Castlefield Gallery HOME - British Art Show 9
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AR show Castlefield Gallery HOME Manchester Art Gallery the Whitworth 27.05.2022 – 04.09.2022 RITISH
01. Castlefield Gallery 04. the Whitworth
2 Hewitt Street, The University of Manchester,
Manchester Oxford Road,
M15 4GB Manchester
Artists presented: M15 6ER
Joey Holder and Grace Ndiritu Artists presented:
Anne Hardy, Andy Holden
02. HOME and Katie Schwab
2 Tony Wilson Place,
Manchester 05. Manchester Poetry Library at
M15 4FN Manchester Metropolitan University
Artists presented: Cavendish Street Manchester
Oona Doherty, Sean Edwards, M15 6BG
Patrick Goddard and Artists presented:
Caroline Walker Abigail Reynolds
03. Manchester Art Gallery
Mosley Street
Manchester
M2 3JL
Artists presented:
Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage,
Simeon Barclay, Oliver Beer,
Than Hussein Clark, GAIKA,
Elaine Mitchener, Grace Ndiritu,
Hardeep Pandhal and Hetain Patel
The BAS9 film programme includes
Patrick Goddard, Andy Holden,
Katie Schwab, Abigail Reynolds,
Grace Ndiritu and Hardeep Pandhal
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SOUTH 04Castlefield Gallery
Joey Holder
Grace Ndiritu
HOME
Caroline
Walker
Patrick
Oona Goddard
Doherty
Patrick Sean
Goddard Edwards
the Whitworth
Andy
Holden Anne
Hardy
Katie
Schwab
Manchester Art Gallery
Hardeep
Pandhal Hetain Simeon Barclay’s BAS9
Patel commission continues
downstairs in the
Hurvin ‘Out of the Crate’
Anderson collection gallery
Grace
Ndiritu
Elaine Film Simeon
Mitchener programme Barclay
Michael
Armitage
Than
GAIKA Hussein Oliver
Clark BeerEvery five years, the British Art Show presents a panoramic view of contemporary art in the UK. Focusing on work made since 2015, British Art Show 9 reflects a precarious moment in Britain’s history. During this time politics of identity and nation, and concerns of social, racial and environmental justice have pervaded public consciousness. The artists presented here illuminate and respond in critical ways to this complex situation, imagining more hopeful futures and exploring new modes of resistance. British Art Show 9 changes and adapts to each of its four host cities. The exhibition addresses three overarching themes: healing, care and reparative history; tactics for togetherness; and imagining new futures. The exhibition includes film, photography, painting, sculpture, and performance, as well as multimedia projects that don’t sit easily in any one category. In Manchester, the presentations at Castlefield Gallery, HOME, Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth feature new works, ambitious immersive installations, and special commissions that engage with local histories and cultures in Manchester. The exhibition includes a programme of artists’ films at Manchester Art Gallery and there is a dedicated website that enables artists to share work online. Following the external pressure to silence calls for Palestinian solidarity at the Whitworth in 2021, artists participating in British Art Show 9 have taken multiple positions of resistance. A number of artists have chosen to withdraw from the exhibition in Manchester in protest, others have chosen to respond in other forms whilst continuing to present their work. Collectively the artists in British Art Show 9 invite us to consider different ideas, feelings and histories, and expand our understanding of how we engage with the world. British Art Show 9 is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition presented in collaboration with the cities of Aberdeen, Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth. Curated by Irene Aristizábal and Hammad Nasar. www.britishartshow9.co.uk #BAS9
Following the external pressure to silence calls for Palestinian soldiarity in connection with Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies exhibition at the Whitworth in 2021, BAS9 artists have taken multiple positions of resistance. A number of artists have chosen to withdraw from BAS9 in Manchester in protest, some have chosen to address this issue directly in the work they are showing, and others have chosen to resist in other forms. We support all BAS9 artists, affirm the right of cultural institutions to operate without political interference and express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We are committed to BAS9 being a platform for action and exchange around multiple issues, and wish to contribute to a wider conversation with the artistic communities and audiences of Manchester and beyond. We believe in the exhibition as a space of encounter with the capacity to change the way we think and feel about the world in myriad undefined ways, and in the work of artists as a reservoir of hope to confront our turbulent present. A selection of books that speak about the possibilities of art, the role of museums, and the history and present of Palestine are available at Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth. We invite you to take your time, browse and join the conversation.
