Stanley Picker Gallery

Archive for the ‘Programme’ Category

Under Construction

Onsite: 14 September – 20 December 2024
This project at Stanley Picker Gallery is part of London Design Festival 2024.

‘Under Construction’ looks at more than a decade of ambitious live-build projects led by architect Takeshi Hayatsu, working together with an evolving cohort of collaborators, participants and community partners (including 121 Collective, Community Brain, Citizen Zoo and Dorich House Museum…) and developed and delivered collectively each year with the Unit 5 students from the Department of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University.

Since 2011, eleven innovative building projects have provided a series of imaginative and highly resourceful responses to the specific opportunities and challenges of chosen locations around the borough of Kingston and elsewhere, as well as to communities and their needs. ‘Under Construction’ will present visual and tactile materials on these diverse projects together with a specially commissioned film by w.in.c films that will consider their impact on the collaborators and participants involved over the years. The film will follow the life of past projects as they are housed at various sites in Kingston, Tolworth and beyond, and how certain materials have since been recycled to become part of new community build projects in collaboration with Citizen Zoo, Community Brain, and 121 Collective – formed by student alumni of Hayatsu.

As a key part of ‘Under Construction’, an entirely new live build will take the Stanley Picker Gallery’s unusual island location as the site and subject for a series of evolving architectural interventions both inside and out, that will aim to shift and alter how the building itself behaves as a public gallery and ‘expanded studio’ and how visitors in turn respond and interact. Works will commence in September, during London Design Festival 2024, with elements under construction throughout the exhibition period and then remaining in-situ beyond.

Hayatsu has an approach to teaching through making. The projects have often started with a research trip to his home country Japan, where his students encounter traditional building methods and develop new skills and designs based on these experiences. Accordingly, each project has been developed to evolve through a collective and haptic understanding of materials, construction and craft techniques, and delivered through shared core values of community engagement and environmental sustainability.

Projects such as the ‘Kintaikyo Bridge’ (2011-12), a replica of 17th century Japanese wooden bridge or ‘Woodland Chapel’ (2013-14), a structure made for a local St Johns Primary School both made entirely from donated and recycled materials are exemplary of the economy of means and the ethos of DIY builds. ‘Temple’ (2014-15) and ‘Seminar House Pavilion’ (2015-16) were created for the garden of Dorich House Museum, each championing special techniques such as elaborate carpentry or yakisugi, a Japanese method for scorching timber. The following year, the ‘Barbican Tea House’ (2016-17) was a burnt timber cladded tea house specially commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Japanese House: Architecture and Lift After 1945’ at the Barbican Centre London, as a collaboration between architect Terunobu Fujimori, Takeshi Hayatsu and architecture and product design students from Kingston University.

‘SHEDx’ was a community engagement programme initiated by a community interest company The Community Brain in Kingston. Based on the notion of the university as a centre for productions and an incubator of new ideas, they built a series of sheds to establish a strong relationship between Kingston University and the local community. As part of the project ‘Heritage Shed’ (2017-18) housed a display an allotment culture. Like many other builds, this shed travelled to various contexts including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Hampton Court Flower Show and the Garden Museum. Hayatsu’s idea of democratising crafts have continued to unfold through recent collaborations such as the ‘Green Shed’ (2018-19) and ‘Nature Hide’ (2019-21), which involved schoolchildren decorating individual wooden panels with locally sourced clay paint, as well as public engagement elements of the ‘Surbiton Yatai’ (2017-18) and the ‘Lantern Procession’ (2023) launched with public processions.

Throughout the duration of ‘Under Construction’ at Stanley Picker Gallery, workshops and other public events will provide a chance for visitors to learn about and get involved with various elements of Hayatsu’s exciting live build project.

BIOS

Takeshi Hayatsu is a Japanese architect based in London. Hayatsu studied architecture at Musashino Art University in Tokyo and Architectural Association in London. He worked for David Chipperfield Architects, Haworth Tompkins and 6a architects before establishing Hayatsu Architects in 2017. Alongside his practice he teaches MArch unit in Kingston School of Art. He also conducts annual summer school in Japan with Grizedale Arts. He is a member of Design Review Panel at Harrow Council.

Department of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University. Architecture and Landscape are richly interconnected, and encompass aspects which are intellectual and embodied. Our situation as part of the School of Art and Architecture is key to our identity. The large workshops and the ethos of thinking through making speak of the inherent dynamic of how we see knowledge generated in the productive tension between tectonics and representation. This is a fundamental and essential part of how the department seeks to enable its students; firstly through a direct and immediate connection with how things are made and the nature of the spaces that result; and secondly with how it is represented critically.

121 Collective consists of architectural designers and makers with a special appreciation for craft, community and sustainability. After being introduced to the local community interest company The Community Brainduring their time as architecture students at Kingston School of Art, they have continued to work closely together on a range of community-led projects which revolve around inclusivity and play. 121 are based at Tolworth Main Allotments at the Farm of Futures, where they have converted an abandoned shed to their headquarters, creating a sustainable community hub which supports the growth of local ideas as well as food, and promotes cross-generational skill sharing, circular economy and the upcycling of materials.

w.in.c (Women’s Independent Collective) films, was founded in 2008 by Abbe Leigh Fletcher, Petra Reynolds, Sabela Pernas Soto and Claudia Vásquez Ramírez. They are a growing network of filmmakers from the MA film making course at Kingston School of Art. Their aims are to tackle gender inequality through film and challenge established hierarchical modes of production by working collectively across continents. To make filmmaking more accessible to women and girls and to constructively celebrate international women’s perspectives through film.

The full list of collaborators, as well as public events and activities programmed throughout will be continually updated on this page.

