Posts Categorized: Exhibitions
‘Interchange Junctions’
HS Projects curated its first major group exhibition, ‘Interchange Junctions’, at 5 Howick Place. The exhibition examines contested cultural and political histories, which carry special resonance at Howick Place, named after Viscount Howick (later 2nd Earl Grey) one of the main architects of the Reform Act 1832, Catholic emancipation and the abolition of slavery in the British Empire.
‘Interchange Junctions’ follows on from Yinka Shonibare’s permanent commission ‘Wind Sculpture’, a site specific response to the history of the area and continues Shonibare’s focus on themes of colonialism, trade, and race, employing the artist’s signature use of batik Dutch wax fabric designs which have become synonymous with African identity.
The artists in the exhibition have been invited to create a dialogue with Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Wind Sculpture’, with the multi-cultural aspect of the exhibition paying homage to the enlightened actions carried out in the name of Howick. Through a range of media from film, animation, sculpture, collage, photography, drawing, painting and performance, the artists seek to explore cultural frameworks and issues of identity and how we negotiate these through the historical legacy of our collective past and our ever evolving multi-cultural global world.
‘Interchange Junctions’ offers the opportunity to experience a number of new works and site specific commissions as well as works that have not been shown in London before. Ideas of mobility, memory and transmission, migration, trade and colonial struggle are explored along with notions of social awareness and engagement. Misinterpretation and misplacement of accepted norms from one culture to another are part of a discourse on friction between cultures, identity and cultural belonging. Notions of power, success and failure run through the exhibition challenging long held assumptions.
Participating artists: Faisal Abdu’Allah, Larry Achiampong, Faig Ahmed, Alice Anderson, Shiraz Bayjoo, David Blandy, Phoebe Boswell, Jessie Brennan, Fiona Curran, Corinne Felgate, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Romuald Hazoumè, Rob Kesseler, Alex Lawler, Alan Magee, Jade Montserrat, Alida Rodrigues, Zineb Sedira, Shahzia Sikander, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Michelle Ussher, Andy Wicks and BA(Hons) Ceramic Design Central Saint Martins students (Lucy Anderson, Sarah Christie, Yung Cheuk Chung, Srabani Ghosh, Ziynet Hidiroglu, Ellis Hooson, Sun-a Kim, Friedrich Ly Thien Co, Jessica Martin, David McQuire, Megan Niell, Niamh Philips, Jose Salgrado De Lacerda, Harriet Sennett, Sandra Stallard, Akville Zukauskaite).
During the closing event of 19th June, there was a rap performance by David Blandy and Larry Achiampong who under the alias ‘Biters’, examined the possibility for truthful, authentic experience via the popular cultures that have influenced them. They investigated what identity might mean in the post-colonial and post-mass media age by crate-digging through history, recycling already-sampled beats and reciting stolen rhymes.
‘Interchange Junctions’ was funded by Invesco Real Estate (IRE) and Urban & Civic, the joint developer behind 5 Howick Place with Doughty Hanson & Co Real Estate.
‘Interchange Junctions’ was at 5 Howick Place, Victoria London, from 10 May – 21 June 2014.
‘Fragile Monuments’, Kendell Geers
HS Projects presented a series of works by internationally acclaimed artist Kendell Geers as part of the 5 Howick Place Exhibition Programme that also featured in the group exhibition ‘Paradigm Store’. Geers was born in South Africa and now lives and works in Brussels. At the 1993 Venice Biennial he officially changed his date of birth to May 1968, a momentous year in world history for human liberation and equality.
Geers creates work that aims to disrupt commonly accepted moral codes and principles. Employing a wide range of references— from the realms of history of art, iconography and kitsch— Geers questions artistic value and mocks the notion of originality. His work reveals razor-sharp humour that plays with the viewer’s repulsion and ridicules racial or religious stereotypes. Laden with complex and deep political implications, it is challenging and confrontational, while at the same time, Geers’ minimalist aesthetics generate a subtle poetic undertone. His use of language, ready-mades, neon, glass, icons, film, chevron tape and other objects confront the viewer head on. They often startle the eye and require a degree of interrogation from the spectator.
‘Obelisk’, 2008 is a unique and free-standing sculpture by Kendell Geers, seen here in the UK for the first time. Taking the form of this triumphal sculpture, the work is a quadrangular shaft made from cast cement embedded with broken green glass bottles. Monolithic and tapering, the elegant form is reminiscent of historic and public statuary. Here, however, the entire form and even its pyramidal apex is encrusted with shimmering fragments of glass lending the form both an alluring and menacing quality. Historically the Obelisk is a symbolic marker of exchange between Nation States, celebrating alliances between different cultures. By inserting green glass into the concrete obelisk, Geers transforms this gesture of benevolence into a complex and barbed realisation of exchange, suggesting an underlying truth about the difficulties and embedded prejudices between cultures.
