Archive for the ‘Fellowships’ Category

The Decorators

The Decorators is an interdisciplinary design collective founded by Suzanne O’Connell, Carolina Caicedo, Xavi Llarch Font and Mariana Pestana in 2011. With backgrounds in landscape architecture, spatial design, curation and psychology, they work on spatial design projects that aim to reconnect the physical elements of a place with its social dimension.

The Decorators’ projects can be read as the testing of possible infrastructures for communal life, designing programmes and physical elements for a space that turns an individual into a collective. In particular they have produced tables, seating configurations and frameworks for collective eating. Commensality – eating and drinking at the same table, is a fundamental social activity, which creates and cements relationships, but which can also defy dominant power structures. For The Decorators, the act of eating is a political act.

During their fellowship they want to consolidate this experience and build an inventory of objects and situations that produce collective experiences based on the consumption of food. By staging a series of design experiments both in and outside of the Stanley Picker Gallery, in collaboration with students and the local community, The Decorators seek to develop a series of observations, situations and working sculptures which they will exhibit, use, photograph, draw and compile into a catalogue of (political) commensality.

Erika Tan

Erika Tan is an artist and curator whose work is primarily research-led and manifests itself in multiple formats such as moving image, publications, curatorial and participatory projects. Appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2018, she is Course Leader of the MA in Fine Art, Reader in Contemporary Art Practice in Central Saint Martins and an Associate Researcher in the Decolonising Art Institute, UAL (London).

Tan’s most recent research has focused on the postcolonial and transnational, working with archival artifacts, exhibition histories, received narratives, contested heritage, subjugated voices and the transnational movement of ideas, people and objects; her future projects point towards the digitization of collective cultural memory and cloud architecture through the prism of ruins, hauntings, and mnemonic collapse.

Tan’s work has been exhibited, collected and commissioned internationally including: The Diaspora Pavilion (Venice Biennale 2017); Artist and Empire (Tate Touring, National Gallery Singapore 2016/7); Come Cannibalise Us, Why Don’t You (NUS Museum, Singapore 2014); There Is No Road (LABoral, Spain 2010); Thermocline of Art (ZKM, Germany 2007); Around The World in Eighty Days (South London Gallery / ICA 2007); The Singapore Biennale (2006); Cities on the Move (Hayward Gallery, London). Recent curatorial projects include Sonic Soundings/Venice Trajectories.

Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen are London based artists working across objects, installation and film, exploring processes of production as cultural, social and political practices. Recent exhibitions include Para Site Hong Kong, The 7th Moscow Biennale,Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Fotomuseum Winterthur, HKW in Berlin and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Recent screenings and talks include the ICA in London, TENT Rotterdam and Congo International Film Festival in Goma. Their work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and M+ Museum in Hong Kong.

Over the course of their fellowship, Cohen & Van Balen will develop a new body of work looking at gambling as a symptom of the contemporarycondition. Working with writers, psychologists and economists, they will explore gambling as a state of mind, a prominent gesture, practice and ideology in both contemporary politics and art; manifestation of delusion, grandeur and the belief of fantasy materialising. Through experiments with language, systems, situations, objects and bodies, their project will question why times of uncertainty call for irrational behaviour.

Michael Marriott

Born and based in London, Michael Marriott has been working as a designer since 1993. Trained as a furniture designer, which forms the core of his practice, but also includes exhibition, product and interior design projects. In all his varied practice there is a common core though, which is a search for the elemental nature of the thing in hand.

He is known for making supremely well detailed and highly functional objects, renowned for their keen and economical grace. He recently launched his first injection moulded product, a wall mounted coat hook, named after the Anglo-Hungarian architect Ernö Goldfinger, and now available through online shop woodmetalplastic.com

During his Fellowship, he will investigate alternative means of marking and colouring plywood – one of the materials he employs most extensively in his work – with methods that don’t rely on brush strokes, screenprinting or out-sourced services.

Cally Spooner

Cally Spooner (b. 1983) is an artist and writer born in London, where she is currently based. Her work consists of media installations, essays, novels and live performances such as radio broadcasts, plays and a musical, which grapple with the organisation and dispossession of that which lives. She often uses rehearsals, or the episodic form, as a means, and an end, in itself. Recent solo shows include New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Aspen Art Museum, and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2015). Her essays/writing have appeared in Flash Art and Artforum; her book of scripts is published by SlimVolume (2016) and she is the author of the novel, Collapsing In Parts published by Mousse.

Over the course of her Fellowship research, Spooner will seek a cross-disciplinary exchange with Kingston University’s Schools of Humanities; Performance and Screen Studies; and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), to unpack the politics, ethics and economics of collaboration in the creative industries. Operating both practically and academically, her Fellowship will become groundwork for the formation of a more or less functional performance company. Through study-groups, networking, publishing and knowledge building, Spooner’s research activities will explore and test models of generative, collective production, alongside analysis of contemporary states of management and power; directorial presence, authorial absence, the trusting in (or harnessing of) the genius of one’s ‘cast’.

Yuri Suzuki

Yuri Suzuki (b. 1980) is a sound designer and electronic musician born in Tokyo and based in London. Suzuki’s projects explore the realm of sound, interaction and electronics through designed objects. Since 2013, he teaches at the Royal College of Art in London and works as an associate for Disney, New Radiophonic Workshop and Teenage Engineering. Suzuki is the founder of Yuri Suzuki Ltd (YS Lab), an R&D consultancy working with companies including Google, Panasonic and Disney. His works OTOTO and Colour Chasers were acquired by MoMA in 2014.