Thomas Pausz

Haunted Ecologies

Onsite: 25 April – 13 July 2024
Launch Event: Wednesday 24 April 6 – 8pm | All Welcome

Stanley Picker Fellow Thomas Pausz’ solo show Haunted Ecologies intersects the research fields of media, ecology and ‘hauntology’ – the understanding that our perception of contemporary environment and culture is always haunted by spectres of the past and by hopes and visions of the future – to propose an immersive installation echoing the transformations of local ecosystems.

The Stanley Picker Gallery is situated on an island along the Hogsmill River, a tributary of the Thames whose riverbank flora is immortalised in John Everett Millais’ famous painting of Ophelia. This exhibition presents a collection of works inspired by the ecology of the surrounding river. The installation echoes the transformations of the river over time and traces how, from Eadweard Muybridge’s landscape photography to contemporary digital image making techniques, the media constellations we design are evolving with and changing our perception of the ecosystem.

As a chalk stream, the Hogsmill River has an increasingly endangered ecology due to excessive extraction of water and increasing sewer discharge. This influx of sewage water on the one hand radically raises the nutrient level of the river, benefitting certain plants and hence causing changes in biodiversity, on the other it also introduces a large variety of harmful polluting substances.

Eadweard Muybridge (Kingston Upon Thames 1830 – 1904) became world renowned for his innovative studies of animals in motion, but was also an accomplished landscape photographer. In her book River of Shadows Rebecca Solnit¹ details how Muybridge often superimposed separate images of clouds onto his photographs, creating composite images to achieve more dramatic visual effects. The original photograph at the entrance of the gallery was taken in Yosemite on Muybridge’s travels through America c. 1872. This work forms part of the Royal Borough of Kingston’s Muybridge Collection now archived at Kingston University’s Town House Library.

Darkroom is a video projectionwith 4.1 sound that links to Pausz’ research on 19th century spirit photography, and how the techniques developed to manufacture ‘ghost’ images were later used to modify landscapes. William H. Mumler was the first to introduce this genre as he became known for capturing iconic translucent ‘spirits’ which appeared next to portraits of living subjects. Mumler was later taken to court and prosecuted for fraud, and while never convicted, he was publicly shamed and eventually threw all of his photographic materials into the Hudson River². During his early Fellowship experiments, Pausz took photos of the Hogsmill River and immediately developed them in the darkroom, going back and forth between the two. His film, shot with a so-called phantom high-speed camera, documents the process of developing the images, and is accompanied by a composition with sounds recorded by Pausz near Tolworth using hydrophones to capture sewers discharging into the Hogsmill. The soundscape was composed by the artist in collaboration with Tom Manoury to create the immersive environment.

Pausz has been researching techniques to filter and to revitalise water, especially in relation to environmentalist, philosopher and inventor Viktor Schauberger, who was specifically interested in the flow of water and the potential energies harvested from it; and Dr Masaru Emoto, whose research centred around the memory and molecular structures of water. Building on their ideas, Schauberger’s Cabinet consists of a neon light of a whirlpool, a lightbox with elaborate 3D printed funnels that can help animate and energise water, as well as smaller lightboxes with 3D printed reliefs capturing the unique patterns droplets form as they hit the surface of water.

In the second gallery, Sources features four videos, each taken of a specific site where sewage water enters the Hogsmill River. The footage documents the plant life, insects and suburban fabric of the ecology of the sites, and was shot using various methods, including a new rendering technique for 3D scanning. The accompanying sound, also composed of recordings from the sites, feels harsh with frequent interruptions and translates the experience of the sudden changes and disturbances in the river.

1) Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows. Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. Bloomsbury, UK, 2003.
2) Tony Oursler: Notes on Mysticism and Visual Transects. In: Séance. Ed. by Shannon Taggart, Atelier Éditions, Los Angeles, 2022.

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Public Events

Artist Talk & Guided Tour | All Welcome
Main Lecture Theatre, Kingston School of Art
Thursday 25 April 2 – 4pm
Meet our Fellow Thomas Pausz and learn more about his practice, followed by a guided visit to his solo exhibition at Stanley Picker Gallery.

Curator’s Tour | All Welcome
Thursday June 27 12.30 – 1.30pm
As part of the London Rivers Week, Stanley Picker Gallery Curator Borbála Soós will lead a free lunchtime tour in the exhibition. Book your free ticket HERE.

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Thomas Pausz is an artist and designer born in Paris and based in Reykjavík. Pausz holds an MA from the Royal College of Arts (UK) and a BA in Philosophy from Paris X University (France). Pausz´ fictional ecosystems take various forms to explore unforeseen interactions between humans, non-human life forms, and media. His worldbuilding projects are informed by field research in specific environments, and critical dialogues with researchers in the fields of biology, climate science, and bioethics. Pausz puts a particular emphasis on the design of exotic technologies as a medium to redefine interspecies relations. Can VR for pollinators, software to read seashells, or ´spectral´ wildlife photography refocuses the human gaze and offer poetic spaces, where biological and technological are renegotiated? Recent projects include Hide & Seek at Listval Gallery, Reykjavík; Interspecies Futures at Centre for Book Arts, New York; Nature in Transition, Shifting Identities at The Nordic House, Iceland; The Wildflower at Hafnarborg Museum, Iceland; The Swamp Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale; Species Without Spaces at Atelier Luma & Istanbul Design Biennale; Food: Bigger than the Plate at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London UK and Out of the Sea at Passerelle Contemporary Art Centre Brest, France. Previously he was a fellow of the Academy Schloss Solitude (DE), artist in residence at the Politics of Food programme at the Delfina Foundation (UK), and member of the interdisciplinary Swamp School (LT).

Thomas Pausz was appointed a Stanley Picker Fellow in Art and Design in 2022. The Open Call for Applicants to the Stanley Picker Fellowships in Art & Design 2024 opens in May with a deadline of 1 July.

