***Please check T.A.F website for opening hours due to Covid-19: https://www.facebook.com/tafTheArtFoundation/ *****
My Brexit Lexicon video work will be exhibited at The Art Foundation Athens (T.A.F) from 28 October to 31 December 2020, as part of the Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit international exhibition.
Complex States arrives as a timely and urgent response to both the divisive events of “Brexit” and the “Covid-19” pandemic; and featuring over 30 artists, multiple venues worldwide and a cutting edge online AR platform. As an exhibition that traverses nations, as well as the physical and virtual, Complex States hopes to offer a platform for renewed trans-national dialogue, collaboration and cultural exchange.
Curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou (Director of ARTinTRA) and Catherine Harrington, “Complex States” platforms critical engagements with Brexit by artists including Jeremy Deller, Jason Decaires-Taylor, Richard Littler, Stephane Graff, Michal Iwanowski, and Rita Duffy. The exhibition brings together a wide selection of media, from paintings and sculpture to videos and installations with the aim of shedding light on the ways artists have responded to Brexit, and the urgent topics of identity, migration, globalisation, social media, and ‘fake news’ that Brexit has provoked. Selected artworks will be exhibited individually at one of a variety of venues and locations, and all artworks in the show will be brought together on an online platform (www.complexstates.art) featuring cutting-edge augmented reality experiences made possible through our collaboration with the mixed reality specialist afca.
A new series of work made during the Covid-19 lockdown and released today on Flowers Gallery’s online Viewing Room.
The Celestials are a series of cyanotypes made using negatives of pictures I’d taken from plane windows during my work expeditions over the preceding years, partly because they had immediately become an estranged perspective and partly because the spectre of climate change was dominating my thoughts, and much of the media coverage I was seeing. Satellite images released by NASA and the European Space Agency showed a dramatic drop in nitrogen dioxide emissions during lockdown; the skies were clearer, bluer, the earth was breathing again and like many people, I saw this as a sign of hope and of the changes we desperately need to make.
Guest curators include:
Melanie Chambliss, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American History
Joshua A. Fisher, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Immersive Media, Interactive Arts and media
Joan Giroux, Professor, Art and Art History Department
Ames Hawkins, Ph.D., Professor of English and Creative Writing
Raquel L. Monroe, Associate Professor of Dance
Onur Öztürk, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Instruction, Art and Art History Department
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, Associate Professor of Journalism
For more information about the exhibition, please visit the exhibition web page here.
Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph, is the first exhibition of Odette England’s book by the same name, which was published in the US in March 2020, marking the 40th year of Roland Barthes’ renowned work, Camera Lucida (La chambre claire). As part of this project, England invited more than 200 photography-based artists, writers, critics, curators, and historians from around the world to contribute an image or text that reflects on the instigator of Barthes’ semiotic musings—a photograph of his mother, Henriette, aged 5, that is never seen in the book, and is perhaps one of the most famous unseen photographs in the world.
My contribution is the above photograph: ‘The crowd in the hotel seem quite a jolly lot (1966)’ from the series, New Vedute.
Other invited artists include the likes of David Levi-Strauss, Alec Soth, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Mona Kuhn as well as emerging and mid-career artists and critics including Stanley Wolukau Wanambwa, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Jess T. Dugan. From a diverse array of found photographs to intimate portraits of artists’ lives, this exhibition creates a multitude of platforms from which to consider the theoretical conversations about photography—not only what we see but how we see—that continue to shape our understanding of the medium today. In addition to coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Camera Lucida, this exhibition opens two seasons of programs celebrating the 40th anniversary of Houston Center for Photography.
More information here.
Facing Britain – British documentary photography since the 1960s
27 September – 8 November 2020
Museum Goch, Germany
Curated by Ralph Goertz and organised by the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie, Facing Britain brings together for the first time almost all important representatives* of British documentary photography in a large overview exhibition outside the UK.
Long forgotten and only recently rediscovered positions such as John Myers, Tish Murtha or Peter Mitchell are shown alongside works by more well known photographers such as Martin Parr. The show thus offers a unique insight into the developments in the field of photography in the United Kingdom, which are interwoven with continental Europe and North America, but also independent of them. The documentary aspect proves to be one of the great strengths of British photography, which is capable of depicting a part of Europe in transition in a multifaceted, surprising and artistically original way. Facing Britain was therefore deliberately chosen as a temporal bracket for the period of Britain’s membership of the European Union and its forerunner between1963 till 2020. Particularly in view of the current Corona pandemic, the exhibition proves to be a break in the artistic development of an entire nation.
