We are reopening by appointment. Click here to book your visit.
Annie Whiles, Rock/Dog/Wood, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
“Until recently, I thought the moon was doing the shining. From within. Emanating.
Quite recently, I read that the length of time required for a signal to travel across the vastness of space, means that any signal detected would come from the distant past. I took this to mean that if we were receiving messages from another planet, they were still landing in our past. It actually meant the other planet’s past but it had already sent me where I needed to go to fetch the Listening Thing.”
Matt’s Gallery is delighted to announce that it will reopen with Annie Whiles’ The Listening Thing, a new work commissioned especially for our 3x3x3 metre cubic gallery space at 92 Webster Road.
To ensure the safety of our visitors, artists & staff, visitors to the gallery will be required to wear a face covering, unless they are exempt from doing so. If you do not have a mask, we will provide one free of charge. We also ask that visitors clean their hands using the sanitiser provided when entering the gallery. Please stay at home if you are feeling unwell.
During exhibitions, we will be open Thur – Sat 11am-5pm, by appointment. Please click here to book your visit.
MattFlix
Joey Holder, Semelparous, Until 5.59pm 21 August
Joey Holder, Semelparous still, 2020. Digital video, Duration: 7:47. Courtesy of the artist and Seventeen, London.
MattFlix presents Joey Holder’s video work Semelparous (2020), available to watch online for two weeks only.
Semelparous is a monument to the European Eel; a species that undertakes a single reproductive episode before death. The eels adopt a generative strategy, unique to ‘semelparous’ species, in which the organism inputs all available resources into maximising reproduction at the expense of its future survival.
The video work sees the eels depicted as a mythological symbol, biological specimen and, controversially, food. Unable to replicate the species’ enigmatic reproductive life in captivity, young European Eels have been extracted and illegally trafficked to farms across regions of East Asia. These practices have severely impacted the populations, and as of 2011, the European Eel has remained critically endangered.
Click here to watch until 5.59pm Friday 21 August.
Janette Parris, Catching Up, 6pm 21 August – 5.59pm 4 September
Janette Parris, Catching Up still, 2020. Digital video, Duration: 5:51. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Next up on MattFlix is Janette Parris’ Catching Up (2020). Like much of Parris’ work, Catching Up engages with the everyday contemporary urban experience. The film sees three friends meet outside their local south London convenience store to catch up on each other’s lives. A new work created for MattFlix, Catching Up features new original music by Parris.
TRANSMISSIONS Season 2
Matt’s Gallery is delighted to support TRANSMISSIONS as it returns for a second season in September.
Season 2 comprises eight episodes with contributions from BBZ TV, Juliet Jacques, Ignota Books, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Kat Anderson, Plastique Fantastique, and many others including Benedict Drew.
Read more at TRANSMISSIONS.TV.
TRANSMISSIONS collective is composed of Anne Duffau, Hana Noorali and Tai Shani.
Each artist included in TRANSMISSIONS is paid a fee in return for their contribution. In some instances, artists have waived their fees in order to donate the money to a charity of their choice. With a sense of community, all the money used to pay artists in season 2 has been kindly donated by established art institutions and commercially stable artists.
Season 2 is funded and supported by BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Chisenhale Gallery, DACS, Grazer Kunstverein, Matt’s Gallery, Studio Oscar Murillo, Netwerk Aalst, Somerset House Studios and Wysing Arts Centre.
Artists’ News
Jordan Baseman, Fabula, 2020
Artist Jordan Baseman’s film Fabula, created for Culture in Quarantine, looks at the shift in our dreaming habits since the world entered lockdown. Fabula features the voice of Dr. Deirdre Barrett from Harvard Medical School, who has been researching this phenomenon.
Filmed in Lockdown is a series of new works of literary, musical, visual, and performance arts, commissioned for Culture in Quarantine by Arts Council England and BBC arts. Click here to visit BBC iPlayer and watch Fabula in full.
Nicola Bealing & Alison Turnbull, Bugs: Beauty and Danger, GroundWork, King’s Lynn, Until 5 December 2020
Nicola Bealing, Long Journey, 2015. Oil on board, 50x50cm. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Bugs: Beauty and Danger has now reopened and continues to 5 December 2020. Bugs celebrates the beauty and power of insects at a time of increasing threat to many common species. This exhibition addresses our complex relationships with some of the tiny creatures without which the earth would not survive. Eight international artists, including Nicola Bealing and Alison Turnbull, will show work across the disciplines of painting, film, photography, print and installation.