Larry Achiampong

Onsite: 25 January – 28 March 2024

Caution: Contains flashing lights and themes of a sensitive nature including depression, anxiety, suicide and racism. Please talk to a member of staff if you have any questions.

Stanley Picker Fellow Larry Achiampong’s show centres around two moving image works, processing the imprints of depression, inherited trauma, digital anxiety and Black Masculinity. The films delicately unfurl the tensions of dislocation, lost kin and grief, while placing the visitors in an environment filled with sculptural elements, Ashante stool, games and karate mats, reflecting on the Okinawan karate’s ‘hard-soft style’.

A Letter (Side B) 20 mins (2023) looks at the affective impact of history, immigration and geographical separation on two brothers living in Britain and Ghana. Through the nuanced uses of current and older technologies, visuals, sound and recollections of lived experiences and conversations, the film points to the wider social and political consequences of institutional structures and behaviours that threaten the lives of migrants and refugee families. The piece collapses time, exploring how the past interrupts and impacts in the present and incorporates recent footage filmed by Achiampong in Ghana as well as archival footage from The Museum of African Art: The Veda and Dr Zdravko Pečar Collection in Belgrade, Serbia. Speaking from a deeply personal perspective, the film utilises a ‘hacked’ Game Boy Camera, which Achiampong modified to enable the capture of moving image via HDMI. Through the marriage of storytelling and the use of retro technology, the exploration of time travel and the concept of ‘Sanko-time’ becomes possible. Coined by Achiampong in 2017, the term relates to the Ghanaian Adinkra symbol and indigenous Akan term ‘Sankofa’, meaning to ‘go back and retrieve’. The stools, fabricated in the workshops of Kingston School of Arts to Achiampong’s design, are modelled on the typology of Ashante furniture from Ghana and include Adinkra engravings. You are invited to play the Oware board game in the exhibition, please speak to a member of staff to learn the rules and collect a set of marbles.

A Pledge 20 mins (2024) is a new work that explores the interconnected states of generational trauma, mental and physical health and communal agency. The film begins with the story of a driver and his strained relationship with his father. Depicted through a third-person monologue (voiced by Larry’s son, Sinai Lee Achiampong-Rose), the segment addresses issues of abandonment, inherited trauma and seclusion, whilst holding the rejuvenated promise of connection through the act of driving which the motorist and his father share. Repurposed older technologies, in particular Game Boy Camera moving image presents the story like a driving-based videogame. Shot in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, the second part of the film depicts a father and son engaging in the practise of Gōjū-Ryū Karate. ‘Gōjū-Ryū’ (剛柔流) is a Japanese term meaning ‘hard-soft style’ used in traditional Okinawan karate to describe the combination of hard and soft techniques.

Games in the Exhibition: You are welcome to use the gaming corner at the Gallery entrance, including video games The Legend of Zelda – Majora’s Mask; Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and the Oware board games inside the exhibition. Please speak to a member of staff to learn the Oware game rules and collect a set of marbles to play.

Associated Events | All Welcome
Artist Talk: Thursday 25 January 2-4pm
Main Lecture Theatre, Kingston School of Art, Grange Road

Film Screening: Wednesday 13 March 6-8pm
Town House Courtyard, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, KT1 2EQ
Q&A with Larry Achiampong followed by a screening of his epic film Wayfinder
BOOK YOUR FREE TICKET HERE

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Bio: Larry Achiampong (b. 1984, UK, British Ghanaian) is an artist, filmmaker and musician. He completed a BA in Mixed Media Fine Art at University of Westminster in 2005 and an MA in Sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art in 2008. Achiampong was awarded the Stanley Picker Fellowship in Art and Design at Kingston University (2020), was shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2018/2021) and received the Paul Hamlyn Award (2019). Recent major projects include Genetic Automata (with David Blandy) at the Wellcome Collection, London (2023-24); Wayfinder at Turner Contemporary Margate, MK Gallery Milton Keynes and BALTIC, Gateshead (2022-2023); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Relic Traveller: Where You and I Come From, We Know That We Are Not Here Forever, Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art, Montreal (2021); When the Sky Falls, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2020); Pan African Flag For The Relic Travellers Alliance & Relic Traveller, Phase 1, 019, Ghent (2019); Dividednation, Primary, Nottingham (2019).

Credits: ‘A Letter (Side B)’ (2023), ‘A Pledge’ (2024) and ‘A Funeral’ (forthcoming) form part of the series ‘Ghost_Data_’ co-commissioned by The Mosaic Rooms, Stanley Picker Gallery at Kingston University and Heart of Glass.

Special thanks to: David Falkner, Faith McKie, Borbála Soós, Natalie Kay, Tat Whalley, Aylish Browning, Rebecca Moss and the whole team at Stanley Picker Gallery; Chrissoula Spiropoulou, Dave Hallett, Giuseppe Valletta (Kingston School of Art Moving Image Studios); Théo Welch-King, Camila Colussi (Kingston School of Art workshops);Mark Wayman, Megan Visser and Charles Stanton-Jones (ADi AV Solutions); Copperfield Gallery, London; Marie and Indran Tanabalan (Kaizen Ryu Karate Do Seiwakai East London); Hayleigh-Joy Rose; Sinai Lee Achiampong-Rose; Zael Grace Achiampong-Rose; Louise Searle; Reece Straw; Ian Woods; Veronica Grace Adjei, William Anderson; Laura Achiampong; Simeon Davis; Emily Gee; Angelina Radaković; Rachel Jarvis; Benjamin Cook (Lux Moving Image); Coli Burch (Verve Picture); Nefertiti Oboshie Schandorf.