Artists in Manchester Hurvin Anderson Michael Armitage Simeon Barclay Oliver Beer Than Hussein Clark Oona Doherty Sean Edwards GAIKA Patrick Goddard Anne Hardy Andy Holden Joey Holder Elaine Mitchener Grace Ndiritu Hardeep Pandhal Hetain Patel Abigail Reynolds Katie Schwab Caroline Walker
Hurvin Anderson Hurvin Anderson was born in Birmingham and first visited Jamaica, his ancestral homeland, as a teenager. For him, painting is ‘a dialogue between these two territories – trying to get these two places to meet.’ His paintings of Caribbean barbershops describe a vanishing facet of Black British life. Set up in people’s homes, such places acted as informal community centres while specialising in ‘creating identities through haircuts’. Revisiting his father’s friend’s barbershop in Birmingham, Anderson found what seemed a forgotten, timeless space, ‘some sort of secret meeting hall’ which bore ‘the stamp of political, economic and social history.’ He later felt compelled to return to the subject again and again. He refers to the barbershop paintings shown here as ‘dub versions’; he concentrates on details rather than portraying the whole scene, ‘like a dub producer would focus on one particular sound, cutting away everything else.’ Michael Armitage Michael Armitage divides his life between Kenya and the UK. He uses his time in East Africa to travel, collect ideas and make drawings, while his paintings and lithographs are mainly realised in London. Armitage’s subjects are primarily derived from his own experiences of East Africa; its people, politics, history and mythology, its animals and landscapes. Many of his works address socio-political concerns. He paints enigmatic and ambiguous narratives on Ugandan Lubugo bark cloth, made from the pounded inner bark of the Mutuba tree. Armitage describes the act of painting with Lubugo as an alliance between himself, the fabric and the paint. Each piece of heavily textured bark cloth is unique, with ‘divots, holes, stitching and grain that disrupts the way the paint comes off the brush.’
Simeon Barclay Simeon Barclay’s multimedia installations question how memory, images and objects situate and define us. The artist’s Black British working-class background and his long experience of working as a machinist in the manufacturing industry inform his new work commissioned for British Art Show 9, Precariously Perched on the Edifice of Ruins (2021-22). A film, With Small Forward (2021), featuring archival images of club culture, and a Rodin- inspired sequenced neon nightclub sign, As a Precursor to Folly (2021), focus on the way in which spaces like the nightclub and art gallery provide a means of liberation and escape from everyday existence, whilst also cultivating hierarchies and refined codes of social display. As humans our need for social and cultural interactions and the need to create value in those exchanges riff on both the museum and the dancefloor, places where we are ‘seen, or being seen seeing.’ A new audio work, The Tenderness of a Certain Veneer (2022), takes a deaccessioned cabinet from Manchester Art Gallery’s collection and turns it into a sound system, recalling the radiogram that presided over his parents’ front room. Situated in the Gallery’s innovative ‘Out of the Crate’ collection display, Barclay’s work challenges traditional notions of what sculpture is, what it can do, and who it is for. Oliver Beer An artist with a background in music, Oliver Beer has a particular interest in the relationship between sound and space and the musicality of the human experience. He makes objects and architectural spaces sing and uses singers’ combined bodies as a single instrument, generating an entirely new form of song. Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II (2018), explores ideas of ‘inherited music’, creating intimate duets based on singers’ earliest musical memories. Pairs of vocalists join their lips in a tight seal, producing a shared mouth cavity. In this space their two voices interact and a ‘third voice’ appears. Their voices converge and their coupled songs – a hymn and an Aboriginal songline; an Indian raga and a 900-year-old melody by Hildegard of Bingen – create a percussive, throbbing effect.
Than Hussein Clark Than Hussein Clark’s multifaceted installations and moving image works are inspired by theatre, fashion and design and are dense with references to film and literature, underpinned by personal recollections and fantasies. Believing that history is never fixed but is something to be explored and retold from different perspectives, he takes historical subjects and re-examines them, turning them inside out and back to front in order to reveal unexpected aspects. For British Art Show 9 in Manchester, he takes an oblique look at the city’s industrial past and present in a scenography for a new play, Sense in the Capital (2022). In two works focusing on French writer and activist Jean Genet, excerpted from the labyrinthine installation A Little Night Music (And Reversals) (2019), Clark presents us with images that are simultaneously simple and highly complex. Once one starts probing, everything – from their titles to the smallest detail – has its own significance, leading to further layers of meaning and new connections. Oona Doherty Belfast-based dance artist and choreographer Oona Doherty creates visceral, multi-faceted works inspired by club culture, ‘informal’ dance, and the way people move on the streets. Renowned for her unorthodox and transformative approach to making dance,her choreographic vocabulary is based on acute observation. Irish choreographer John Scott describes how Doherty ‘observes and feels everything from a dramatic fall to a tiny finger tremor, removing the superfluous and highlighting vital details.’ In Doherty’s filmed solo, Hard to be Soft – Episode 1: Lazarus and The Birds of Paradise (2017), she conjures a cast of young working-class men from her home city, Belfast. Using the muscles of her face as much as her body, she is alert to every nuance of masculine posturing and what it masks.
