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ARCHIVE 2005 |
| Phil Coy
Ten & A Half Square Miles (Against reason)
18 November to 22 December 2005 |
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Ten and a Half Square Miles (Against Reason) was an exhibition of new work by the artist Phil Coy (recently featured in ICA’s London In Six Easy Steps and Hayward Gallery’s Incommunicado touring exhibition). All the work was drawn from his six-month residency at Lambeth Archives. The residency programme represented a collaborative partnership between Lambeth Arts, Lambeth Archives, Oval House, the Hayward Gallery, the CfBT Action Zone and 198 Gallery.
Orientated as an insider within the Archive, Phil Coy developed further his interest in the sometimes random, often prescribed nature by which images and data become historicized. As a result he manipulated and mimicked the structures of data processing and devised his own generative systems of production, sometimes co-opting his colleagues at Lambeth Council and the local Loughborough Primary School children into the process.
One work sees Phil Coy mimic the process that prospective London cabbies undertake of ‘doing the knowledge’. Setting out on a ubiquitous Honda C90 he charted all of Lambeth’s 1512 streets. Unlike the aspiring cabby whose aim is to remember, Coy’s seemingly autistic performance, and the film that articulates it, serve more as a hypnotic erasure of memory.
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Petrona Morrison
South African Diary II
14 October to 11 November 2005 |
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Petrona Morrison’s body of work, South African Diary II, was inspired by her experience on a two-month residency at the Bag Factory (Fordsburg Artists Studios) in Johannesburg, in 2004. It documents the artist’s response to the contradictions and tensions of the South African reality.
South African Diary II explores a wide range of issues: economic discrepancies, racial identity and the mythologized “Rainbow Nation”, all viewed through the lens of an Afrocentric black Jamaican woman returning "home”. Intrinsic to the exhibition are the same issues of race, identity and power which are relevant to the Diaspora, and more particularly, to the Caribbean experience.
In the form of a visual diary, the exhibition included images of a documentary nature interspersed with text, which questioned the inconsistencies and disparities inherent in today’s South African society and challenges the nature of these images.
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Alison Locke and Chris Anderson
Brixton Street Studio
9 September to 7 October 2005 |
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Brixton Street Studio is the work of documentary photographers Alison Locke and Chris Anderson: a photographic portrait of the unique cultural diversity of Brixton’s community. Brixton Street Studio investigates the sense of identity and place of this urban community by building upon the wide tradition of studio portraiture around the world, and bringing it onto the street.
Locke and Anderson photographed a broad section of Brixton people going about their ordinary lives against hyper-real, idealised painted backgrounds that transport them out of their everyday context. 198 Gallery exhibited a wide selection of these compelling images.
Brixton Street Studio contributed to a historical perspective: the work of earlier Lambeth studio photographers, including Harry Jacobs, whose portraits depicted the community from the 1950s to the 1990s, were exhibited with Locke's and Anderson’s photographs.
The Brixton Street Studio portraits will be integrated into Lambeth Archive’s collection and document today’s Brixton unique cultural diversity by becoming its new living archive. The project was extended by Tate Modern for the long weekend festival, May 2006.
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Parm Kaur
Textual Timespace
1 and 2 September 2005 |
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Textual Timespace was a series of poetic sound and image installations which investigated intimate interactions between individuals within the public white noise of city life. It explored creative metaphors based on theories of simultaneous action found in Einstein’s theory of relativity and postmodern approaches to visual and Live Art.
This installation broke new ground in science-art investigations as the poet and interdisciplinary artist Parm Kaur, recently featured on BBC 2‘s DNAsia, BBC Radio 3 and 4, created new work which elucidated the similarities of scientific and artistic reasoning on how the passage of time affects our understanding of truth.
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Vision Light Project Participants and Mario Lewis
Vision Light
10 August to 26 August 2005 |
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Vision Light explored the experience that visually-impaired people have of art, and encouraged the audience to discover new ways to think about the relationships between sight, other senses and art.
Led by Trinidadian artist Mario Lewis, the Vision Light series of workshops aimed at giving a group of diverse blind and visually-impaired individuals an opportunity to explore and communicate how they experience being both audiences and makers of art. The Vision Light exhibition showcased the work resulting from the workshops, involving elements of video, sound and performance.
By offering the audience an opportunity to discover the rich and eclectic works produced by a group of artists with varying levels of visual impairment, ages and cultural backgrounds, Vision Light challenged the attitudes and preconceptions of sighted and visually-impaired visitors about human diversity, access to art and the role of sensations in the artistic experience.
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Urban Vision - Metropolis
25 July to 12 August 2005 |
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The Urban Vision - Metropolis exhibition gave talented budding graphic designers, photographers and illustrators an opportunity to exhibit their innovative work and celebrated the integration of the urban lifestyle to UK culture. This year, the Urban Vision - Metropolis exhibition included artworks created in partnership with the Youth Advocate Programme (ISSP) Digital Expressions (YAP) and the Lambeth Youth Offending Team.
