This year’s RA Summer Exhibition includes one of my Celestial cyanotype prints.
Held every year without fail, the Summer Exhibition is a celebration of contemporary art and architecture. Anyone can enter their work – leading artists, household names, new and emerging talent – and it provides a platform for the artistic community to showcase what they’re doing. This year’s exhibition includes over 1,300 works selected by coordinator Yinka Shonibare and a panel of artists, under the theme of ‘Reclaiming Magic’.
Image: Ivor Wieder with his grandchildren Nadav, Daniella and Adiel, London, May 2021 (04:03 mins)
In partnership with the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Jewish News, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and Dangoor Education, Generations: Portraits of Holocaust Survivors showcases new works from 13 contemporary photographers, all members and Fellows of the RPS, alongside photography by RPS patron, Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge.
My contribution to the exhibition is six video portraits of survivors, which are accompanied by the words of family members, each of whom describes the legacy their relative’s experience of the Holocaust has had on their own lives and upbringing. These family members are revealed later in the video portrait, as is an object the survivor sees as particularly significant, such as a tattooed identification number, religious text or family photograph.
ABOUT:
Displayed for the very first time, these powerful photographs capture the special connections between Holocaust survivors and the younger generations of their families.
The systematic persecution of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 led to the mass extermination of 6 million lives. For those who survived, its memory and impact were life changing.
Through a series of individual and family portraits, the moving photographs in this exhibition present a group of survivors who made the UK their home after beginnings marked by unimaginable loss and trauma. While offering a space to remember and share their stories, these portraits are a celebration of the rich lives they have lived and the special legacy which their children and grandchildren will carry into the future.
Photographers include Frederic Aranda, Sian Bonnell, Jillian Edelstein, Arthur Edwards, Anna Fox, Joy Gregory, Jane Hilton, Tom Hunter, Karen Knorr, Carolyn Mendelsohn, Simon Roberts, Michelle Sank and Hannah Starkey.
The exhibition will move to the Royal Photographic Society in Bristol from January 2022.
The Brexshit Machine will be exhibited at The Container, Tokyo, Japan from 23 December – 7 March 2021 as part of the ‘Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit’ international exhibition.
“With days before the official separation of the UK from the EU, there is no more timely occasion to present Simon Roberts’s Brexshit Machine in the confined space of The Container. Radiating monotonous “Brexit terms” in green LED letters, all bearing the prefix Brex-, as became ubiquitous in the UK since the decision to separate in 2016, to share the anxieties surrounding this moment of change. The work was initially created to mark 31 January 2020, the day that the UK’s membership of the European Union ended and the start of the “transition period”, and is reinstalled again, at The Container, symbolically at the end of this transition, still with many “brexieties”. The installation doesn’t only paint a portrait of a country during an identity crisis, but also of the discourse surrounding this moment of change.” Shai Ohayon, Curator, The Container gallery.
Download a press release here. And copies of the exhibition catalogue are available online here:
Complex States was created by Vassiliki Tzanakou (Director of ARTinTRA) and Catherine Harrington, and is a platform for critical engagements around Brexit by artists including Jeremy Deller, Jason Decaires-Taylor, Richard Littler, Stephane Graff, Michal Iwanowski, and Rita Duffy.
The exhibitions 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.
Image: The Celestials #009B_06_2020, 2020
I have two of my Celestials series included in the group show, Small is Beautiful XXXVIII at Flowers Gallery. Due to Covid restrictions, the exhibition is online and can be viewed until 10 January 2021 here: https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/505-small-is-beautiful-xxxviii/
Small is Beautiful was first established at Flowers Gallery in 1974, inviting selected contemporary artists working in any media to present works with a fixed economy of scale, each piece measuring no more than 7 x 9 inches, offering a rare opportunity to purchase smaller pieces by internationally recognised names and discover new talents.
Image: The Celestials #005A_06_2020, 2020
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
Image: ‘Desert Blast #12, Large Glitter Maroon Flash, Nevada, 1999’
I have prints from my This Lands is Your Land series included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography exhibition Go Down Moses.
The exhibition is guest curated by Teju Cole. An acclaimed writer, photographer, and critic, Cole is the former photography critic of the New York Times Magazine and is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard University. This is his first major curatorial project.
