Archive for the ‘Online Commissions’ Category

Erika Tan

Online Salon: Speculative Conversations Erika Tan in conversation with Kathleen Ditzig & Wendy Teo
Saturday 9 July | 1-3pm

Online Premiere: Erika Tan Barang Barang: Spectral Entanglements (2022) 2-channel video 23 mins. Online 9-16 July 2022

Barang-Barang is a multi-faceted installation containing collected objects, materials and moving-image works produced over the course of Erika Tan’s Stanley Picker Fellowship. The project explores the value and relevance given to the material traces and afterlives of objects made, collected, discarded or valued by others, responding to local specificities, personal collections and historical connections that the artist encountered, from coconut coir mills in Kingston upon Thames to the speculative entanglements that she weaves between different events, places and people, including that of her mother Fay Tan.

Barang-Barang is a Malay word used colloquially in Singapore to mean ‘stuff’, ‘belongings’ or ‘freight’. In Khmer the word means ‘French’ and in Thai a similar sounding ‘farang’ is used for ‘stranger’, ‘foreigner’ or ‘white person’, but also to describe things that are imported. In the Cebuano language of the Philippines barang means ‘mythology’, ‘magic’ or ‘malignant sorcery’.

Whilst commencing her Fellowship research, Tan was immediately drawn to the history of the Stanley Picker Gallery’s physical location, on an island along the Hogsmill River that is the former site of an old water mill that once processed coconut coir for domestic and commercial use. For Tan the coconut itself provides a potent symbol of the diasporic experience, the history of its applications as a material and culinary ingredient representing an illustrative critique of global cultural exchange.

The exhibition focuses on the legacies of four female artists – Dora Gordine, Georgette Chen, Kim Lim and Fay Tan – who are brought together in filmic space to explore aspects of their lives. There is no evidence, as yet, that these women ever met, but Tan’s work imagines their possible conversations and interactions as artists and as women.

The main moving image work for the exhibition was filmed on location at Dorich House Museum, the former studio-home designed by Gordine herself in the 1930s. The house provides the setting for a speculative encounter between the four artists, who are brought together by Tan through what she describes as an “imagined constellation of celestial art historical references that stretch conventional understandings of time and space, geographical location and historical veracity”.

To accompany the Gallery exhibition, Tan has also intervened in the permanent collection displays at Dorich House Museum, requesting that Dora Gordine’s bronze heads of unidentified Asian subjects be turned to face away from visitors. At the Museum entrance a video of Gordine’s bust of Chia-Chu Chang (1925-26) sits across from Gordine’s own self-portrait (1930-32), the artist and her subject reconnected in a direct visual dialogue.

Barang-Barang continues Tan’s interest in ‘minor’ histories and a process of entanglement that the making of a work can foster. The project draws lines between disparate moments in time, individuals and geographical locations to find new positions and perspectives, not only through the specifics of these histories and individuals, but also the way in which we might understand larger or more known/received histories.

Barang-Barang was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and supported by the Stanley Picker Trust and Arts Council England. The project was previewed at Taipei Fine Arts Museum as part of Art Histories of a Forever War – Modernism Between Space and Home (Nov 21-Feb 22) in advance of its premiere at Stanley Picker Gallery accompanied by a display at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University. A limited-edition artist book is being produced to accompany the exhibition.

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.

Thank you to everyone involved in helping to develop and stage the exhibition, including Sara, Ant & Charles at ADi, Aylish Browning, Maya Dew, David Falkner, Fiona Fisher, Lara Garcia, Anthony Lam, Guillermo (Will) Rodriguez Lopez, Jelena Luetzel, Faith McKie, Rebecca Moss, Sebastian Nissl, Gary Stewart, Alex Stillwell, Heidi Tan, Nathaniel Tan-Lam, Théo Welch-King, Tat Whalley and Saffron Yates.