The exhibition presented pieces that were produced through the new ‘Pix and Mix’ programme in Graphics, Photography, and Illustration. It also included video projects such as the Africa Remix film Brixton Bytes, in collaboration with Hayward Gallery's Digital Extensions youth outreach programme. This show was the young people’s response to the urban sprawl expressed through photography and graphic art.
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Anissa-Jane
Womanyfestations: The Beauty In Manipulation
29 April to 10 June 2005 |
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Presenting work developed from her project Wo-manifestation, an exploration of her roots, Anissa-Jane investigated personal and collective experiences of cultural displacement and their effects. Her non-wearable garments made using materials such as brown paper, cocoa butter and hair express how people have been forced to change and adapt under societal pressures in their non-native surroundings.
In her hands, brown paper, a material more familiar used as packaging or as envelopes, becomes "a metaphor for [her] own brown skin." Part of the message is a celebration of "the accomplishments of [her] forebears who have lived through and adapted to their changing social situation over the centuries." While her personal standpoint is that of a British West Indian female, her work has a wider relevance: the works can hold meaning for any person who has been subjected to social forces and pressures that have necessitated changes in their way of being.
Anissa-Jane draws on fashion, theatre and popular culture for her methodology and presentation. Made by manipulating brown paper in different ways such as "twisting, crumpling, oiling, threading and staining," her beautifully handcrafted theatrical and sculptural garments such as Wo-manifestation gain a life of their own, transcending boundaries and restrictions. The material has changed through these processes, but its original identity can still be perceived. There are also intriguing contrasts in the qualities of her work such as flexibility and fragility, strength and delicacy.
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Brixton Graffic Show
Artists in the exhibition: Anissa-Jane, Kofi Allen, Christian Badger, Jennie Baptiste, Doze, Rebecca Harman, Thabo Jaiyesemi, Marok, Mau Mau, Eddie Otchere, Reach, Trini&Blest, Winstan Whitter, Adrian Wood
11 March to 22 April 200 |
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The 2005 Guinness® Foreign Extra Stout Brixton Graffic Show was the third major exhibition of graphic urban art housed together in Brixton that celebrates contemporary photographic art, using techniques from the past and of the future.
Brixton Graffic Show was developed by photographer Eddie Otchere. His vision created a pan-urban collaboration that saw London, Berlin and Paris coordinating the development of a graffic visual vernacular with more than fifteen other creatives across the capital, as well as some designers from other regions.
"Brixton Graffic Show is not just a group show, it's a defining moment in the development and promotion of urban aesthetics and culture in the UK. We are confident that the show will challenge many people's preconceptions about graffic art and will place many urban artists firmly within the UK and international arts scene as innovators of modernisms," commented exhibition curator Eddie Otchere. |
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Mario Lewis and project participants
Proverb
21 January to 4 March 200 |
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The exhibition presented an installation meditating on the diasporan experience, commenting on 'migration, history and belonging,' and a 'hybrid film' that explores 'the passing of time, estrangement, [and] alienation as a poetic construct.'
Since living in London, Lewis has used the medium of video extensively to explore aspects of contemporary culture and his personal history by visiting chosen places such as Lord's Cricket Ground, Cambridge University, a traditional English umbrella shop in central London, or a pub full of football supporters. Once there, he would initiate conversations with people, uncovering various worlds within UK society as he examines his own place within it.
The time-based nature of the moving image is perhaps suited to his interest in the relationship between the past and present, between the cultures of the destinations of migrants and the cultures left behind. The range of ways in which the moving image can be used also fascinates Lewis: by 'deconstructing the language of cinema' through the use of 'different strategies and aesthetic devices that function in-between documentary, cinema verité and experimental filmmaking, [... his] intention is to engage in the ongoing discourse which is connected with 're-presentation' and at the same time question the notion of 'difference'.'
Lewis has exhibited internationally outside of his native Trinidad, most notably in Cuba, the United States, Brazil and Senegal.
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Zory
Mass Hollow
19 November 2004 to 7 January 2005 |
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Iranian artist Zory creates works that seek to "challenge preconceptions, and to raise questions about dehumanization, human oppression and human alienation" by working in a variety of media including sculptural installation, video and photography, many of them with a performance element.
"In this installation I seek to question the key issues pertaining to the subject of displacement, integration and traumatic experiences that many immigrants go through after being forced to leave their countries." (Zory)
Three videos were shown. In Masks, a figure takes a close-fitting mask off her face, one after another, frustrating any attempt to glimpse her true identity. In Dancing with the Wall, "Zory returns to the theme of the veil as a paradigmatic emblem of human enclosure and constraint against which the individual inevitably will resist. The brick walls within brick walls combined with the veil are seen here as a malign presences referencing the division of physical, political and psycho-social space: the separation of the inner from the outer world, the domestic from the public, the so-called third world from the so-called first world" (Alex Rotas). Peace Breaking shows the face of a woman struggling to break free from hands covering her open mouth.
This was the first major solo exhibition for Zory, who has exhibited widely in the UK. Her exhibitions to date include Religion, Art and War (London and touring, 2003-2004); Sanctuary: contemporary art & human rights at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2003); A Sense of Place (Cardiff, 2003). |
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