newsfromlondon201209

Christopher Kulendran Thomas

 

CHRISTOPHER KULENDRAN THOMAS

WHEN PLATITUDES BECOME FORM

Curated by Tom Trevatt

Opening 4-7pm Sunday 7^th October

Exhibition continues until 16th December

"In August 1940 Gilbert Renault, more famously known by his pseudonym, Colonel Rémy, returned to occupied France to volunteer as an agent in the French Résistance. During his time working for the British Government and the Free French Government in Exile, headed by Charles de Gaulle, Rémy became the most effective agent amongst almost 2000 volunteers. Working for the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA) Rémy organised one of the most active resistance networks (an organisation created specifically for military purposes; intelligence gathering, sabotage, espionage), the Confrérie de Notre Dame (Brotherhood of Our Lady). The express purposes of this network were the gathering of information, maps and photographs that aided the Allied armies in their incursions into both occupied France and German territory. Alongside the high profile resistance fighters as many as 400,000 French adults (by some estimates) partook in some form of resistance, be it producing, distributing or consuming resistance literature, committing acts of sabotage, gathering intelligence, housing spies, engaging in guerilla warfare. These activities, the networks created, the espionage, the clandestine publications, the economic resistance, people, relationships, weapons, forged documents, lies, secrets, loyalties made, loyalties broken, lives lost, loves formed, these things, these objects, these contingent materials of the Résistance are what the liberation movement colluded with." 
-  Excerpt from The Allure Of Collusion by Tom Trevatt

Not dissimilarly, a contingent ecological conception of the work of art is central to When Platitudes Become Form, an ongoing enterprise that exploits both the aesthetic and financial differences between centres of art power and their margins to pursue political affects that are not confined to the relation between artwork and viewer. Itself a target for marketisation, Christopher Kulendran Thomas' work takes as its materials the whole system by which art is distributed, including but not limited to the market, the state and global art imperial power, utilising the tools of distribution in the continual evisceration of the formation of the contemporary.

Tuesday November 6th, 7-9pm : To launch The Allure of Collusion, a new publication by Tom Trevatt to accompany the exhibition: When Platitudes Become Form, curator and writer Tom Trevatt will be in conversation with Christopher Kulendran Thomas, all welcome.

 

Tuesday November 20th, 7-9pm : Conversation with Simon Sheikh, curator, critic and Senior Lecturer in Curating, Goldsmiths University of London.

Ângela Ferreira

«Ângela Ferreira’s first solo show in London also marks the launch of Marlborough Contemporary, located above Marlborough Fine Art’s historic gallery.

Ferreira’s work incorporates diverse materials and histories. Sculptural forms often present other research media, such as film or photography. The work references modernist and architectural precedents, their relationships to post-colonial narratives and displaced utopias.

Stone Free links two holes, two spaces, two locations. The Cullinan Diamond Mine, source of one of the largest diamonds ever unearthed, acts as the first reference point for the show. Loaded with symbolic value, mines in South Africa have always appeared as powerful images of the political and economic structures that they sustained. The Chislehurst Caves in South East London are a warren of mines and tunnels that became a site of counter-culture in the Sixties. Jimi Hendrix, who performed there, is a key figure for the exhibition, bridging not only musical cultures, but also an African American identity via an adopted home in London, just yards from the gallery. One of his songs lends the show its title.

How to represent a hole in material terms? For Ferreira these excavations might be interpreted as negative monuments attesting to the paradoxical history of human desires, presented as a social and critical space.

Born in Mozambique, with Portuguese and South African heritage, Ferreira lives and works in Lisbon. Her retrospective, No Place At All, took place at the Chiado Museum in Lisbon in 2003. In 2007 she represented Portugal in the Venice Biennale with Maison Tropicale, now housed in the Museion, Bolzano. In 2008 she was selected for the São Paulo Biennial. Current commissions include projects at the Walther Collection, Ulm and at the Haus der Kunst, Berlin. Her work is represented in many international collections, from the FRAC Bretagne in France to the National Gallery of South Africa.»

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Joana Vasconcelos

Full Steam Ahead (Fotomontage)

Joana Vasconcelos
Haunch of Venison, Londres
exposição individual
11.10.2012 > 17.11.2012
inauguração | 09.10.2012 | 18h-20h

«Vasconcelos proposes an ambitious set of new works, specifically conceived for her first solo exhibition at Haunch of Venison's renovated London space. Two large scale pieces and two sets of medium-sized works will interact between themselves and dialogue with the space.

On the upper floor, room 1-01 will host Valkyrie Crown, an enormous, organic textile body, suspended in the skylight; its many tentacles trail up and down the staircase, reaching the ground floor. There, on room 0-02, the tentacles connect with the tubular volumes - also textile and colourful - which pierce through constructivist-inspired structures, whose monumental version - Tetris 17th Century (the other three versions are Luso Tetris, Tetris Waves and Tetris Keil) - can be seen in the adjacent room (room 0-01). Entirely covered in colourful tiles, these structures result from the combination of different parallelepipeds, resembling the popular video game Tetris or Lego constructions. The rigid surface of the tiles is pierced by different textile arms, ellongated and soft, that run through and meander around the works' angular shapes.

Full Steam Ahead (Red #1) will be presented on the first room of the exhibition path (room 0-03). These unlikely robotised fountains built with steam irons reinterpret the behaviour of a flower's petals: the irons open and close repeatedly in order to expel steam, thus resulting in a surprising domestic-inspired, synchronised sci-fi choreography. Full Steam Ahead (Red #1) opposes and parodies other robotic universes prone to belligerent transformism.

In the exhibition proposed by Joana Vasconcelos, the mechanical structures undergoing a cyclical metamorphosis, or even the bodies that invade and adapt to the space, interacting in a viral and colourful logic, seem to resonate with the complex adaptation processes of beings to their external conditions and to their surrounding environment.»

Clare Woods

"Interpreting the conventions and traditions of the landscape genre, Wood takes as her subjects the experience of landscape and the experience of objects that might lie within it."

Thomas Schütte