Host & Parasites

Host by Flo Kasearu at Stanley Picker Gallery
Parasites by Flo Kasearu & Elīna Vītola at Dorich House Museum

For Flo Kasearu’s first UK solo show Host, visitors will not be able to visit her major piece the Flo Kasearu House Museum as this is in Tallinn, so instead she has produced soap replicas of her 113-year-old family house. This will not only provide a lifetime’s soap supply for Flo’s home sauna but help divert her fear of running out of soap to other worrisome dangers, such as her wooden house catching fire, the gap in her garden fence, and public space being ‘parasited’ by order.

At the same time in Parasites, Flo Kasearu & Elīna Vītola are hosted in Dorich House, the 1930s former studio-home of artist Dora Gordine (1895-1991) in Kingston upon Thames. The artists’ interventions in the museum include unassumingly tiny objects which encapsulate immense power and potential. The miniature monuments are bronze casts of ticks, thorns, deer poo and seeds among others, which parasite on Gordine’s sculptures, connecting the museum and the neighbouring Richmond Park.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Borbála Soós.

Flo Kasearu, Elina Vitola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London.

Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards.

Flo Kasearu, Elina Vitola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Ellie Laycock.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Ellie Laycock.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Ellie Laycock.

Flo Kasearu and Elīna Vītola, Parasites at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University, London. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards.

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Event:

Wednesday 29 November, 2-4pm Flo Kasearu Artist Talk FREE all welcome
Main Lecture Theatre, Kingston School of Art
Estonian artist Flo Kasearu (b 1985) will talk about her working processes, including how she uses irony in her practice to reflect on the absurdity of world around. The Flo Kasearu House Museum which celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2023 is a sigh-specific art project across the attic, basement and backyard of the Flo’s house in Tallinn. The house museum hosts many of her previous and ongoing works and collaborative projects. After the talk, you are also welcome for a free tour of Flo Kasearu’s solo exhibition Host at Stanley Picker Gallery, where you can encounter various instances of her house museum.

Thursday 30 November Host & Parasites Artist-led Tour with Drinks FREE all welcome
4.30 – 6pm Stanley Picker Gallery
6.30 – 8pm Dorich House Museum
Join us for a tour of the exhibition Host at Stanley Picker Gallery followed by Parasites at our Kingston University partner venue, Dorich House Museum. Artist Flo Kasearu will guide visitors in her solo show at the gallery and discuss her collaborative working processes with Elīna Vītola for the museum exhibition.

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Artist Biographies:

Flo Kasearu (b. 1985) lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia. Over the past 10 years Flo has been living, working and hosting visitors in the Flo Kasearu House Museum in Tallinn, Estonia. She parasites in private and public spaces, living off various social processes, and using irony as her characteristic artistic tool. She is represented by Temnikova & Kasela. www.flokasearu.eu

Elīna Vītola (b. 1986) lives and works in Riga, Latvia. Her work varies from paintings to complex communal installations involving several other artists and creative practitioners. She has been a host in “Artists Crisis Center”, “Monumental Café”, and Low Gallery in Riga. She is represented by Kogo Gallery. www.elinavitola.com

Dora Gordine (1895-1991) was born in Latvia and first exhibited in Estonia. Forging her reputation as a sculptor in Paris, London, and Berlin, from 1930 Gordine worked and travelled in Southeast Asia before settling in London, where Dorich House was built to her own design a ‘deer’s leap’ from Richmond Park. Following Gordine’s death, the Grade II listed building, an exceptional example of a modern studio house, was acquired and renovated by Kingston University and is now a museum. www.dorichhousemuseum.org.uk

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Supported by Kingston University, Arts Council England, the Estonian Ministry for Culture, Estonian Embassy in London, Estonian Contemporary Art Development Center, and State Culture Capital Foundation, Latvia. Courtesy Temnikova & Kasela and Kogo Gallery.

Ligaya Salazar

Launch Event Wednesday 10 May 5-8pm | All Welcome

*Extended Dates The exhibition reopens from 5-23 September as part of London Design Festival 2023 (details below)

Click here to download A World of Islands Exhibition Zine.

A World of Islands considers the movement of indigenous knowledge, practices, materials and people, and historical and current fabrications of tropical utopia and dystopia. Locating the ‘tropics’ as both a mythological and real place with shared colonial and ecological trauma but wildly divergent histories and cultures, the exhibition unpicks some of the clichés and relocates agency in the ‘tropical’ narrative.

This exhibition explores these themes in the context of one of the largest diasporic tropical populations, dispersed in over 100 countries through forced, government-sanctioned and voluntary movement across oceans. Here, A World of Islands brings together artistic perspectives and research on the Philippine archipelago, its climate, its people and their movement over seas and oceans.

Filipinos have played a disproportionate role in worldwide maritime trade, currently making up 20% of the international maritime workforce. The importance of the sea in a place where it makes up five times more space than land is explored through Derek Tumala’s work. The experience of contemporary Filipino life and diaspora is highlighted through artworks by Carol Anne McChrystal, Ronyel Compra, Alex Quicho and Stephanie Comilang that touch on memories, rituals and practices of home and community-making.

The exchange of plants and craft, building, food and medicinal knowledge during the period of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade between Mexico and the Philippines (1565 – 1815) had a significant impact on both places. Stanley Picker Fellow Ligaya Salazar’s project explores practices of ‘making home’ amongst Filipinos displaced by the galleon trade in coastal pacific Mexico through a collaboration with Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working in Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.

Ronyel Compra is a visual artist who integrates the techniques used in local crafts production and trades into his practice as reflections of memories, history, and experiences of places and his hometown.

Carol Anne McChrystal is an artist whose materially-driven sculpture practice uses chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity.

Alex Quicho is a writer and artist in London. Her work focuses on multi-scalar violence and pleasure; affective experiences of technology; and resonances between pre-colonial spirituality and post-colonial futurity.