Disclaimer: All representations of artists within the film work, whilst referencing factual materials such as oral histories, archival materials and interviews, are ultimately representations, mediated through personal and differently situated positions and interpretations. In this way, the works might be conceived of as fictional landscapes and constellations, as much about the artists’, performers’, and audiences’ desires, as they might reflect any specific lived experience.

Artist Biographies by Erika Tan:

Georgette Chen (Chang Li Ying) was born in 1906, some would say in Paris and others China. She trained in Paris and the United States and established herself in Paris as an artist before coming to Singapore via Hong Kong, China and Malaysia (1953-1993 Singapore). Now considered in Singapore as a Pioneer Artist, she was a fundamental part of the Nanyang Fine Art Academy and the Nanyang group and received a Cultural Medallion in 1982. Georgette is best known for her local portraits, local landscapes and baskets of fruit. Georgette also learnt to speak Malay and went by the name Chandana to her Malay artist friends.

Dora Gordine (1895-1991) was born in Latvia, which at that time was a province within the Russian Empire, of Jewish parents. Her exact date of birth she took care to keep secret and cultivated a mystique about her past. She grew up in Estonia where she trained as a sculptor and lived both in Paris (1924-1929) and Singapore (1930-1935) before settling in London in the 1930s. Her Chinese Head exhibited in Paris in 1926 received great reviews and she went on to become the first female artist commissioned to make work for the British government in Singapore. Gordine made a series of ‘Asian’ heads during her stay in Singapore, four of which are held in Parliament House Singapore and some of which are in Tate Britain (London) and said to be the Tate’s earliest ‘Southeast Asian’ works. Gordine relocated to London in the 1930’s where she married Richard Hare and built her studio home Dorich House in Kingston upon Thames.

Kim Lim, born 1936 Singapore. She spent a large part of her childhood actually in Malaysia and in 1954, at the age of 18, she went to London to study at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art. She remained in London for the rest of her life (1954-1997) and married acclaimed sculptor William Turnbull. She had two sons who have inherited both her and her husband’s artist estates which they now manage. In 2019, she is found to be the highest publicly collected female ‘Black’ artist in the UK. During her life she did have exhibitions in Singapore but collecting and celebration of her work in Singapore has been more posthumous.

Fay Tan (my mother) was born in 1940 in the UK. Whilst in London learning shop window display (1950’s), she met my father (Leong Seng) who had been sent to London to study after the Japanese occupation of Malaya. After Leongs return to Singapore, Fay emigrated to Singapore where she lived for over 40 years. Initially a self taught artist and ceramicist – she also attended Nanyang Fine Art Academy life drawing and painting classes in the 1970’s and later completed her B.A Degree in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, London. In 1987, we are both included in the same exhibition in the National Museum Singapore called Transformation Image: Contemporary Ceramics in Singapore.

Barang-Barang: Spectral Entanglements 2-channel video (2022) 23 minutes

Film Credits:

Eugenia Low as Georgette Chan
Lucia Tong as Kim Lim
Cathy McManamon as Dora Gordine
Emma Vansittart as Fay Tan

Editor: Lara Garcia
Sound Design: Gary Stewart
Colour Grading: Remi Stewart

Producer: Jelena Lützel
Director of Photography & Camera: Cristina Barillari
Camera: James Goodchild
Sound: Laurie Overton
Lighting: Ada Wesoloska
Costuming & Make-Up Design: Andria Kyriakidou, Imanuela Oh

Hair & Make-Up Artists: Daisy Adler, Mariam Conteh, Abbie Hutchings
Art Handler: Tat Whalley

White Garment Designers:
Moning Liu, Xirui Feng, Yizhou Zhang, Qianhuizi Chang, Lea Bauvais, Xiangqing Chen, Jiaxin Wu

With thanks to David Falkner, Fiona Fisher, Audrey Thomas Hayes, Rebecca Moss, Abbie Fletcher, Lauren Bell, Anthony Lam, Maria Piene, Richard Sorger Qinyi Lim, Joleen Loh, Julian Rodriguez and the Department of Film and Photography in Kingston School of Art.