Suzuki’s design practice raises questions around our relationship to sound, and how music and sound may affect people’s minds. He is interested in how contemporary products and infrastructures remain often under-developed in their sound features, while being highly refined in terms of visual design and technology. Suzuki will use his Stanley Picker Fellowship to work with Kingston University’s teaching staff and students to investigate the psychological and physical agency of sound and explore how more thoughtfully designed soundscapes could improve our daily lives. By staging a series of design experiments, workshops and interviews in collaboration with sound practitioners, including musician Matthew Herbert among others, Suzuki will seek to develop a number of designed products proposing new ways in which sound can inhabit the everyday.

Yuri Suzuki’s Stanley Picker Fellowship Edition Acid Brexit – a 7″ Limited Edition Blue Vinyl is now available to listen to and watch online, and purchase on vinyl from 1 March 2019.

Simon Martin

Simon Martin is an artist living and working in London whose work explores ideas of subjectivity and the built environment. During his Stanley Picker Fellowship Martin aims to undertake an area of research around Objecthood, sound and memory.

Martin has previously made videos and exhibitions looking at how we might experience a range of cultural artefacts including buildings, images, artworks and furniture, reflecting on how the codes and commands of such artefacts press into our consciousness and play with memory. Recently he has said ‘I have moved from looking at particular objects and thinking about them in social terms to looking at how object image and place coalesce and seep into us in more indirect ways’.

Working with sound is an attempt to engage more directly with the modalities of production and distribution in contemporary art and technology. This together with a deeper investment in the possibilities of aural culture has been the main focus of his recent attention. Reflecting on the Internet Martin asks ‘Where does this vast accumulation and super fluidity of instantly callable images together with their simple replaceability leave us in terms of production as artists? What does it do to knowledge? What form of productivity effectively sidesteps this machinery without losing essential drives?’ Sound, proposes Martin, offers one possible way forward.

Martin will develop a new body of work for the Stanley Picker Fellowship built from the sonic ghosts offered up by the recent past, the city and our technological selves.

Martin has had numerous exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Tate Britain, White Columns, New York and Bass Museum of Art, Miami.

Yemi Awosile

Yemi Awosile is a textile designer who lives and works in London, with a special interest in materials, technology and the visual arts which she expresses through textiles and material processes. Her research builds on a sound project involving the use of acoustic textiles and multi-media print techniques presented at the Royal Festival Hall in Autumn 2014, featuring urban Nigerian city soundscapes by Lagos based artist Emeka Ogboh. In her research Awosile looks at the emergence of new sub-cultures created through virtual space and imagined proximity, enquiring into the migratory movement of people, exploring unexpected parallels through textiles, technology and audible soundscapes.

Awosile’s Stanley Picker Fellowship project is informed by African sub-cultures rooted in an urban village in Delhi. Like most urban environments it is in a constant state of flux. The principle motivation for the project being to explore the social significance of textiles and its capacity to express collective narratives. The aim is to create a textile collection which reflects creative dialogue between different social groups. The process of developing the collection will entail a study of cyclical patterns of activity from within the garment trade. Many of the Nigerian social groups are involved in the garment trade so the project includes a wider look at the African Diaspora. Part of the research will be recorded through audio soundscapes presented through experiments using acoustics. The second strand looks at the social implications of cross cultural unions connected to the notion of identity.

Oreet Ashery

Revisiting Genesis is a web series being developed by Oreet Ashery  for her current Stanley Picker Fellowship, exploring some of the philosophical, sociopolitical, practical and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death, particularly in relation to digital legacies and the importance of friendships. Revisiting Genesis is supported by The Wellcome Trust, public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and by The Gallery at Tyneside Cinema and waterside contemporary.

Oreet Ashery is a UK based interdisciplinary visual artist born in Israel, whose personally and politically charged exhibitions, performances, videos and writings are highly regarded internationally. Often presenting her work in the guise of fictional characters, her most consistent being ‘Marcus Fisher’ an orthodox Jewish man, Ashery works on public, community, educational and participatory projects that are both politically and socially engaged, and is particularly interested in gender, race and religion, ethnicity and identity.

Ashery says of her ongoing practice:

“My practice incorporates the performative and fictive, the potential group, the body in deterritorialised public contexts, objects and assemblages. I am currently interested in the ways in which somatic experiences in life and in art produce unexpected politically charged moments and the subjectivities that emerge in self-knowledge forming and knowledge-formations, as part of the making process of working with groups or individually.”

Recent works include The World is Flooding at Tate Modern (July 2014), working with a group of participants to write, produce and direct a performance and the solo exhibition  Animal with a Language  at Waterside Contemporary, London (Sep 2014) as well as many other group exhibitions in Vienna, New York and London.

Onkar Kular

British designer Onkar Kular’s work investigates how contemporary design practice, its processes, methodologies and outputs, can be used as a medium to engage with and question understanding of cultural and popular issues. His work uses a range of different media, appropriate to the particular research project to include new objects, films, events, performances and installations, and is disseminated internationally through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, film festivals and publications.

Recent exhibitions include I Cling To Virtue,  with Noam Toran and Keith R. Jones, an installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum which presented a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and videos that reveal the intricate trajectories of the Lövy Singh clan, a fictional East London family of mixed descent, and Risk Centre,  a solo show at Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm on constructed environments used for risk and safety education.

In May 2014 Onkar Kular designed and curated The Citizens Archive of Pakistan together with Sanam Maher, bringing together a wealth of personal stories, memories and objects. Whether exploring the building of a nation, the drawing of a religious line, the voice of the collective or the experience of an individual, the items included a range of critical perspectives on Partition and considered what it means to revisit this history today.