Ligaya Salazar is a curator focused on contemporary interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of design, art, craft and graphics. Her approach is shaped by an interest in how audiences can be positioned at the heart of curatorial practice, enabling a human-centred take on storytelling. Salazar was appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships in 2021.

Derek Tumala is a visual artist working with new emerging technologies, the moving image, industrial materials and objects. His practice revolves around the realms of science and nature meditating on the idea of interconnectedness.

Associated Events:

Extended Dates We are closed for the Summer break from Sat 15 July, and reopen A World of Islands from 5-23 September as part of London Design Festival 2023 with a special residency by Carol Anne McChrystal accompanying What Does a Design Residency Do? international forum staged in collaboration with IASPIS, Stockholm.

Residency: 9-19 September Ruined Cairn / Pinatubo Effect / Biak Na Bato by Carol Anne McChrystal is a mini-residency that will explore casting volcanic ash from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo Philippines, as part of an ongoing series titled Sandstone Keepsake (Beneath the Paving Stones), in the Gallery’s Project Studio. Book free tickets via Eventbrite.

Online Salon: Pure Flow Thur 6 July 12:30-1:30pm Stanley Picker Fellow Ligaya Salazar in conversation with A World of Islands artists Alex Quicho and Derek Tumala to discuss their shared interest on water, climate and sovereignty.

Onsite Event: 27 June – 15 July & 5 – 23 September Accompanying A World of Islands, practitioner and educator at Kingston School of Art Angela Ford will present a Project Studio display Hemp, Earth + Politics and run a series of workshops exploring the relationships between design, nature, and foraging raw materials.

Workshop: Wed 28 June 12-3pm Earth Pigments: In this hands-on workshop, you will be introduced to the ancient craft of pigment making for paints, a primal method that ties us back to nature. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Workshop: Thurs 29 June 3:30-5pm Afterschool Children’s Botanical Plaster Casting: For children aged 7-11, this workshop will introduce the use of clay, plants, and plaster in the creation of a relief plaster cast tile. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Workshop: Sat 1 July 1:30-4:30pm Foraging and Cordage-making (wild string): This 3-hour workshop will introduce you to foraging for local invasive plants such as nettle, bramble, and dandelion. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Daniel Shanken

Please Note: Gallery Closed Friday 7 & Saturday 8 April

Warning: Contains low and flashing lights and trip hazards. Live internet feed may include potentially offensive material.

The Cascades is a multi-channel installation that brings together an ongoing series of work by artist Daniel Shanken. The installation focuses on networks of information that run in the background of our lives, filtered and curated by intelligent algorithms that push bias and dissonance.

Centering on the probing and prodding, dissecting and inverting, looping and prying of these networks and their manipulating algorithms, this project produces ongoing renderings of generative worlds, fortuitous narratives, animations, and objects, while considering their real-world impact and cannibalization of the natural environment.

Incorporating live content feeds from multiple sources online such as YouTube videos and comments, internet radio, Google Image search, Reddit, and Twitch, the work builds an environment that fluctuates with incoming content scraped from the internet in real-time. Custom-trained machine learning algorithms respond to and alter the work, while offering insights through laser-projected text. Using randomness derived from physical sources such as radioactive decay and atmospheric noise, material is shuffled and displayed in unpredictable combinations that are never the same. This is in contrast to most search engines and hosting sites that control content and information through tailored interfaces that often exclude voices hidden in the noise.

The installation creates a spontaneous environment that allows viewers to enter through interfaces other than the normal internet screen space confronted on a daily basis. The work reflects the remnants of discarded technological production, oversaturated media landscapes, data centres, landfills, and mining tunnels. It draws on the intangible data-points, AI algorithms, and rendered objects often encountered in the periphery.

The Cascades was developed through research conducted during Shanken’s current PhD with the Contemporary Art Research Group (CARG) at Kingston University’s Centre for Practice Research in the Arts (CePRA). Shanken is due to publish a novel as a continuation of this project and his PhD.

Daniel Shanken is an artist working across disciplines and media. His practice explores the interplays between technology and cognition, examining their ongoing effects on the environment, consciousness, and culture. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Hong Kong Arts Centre, JCCAC in Hong Kong, Cloud Art Museum in Shanghai, ICA in London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery in London, CCA in Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA in Manchester, V Art Center in Shanghai, and Kiasma in Helsinki.

Bore Hole (2021) is a never-ending, procedurally generated hole with an internet browser at the bottom that only goes to a continuously refreshing Reddit “new” content page. The hole is littered with user-created 3D models downloaded from free hosting sites. A Geiger counter embedded in a granite-cased computer, influences the work through randomness created from the radioactive decay of the granite and particles in the natural environment.

Gaoler (2018-2023) is a video application that incessantly searches YouTube, randomly picking and playing videos while a walking figure traverses an endlessly generated desert. The figure is forced to read out snippets of comments and conversations happening under different user uploaded videos. Incoming video and text are mashed together in real-time reflecting the diversity and disparate nature of current platform users.

Machine Visions (2022) is laser projected text generated by a custom-trained Machine learning chatbot that is endlessly talking to itself. The chatbot was trained on texts and novels about the end of the world, technological breakdown, consciousness, and the singularity. The sentiment of the text influences elements of the other works in the space including lighting and search terms.

Internet Autosarcophagy (2019-2023) is a video application that continuously scrapes content from various search engines, audio streaming, and hosting sites, randomly dispersing that content within a live-generated environment. Sound, image, and text come in as fragments from different sources creating a disjointed and ephemeral space. At the centre of the program is an autonomous first-person shooter system that switches from a cell phone, displaying
incoming Twitch chat messages, to different weapons that initiate and react to the sentiment of the incoming information.