The Decorators

Launch Event: Wednesday 17 November 6-8pm / All Welcome

For their Stanley Picker Fellowship commission Portal Tables, The Decorators take the idea of commensality – the social practice of eating together – and extend it beyond the human to include microbial communities.

Domestic food fermentation gained momentum during the periods of social-isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with many people sharing home-made recipes through social media. Bacterial communities, such as those nurtured in food fermentation, actively participate in human digestion. It is believed that bacteria produce joy in the human body through the release of hormones like Dopamine and Serotonin, perhaps serving as a substitute for the social joy of IRL (In-Real-Life) human interaction.

In parallel, a growing area of research has been exploring how bacterial communities digest xenobiotic materials, synthetic and foreign to animal life. It was found that different species of bacteria eat plastic, including Pseudomonas Putida and Ideonella Sakaiensis.  These findings distort the structure of commensality as we know it and open-up ethical questions regarding the use of bacterial life as a solution for human happiness or pollution.   

Portal Tables is a set of three polyurethane inflatable furniture pieces that encourage affect between microbial and human communities. The pieces are designed to be flatpack, easy to wash and used anywhere within the home or outside. Portal Tables comments upon the contemporary obsession with microbial life, probiotics and wellbeing, and speculates on the possible relations and social encounters – political, tender, economic, friendly – across bodies and species.

Kimchi-Pool (2021) seats up to twelve people around a large vessel as they collectively make Kimchi – fermented cabbage and radish napa with various seasonings – a staple of Korean cuisine. Users may choose to seat, kneel or lean, negotiating their bodily position and weight around the bouncing materiality of the Kimchi-Pool. The largest Korean community in Europe lives near to the Stanley Picker Gallery in New Malden, within the Royal Borough of Kingston.

Cheese-Board (2021) has been designed for one person to make Labneh, a type of soft cheese traditionally made in Lebanon. A person can kneel at the edge of the table and use it as a working surface. Then lay down on the top of it, while waiting through the fermentation process. 

Sofa-Bread (2021) sits two people.  It invites a diversity of postures – feet up or down, upright or laying down. The two ceramic bowls are for bread dough to be proved whilst users rest together with it on the sofa. 

On the walls of the gallery are two diagrams. The first is anthropologist Susanne Kerner’s diagram of commensality, outlining different levels of food sharing, evolving from one body – such as in-utero feeding, where food is shared between mother and foetus – to many bodies, from siblings to strangers, banquets to food banks. The second diagram distorts the first, shifting the gaze to the inside of the human body, thus considering the microbial communities involved in commensality.  

The two short films for the exhibition are directed in collaboration with Sergio Márquez, with graphics and motion design by Stephen McLaughlin, and original soundtrack by Maxwell Sterling. In the second of these films (below) Kimchi-Pool was activated by a group of regular participants of the yearly Kimjang Project, led by Justina Jang, festival director of the Kingston Korea Festival, Cheese-Board was activated by Inês Neto dos Santos and Sofa-Bread was activated with the performance Resting (2021) by Laura Wilson, performed by Elina Akhmetova and Piedad Seiquer with costumes by Lucie Kordacova. These live activations were filmed at the Picker House, Kingston upon Thames.

The Decorators is an interdisciplinary design collective founded by Suzanne O’Connell, Carolina Caicedo, Xavier Llarch Font and Mariana Pestana in 2011, and appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2018. With backgrounds in landscape architecture, design, curation and psychology, they work on spatial design projects that aim to reconnect the physical elements of a place with its social dimension and expand notions of community. 

Portal Tables was launched online in May 2021 with the video-essay Portal Tables: Connecting Multiscalar Communities. A preview of the project was displayed at the Victoria & Albert Museum for London Design Festival (18-26 September 2021) with the furniture piece Sofa-Bread, before the project received its full premiere at the Stanley Picker Gallery in November 2021.

