemporary video art, House of Reasoned Truths taps into the vitality of this recent work, capturing its aesthetics and broad range of formal strategies, while focusing specifically on its capacity to address the challenges of modern life in an era of globalization.

The artists in this show come from across the continent. They work reflexively, using the conventions on their respective social worlds to meditate on them and their contradictions. They speak to questions of community, social cohesion, feminism, diasporic subjectivity, geopolitics, environmental forces, performativity, and power – provoking reflection on Africa and the world today, beyond historically reductive classifications.

Artists 

Halida Boughriet (Algeria) graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Exchange Program of the SVA New York in cinematography. She explores a broad media range and does make performance a central issue to her artistic expression, through varied elements, references and tools. The omnipresence of human bodies is an essential aspect of her poetical/experimental work. 

Halida Boughriet has exhibited at several institutions such as the Documenta, Museum of Modern Art of Algiers; Hood Museum, Hanover, USA; Centre Pompidou, MAC/VAL Museum, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Dakar Biennale to name a few.

Cesar Schofield Cardoso (Cape Verde) is a photographer, videographer, and software developer. His work engages with history, memory, politics, and everyday life, aiming to grasp the complex dynamics that characterize the conditions and possibilities of the place where he was born, Cabo Verde, at the heart of the Atlantic Ocean.

Cardoso’s work has been showcased in a variety of contexts, including Venice, S.Tomé e Príncipe Biennales; Apexart, New York; Hangar Artistic Research Center, Lisbon; Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma, Spain; La Base sous-marine, Bordeaux.

Djibril Drame (Senegal) is visual artist based in Dakar after living in Los Angeles for years. His work strives to shed light on socially relevant and potentially controversial issues affecting our world today. It reflects the many aspects of Africa’s multifaceted history and innumerable intertwined cultures, offering an alternative African narrative.

Drame has had numerous exhibitions internationally including Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Lincoln Film Center, New York; Somerset House, London; MACAM – Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Byblos; Haus Der Jugend, Freiburg; Dakar Biennale.

Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia)’s work deals with subjects such as hybridity, diaspora identity, and the human condition, and has been featured in such international exhibitions as the Venice, Havana, Dakar Biennales. Mutelekesha has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Gallery Palazio Tito in Venice, Italy; the Henry Tayali Art Centre in Lusaka, Zambia; and the Interkulturelt Museum and Kunstnerforbundet Gallery for Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway.

He’s the founder of Lusaka Contemporary Art Centre (LuCAC) in Zambia.

Harold Offeh (Ghana) studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture and is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of history.

He has exhibited widely, including Tate Britain and Modern, London; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; Miami Art Basel; Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; MAC VAL Museum, Paris; Kulturhuset, Stockholm; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen.

Minnette Vari (South Africa) lives in Johannesburg. As Kendell Geers observes in a catalogue essay published in 2004 by Kunstmuseum Lucerne, “Minnette Vári has in her lifetime witnessed the fall of apartheid and all its structures, followed by the new democracy.” In response to this history, Vári has written a history of herself in relation to this trajectory, one that attempts to recover what is lost, to give shape and voice to forgotten or erased memories. Her work conflates self and history, examining how identity arises out of the traumatic past. In her videos and drawings, Vári frequently depicts her own body enduring a disfiguring metamorphosis – she merges with and emerges from nature as well as from the concrete architecture of modern cities. The female “protagonist” of her video works is sometimes archetypal and sometimes spectral, a persona who ingests and is ingested by time. Vári has exhibited her work since the early nineties, participating in such group exhibitions as Banquet, ZKM Karlsruhe; Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art, Museum for African Art, New York; the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2007); the 1oth Havana Biennale and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists, MKK Frankfurt.

Haythem Zakaria (Tunisia) attended the Fine Arts School of Tunis. His visual creations, largely imbued with Sufi spirituality, use unconventional visual techniques (glitch, meta-image, cine process) that guide him and involve him in the experimentation with matrix and protocol devices. He is thus led to explore methods aimed at ‘over-producing’ the image through integration, grafting, and superimposition of visual or sound information.