In ‘Monument to the F-Word XI’, 2010, seen here in the UK for the first time, Geers reconfigures the provocative word into a three dimensional sculpture carved from one solid block of highly polished bronze. The work gently nods to the form of Constantin Brâncuși’s bronze ‘Bird in Flight’ which depicts the elegance of a swooping bird. The work also recalls Brâncuși’s ‘Endless Monument’ in reference to public monuments as cultural symbols of history and international relations. Here, Geers depicts the monument in the suggestive form of a bullet or a modern missile which alludes to notions of conflict and relates to displacement and immigration; a subject of tenacious relevance in world affairs and culture. The idea of flight and of movement is reinforced by the way the work balances freely upwards. Geers has purposefully kept the meaning of the ‘F’ word open as language becomes abstracted and transformed. Here, the ‘F Word’ hangs in flux suggesting a dialogue concerning the permanence and impermanence of meaning.
In ‘Brawl I’ 2009 and ‘Brawl II, 2009, Kendell Geers instigates a powerful and confrontational dialogue with ‘readymade’ icon and Dadaist great, Marcel Duchamp. The works form part of a series of sculptures consisting of sheets of bullet-proof glass that have been shot at with a rifle. In a contemporary renewal of Duchamp aesthetic, the beautiful delicacy of the shattered panes provides a rich juxtaposition with the violent act that created them. Here, the physical properties of the materials have been pushed to their very limit, creating a work that resonates with a powerful sense of the corporeal. Neither homage nor naïve appropriation, the ‘Brawl’ works demand that the viewer reassess pre-conceived notions of the ‘authentic’ – both in the art world and in wider political spheres.
Kendell Geers’ sculptural series ’T.O.T.I’, 2005 and ‘Twilight of the Idols’, 2009 are iconic found object figures wrapped in red and white hazard tape. Here Geers’ aims to alert us to the ways in which we consume images and the meanings of cultural icons and symbols. Iconic figures such as Christ and Buddha are bound in chevron tape, turning their aura on its head and transforming them into fallen heroes for the late capitalist era. Like many of Geers’ sculptures, these too function as embodiments of an ideological structure. Here bound, gagged and packaged, the traditional meaning of the holy icons seems to have collapsed. A question hangs in the air: what do these icons really mean today?
‘Fragile Monuments’ was at Howick Place from September 2014 – March 2015.
‘Composites’, Matt Calderwood
HS Projects presented a new series of sculptures and works on paper by Matt Calderwood, in direct response to the site at 5 Howick Place.
Matt Calderwood is well known for his modular works, made of interlocking elements that explore the potential of sculptural language and examine the properties and dynamics of different materials. Taking the dynamism of urban architecture as his starting point – the chevron shape is a familiar theme – Calderwood experiments with balance, tension and chance to produce site specific works that become a record of a specific place.
‘I have been thinking about adaptability and the potential for change in response to changing external factors. All the works I have chosen to install at Howick Place are essentially modular, and as such, have the potential to be expanded, contracted and reconfigured in response to their environment.’
‘Rubber (Pile)’, 2013-17 and ‘Untitled’, 2017 are configurations of elements that have previously been used as printing blocks in the studio and exhibited as components of earlier sculptures. The element of chance plays an important role in Calderwood’s process-based but also carefully choreographed practice. The components in ‘Rubber (Pile)’, 2013-17, previously shown at Baltic 39 in a loose and scattered manner, are here pulled together into a much more dense and energetic pile. In their current location they could be seen as something like a camp fire.
Component parts of ‘Untitled’, 2017 were previously used for his work ‘Strapped’, 2013, which was exhibited during Frieze Sculpture Park in Regents Park, physically strapped-up and leaning against a tree in the park. At Howick Place the components transform into a totallly new work, a modernist and abstract towering structure, still bearing the imprints and residues from the elements, after being exposed to the weather conditions of Regents Park.
This performative and experimental aspect of Calderwood’s work remains a constant throughout his practice. For his exhibitions ‘Paper Over the Cracks’ at Baltic 39 and ‘Exposure’ at the De La Warr Pavilion, he exposed a series of geometric structures, made from welded steel and clothed in white billboard paper, to the natural elements to fend for themselves. During the four months’ exposure to heavy wind, rain, strong sunlight and salty air on the outdoor roof terraces, a slow process of transformation took place. The paper weathered and faded, and the steel began to rust in patterns, a visual record of how the sculptures met the elements they were exposed to.
Opposite the lifts, ‘Composites’, 2017 is a new series of large-scale works on paper, hand printed directly from 3d sculptural elements, similar to the ones exhibited. Mounted onto shaped aluminium composite panels, they are made in response to the Howick Place site. Black designs on white paper formed from chevron blocks, reminiscent of fonts and arranged according to chance, appear as contact prints of the sculptures, their different shades add dimension and depth. Different configurations of the ‘Composites’ will be explored during the course of the exhibition.
‘Composites’ was at 5 Howick Place from June to December 2017.