Edition: A special digital print-on-demand edition accompanying Portal Tables is available for sale individually (£20 each) or as a set of 6 (£100). Available exclusively through the Stanley Picker Gallery, proceeds from the sale of our editions and publications support our public programme and keeps the Gallery free for all visitors. Please contact us for details.

Thank you to everyone involved in the project, to the Stanley Picker Trust, Arts Council England, Victoria & Albert Museum/London Design Festival, ITI/Larsys (Instituto Superior Técnico) and the Kingston Korea Festival.

Judy Price

As part of The End of the Sentence at Stanley Picker Gallery, artist Judy Price presents an online viewing of The Good Enough Mother (2020).

Originally conceived as a moving-image installation, the piece was commissioned in collaboration with Dorich House Museum and features a bronze sculpture of a baby by Dora Gordine (1895-1991) acquired for the first Mother and Baby Unit at HMP Holloway in 1948. The soundtrack to the film explores the incarcerated pregnancy, drawing on interviews by midwife Dr Laura Abbott, as well as the field work and research of forensic psychotherapist Pamela Windham Stewart. The script, developed with artist & writer Andrew Conio, is re-voiced by actors from Clean Break, a women’s theatre company that uses theatre to keep the subject of women in prison on the cultural radar and whose members have lived experience of the criminal justice system.

Anonymous, HMP Holloway (date unknown). Postcard courtesy Pamela Windham Stewart.

The material and spatial elements of the installation reflected those of Holloway Women’s Prison: the door height, the bench dimensions, and the carpet tiles appropriated from the prison itself. A single photograph of a small yellow fire hose plug is installed at navel height at the entrance of the installation at the Gallery and offers a close examination of some of the less obvious traces of prison control – in the event of a fire in a cell at HMP Holloway, the small yellow plug was removed from the door and a hose inserted blasting water into the cell, before allowing the inmate to evacuate.

Judy Price, Fire Plug (2020). Colour photograph.

For the duration of the exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery, the original bronze sculpture by Gordine, on loan from the National Justice Museum, will be on display at Dorich House Museum in Kingston, Gordine’s former studio home. Installed in the upstairs gallery of the Museum, its reflection is visible in a convex mirror sourced by Price and Conio to resemble those used with the prison environment. The intervention, titled Reverie, cites psychoanalyst Wilfred R. Bion’s notion of reverie, in which the mother holds and ‘digests’ the baby’s trauma, love, hatred, and reflects back containment. The mirror, a captivating cold glass eye, does not hold, it gives back nothing. Instead, it surveys Smiling Baby and the space as a whole.

Judy Price Reverie (2020) Installation view at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Judy Price Reverie (2020) Installation view at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

Judy Price Reverie (2020) Installation view at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University

One narrative that has emerged about the Gordine sculpture is that it was originally commissioned by a visitor to Holloway Prison, Rosalie Holmes. A surgeon’s wife and art enthusiast, Holmes campaigned for better conditions at the Prison during the 1930’s and 40’s. Paying for the sculpture out of her own pocket, she described the prison as a place “hungry for beauty”. The sculpture installed in the Prison’s Maternity Unit in 1948 was a second cast. The model for the sculpture appears to have been Jasmina Hamzavi (born 1946), the daughter of Abdul ‘Abdy’ Hossein Hamzavi, the Press Attaché for the Iranian Embassy in London. According to Jasmina in an interview with Dr Jonathan Black at Kingston University in 2011, her father asked Gordine to make a bronze figure of his 9-month-old daughter. The Unit was redeveloped in the 1970s and eventually closed in 2013 “due to under-occupancy”. From accounts by staff who worked at the Prison, the sculpture was not on display in the later Mother and Baby Unit but lay forgotten in an administration block until the Prison’s closure in 2016. The sculpture now forms part of the collection at the National Justice Museum in Nottingham.