His works have been hosted by Fondation Hippocrène, Paris; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; Halle 14, Leipzig; Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo; Kamel Lazzar Foundation, Tunis; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg among others.

About the curator

Kisito Assangni is a Togolese-French curator who studied museology at Ecole du Louvre in Paris. Currently living between London, Paris and Togo, his research interests gravitate towards the cultural impact of globalisation, psychogeography, critical education, and archival systems. He inherently aims at going beyond the usual relations between artist, curator, institution, audience, and artwork in order to engage audiences in encounters with art that are unexpected, transformative, and fun.

His discursive public programs and exhibitions have been shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale, ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre of Contemporary Art, Glasgow; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Malmo Konsthall, Sweden; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow; HANGAR Centre of Contemporary Art, Lisbon among others.

Assangni has participated in talks, seminars, and symposia at numerous institutions such as Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Ben Uri Museum, London; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Kunsthall 3.14, Bergen; Depart Foundation, Malibu; Cambridge School of Art, UK; Sint-Lukas University, Brussels; University of Plymouth, UK; University of Pretoria, South Africa; Motorenhalle Centre of Contemporary Art, Dresden.

He coordinates a vast array of cultural projects.

Closed Easter Weekend (Friday 29th and Saturday 30th March)

For Want of (not) Measuring

Tuesday, December 19th, 2023

For Want of (not) Measuring brings together artists Ron HaseldenJim HobbsPatrick Adam Jones and John Timberlake who explore the problematic and poetic use of systems and measurement. Whereas measurement often focuses on quantitative results, the artists instead choose a metaphysical approach to exploit the corporeal use of measuring apparatus as a vehicle for critique. Here, surveying sticks, cameras, physical grids, and light meters (amongst many other tools) are all used to point out the futility, absurdity and impossibility of truly knowing the world around us; seascapes and passages are investigated though their human relationships to the measurement of time, perspective, location and memory.

Ron Haselden

Ron was born just downstream from Greenwich and visits to the Maritime Museum were quite frequent when young. Meridian zero establishes a place as either a beginning or ending and travel always comes to mind – travel and distance – in either direction. 

The work Passage exists currently as a small sculpture for a large scale pathway to be later constructed in a field for a period of time at La Land Chauve, in Brittany, France, surrounded by trees using lightweight materials…coloured fishermans’ cord supported on fine 3 meter high steel rods enabling people to be able to walk through.

For the Greenwich exhibition it is being reconstructed as 1.70m long structure built in fine rod and coloured cotton in high relief to be suspended across a wall. 

Jim Hobbs

For the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Jim Hobbs has built a large scale sculpture/structure which houses the filmic installation H(xy)/V(z) = Ø. The work stems from an interest in the nocturnal and the use of artificial lighting to create or enhance an augmented form of vision. The recollected experience of being blinded by lights while driving at night is the catalyst for a series of loosely linked moving images and graphics which in turn create a type of hallucinatory experience. The film is projected onto a monumental blackboard surface which has been enhanced with a hand-drawn grid made with engineers’ chalk. The structure/screen relates to Hobbs’ father’s work at General Electric, where automotive lighting was tested out by projecting street scenes onto a gridded wall and then shining head lamps onto it – measuring the technical/numerical/ visual range of the light while also destroying the superficially projected image. The piece also includes a 4.1 audio installation* where sounds gathered from various light sources (using electromagnetic microphones) have been manipulated and edited into a multi-frequency soundscape. *Special thanks to Jono Crabbe for the edit and mastering of the audio.

Patrick Adam Jones

The current work is a continuation of an ongoing series based on The Schiehallion Experiment of 1774 which attempted to calculate the density of the Earth. Here, there is an interest in how we continue to use measurements in an absurd manner as a way of packaging our relationship to the world around us, making safe, explaining away, avoiding, etc. Working with a surveying stick on a mountain or in a gallery, the work begins as photographic documentation of “performative measurements” which in turn become the source material for drawings, collages and paintings. Within the Stephen Lawrence Gallery, these will be assembled in response to the measurements of the gallery and the “measurements” of the other artists work.