Flesh Projections (2022) are a series of GAN-generated (Generative Adversarial Networks) objects. A 3D-GAN was trained on thousands of 3D modelled and scanned hand tools and technologies from Palaeolithic stone tools to contemporary technologies such as cell phones and laptops. The 3D printed objects represent a cross section of the artifacts the GAN made while trying to recreate this human technological history. For this installation objects are buried in blackened sand and floating in the air creating a hierarchy based on imagined affordances.

Cinematic Garbage Dump (2023) is an AI generated wallpaper made from collaged parts of images created from the prompt “cinematic garbage dump”.

At Home

Exhibition Launch: Wednesday 16 November | 6pm-8.30pm

*Closed 20-31 Dec 2022 / Reopen 3 Jan 2023

At Home consists of four films which each explore a key theme of domesticity: shelter, identities, well-being and connectivity. Created by the artists, designers and researchers Martha Rosler, Noam Toran, Superflux, and Simone Niquille between 1989 and 2021, the films offer a critical reflection on the values and meanings of the home in the past, present and future.

The exhibition is the next step in an ongoing research project by Jana Scholze, Penny Sparke and Catharine Rossi, three members of Kingston University’s Modern Interiors Research Centre. It originated as At Home: Panorama de nos vies domestiques, an exhibition curated for the 12^th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne (April to July 2022). Countering more widespread presentations of domesticity focused on consumerist visions or technological utopias, At Home instead addresses experiences of living in and creating a home, wherein exhibition visitors are as much the experts as the curators.

In particular, the films articulate growing concerns with the climate emergency, widespread inequality, the erosion of the boundary between the private and public self, and technological advances, and how these are affecting the domestic sphere. Conceived before Covid-19, researched during it, and exhibited in its aftermath, At Home also includes a reflection on the changing meaning of the home in light of the pandemic.

The exhibition invites all visitors – neighbours, artists, designers, architects, policy makers, students and staff – to join the curators in continuing their At Home research. Through the exhibition and accompanying programme it will explore ideas of shelter, identities, well-being and connectivity as core values of domestic life for humans and non-humans alike. At Home is also an opportunity to reflect on using exhibitions as research tools and what it means to bring an exhibition from one site to another.

Films:

Shelter: Martha Rosler, Housing is a Human Right, 1989/2017

Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. A retrospective of her work has been shown internationally, and her writing is published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. In 2012, she presented a new series of photographs, taken during her trip to Cuba in January 1981, and in November, she presented the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA in New York. Her most recent publications include Culture Class (2013; Spanish trans.: Clase cultural. Arte y gentrificación, 2014), on artists and gentrification; Martha Rosler: Irrespective (2018), accompanying her survey show in New York; and La Dominación y lo cotidiano: ensayos y guiones (2019), a book of essays and scripts in translation. Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn.

Identities: Noam Toran, Desire Management, 2005

Noam Toran’s work involves the creation of intricate narratives developed as a means to disrupt hegemonic historiographies. Drawing from marginalised or neglected histories, Toran reflects upon the interrelations of memory, erasure, mythology, identity, and the essential force of storytelling as embodied in archives, film, literature, and performance. The work is materialised through dramatisations that take the form of installations, educational models, films, performances and scripts. Noam is currently working on his solo exhibition We Crave Blood for the Rawart Gallery in Tel Aviv (February – March 2023).

Wellbeing: Superflux, Mitigation of Shock, Singapore, 2019

Anab Jain studied filmmaking at the National Institute of Design before moving to London to gain her Masters at the Royal College of Art. In 2009, she co-founded Superflux with Jon Arden. She’s been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts and is also the recipient of the Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, as well as awards from Apple and the UK Government’s Innovation Department. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, V&A Museum, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China, Vitra Design Museum, and Tate Modern.She currently serves as Professor of Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Born and educated in the UK, Jon Arden holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. He leads the Studio’s conceptual and technical research projects. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York and V&A London on numerous occasions, and he has won prizes from UNESCO and New York’s Social Design Network. He has lectured at the Architectural Association London, MAD Faculty Genk, Belgium, and Kitchen Budapest Hungary.

Connectivity: Simone C Niquille/Technoflesh, Homeschool, 2019

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher based in Amsterdam NL. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at HeK-Haus der Elektronischen Künste (2020), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), La Gaite Lyrique (2019). She has published writing in Volume Magazine, AD Architecture and e-flux. She is Chief Information Officer at Design Academy Eindhoven. In 2016 she was Research Fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and is commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Niquille is recipient of the Pax Art Award 2020 and 2021/22 Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Center for Architecture. Currently she is investigating the architectural and bodily consequences of computer vision, researching the politics of synthetic training datasets.

Exhibition design by Plaid

Curated by Jana Scholze, Penny Sparke and Catharine Rossi

Dr Jana Scholze is a design curator and Associate Professor at the Kingston School of Art in London heading the MA Curating Contemporary Design in collaboration with the Design Museum. Her transdisciplinary research covers questions around formats of interaction and contemporary design practice engaging with society, technology and the environment. She is a Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she has been previously the Curator of Contemporary and Modern Furniture and Product Design working on acquisitions and exhibitions, such as What is Luxury? (2015). Publications include Medium Ausstellung (Transcript, 2004), Barber Osgerby Projects (Phaidon, 2017) and contributions to series such as Cultures of the Curatorial – Curatorial Things (Sternberg Press, 2019). She is on the advisory board of and peer reviewer for IDEA Journal.

Penny Sparke is Professor of Design History at Kingston University and the Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre. Her research areas cover modern design, interiors, gender, identity, and nature, and her most important publications include An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the present (1986, 2004, 2013); Design in Context (1987); Electrical Appliances (1988); Italian Design from 1860 to the present (1989); The Plastics Age (1990); As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995); Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (2005); The Modern Interior (2008); and Nature Inside: Plants and Flowers in the Modern Interior (2021).