Film Credits
Judy Price, The Good Enough Mother (2020). Script: Judy Price & Andrew Conio. Filming: Nelson Douglas & Judy Price. Video editing & colour grading: Nelson Douglas. Sound editing: Judy Price & Andrew Conio. Sound sweetening & design: Ben Hurd. Voice actors & scripting: Clean Break (Terri-Ann Oudjar, Edith Emenike & Jennifer Joseph). Duration 26 mins

Laura Abbott, The Incarcerated Pregnancy: An Ethnographic Study of Perinatal Women in English Prisons, unpublished thesis (2018) and Pamela Windham Stewart in various unpublished writing and recorded conversations between Stewart and Price.

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Ben Judd

The Origin considers the importance of community within a large city and facilitates meaningful exchanges between strangers, aiming to reconnect people both to each other and to their environment. Britain’s island status, both literal and metaphorical, has always been at the heart of its identity; The Origin will mirror those concerns by creating a miniature floating community that will act as a microcosm for the ways in which we co-habit, communicate and solve problems. A temporary community, an experiment in living, is exciting and relevant because it embraces the propositional; the ‘what if’ – it can be seen as a rehearsal for an alternative future. The idea of a classless, stateless, humane society based on common ownership feels particularly poignant within the current climate. The Origin aims to reconsider ideas of hope, love, solidarity, care and support – values that will shape this community’s identity. 

#TheOriginKingston

In Summer 2020, Stanley Picker Fellow Ben Judd collaborated with local residents, community groups, students and academics to develop ideas for an adaptable floating structure The Origin which will travel along the River Thames. Due to COVID-19, this project took place online. Participants were  invited to contribute to aspects of the community such as costume, narrative, movement, music, engagement with the local environment, and use of the boat.

The online version of the floating resource ran for six weeks throughout June and July on these pages.

Each week is dedicated to a specific subject area at Kingston University and a local community group. Both groups use the online space to develop a particular aspect of the project’s community, identity and legacy by uploading content onto these pages, developing a dialogue and collaboration between the two groups. You can also follow the activities at #TheOriginKingston on Instagram & Twitter.

Week 1 (1 – 7 June) Fashion & The Gate

Week 2 (8 – 14 June) Creative Writing & The Bradbury

Week 3 (15 – 21 June) Dance & The Grange

Week 4 (22 – 28 June) Music & Refugee Action Kingston

Week 5 (29 – 5 July) Sustainable Design & Mill St Residents’ Association

Week 6 (6 – 11 July) Interior Design & Canbury and Riverside Association (CARA)

Ben Judd

Ben Judd is based in London. His work examines collectivity and participation through performance, moving image and installation, enabling different forms of communities to be explored in relation to site and context. He often works with collaborators as a method to develop self-reflexive folk histories and construct temporary communities. Judd has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, recently including ICA, Art Night London, Whitstable Biennale and Victoria Gallery & Museum, University of Liverpool.

MSc Project Management for Creative Practitioners

Collaborating with Ben Judd is a team of four students from the postgraduate course MSc Project Management for Creative Practitioners at Kingston School of Art. They are project managing the initial online phase of The Origin; each student using their strengths to manage unique elements of the project:  Sofia Torres – Social Media, Ching-Fang Wu – Online Content, Oshan Fenlon-Wilson – Events and Charlotte Addy – Project Integration.

Cold Protein with Ed Atkins, Malak Helmy & Zadie Xa

Cold Protein is a free, downloadable podcast series of artists’ sound works, conceived to be experienced in specific physical locations.

Bringing together the foundational principles of augmented reality with the digital medium of podcast radio, Cold Protein invites artists to create site-specific sound pieces for places where a physical manifestation of their work may not be likely. In turn, audiences are invited to download the episode and visit the relevant site for the full experience of the work.

Cold Protein is curated by Stella Bottai and Lucia Pietroiusti. This first series is supported by Jerwood Charitable Foundation as part of the Site Line digital commissioning programme with Stanley Picker Gallery. The podcast logo was designed by Kingston University Graphic Design graduate Stacie Woolsey.

Don’t know how to get a podcast?