Sean Edwards Sean Edwards’s multi-part sculptural installations embrace objects, print, photography, moving image and spoken word. He compares the relationship of their individual elements to that of ‘poems in a poetry collection, self-contained yet connected.’ The works included in British Art Show 9 in Manchester – a wall painting and print – were originally part of an expansive sculptural environment which Edwards created for the 2019 Venice Biennale. Entitled Undo Things Done, the installation – in a former church – surveyed his Catholic working-class childhood in Wales, its prevailing mood of poverty and low expectations uplifted by flashes of vibrant colour. Towards the end of its showing in Venice, Undo Things Done was itself undone by the floods which deluged the city. The works shown here are ‘poems’ that survived that catastrophe. They speak variously of regret, social stigma, ritual and chance, and celebrate the resilience of folk heritage and craft skills. GAIKA Defining himself as a ‘hard-to-place person’, GAIKA characterises his experimental music as ‘ghetto-futurist’. He is also an artist, writer and activist who is unwilling to be limited to ‘just one thing’. In 2018 he launched his debut album, Basic Volume, an elegy to his late father, a Windrush-generation immigrant, and created SYSTEM, his first art installation. This marked the 70th anniversary of Windrush by exploring the impact of migration on music in the UK, sound system culture and the history of the Notting Hill Carnival. GAIKA’s new experiential installation, ZEMEL (2022), is a smaller-scale relative of SYSTEM, which was designed as a vast audio-visual sculpture. Taking as its point of departure the story of GAIKA’s 91-year- old late uncle Zemel, ZEMEL incorporates a shrine to his uncle and other Windrush-generation deportees, who are commemorated here as demiurgic or folkloric heroes.
Patrick Goddard As demonstrated by his film, Looking for the Ocean Estate (2016, shown in the film programme), Patrick Goddard’s satirical art and writing focus on urban politics and ecology. Another film, Animal Antics (2021, shown at HOME), is an absurdist commentary on a post-wilderness world. Set in a zoo, it features a woman and her talking dog as they encounter the caged inhabitants whilst reflecting on humanity’s relationship with the ‘natural’ world. The film is set in an all new post-apocalyptic themed zooish enclosure- installation together with the piece Humans-Animals-Monsters (2020); a related sculptural work consisting of 24 severed heads of animals. Their wounded necks have been repaired with vintage mirrors that reflect both viewer and the space around them – in a nod (to quote Goddard), ‘towards the division, or lack thereof, between animal and human.’ Nearby, his intervention, RAW (dancefloor edition) (2022), forces the would-be raver to tread warily. Though the motion triggered lights may seem playfully interactive, the dancefloor is unfriendly; made from the sort of deterrent paving used by local authorities to discourage access, it acts as a potential ankle-breaker and an antidote to posturing. The floodlights themselves blast an ‘anti-drug’ blue-hue typically found in certain public toilets to discourage intravenous drug use. Anne Hardy Anne Hardy imagines the city – the source and inspiration for her work – as a sea in constant flux, with tides and backwaters akin to our unconscious. Working initially with photography, and latterly with large-scale installations, she creates alternative versions of our everyday world using urban jetsam and street-combings: materials and objects, sounds and other intangible things that she finds in the forgotten corners and voids in the city, seeing them as conduits to altered states and timeframes. Liquid Landscape (2018-present), presented at the Whitworth, combines objects and sonic gatherings from that port city with the
experience of an unexpected tropical storm in London. Surround sound, light and wind are choreographed to suggest a sequence of changing atmospheres, which sit in parallel with a physical space defined and shaped by colour. Visitors are asked to take off their shoes before entering; as Hardy remarks, ‘removing your shoes makes you vulnerable and more sensitive; you become part of the installation.’ She goes on to say: ‘I want the work to give you the feeling that it is performing for you, and around you; that it is a poetic being with which you can spend time but can never fully understand.’ Andy Holden Andy Holden’s art constantly moves between subjects (history, memory, nostalgia, science and philosophical enquiry), media (large installations, sculpture, painting, animation, multi-screen videos and performances) and approaches – different types of interpretation and different modes of thought. Among his ‘giant tangle’ of influences, Holden lists paintings by outsider artists and other people’s collections. It was his own love of collecting and his obsession with charity shops that led him to discover the work of Bedford-based outsider artist Hermione Burton (1925-2007). Having found her paintings by chance, he has since collected, researched, restored and exhibited her work and pieced together her life story in the 40- min film Hermione: Kingdom of the Sick (2022). As the custodian of Hermione’s paintings, Holden believes that he should‘make visible, and permanent, her remarkable body of works, contextualising them and providing a new way for them to be understood.’ the Whitworth, home to The Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, one of the most significant public collections of outsider art in the UK, provides a distinguished setting for Hermione’s work. In an earlier, unrelated animation, Enigma of Capital – Structure of Feeling Episode 5 (2020, shown in the film programme), Holden appears as his cartoon avatar, wandering and wondering in a post-cartoon wasteland.