Dr Catharine Rossi is Professor of Architecture at University for the Creative Arts Canterbury. Her research areas include contemporary design, post-war Italian design and architecture, craft, club culture, and feminism. Publications include Designing Craft in Italy: from Postwar to Postmodernism (MUP, 2015), and Post-Craft (Sternberg Press, 2022) and The Italian Avant-Garde: 1986 – 1976 (Sternberg Press, 2013), both edited with Professor Alex Coles. Exhibitions include Space Electronic: Then and Now (14^th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014) and the co-curated Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today (Vitra Design Museum, 2018). She is on the Advisory Board for the Journal of Modern Craft.

Originally commissioned by Cité du Design and Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2022

Dani Admiss

www.sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline is a collaborative literacy and climate justice project in search of transformative and regenerative repair. A coalition of art workers, agitators, dream weavers, growers and caregivers have co-created a holistic and ever-growing decarbonisation plan for the art sector and beyond.

Transitioning to a low-carbon planet will affect every facet of daily life but the current paths to decarbonisation, presented to us by politicians, regulators and CEOs, have numerous trade-offs and uncertainties. From Net-Zero fantasies, financialisation of nature to a burn now pay later attitude, each top-down route either reinforces a market-based and extractive approach to the environment, ignores varied individual needs, vulnerabilities and histories, or harms as opposed to protect the planet in its various entanglement of environmental, social, political and sacred ways of being.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline sees the climate emergency as a social and political problem, as well as an environmental one. It recognises the interconnectedness of struggles, and in doing so, works to reclaim repair as an initial step towards healing. What does a just transition look like? And how can we heal the imagined future and broken relationships of the present?

Through collective study our coalition asks questions such as: How can intergenerational wealth help communities in the face of climate emergency? What would it mean if we took museums “to the orchards”? What configurations of life are possible after restitution? Is it possible to replace carbon literacy with love?

Together we call for solutions to the climate crisis that not only reduce emissions but create a fairer and more just world in the process.

The plan is a gift to all art workers in their own decarbonisation journeys. Gratitude and solidarity to all our contributing artists, researchers, activists, communities, participants and partners.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline One-Day Festival / Friday 7 October 2022:

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline community festival and teach-in featuring commissioned talks, performances, film screenings, refreshments and music, as well as a public vote where the community will decide on a decarbonisation plan for the Gallery.

Including contributions from Chanelle Adams, Elena Agudio, Amazoner Arawak, Apex Zero, Maxwell Ayamba, Araceli Camargo, Lauren Doughty, Hazel Falck, Ellie Harrison, Susannah Haslam, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Sarah Mady, Lou-Atessa Marcellin, Samuel Onalo, Sean Roy Parker, Anne Pasek, Luiza Prado, Charles Pryor, Megha Ralapati, Oliver Ressler, Studio Hyte, Tatjana Söding, Shridhar Sudhir, Cecilia Wee, Heba ElSharkawy, The Grange, Writers’ Kingston, The Community Brain, Hogsmill Community Garden, Kingston’s Stylophone Orchestra, The NewBridge Project, The Networked Condition, Platform London, Kingston Stylophone Orchestra, Save the World Club and more!

Visit www.sunlightdoesntneedapipeline.com for full festival schedule. A recording of the live streamed festival will be published on our website.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline Community Programme / October 2022:

Following the festival, through the whole of October 2022 our local community are invited to use the Gallery spaces to stage activities relating to Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline, all public activities are listed below. Currently including Community Brain, Creative Youth, Flowers We Gift to Ukraine, Hogsmill Community Garden and Kingston HIVE and more. Please contact the Gallery to find out how you can also get involved.

Lobby Display: Thurs 13-Fri 21 October 11-5pm. Join us in the Gallery’s Lobby for exhibition & drop-in A-cross by Ariadne’s Thread, a Polish-Ukrainian support group that helps to preserve cultural heritage and promote a brighter future through creativity.

Workshop: Tues 18 October 11-12:30pm. Join Dr Heba Elsharkawy, Kingston School of Art Head of Department Architecture & Landscape, for Net Zero Carbon Communities – how can we achieve this? that will introduce the national and local agendas for Net Zero Carbon agenda and produce localised interventions to help achieve the net zero carbon targets. Click here to book a free ticket on Eventbrite.

Workshop: Thurs 20 October 2-5pm. Led by Dr Paul Mickelthwaite, Kingston School of Art MA Sustainable Design, Localise! Sustaining where we are now is a workshop that will reflect on how, and what, we move through the world. Click here to book a free ticket on Eventbrite.

Lobby Display: Tues 24-Sat 29 October 11-5pm. The Gallery’s Lobby space will be taken over by The Grange Trash Monster an ambitious installation using recycled plastics to create a sculptural costume.

Workshop: Wed 26 October 11-12:30pm. Join Hogsmill Community Garden for Garden Artclub where young artists will delve into the themes of nature through making windcatchers. Click here to book a free ticket on Eventbrite.

Workshop: Thurs 27 October 2-5pm. Creative Youth will host Printing for the Planet, a lino printing workshop at the Gallery and share your vision for a climate conscious arts sector. Click here for book a free ticket on Eventbrite.

All Day Event: Fri 28 October 11-5pm. Kingston HIVE will host Eco-Art Pop Up an exciting event raising awareness of the climate emergency and the importance of sustainability, featuring interactive games, local art, music and movement. Click here for book a free ticket on Eventbrite.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline Monthly Newsletters / March-September 2022:

In advance of the Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline festival and web-resource launch, Dani Admiss published elements of her Fellowship research in the form of a monthly newsletter. Read the Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline Monthly Messages here below:

March
April
May
June
July
August
September

Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher working across the fields of design, art, technology and science, and was appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2020. Her approach is framed by world-making practices and community-based research prioritising these as lenses to explore alternative forms of curatorial practice.