A podcast is essentially a radio show that you can get on the internet, so you can listen any time you want.

You have two options:
You can listen to a podcast through a website (this is called streaming). Or, you can download a podcast, which means you’re saving it on your phone, or tablet, or computer, and you can listen to it anytime, even without an internet connection. Cold Protein is currently available on streaming and will soon be available as a downloadable podcast.

To stream: Visit the coldprotein.today episode page you want to listen to, and click the play button.
To download: Get it delivered to your phone or tablet using an app.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that Cold Protein is not responsible for and does not guarantee your entrance to the locations. Access is at the discretion of each individual site, and subject to their opening hours, T&C and ticketing (if applicable).

coldprotein.today

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Oreet Ashery

Oreet Ashery’s Revisiting Genesis is a major online commission taking the form of a web-series in twelve episodes. Commissioned through the Stanley Picker Fellowships, the project premiered at Stanley Picker Gallery in Spring 2016 and led to Ashery winning the Jarman Award in 2017. The work is being presented at The Wellcome Trust in 2019 as part of Jo Spence & Oreet Ashery: Misbehaving Bodies. 

Written and directed by the artist, Revisiting Genesis explores the philosophical, sociopolitical, practical and emotional implications of the processes surrounding death and withdrawal, digital afterlives, outsider communities, social networks and reincarnations of women artists. Developed in consultation with Medical and Death Online experts, including researchers at Kingston University, and produced with a range of artistic collaborators, Revisiting Genesis responds to diverse influences spanning from feminist art practice to outsider and minority politics, as well as the emergent online death industry.

Revisiting Genesis follows two nurses, both named Jackie, who assist people actively preparing for death to create biographical slideshows serving as their posthumous digital legacy. The slideshows become a tool for reflection on cultural and social loss, friendships and memory as identity. When a group of friends request this treatment for Genesis – an artist who is dying symbolically and otherwise – Nurse Jackie attempts to activate Genesis’ memory through the making of her slideshow, which draws from elements of Ashery’s own autobiography and explores the disappearance of social and educational structures under contemporary neoliberalism. Jackie concludes that it might not be Genesis who is vanishing, but the structures she had relied on. Presented in parallel with Genesis’ story, the twelve episodes are intercut with improvised interviews between individuals with life-limiting conditions and Nurse Jackie, played here by a practising GP.

Revisiting Genesis was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University and supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, Tyneside Cinema, Goldsmiths University of London 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. 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 was appointed Stanley Picker Fellow in 2014 and won the Jarman Award in 2017.

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Fabien Cappello & Rachel Davies

Streetscape is an audio-visual collaboration between filmmaker Rachel Davies and designer Fabien Cappello to accompany Cappello’s Stanley Picker Fellowship exhibition at the Gallery from 23 April – 13 June 2015.

Streetscape  seeks to explore how public furniture inhabits and relates to its surroundings. Taking into consideration the provenance, uses and contexts of existing London street furniture, Cappello has created a series of prototypes that are currently on exhibition in the Stanley Picker Gallery and in use around Kingston town centre.

In a series of long takes, filmmaker Rachel Davies creates a narrative that take a subtly hyper-real approach that places Cappello’s public furniture prototypes in an urban context that could be read as one of many towns around Britain. The soundtrack moves in and out of focus to highlight birdsong, a bike bell and a rollerblader amongst the steady hum of traffic.

Nick Ferguson: The Mobile Landscape

The Mobile Landscape is a slideshow with a documentary-style narrative that describes Ferguson’s journeys around the highways of England. In search of a site for a public art project, the artist takes the viewer along rural stretches of the motorway to inspect a series of roadside advertising hoardings in South East England. They are the type mounted on obsolete transport infrastructure and which are strategically positioned on agricultural land. As the hoardings are surveyed for their potential, there emerges a political history of the view from the road: of a countryside sculpted by the comings and goings of capital; of rural aspirations and anxieties; of clandestine livelihoods sustained by proximity to the road.