Joey Holder Inspired by the world around her, Joey Holder creates ‘constructed environments that respond directly to contemporary, real world events.’ Her interest in the deep sea, with its ‘extreme alien environment’, is explored in her speculative project, Abyssal Seeker. Abyssal Seeker depicts a slow, aquatic journey to a fictional brine lake at the bottom of an unnamed ocean. Protagonists float in and out of the story, semi fictionalised versions of invertebrates, hybridised and constantly shifting. This work initially might seem to recall Jules Verne’s series of novels set under the sea, which transposed themes from Homer’s Odyssey to the crucible of 19th Century colonial expansion. While the colonial project of exploration employed naming and categorization to enable ownership, the beings in Holder’s world attempt to evade identification and classification. Holder’s brine lake represents a place beyond mapping, and uses the deep sea as a metaphor for the limit of human knowledge; a place beyond categorisation, beyond the colonial project of taxonomy. This artwork represents an optimistic speculation of an acceleration to a dark future, an alternative metaphor for escaping surveillance and the cast of the net, and about a more positive future, an escape to a dark, safe place beyond data. www.theabyssalseeker.life Elaine Mitchener Elaine Mitchener is a vocalist, composer and movement artist whose innovative work embraces aspects of contemporary music theatre and performance art. Her installation, [NAMES II] an evocation (2019-21), is part of an ambitious long-term project, SWEET TOOTH (2017), a visceral experimental music theatre work which uses different mediums to expose the brutal realities of transatlantic slavery and the sugar trade that fuelled it. In a small chapel-like space, Mitchener intones the names of some of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an 18th-century Jamaican sugar planter. His immense fortune
was gained at the expense of these enslaved men, women and children from whom he took everything, including their birth names. What we hear are the English names that he imposed on them, the only surviving record of their existence. The glass triptych pictures the artist performing this work. Grace Ndiritu Grace Ndiritu’s projects focus on new ways of thinking about art, science, spirituality and politics in order to address contemporary global issues. Since 2012 she has adopted a nomadic lifestyle, living in many different communities, often under challenging conditions. In 2017, Ndiritu’s lived research led her to found The Ark: Center For Interdisciplinary Experimentation and to invite a group of scientists, artists, gardeners, economists and spiritual practitioners to live together off-grid on the outskirts of Paris. This in turn inspired Ndiritu’s Plant Theatre for Plant People, a participatory project devised for British Art Show 9 in Aberdeen. During a four-day workshop, a community of Plant People explored the natural world through meditation, bonding and shamanistic practices. The project culminated in a vibrant celebratory protest in which participants paraded through Aberdeen, wearing the outfits shown in Manchester Art Gallery. At Castlefield Gallery, Ndiritu’s fashion and economic research project COVERSLUT© displays other examples of how art and creativity can be used in ecological activism. Ndiritu’s directorial debut, Black Beauty (The Journey) (2021, shown in the film programme), presents a fictional TV interview with the Argentinian poet, essayist and writer of fictions Jorge Luis Borges in 1983. The discussion centres on subjects of acute importance now: climate change, pandemics, migration and time.