Sunlight Doesn’t Need A Pipeline was commissioned by the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University and supported by the Stanley Picker Trust and Arts Council England.

Maeve Brennan

Public Events:

Online Salon – Wed 22 June 3-4:30pm Maeve Brennan discusses the broader context and implications of her collaboration with forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov. Watch a recording of this discussion online here.

Onsite Event – Wed 29 June 3-4:30pm Maeve Brennan in conversation about her current project and research-based practice with Kingston School of Art Professor Elizabeth Price. Watch a recording of this conversation online here.

illicitantquitiesnetwork.net

In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. Three of the crates were sent to forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis (Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies) and Dr Vinnie Norskov (Director of Aarhus Museum of Ancient Art) for research.

An Excavation consists of a new body of work derived from Maeve Brennan’s long-term research project The Goods. Carried out in collaboration with Tsirogiannis, the multidisciplinary project is concerned with the international traffic in looted antiquities. Brennan’s works trace the circulation of objects through layered temporalities, focusing on figures such as restorers, joyriders and smugglers whose material actions and practices tie them to wider networks, histories and economies. Brennan has an ongoing commitment to working slowly with people to allow complex narratives to form, attending to the thick and entangled nature of her chosen subjects.

Since 2018, Brennan has observed and documented Tsirogiannis’ investigations, mapping the illicit antiquities network from looters and smugglers to auction houses and museums. By some estimations, antiquities form the largest trafficking economy after drugs and weapons. Using data from police raids, Tsirogiannis has compiled a digital archive containing documentation of over 100,000 looted artefacts which he uses to identify objects of potentially illicit origin when they appear in auction houses, museums and galleries, often leading to the repatriation of objects.

Central to Brennan’s exhibition is a major new film commission An Excavation (2022). The film documents Tsirogiannis and Norskov’s investigation into a series of vases from the Geneva Freeport crates. Made in the 4th century BC by Apulian artisans, these vases remained buried in tombs for 2500 years before they were clandestinely excavated from their now irrecoverable contexts. The objects’ journeys through the hands of looters, smugglers, restorers and dealers are counterpointed by the hand-painted stories that adorn them. Made for burials, the vases depict scenes from the underworld – forensic and mythological narratives start to intertwine.

In 1995, illicit antiquities middleman Pasquale Camera was killed in a car crash. Inside his glove compartment, the Italian police force discovered a stack of photographs of looted antiquities. This evidence led to a series of raids during which the authorities discovered a hand-drawn diagram by Camera, indicating the routes of looted artefacts from tombaroli (tomb robbers) to international markets. This diagram was the basis for a large-scale criminal investigation into key figures within the network, including notorious dealers Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina and Robert Hecht. In The Glove Compartment (Renault 21) (2022) the internal cavity of Camera’s glovebox milled into a block of limestone, his casual hiding place made visible.

Taking Camera’s organigram as its starting point, Illicit Antiquities Network is an ambitious digital project, developed throughout Brennan’s Fellowship, which follows a series of artefacts through the trafficking chain, from looters to museums. The data from each case feeds a centralised map that visualises connections across time, location, individual and institution.

An Excavation continues Brennan’s interest in forms of repair and reparative histories. Her film The Drift (2017) focused on three figures preserving objects in contemporary Lebanon, mapping converging lines between protected ancient temples, smuggled antiquities and traded car parts. This led her to an interest in subsistence looting as a form of livelihood in ‘source’ countries sustained by a demand in ‘market’ countries. The exodus of cultural heritage through underground trafficking chains can be viewed as a continuation of colonial and imperial extraction. The actions of looters and launderers become part of a tangible material process that pulls at the distinction between licit and illicit cultural traffic. Ariella Azoulay writes of museums ‘For these institutions to be transformed or reformed, it is essential that looting be acknowledged as their infrastructure.’ The Goods aims to make this infrastructure visible, focusing on the patient and meticulous work of Tsirogiannis and others to hold institutions to account and make some small repairs to the damage done by an extractive history.

Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker, based in London, appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2019. Working with moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her practice explores the political and historical resonance of material and place. Brennan is currently participating in British Art Show 9 and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2021. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID (Official Competition 2018). Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013 -14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.

Thank you Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, Dr Vinnie Norskov, Museum of Ancient Art & Archaeology Aarhus, Toby Christian, Black Shuck, Ben Rivers, Ali Roche, David Falkner, Rebecca Moss, Faith McKie, Somerset House Studios, Alex Stillwell, Guillermo Rodriguez Lopez.

An Excavation (2022): Film Credits

A film by Maeve Brennan
With Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov

Producer: Ali Roche
Associate Producer: Victoria Tillotson
Cinematographer: Jamie Quantrill
Editor: Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas
Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick
Colourist: Jason R Moffat
Score: Beatrice Dillon
Kanun Player: Konstantinos Glynos

Additional Percussion: Morgan Buckley
Assistant Camera: Frida Martinsen
Production Sound Mixer: Tom Sedgwick
Camera Equipment: SLV, Minitech
16mm Film Stock and Processing: Kodak Film Lab, London
Credits Design: Fraser Muggeridge Studio

With thanks to Anders Bjerggaard, Jack Brennan, Toby Christian, David Falkner, Eloise Hawser, Therese Henningsen, Faith McKie, Rebecca Moss, Imran Peretta, Philomene Pirecki, Paul Purgas, Sophie Richmond, Ben Rivers, Somerset House Studios and James Wreford.

Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University.

With support from Arts Council England and Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus.

Illicit Antiquities Network (2022): Website Credits

Produced in collaboration with Dr Christos Tsirogiannis.

Built by Black Shuck and designed by Rory Gleeson.

With support from Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University; Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.

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.

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