John Timberlake

John Timberlake’s pair of large sea paintings, Beyond the Wall Lies the Ocean, executed in oils on linen, are painted from viewpoints of actual immersion, as if the viewer is struggling to keep their head above the waves. Whilst referencing genre painting and the fabled fathomlessness of the ocean, Timberlake’s paintings also resonate with the historical specifics of Greenwich’s history at the centre of empire, the oceanic of psychoanalysis, and of course, climate change and rising sea levels.

Acknowledgements

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with a text by Stephen Kennedy; Design by Elena Tzilini; Installation Team: Max Holdaway and Lauryn Keift-Wilshere; Sound Editing and Mixing (Hobbs): Jono Crabbe; Sound Installation (Hobbs) FTV support.

Image: Elena Tzilini, Photo Credit: ‘Building The Sackett Receiving Reservoir 1898 – Engineering Party Members’,  Source:  Westfield City, MA Photo Archive.

SOUND/IMAGE 2023

Wednesday, November 8th, 2023

SOUND/IMAGE 2023 brings together a selection of international artists who embrace ideas of collaborative processes and shared creativity. While the individual artworks and installations take on board a wide range of conceptual concerns, they all explore the relationships between sounds and images, and the images which sounds can construct by themselves. The exhibition will run from 10th November until 16th December, 2023.

Special installations by Tony Hill and Christopher Speed will also be open for a limited time to the public from 10-7:30 on 11 November and 10 – 6:30 on 12 November. 

In addition to the exhibition, the SOUND/IMAGE Festival 2023 includes an intensive 4 day conference taking place 9th – 12th November. From over 340 submissions, the programme of complementary talks, screenings, loudspeaker orchestra concerts, and performances – bringing together composers, filmmakers, electronic musicians, live visual performers, researchers from all over the world to stimulate discussion, debate and engage diverse perspectives and new insights on sound and audiovisual practice.

To celebrate the publication of the new book on sonic creativity “Art of Sound: Creativity in Film Sound and Electroacoustic Music” and the launch of our new creative practice research facilities the “Shared Hub for Immersive Future Technologies” this 2023 edition of the festival celebrates works responding to the theme “Creativity Shared”.

Exhibitors

Jane Frances Dunlop; Phill Wilson-Perkin; Zhao Jiajing; Phases (Bryan Yueshen Wu and Ke Peng); Ivano Pecorini; Tansy Xiao; Victoria Sarangova; Francis Olvez-Wilshaw

Penny Andrea with Kit Ashton & Luke Andre Jackson

Maria Glyka with Vassilis Vlastaras, Jorge Cabieses-Valdes & Jim Hobbs

Ole Hagen, Jim Andrews and Mhairi Vari


For more information and to book tickets please visit here.

Private View: 11th November 18:00-19:30

SPECTRUM

Monday, September 11th, 2023

This year’s post-graduate exhibition Spectrum is a celebration of the powerfully diverse subject interests and practices resulting from a year of intense study at Greenwich.  On both the MA Digital Arts and MA Design, these creatives have worked across a massive range of concepts, technologies, and materials which often times combine and mix to form something unexpected.  They are also a group from diverse backgrounds, nationalities and cultures – something that has provided a huge scope for discussing ideas and works from real world perspectives. Learning through making is key to these Masters, and experimentation and practice-led research has given them practical ways of developing new methodologies within their practices. Across all the entire exhibition it is very evident that there is a strong desire to bring the digital into the physical world which in turn truly initiates a public facing conversation through their work. It is with great pleasure that we present Spectrum 2023

MA Digital Arts works by: Maksym Poda, Stergiani Siourtou, Diana Pinhão, Yomi Adebayo, Andreas Arany-Toth, Nihal Bhunjum, Inna Halasyova and Irtaza Ali Siyed.

MA Design works by: Albin Baby, Levina Thomas, Maya Balfour, Karina Igbosi, Samiea McGovern and Tilly Penn.

More information about our MA Design and MA Digital Arts programmes are available here.

A huge thank you to The Three Legs Brewing Company for sponsoring us.