Nick Ferguson is a London-based artist and writer, whose research and practice span art, urbanism and political philosophy. His practice examines the political histories of built environments – rural, urban and maritime. Through fieldwork, modelling, building, talking and writing, it engages with the way that territory is acquired, organised and used. There is a concern with landscape, the picturesque (especially as played out in suburbia), and the relationship between vision and possession.

Ferguson’s writing focuses on the role that contemporary art has played in the construction of the built environment more generally: in the aspiration for a more democratic distribution of places through aesthetic forms and social events; in the expectation from art’s state, private and corporate investors of return; in art’s presentation of local histories for scrutiny and interpretation in the public domain. He has recently completed a practice based PhD in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Laura Hypponen

10 Faces of Anna is a playful exploration of the multi-layered nature of identity and perception through a series of ten fictional monologues performed by a single actress. Like snapshots, these portraits invite the viewer to fill in the gaps in the story. Is there such a thing as a reliable narrator or an objective listener? To what extent is our reading of a character coloured by our own prejudice? The series challenges the narrow female stereotypes of fashion and pop cultures by exploring the contradictions and conflicts beyond the polished facades, or ‘Faces’.

The project started in August 2013, when Laura Hypponen and Annarose Cattanach commenced a weekly workshop to discuss morally complex characters from killers to sex workers, with the idea of creating a series of ten filmed portraits, to be written and directed by Hypponen and performed by Cattanach. The goal of the project was to contribute to the existing literature of monologues for female performers using a multi-disciplinary approach, with a particular emphasis on exploring the darker, shadowy side of human existence. The characters and films were created and filmed in sequence; one character leading to another within the space of one year. Viewed together, they form a multi-layered portrait of both the author and the performer.

This special Gallery event marks the denouement of the entire series of filmed narratives which have been created in collaboration with costume designer & stylist Andrew Ibi, hair & makeup designer Lina Baptista, director of photography Malte Rosenfeld, set & prop artist Vana Karamanou, editor Laurent Chinot, composer Martin Bjorck and a further team of artists and technicians.

Laura Hypponen (b. 1980, Kalinin, Soviet Union) is a London based filmmaker. Her work often borrows elements from the fashion industry’s seductive and highly sexualised imagery, and juxtaposes these with an exploration of complex identities and the struggles of outsiders. Her debut feature film ‘Live East Die Young’ (2012), set in East London’s counterculture scene, was nominated Best UK Picture at Raindance Film Festival and Hitchcock d’Or at Dinard, and distributed globally by iTunes. Her fashion films have been screened widely, including at A Shaded View on Fashion at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Vogue Italia, and London Fashion Week.

Annarose Cattanach (b. 1987, Eastbourne, East Sussex) is a graduate of Oxford School of Drama and nominee of the Spotlight Prize in 2009. In addition to her work in front of the camera, Annarose writes her own comedy material and co-runs a media production company, Scanach Media.

Anat Ben David: MeleCh

MeleCh is an audio-visual installation by artist, performer and Chicks on Speed band-member Anat Ben-David, comprising a triptych of screens featuring mythical singing characters in perpetual movement.

The video works presented in  MeleCh  – the Hebrew word for King – are developed using an improvisational method of speaking or singing words into a sound oscillator and observing their rhythmic effects. The sonic patterns created trigger new ideas about what words to utter and how they might be performed. The themes developed are then constructed into visual narratives through choreographed body movements performed for the camera in a process the artist has named  OperaArt. Honed during Ben-David’s PhD research at Kingston University, this working method is based upon biomechanics and performance improvisation that entails a form of subjective bifurcation; the artist split into the two entities of performer and producer by distancing herself from both her body and voice through interacting with digital interfaces.

The original installation and live event was performed in January 2013, accompanied by a 12″ vinyl edition and printed booklet available for sale directly from Stanley Picker Gallery as a standard black vinyl edition ( £15) and special-edition signed yellow vinyl ( £30).