Archive of Destruction talk

I’ll be talking about the Archive of Destruction with artist Sam Durant (left) on 26 April 2023 at Art Exchange, University of Essex.

Large-scale drawings from Durant’s ‘Iconoclasm’ series have been installed around the University of Essex campus. Based on TV and newspaper images, they depict acts of destruction enacted on public monuments and statues.

The story of Durant’s ‘Scaffold’ sculpture is written up in the Archive of Destruction. It’s a pretty compelling read, involving a huge international outcry, a ceremonial burning, and the eventual transferral of the intellectual property rights of the work to the Dakota people.

Join on Zoom if you can’t make it to the Essex Unviersity campus.

Swedish architecture prize

Our public garden for a new neighbourhood in Lund, Sweden, has been shortlisted for the Kasper Salin Prize - Sweden’s most prestigious architecture prize!

‘Hage’ (‘garden’) is a very simple, beautiful thing, but what makes it so special is the context in which it is embedded. Not just the physical landscape of Råängen but all the work we have done to situate it in a critical / social framework: the commissioned texts, public events, schools programme, exhibitions, seminars, extensive website development, talks, photography, social media + press coverage and involvement of our advisory panel members.

More information on the Råängen programme, which I’ve been working on since 2016, can be found here.

Phot: Peter Westrup, 2021

Trickster Figures is open!

Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body

MK Gallery
4 February - 7 May 2023

Trickster Figures brings together eleven contemporary artists whose work stretches the definition of sculpture. The exhibition includes play, touch, sound and movement as well as objects that are made to be worn. Crab shells, tree roots and shopping bags sit alongside a dance floor and a water fountain. Elements will change and grow while some will never be finished.

The exhibition is rooted in the idea that new relations to the world are under construction, involving powerful slippages between binary systems, identities, humans, animals and the environment. Bodies are implicated in this new relationship, rendering them vulnerable but also magically available for new inscriptions and ways of thinking. As the exhibition curator Jes Fernie describes, “There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.” 

“The historical or mythological ‘trickster’ is often defined as a character who disobeys the rules and defies categories and conventions. The academic and philosopher Donna Haraway refers to tricksters as ‘wild cards that reconfigure possible worlds’. I see the artists in this exhibition doing just that.”
Jes Fernie

Installation views:
Siobhán Hapaska and Nnena Kalu
Ro Robertson
Alice Channer
Photos: Rob Harris

No More Kings

I was invited by artists Dunya Kalantery and Rima Patel to write a text for their book ‘The Brightness of JuJu’, a collaborative project with children from Willow Bank and Harris Garrard Primary Schools in Thamesmead.

It’s a beautiful, touching, violent book made up of collage, painting, assemblage, found objects and wild imagination. It tells the story of a future world without adults in which children make the rules, discover agency, and create magnificent poetry (Curly Swift / Lific / Tailor Swift / Terrific). They invent a crunchy black that is lonely, and feel the sadness of football boots when they are dirty.

I absolutely loved writing this text - it turned out to be an ode to the imagination of children.

Order a copy here

Archive of Destruction goes to Brussels

I was invited by Christian Mooney of Arcade Gallery to launch the Archive of Destruction Reader in Brussels in December 2022. The display system, pictured here, is by artist Anna Barham.

The Reader is now available to buy at the AA bookshop, Tenderbooks, Presse Books (Forma HQ), Yellow Back Books, and Fruitmarket Gallery. You can also order a copy online from Flat Time House.

New exhibition

‘Trickster Figures: Sculpture and the Body’ will open at Milton Keynes Gallery in February 2023.

I’m taking a look at the varying, magical ways that contemporary artists are thinking about the body’s newly configured relation to the world - something that involves increasingly fluid movement between binary systems, human forms, animals, identities, and the environment.

Participating artists: Saelia Aparicio | Alice Channer | Jesse Darling | Nicolas Deshayes | Kira Freije | Siobhán Hapaska | Nnena Kalu | Joe Namy | Harold Offeh | Ro Robertson | Vanessa da Silva

“There is a leakage, a seepage in these works. Many of them allude to bodies or systems that relate to bodies. Jealous bodies, broken bodies, fossilised bodies, vulnerable, contaminated bodies. There is also love, tenderness, glamour, and compulsion.”
Jes Fernie

RCA talk

I’ll be speaking at the forthcoming Curating Contemporary Art and Design: Archives and Collections Intensive at the RCA.

My contribution will consider the status of the Archive of Destruction as a curator-led, self-initiated project, existing beyond an institutional framework. I’ll discuss the playful way in which modes of destruction in the archive have been arranged (fear, love, greed, boredom etc) in order to critique the system of categorisation often employed by museums.

Writing residency in Ireland

I’ve been invited by Askeaton Contemporary Arts to carry out a research residency in September 2022.

I’ll be talking to artists, visiting artworks, and looking through archives to develop a text on the subject of unseen, abandoned, and unfinished projects, to be published by Daly & Lyon to celebrate five years of practice.

Photo: Lily Van Oost textile work.

Archive of Destruction Reader I launch

I’m very excited to launch the first Archive of Destruction Reader

Tuesday 4 October 2022
6.30 – 8.00pm
Flat Time House

I’ll be saying a few words with Gareth Bell-Jones (Director, FTHo) and Jo Melvin (curator and writer) at 7pm.

The Reader includes conversations, texts, stories, artworks, and pictures by artists, curators and writers, including Joe Namy, Marianne Wagner, Katharina Fritsch, Nicole Eisenman, Kasper König, Britta Peters, Vanessa Onwuemezi, Marysia Lewandowska, Horacio Zabala, Candice Purwin, and Joanna Rajkowska.

This will be an informal affair. Everyone welcome!

New text for Mona Yoo installation

I was commissioned by Talbot Rice Gallery to write a text on Mona Yoo’s work. I invite audience members to navigate a notional installation by the artist in the Sculpture Court of Edinburgh College of Art.

We’ve been meeting sporadically on zoom over the last couple of years, talking about ghosts, erasure, malleable time, sculpture, and the urban fabric of Edinburgh.

Mona was artist in resident at Talbot Rice Gallery throughout 2020 - 22. The programme is part of the Freelands Artists Programme.