Hardeep Pandhal Inspired by actual events, Hardeep Pandhal works with images and voices to transform feelings of disinheritance and disaffection into generative spaces that bolster interdependence and self-belief. The undulating white lines in his wall painting, HEADLINES (Withdrawn Artist Reluctantly Participates In Exhibition) (2022) echo others that appear in his drawings and animations over the last decade, most obviously the beards in his drawings of British Sikh soldiers. During this time, Pandhal has sensed a genuine struggle amongst many cultural opinion formers to translate his work into statements and eye-grabbing headlines without severely undermining his work. Simultaneously, he has observed a direct correlation between the low number of headlines his work has generated with the high number of head lines appearing on people’s foreheads when attempting to interpret his art. Pandhal’s video work, Ensorcelled English (2020-21, shown in the film programme) expands his interest in dark enchantment in a fantasy of a cursed art school. Taking his cue from ‘schoolhouse gothic’ he dissects the racist and sexist structures on which art education is too often founded, frustrating and zombifying students and tutors alike. Hetain Patel Hetain Patel’s art focuses on ‘humanity and marginality’. He found refuge from his early small town experience of racist abuse in superhero fantasies, and his work aims to challenge ‘common assumptions based on how we look or where we come from.’ His films address identity, ethnicity and modes of communication. Patel aims to communicate something beyond language. His new film, Trinity (2021) takes this concern with multimodal communication further. It tells the story of two women and their discovery of a physical combative language that once united humanity. Through a sequence of avatars, they experience themselves with different genders, ethnicities and bodies.
Abigail Reynolds Abigail Reynolds’s work embraces sculpture, collage, moving image and performance. Much of her art is inspired by her deep love of books and libraries. She sees libraries as ‘egalitarian, tolerant, social spaces teeming with conflicting ideas’ where diverse communities overlap. Incensed by their lack of funding, she has fought to defend public libraries in this country. During British Art Show 9, Reynolds is developing Elliptical Reading, a regular reading hour at local libraries in each city of the exhibition’s tour. Readers meet to share short sections from a favourite book, creating between them an unruly text or word collage, which builds over time. In Manchester, Elliptical Reading is presented at Manchester Poetry Library, where visitors can find re-bound books on the shelves. Map guides with the locations of these books are available in the library and on the British Art Show 9 website. Katie Schwab Katie Schwab is a maker whose practice is emphatically hands-on; she cherishes both the hand-made and the home-made and her art is collaborative and participatory. Her interest in mid-20th-century design and craft is reflected in the work she is presenting for British Art Show 9 in Manchester; a research project, blueprint for an emotion (2022), in which she concentrates on two designers, Hans Tisdall and Mitzi Cunliffe, who both made artworks for the city. Schwab’s own work embraces a wide variety of crafts including tapestry, textile dyeing and printing, ceramics, rug tufting and furniture making. Her approach is informed by literature, politics and social history, and learning is central to her practice; she is both an educator and someone with an unquenchable desire to learn. Her silent film This Interesting and Wonderful Factory (2019, shown in the film programme) looks at two examples of textile production in the 1920s and 30s: the Cryséde factory in St Ives, Cornwall, and Katie Schwab’s great-grandfather’s factory in Chemnitz, Germany.’
Caroline Walker Caroline Walker’s paintings portray women’s lives from a female perspective, focusing on their domestic surroundings and the work they do. Made in collaboration with the charity Women for Refugee Women, her series Home (2017) depicts asylum seekers in temporary accommodation in hostels and shelters, a psychiatric ward and a church basement. For these women, whose lives are lived in limbo until they are granted refugee status, their cramped cell-like rooms have become the centre of their existence. Walker found that making these paintings ‘opened my eyes to the idea of invisibility, of those overlooked lives in the city around us and about who occupies what spaces and at what times.’ Each woman’s story, told in her own words, can be read online, on the British Art Show 9 website. Walker’s recent paintings, made as the result of a residency at a London hospital, reflect the life and work of its busy maternity department. Her recent experience of it as an expectant mother led her to produce a unique body of works, mixing her own subjective knowledge with an ‘observational or documentary view of women’s working lives.’
Film programme The film programme features a selection of artist films, allowing expanded connections with the works presented in the galleries. 10am Patrick Goddard – Ocean Estates, 2016 12.20pm 33 mins 2.40pm 10.35am Andy Holden – Enigma of Capital – Structure of 12.55pm Feeling Episode 5, 2020 3.15pm 6 mins 10.43am Katie Schwab – This Interesting and Wonderful 1.03pm Factory, 2019 3.23pm 11 mins 10.55am Abigail Reynolds – Lost Libraries, 2018 1.15pm 19 mins 3.35pm 11.15am Grace Ndiritu – Black Beauty, 2021 1.35pm 29 mins 3.55pm 11.45pm Hardeep Pandhal – Ensorcelled English, 2020 2.05pm 31 mins 4.25pm
AR
show
Castlefield
Gallery
HOME
Manchester
Art Gallery
the Whitworth
27.05.2022
– 04.09.2022
RITISH
Caroline Walker, Joy, 11.30am, Hackney,
2017 © the artist. Courtesy the artist and
GRIMM, Amsterdam/New York, Ingleby
Gallery, Edinburgh, and Stephen Fried-
man Gallery, London. Photo: Peter Mallet.You can also read