More information is available here
Image: Mr Jackson, 1974 © John Myers
AOP Photographer and one of the AOP’s board directors, Carol Allen-Storey hosts the fourth in this series and asks the panel, how has COVID-19 impacted your assignments and personal projects as a visual storyteller? I joined fellow photographers Jillian Edelstein, Liz Hingley and Gideon Mendel.
Watch here: https://vimeo.com/432625248
And all eleven of the Breakfast Club conversations can be viewed here: https://www.the-aop.org/what-s-on/videos
Image: Adrien Couvrat, Lyre, 2020, acrylique sur toile, 80 x 60 cm
I’ll be exhibiting some work at Galerie Heinzer Reszler in Lausanne, Switzerland from 25 June 2020 as part of their Summer Exhibition series. Other artists include:
Mirko Baselgia
Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Sophie Bouvier Ausländer
Thibault Brunet
Adrien Couvrat
Kaspar Flück
Aurélie Gravas
Andreas Hochuli
Mingjun Luo
Nathalie Perrin
Sebastian Stadler
&
Mengzhi Zheng
Flowers Gallery celebrates its 50-year anniversary on 10 February 2020, marking the event with a London exhibition of contemporary work by gallery artists produced especially for the occasion. The exhibition includes 50 works by 50 gallery artists, representing the diverse breadth of the programme developed over the past five decades and emphasising the ongoing focus on exhibiting contemporary works of art.
Produced in a range of media, each work will measure 50 x 50 cm.
I will be exhibiting a newly created LED artwork, the Brexshit Machine, based on my wider Brexit Lexicon series.
As part of the 50th Anniversary celebrations, Flowers Gallery is pleased to present 50 Years an exhibition of works by artists represented by the Gallery within their lifetime, on view at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street (5 – 29 February, 2020).
Find out more about the exhibiition here: https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/view/50-years
Flowers Gallery, London, 2020
SIXTEEN concludes its year long tour of the UK by bringing the faces and voices of over 180 sixteen-year-olds to London for the first time. Working in partnership with London City Bridge we will showcase work by all of the photographers in a bespoke outdoor public display overlooking the iconic Tower Bridge. The outdoor exhibition will run from 18 January – 16 February 2020 and is located at City Hall, The Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2AA.
My video portraits will be showcased at the R K Burt Gallery in Borough, fifteen minutes walk from City Hall. The exhibition runs from the 21 January to 13 February.
Events
Curators’ tour: Saturday 18 January, 2pm
On the mezzanine, adjacent to City Hall and The Scoop amphitheatre Queen’s Walk, London SE1 2BD
Curators’ tour and celebratory event: Thursday 23 January
Curators’ tour from 2pm – 3pm on the mezzanine (as above)
This is followed by a celebratory event and drinks reception from 4pm – 6pm
R K Burt Gallery, 57 Union Street, Borough, London SE1 1SG
*Please note RK Burt Gallery has limited capacity so please RSVP to confirm attendance
You can download a press release with more details HERE.
Belfast Exposed is proud to present the touring photography exhibition, SIXTEEN. ‘What’s it like to be sixteen years old now?’ This is the central thread running through the ambitious, exhibition SIXTEEN. Photographer Craig Easton conceived this work following his engagement with first-time voters in 2014. Unlike the rest of the country sixteen year olds in Scotland were given their suffrage for the first, and as yet only time, in the UK.
Sixteen is an age of transition. At a time of increasing national and international anxiety, these young people are shifting from adolescence to become the adults who will live in a politically reshaped country, divorced from the European Union. It is an issue they had no say in. Working with photography, film, social media, audio recordings and writing, Craig and his colleagues give voice to those rarely heard.
The incisive portraits and the young peoples’ candid testimonies reveal whom and what they really care about and reflect the trust engendered between the sixteen year olds and the photographers. This adds potency to the work and highlights how social background, gender, ethnicity and location influence a teenager’s life.
Craig invited fellow photographers Robert C Brady, Linda Brownlee, Lottie Davies, Jillian Edelstein, Stuart Freedman, Sophie Gerrard, Kalpesh Lathigra, Roy Mehta, Christopher Nunn, Kate Peters, Michelle Sank, Abbie Trayler-Smith, Simon Roberts, and Ulster University MFA candidate David Copeland. They joined forces with him to develop the project, and together collaborated with more than one hundred and seventy young people from diverse communities across the country to explore their hopes, fears and dreams.
https://www.sixteentouring.co.uk/
Video portrait: Amie and Natalie Stott, St. Paul’s Onslow Square, London, 2018