Inspired by the life and work of Hilma af Klint, as well as the exhibition of DAS INSTITUT, this study day brought together artists, writers and historians to explore mysticism, feminism and performance. Programmed in collaboration with artist Tai Shani. Participants included Saelia Aparicio, Clodagh Emoe, Florence Peake, Davina Quinlivan, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Lindsay Seers, Tai Shani and V A L V E (Chloe Herington/Elen Evans).
The Cockpit
Gateforth Street, Marylebone
London NW8 8EH (map)
The programme was: 1-4pm
V A L V E (Chlöe Herington) and Elen Evans, Introduction music and interludes
Florence Peake, Voicings
Clodagh Emoe, Seeing the Unseen: An exercise to see, or rather perceive, the the unseen on an experiential and affective level
Saelia Aparicio, A Mysterical Journey
Zina Saro-Wiwa, Phyllis
Davina Quinlivan, Out of Light, Out of Nothingness: Conjuring the Chiasm and ‘Airy’ Spectatorship in the work of Janet Cardiff, Derek Jarman and Barbara Hepworth
Tai Shani, Dark Continent: Mnemesoid, performed by Maya Lubinsky
Participations in print by Saelia Aparicio and Lindsay Seers
Saelia Aparicio lives on a secret island in London. She graduated in Sculpture (MA) at the Royal College of Art in 2016. She has had institutional solo shows at La Conservera, Murcia (2012); the Patio Herreriano Museum, Valladolid (2013) and Da2 2002 Domus Artium, Salamanca (2015). During the summer of 2016 she is undertaking a residency at SeMA NANJI (Seoul Museum of Art) and her work is being showcased at the Bluecoat, Liverpool, and at the ICA as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Her multidisciplinary practice dwells on ideas of the organic, establishing analogies between corporeal and social mechanisms.
Foregrounding experience and perception, Clodagh Emoe’s works, which often take place in a collective setting, are underpinned by an in-between or “other” temporality or state. Projects have been commissioned and shown internationally, including We Are and Are Not, The Model, Sligo (2015); The Things We See, 9th Taipei Biennial (2014); An Exercise in Seeing, Red Cross Forest, Wicklow (2013); Proposition 7, The National Art Studio, Seoul; Parodos, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2012); Psychic Sleep and Collective Thought, Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery (2012), dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012) and Catalyst Arts, Belfast (2013); and Metaphysical Longings (2014). Collaborative projects include Mystical Anarchism, with Simon Critchley.
Florence Peake’s practice encompasses visual art, dance and performance. Peake often incorporates large-scale objects and materials that change and re-form in front of the audience. Peake’s practice uses drawing, painting and sculpture materials combined with found, appropriated and fabricated objects placed in relationship to the moving body. Site and the placement of performance and audience, live and recorded text, as well as a well-developed sense of wit and humour, are key to her body of work. Peake’s work has been presented, among others, at Fig-2, ICA; National Portrait Gallery; BALTIC and Hayward Gallery.
Dr. Davina Quinlivan is a senior Lecturer in Performance and Screen Studies at Kingston University. In 2012, she published The Place of Breath in Cinema (EUP, 2012). Her second book, Filming the Body in Crisis: Trauma, Healing and Hopefulness (Palgrave, 2015) examines healing, loss and desire in moving-image media and film, from Janet Cardiff to Steve McQueen and Terrence Malick. Her main interests lie in the representation of the body, gender, emotion, imagination and intimacy. She contributes to the Times Higher Education culture section and her writing has appeared in Sight & Sound, Dazed Digital and Little White Lies among others. Currently, Quinlivan is developing a project on women, cinema and the politics of movement.
Artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and the Niger Delta, Nigeria. Saro-Wiwa works with video installations, photographs and experimental films, as well as food and performances. She also founded the contemporary art gallery, Boys’ Quarters Project Space, in Port Harcourt. Saro-Wiwa’s interest lies in mapping emotional landscapes. She often explores highly personal experiences, carefully recording their choreography, making tangible the space between internal experience and outward performance as well as bringing cross-cultural and environmental/geographic considerations to bear on these articulations. Recent exhibitions and screenings include The Menil Collection, Stevenson Gallery, Goodman Gallery, Guggenheim Bilbao, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Tate Britain, Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum and the Fowler Museum in LA. Her first solo show, Did You Know We Taught Them How To Dance? debuted at Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Her new monograph of the same name is published by Washington Press.
Lindsay Seers (b. 1966) is a London-based British artist, associated with a genre defined by Mike Brennan as Neo-Narration. She was awarded the Derek Jarman Award with a commission of four short films for Channel 4 (2009); the Paul Hamlyn Award (2010) and the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Award (2012). Her installation Extramission 6 (Black Maria) was included the 2009 Tate Triennial, Altermodern, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, who described her work as “ceaselessly re-editing the documentary of her life as a ‘black’ woman in modern day Britain”, although in fact her works use biography more widely as a locus for a complex intertwining of events. Seers is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
Tai Shani’s multidisciplinary practice revolves around experimental narrative texts, which alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect in relation to post-patriarchal realism. Shani’s on-going project, Dark Continent Productions, includes films and performances, forming a mythology that conceptualises the ‘epic’ to test the potentials of feminist politics and ideologies, a platform to imagine a post-patriarchal world. Shani has presented her work extensively in the UK and abroad, including Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2016); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2015); Southbank Centre, London (2014-15); Arnolfini, Bristol (2013); Matt’s Gallery, London (2012); FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais and Loop Festival, Barcelona (both 2011).
V A L V E is the outlet for composer/performer Chloe Herington’s compositional work, often using text and image as the starting-point for scores. She collects sounds and diagrams, composing predominantly for bassoon, saxes, electronics and found sounds to explore synaesthetic memory and collective experience. Herington also plays sax/bassoon in Knifeworld and Chrome Hoof.
Hosted by The Cockpit