Go Down Moses presents a reinterpretation of the MoCP’s permanent collection that can be understood as a visual tone poem of contemporary America, exploring elemental themes of movement, chaos, freedom, and hope. In doing so, Cole uses the photographic archive to interweave the past and present, suggesting an aesthetic approach to understanding the current psyche. He writes:
Questions of liberation tend to interleave the present and the past. What is happening now is instinctively assessed with the help of what happened before, and both despair and hope are tutored by memory. The old Negro spiritual “Go Down Moses,” beloved by Harriet Tubman and generations since, sought to link the black American freedom quest with the story of ancient Israel’s struggle to be free of Pharaoh’s bondage.
Humanity is on the move. The ground beneath our feet is shifting, the skies cannot be relied upon, and even our own bodies bear the marks of the strain. Everyone is longing to be free, and everyone is curious about whether hope is still possible. The photographic archive contains evidence that thus it ever was, that we have always lived in this urgency.Through an intuitive sequence of photographs, in images soft and loud, this exhibition proposes a redefinition: that hope has nothing to do with mood or objective facts, but is rather a form of hospitality offered by those who are tired to those who are exhausted.
You can read an article on the exhibition in the Guardian here.
Simon Roberts is included in Oakland University Art Gallery’s ‘Your Very Own Paradise’ alongside:
Nick Archer, Enrique Chagoya, Melanie Daniel, Maira Kalman, Amer Kobaslija, Andrew Lenaghan, Tayna Marcuse, Rebecca Morgan, Lamar Peterson, Orit Raff, Thomas Trosch, and Marc Yankus.
This exhibition explores notions and taxonomy of visual paradise. The subjectivity surrounding paradise is parsed via the depictions of motifs as progressive, optimistic existential indicators: home, food, identity, métier, harmony, euphoria and so on. In an era of crisis and dissimulation, this exhibition presents a conduit to inspire the viewer to repose in a visual culture that is less pessimistic and more open to the abundance of a positive and inclusive world view. Its ideology finds parallels in Nordic notions of hygge and the wisdom and enlightenment that compels us towards the actions of contemplation, assimilation and illumination.
More information here: www.ouartgallery.org/exhibitions/
‘Another Europe‘ is a group exhibition featuring 28 photographs, one from each EU Member-State displayed from April 18th to May 16th 2019 on the pedestrian street of Nicolae Balcescu in Sibiu, Romania. The exhibition is organised on the occasion of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the EU Summit of Sibiu (9th May).
The photographers represent a wide range of photographic practices and are a mixture of established and emerging talents. Together they voice themes and influences we all recognise as part of our cultural heritage from concrete manifestations such as monuments, buildings and sites to the more ephemeral social aspects such as childhood, fairytales; theatre, landscape, conflict, work, celebration, family, memories, literature and traditions.
Images of NATO observation towers by Belgian photographer Els van den Meersch contrast with those of a wedding ceremony in Greece by George Tatakis, Petra Lajdova’s striking portrait of a woman in traditional Slovakian clothing, Marketa Luskacova’s Czech carnival scenes or the installation of a Jeff Koons sculpture at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum by Henk Wildschut. Italian photographer Massimo Vitali, famous for his heat-infused Mediterranean beach scenes, has photographed the Rome Forum while Simon Roberts (UK) brings us a very British beach scene of the Charles Dickens celebration at Broadstairs.
Curated by UK artist Hamish Park, the exhibiting artists are in full:
Jean Back (Luxembourg), Gerry Balfe Smith (Ireland), Jelena Blagović (Croatia), Paulo Catrica (Portugal) Emil Danailov (Bulgaria), Joanna Demarco (Malta), Alvaro Deprit (Spain), Tamas Dezso (Hungary), Jeanette Hagglund (Sweden), Nina Korhonen (Finland), Astrid Kruse Jensen (Denmark), Petra Lajdova (Slovakia), Marketa Luskacova (Czech Republic), Marlot & Chopard (France), Adam Panczuk (Poland), Klaus Pichler (Austria) Romualdas Požerskis (Lithuania), Birgit Püve (Estonia), Simon Roberts (UK), Oana Stoian (Romania), George Tatakis (Greece), Andrej Tarfila (Slovenia), Andreas Trogisch (Germany), Thodoris Tzalavras (Cyprus), Iveta Vaivode (Latvia), Els van den Meersch (Belgium), Massimo Vitali (Italy), Henk Wildschut (Netherlands).