Helen Carmel Benigson: Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia Fat

Helen Carmel Benigson
Anxious, Stressful, Insomnia Fat
Carroll / Fletcher

«...the flatness prescribed by the Internet onto the body» [...MORE...]

«These weight‐loss support group members then became avatars – digitalized versions of themselves within her videos, questioning the dematerialisation of the body through coding and information.» [...MORE...]

Helen Carmel Benigson (b.1985, London) was recently involved in Platform, a residency programme at Sheffield’s Site Gallery and the LUX Associate Artist Program. Recent solo exhibitions include: Performa.13 After Hours, New York; Going to Africa via a Machine Called a Sunbed, Meantime Project Space, Cheltenham and the Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town; and Palm Trees and Poker Players at UCA, Farnham and Breathe Harder, a site-specific performance at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Recent group exhibitions include: Ericka Beckman: Image games – work in context at Tate Modern, London; Videonale.14 at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Lagos and Odessa; Videocracy at The Centre for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv and The House in the Sky at Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London. In 2014, Benigson was awarded a Clarendon Scholarship to support her DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.

Diango Hernández: The New Man and the New Woman

Diango Hernández
The New Man and the New Woman
Marlborough Contemporary

Diango Hernández's work is an explosion of energy on a black graphite canvas. His language oscillate between "personal and collective memory, blurring the line between conflicting poetic and political points of view. [...] Hernández believes that all art is autobiographical but also incorporates the collective organised structures that give shape to history." [PR]

«It is very early in the morning. The grass is covered with cold, dense dew. We haven’t even moved a hundred metres and my boots and trousers are already drenched and cold. The morning mist has turned my legs into two moving blades of grass. I try to walk as fast as I can and not to shiver, and I long for the sun to come up and make everything evaporate. An hour later, like we do every morning, we are all standing to attention like soldiers, each one of us facing an infinite furrow of exuberant tobacco plants. With our hoes in our left hands, we all shout in unison: ‘We will be like Che.’ The tobacco plants and the weeds around them remain inert; our cry does not even move one leaf. Our voices quickly dissolve. It is worse each morning to work in silence.

However, today I hear the same instruction, like a continuous, infinite echo that refuses to leave its cave. Throughout all those years I learnt how to differentiate the voices of my companions and today I manage to break the unity. I hear each voice separately and I am able to recognise each one of our faces as well as our minuscule bodies.

Who amongst us is like Che? No-one!

Who wants to be like Che? No-one!

Who would have wanted to be like Che? No-one!

Diango Hernández, 2013» [PR]

«The New Man and the New Woman at Marlborough Contemporary is Diango Hernández’s first solo exhibition in the UK. Diango Hernández (1970, Cuba. Now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany) will have solo shows at Mostyn, Llandudno and at Kunstverein Nürnberg in 2014. He has participated in many group shows in international institutions, such as MOMA in New York and the Hayward Gallery in London. His work has been presented at the 2005 Venice Biennale, the 2006 Biennales in São Paulo and Sydney and the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. A major solo exhibition was held at MART, Roveretto, in 2012.» [PR]