‘Paradigm Store’
HS Projects curated the second major group exhibition at 5 Howick Place, ‘Paradigm Store’. ’Paradigm Store’ examines the interface between art and design and the latent socio-economic and political forces that underpin it through new and recent work by seventeen UK and international artists.
Spread over five floors and 80,000 sq ft, HS Projects brings together a diverse line-up of emerging and established artists to explore issues of the decorative and the functional through a mixed range of media, proposing new ways of re-considering our environment and social structures. From immersive, site-specific installations and large-scale sculptural works to paintings, performance and film, the exhibition aims to investigate artists’ unrivalled engagement with art and life through reference to the readymade, 20th Century Modernism, architecture, specific histories and origins, as well as the subversion of language and modes of popular culture.
Highlights of ‘Paradigm Store’ include a new ‘still-life’ ceramic arrangement by British artist Simon Bedwell; an ‘art store’ installation by artist duo Cullinan & Richards; an animated rock garden by Harold Offeh; a collage installation of cut-up fragments and clay bricks by Paula Roush; a sculptural relief by Theo Stamatoyiannis which questions the boundaries of sculpture and architecture; a free-form installation by Beatriz Olabarrieta that combines low-fi building materials with video; and new collage sculptural structures by Anne Harild. A film by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes inspired by Japanese ‘sangaku’ is shown in the UK for the first time, courtesy of the Cartier Foundation, alongside other works making a UK debut by Kendell Geers, Claire Barclay, Nike Savvas and David Shrigley. Other participating artists include Yutaka Sone, Maria Nepomuceno, Ulla von Brandenburg, Elizabeth Neel and Tobias Rehberger.
During the private view there was a performance by artist collaborators Meta Drcar and Dori Deng featuring three female dancers responding to the architecture of the space; as well as a live performance of sculptural objects by Harold Offeh based on his series of work looking at elements of historical 17th and 18th century gardens as sites of artifice, spectacle and theatre.
‘Paradigm Store’ was funded by Invesco Real Estate (IRE) and Urban & Civic, the joint developer behind 5 Howick Place with Doughty Hanson & Co Real Estate.
‘Paradigm Store’ was at 5 Howick Place, Victoria London, from 25 September – 5 November 2014.
‘Legacy’, Harold Offeh
Working with HS Projects, Harold Offeh developed a project with ETAT (Encouragement Through the Arts and Talking for the over 50s) and the residents from Peabody’s Pimlico Estate in response to the Post-Olympic legacy. The focus of the project was to develop a series of posters looking at some of the key themes that drove the 2012 Olympics. Posters are firmly embedded within the visual culture and history of the Olympics, capturing the spirit of the host cities’ games.
The starting point for the project was to look back, after the games had finished, and capture responses to London’s 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. The members of the group assessed the impact of the games on themselves, their communities, London and the nation as a whole.
Harold Offeh’s conversation with the group started by looking at some of the key themes that drove the Olympic project. London’s 2012 motto was to inspire a generation. He asked members of the group what they had found inspirational about London 2012. Many of the initial conversations focused on identifying interests, likes and dislikes about the games and their overall impact.
The group developed a series of posters from their initial ideas. The posters celebrated the group’s enthusiasm for the sporting and cultural success of the games, but also reflected more personal associations. Many members of the group took great inspiration from the Paralympics and the inspiring achievements of athletes and the positive shift in attitude to disability it brought with it. The exhibition featured a lively and eclectic mix of approaches from an embroidered felt celebration of British cycling success, to photographs taken during the Paralympic games accompanied by poetic text.
‘Legacy’ was commissioned by HS Projects and funded by the Insight Community Arts Programme (2002 – 2015).
The project ran from October 2012 to March 2013.
‘Virtual Failure’, Troika
HS Projects presented an exhibition of recent work by Troika, the collaborative contemporary art group formed by Eva Rucki (b. 1976, Germany), Conny Freyer (b. 1976, Germany) and Sebastien Noel (b. 1977, France) in 2003.
Troika’s work deals with the ways in which the digital world informs and crosses over into the physical one and how technological advancement influences our relationship with the world and with each other. With a particular interest in the subjective and objective readings of reality and the various relationships we form with technology, they investigate the coalescence of seemingly irreconcilable opposites — nature and technology, the virtual and the real, the human and the non-human. Through drawing, sculpture and immersive installations, the artists merge digital, high-tech and natural processes and materials that range from high voltage electricity to evolutionary computer algorithms, industrial acid, optics, soot or 3D programs to form a coalition between the increasingly abstract landscape surrounding us and experiences on a human scale.
‘Virtual Failure’, 2017 is a tapestry-like construction made of tens of thousands of coloured dice generated, line by line, by manually emulating the rules of a simple computer binary program. The work originates from an interest in the human experience of digital production and the shift away from the material towards the virtual. ‘Virtual Failure’ is part of a recent series of works in which Troika adapt systems and methods, such as computer algorithms or mathematical sequences that are borrowed from the digital backbone of our physical world. Using everyday materials to simulate digital sequences, these works are physical reenactments of what is increasingly invisible. They merge a process of making – close to traditions of ‘handmade’ automatism – and a mathematical kind of chance, inspired by probability theory and protocols, more frequent in geometric abstraction.
Troika arrive at these logically-derived compositions by setting initial conditions – here the choice and order of the first row of coloured dice – and then by introducing an unpredictable element – here an evolutionary algorithm – from which the unexpected emerges. By pairing dice as a symbol for fate with a scientific computational system, ‘Virtual Failure’ is a homage to twentieth-century artistic recourses to chance and systems of order based on random decisions, including those of Marcel Duchamp mock-scientific procedures – ‘3 Standard Stoppages’ – that subverted scientific rationalism and questioned the status quo of the processes underlying a mechanistic worldview.
‘Compression Loss’, 2017 is part of a series of objects in which Troika take mythological figures and forms and deconstruct them into separate ‘slices’. The title references the process by which a digital file looses some computational information each time it is copied, as well as a method of rationalisation in which the whole is seemingly understood by its deconstruction into smaller, separate parts — a process which does not account for accumulative significance.
The works in this series are produced by industrial and traditional methods that fold in computational information. Mythological and ancient objects and figures associated with both technological mastery and the inconclusive or indeterminate character of knowledge, are cast in resin by using 3D digitised models of the originals taken from online libraries, or by recasting plaster reproductions of their originals.
The objects – Hebe, the goddess of eternal youth and Thoth, the ur-god of magic, are reproduced in individual slices of normed thickness. They are then re-assembled by re- appropriating logically and mathematically derived sequences, or according to prescribed variations such as doubling or compression. Each iteration then has an identity that cannot be confused with its original. Yet, intrinsically linked to their source, each iteration alludes to the coalescence of seemingly irreconcilable opposites: authenticity and artifice, model and copy, the virtual and the real, the logical application of science and the shifting nature of mythology and belief.
‘All Colours White’, 2016 explores the relationship between what is natural and artificial and the plurality of seemingly indivisible entities and experiences. It consists of a mechanism which projects red, blue and green light onto a canvas structure. The projection is a constant loop of 12 minutes. Initially distinct, the colours gradually bleed into each other, creating an intricate spectrum until their collective amalgamation results in pure white light.
In the installation, the natural and the digital collide. The specific combination of red, blue and green references the colours that mediate our digital experience, while the composite colour spectrum inherent in white light is intrinsically natural. With a particular interest in temporality, subjective experience and the frameworks through which we perceive the world, ‘All Colours White’ investigates that which coexists but cannot be experienced simultaneously.
‘Virtual Failure’ was at Howick Place from July to December 2018.