Viewing articles tagged with 'London'

Forma Arts and Media, Peveril House, London, SE1 4TD

Interview with Alberta Whittle: ‘RESET’

Alberta Whittle’s new moving image work ‘RESET’ (2020) was awarded the 2020 Frieze Artist Award. Filmed across the artist’s native Barbados, as well as South Africa and the United Kingdom, it charts a polyphonic journey, woven together through contributions by writers, performers, and musicians, who Whittle refers to as her accomplices. ‘RESET’ is steeped in postcolonial and queer theory, informing Whittle’s process, which is also a form of protest: the work addresses contagion, xenophobia and their colonial entanglements, while exploring healing and meditation as forms of resistance. To reset, by Whittle’s terms, is not only to wipe the slate clean, but also to create a new de-colonial language: aural and written, embodied and spiritual, made up of multiple diasporic alliances. Interview by Inês Geraldes Cardoso

Further reading +

Prototype Publishing

Helen Marten: The Boiled in Between

Helen Marten was awarded the Turner Prize in 2016 for her enigmatic work in sculpture. Two years later, the artist noted a disconcerting lack in critical dialogue surrounding her work. Marten usually works across sculpture, painting, print-making, film and writing, but decided to temporarily vacate her studio for a year to solely focus on writing her first novel, ‘The Boiled in Between’, published by Prototype in 2020. Article by Olivia Fletcher

Further reading +

Jerwood Arts, 171 Union Street, London SE1 0LN

Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Interview with Reman Sadani

As Reman Sadani's film 'Walkout 1' premieres at Jerwood Arts, Anneka French sat down with the artist, one of the winners of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020, to discuss her new work and the impact the award has had upon her practice. Interview by Anneka French

Further reading +

Jerwood Arts, 171 Union Street, London SE1 0LN

Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Interview with Guy Oliver

Ahead of the presentation of his newly commissioned film, 'You Know Nothing of My Work', at Jerwood Arts this autumn, Anneka French sat down with artist Guy Oliver—one of the recipients of the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020. Interview by Anneka French

Further reading +

Castor, Enclave 1, 50 Resolution Way, London SE8 4AL

Interview with Grace Woodcock

If you’ve managed to envisage telepathy and sleeplessness, then you’re some way to grasping the substance of my recent conversation with Grace Woodcock. We discussed her retro futuristic solo exhibition at Castor gallery in London, through the lens of Octavia Butler’s equally fascinating and terrifying sci-fi novel ‘Mind of My Mind’ (1977). The book tracks a young, poor and mixed race woman called Mary who goes through a dramatic transition from “latent” to “active”. She supplants her trans-racial, trans-gender breeder Doro by creating a super-race of telepaths, all connected through a universal pattern. Interview by Jillian Knipe

Further reading +

Soft Opening, 6 Minerva St, London E2 9EH

Olivia Erlanger: Home is a Body

At Soft Opening, contained within five large polystyrene and plexiglass eyes — their slightly warped corneas protruding from the walls — Erlanger presents a collection of domestic rooms, modelled precisely in miniature: a bedroom, garage/gym, living room, bathroom and garden. The white picket fences and floral bedspreads evoke an image of suburban life that those of us who grew up outside of America will recognise largely through its ubiquity in the fictional worlds of Hollywood films. Review by Amy Jones

Further reading +

The Cob Gallery, 205 Royal College St, London NW1 0SG

Cat Roissetter: English Filth

There’s an orgy of misdemeanours taking place—breasts are being grabbed and bottoms are being fondled, lecherous eyes are smirking and clownish faces are locking lips. It’s hard to tell where one mound of flesh ends and the next begins. Cat Roissetter’s exhibition ‘English Filth’ at The Cob Gallery is populated by some disreputable characters who look suspiciously like the lively heroes of fairy-tales and bedtime stories—gone feral. Review by Claire Phillips

Further reading +

Cooke Latham Gallery, 41 Parkgate Rd, Battersea, London SW11 4NP

Interview with Johnny Izatt-Lowry

“Each subject moves further away from reality as it becomes an image found, manipulated, photoshopped, drawn etc. This world between the familiar and the unfamiliar is where I want my work to exist.” I asked Izatt-Lowry about the inspirations behind his uncanny, dreamlike painterly worlds and his most recent Cooke Latham exhibition: ‘BY DAY, BUT THEN AGAIN BY NIGHT’. Interview by Sonja Teszler

Further reading +

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, St James's, New Cross, London SE14 6AD

Sophie Barber: The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung

Sophie Barber’s canvases drape tentatively across the floor at Goldsmith’s Centre for Contemporary Art. Repurposed from old paintings and materials within her studio in Hastings, Barber’s works suggest child-like fortresses or half-completed patchwork quilts, laid bare for inspection. With its excitable superlatives and hyperbole, ‘The Greatest Song a Songbird Ever Sung’ invites its viewer to group these works together as a foray into the faux-naif style. Review by Olivia Fletcher

Further reading +

The Assembly Room, 82 Borough Road, London, SE1 1DN, United Kingdom

Elizabeth Price: SLOW DANS

Elizabeth Price’s cycle of three multi-channel video works comes to London’s Assembly Room after showings at the Walker Art Centre, Nottingham Contemporary and the Whitworth, University of Manchester. Review by Kirsty White

Further reading +

Modern Art, 7 Bury Street, St. James's, London SW1Y 6AL

Martha Jungwirth

Martha Jungwirth is an artist you feel you may have seen before. A sense of déjà vu pervades her exuberant works, slashed and smeared in paint. With all the ferocity of a Willem de Kooning and the poetic subtlety of a Joan Mitchell, Jungwirth’s paintings sit comfortably amongst her Abstract Expressionist forebears, even while they mutter disobediently. Review by Claire Phillips

Further reading +

Pace Gallery, 6 Burlington Gardens, Mayfair, London W1S 3ET

Trevor Paglen: Bloom

The gallery attendant at Pace warned me before I could even get a foot through the door. By entering, she explained, I'm consenting to being filmed. It's nothing to worry about, of course— it's just art. But that's precisely Trevor Paglen’s point. He has spent his career exploring the nature of artificial intelligence and data collection and, in this new exhibition, offers a reminder that these practices are never as benign as they appear. Review by Kaitlyn Kane

Further reading +

Seventeen, 270-276 Kingsland Road, London E8 4DG

Gabriella Boyd: For Days

The works have largely one-word titles, and have the ability to describe something large and boundaryless: ‘Stream’, ‘Flood’, ‘Bad Decisions’, ‘Constellation‘; and in other instances specific anatomical objects of focus – ‘Retina’; ‘Tract’, ‘Spit’. The decision to title in this way leaves the viewer with a tight entry point, that either hones into a specific event or zooms out to a dynamic that goes beyond the capacities of the frame. Review by Alice Gale-Feeny

Further reading +

Platform Southwark, 1 Joan St, South Bank, London SE1 8BS

GLF at 50: The Art of Protest

In 1970, a group of students started weekly meetings at the London School of Economics; they called for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, education, the age of consent and in being treated as mentally unwell. Celebrating 50 years of activism, radical protest and positive queerness ‘GLF at 50: The Art of Protest’ at Platform Southwark is part of a sprinkling of events marking half a century of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and their core assertion that ‘Gay is Good’. Their manifesto (republished for this exhibition) was a seminal clarion call for equality. Review by Ian Giles

Further reading +