Leah Capaldi, Art Licks Tele: Episode 13
Art Licks Tele is a new weekly Art Licks diary from artists and writers across the world during Covid-19 lockdowns. Click here to watch Episode 13 of Art Licks Tele, which presents contributions from Leah Capaldi (London, UK); Naama Roth (Kibbutz Urim & Tel-Aviv, Israel); Paul Setúbal (São Paulo, Brazil).
Willie Doherty on The Culture Cafe, Radio Ulster
Willie Doherty, Unquiet, 2018, still. High definition video, Duration: 19:00. Courtesy the artist; Alexander and Bonin, New York; Kerlin Gallery, Dublin; Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Matt’s Gallery, London; and Galeria Moises Perez de Albeniz, Madrid.
Willie Doherty recently appeared on Radio Ulster’s The Culture Cafe to discuss his recently released film Endless (2020) and the screening of Unquiet (2018) on MattFlix 24 July – 7 August. Click here to listen back.
Benedict Drew, Hippo Campus: Where We Learn, The Exchange, Penzance, Until 19 September 2020
Benedict Drew and OSE Associates, Spelunking still, 2017. Courtesy of the artist, Open School East and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Hippo Campus: Where We Learn is a group exhibition featuring works from the Arts Council Collection that explores alternative schooling, peer-to-peer learning and self-education.
In recent years there has been increasing concern about the downgrading of arts subjects in primary, secondary and higher education. With the rise in fees, closure of courses and loss of studio space across UK art colleges, artists and their peers are increasingly initiating alternative models of education for themselves. Hippo Campus explores how we learn, where we learn, and who we learn from.
Benedict Drew will be showing Spelunking, a collaborative film made with Open School East associates in 2017. Taking Margate’s caves and tunnels as a starting point, Spelunking took the form of 8 thematic public workshops organised by OSE associates, which led the participants on a metaphorical journey around caves, tunnels, smugglers’ paths, cavities, stalactites, cryptocurrency and subterranean myths.
Graham Fagen, read Reimagining The Narrative: Black Voices at visitblackhistory.com
Ghetto Priest and Graham Fagen. London. By David Levene 10/3/15.
Read Ali’a B. Edwards’ piece on The Slave’s Lament here.
A single screen version of The Slave’s Lament is on view at Art Image. Click here to watch.
Graham Fagen, New Symphony of Time, Mississippi Museum of Art, Mississippi, USA, Ongoing
Graham Fagen, The Slave’s Lament, 2015, video still. Image courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
New Symphony of Time expands the boundaries of Mississippi’s identity, casting light on a shared past to help reflect an expansive, more inclusive future. This ongoing exhibition features a single screen version of Graham Fagen’s, Slave’s Lament amongst other contemporary pieces such as Benny Andrews’ Mississippi River Bank and Jeffrey Gibson’s Sharecropper, pieced quilts, historical paintings, and self-taught artwork, which provide an alternate lens from which to consider the significant creative contributions of the state of Mississippi and its place as part of a broader, American narrative.
Melanie Jackson & Esther Leslie, 39th EVA International, Limerick, Ireland and Online
Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, The Inextinguishable, 2020. Courtesy of the artists and Matt’s Gallery, London.
Phase 1 of the 39th EVA International will open on the 18th September and continue until 15th November 2020. The Phase 1 programme will include venue-based, online, and offsite presentations by artists including Bora Baboci, Yane Calovski, Eirene Efstathiou, Laura Fitzgerald, Michele Horrigan, Melanie Jackson and Esther Leslie, Áine McBride, Emily McFarland, Eimear Walshe, Driant Zeneli, and Women Artists Action Group.
David Osbaldeston, DANCE FIRST THINK LATER, General Practice, Lincoln, Until 23 August 2020
David Osbaldeston, from Generalised Laughter Series, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
David Osbaldeston is showing new works at General Practice, Lincoln. Dance First, Think Later is a group show of work made by 45 artists during lockdown which features work by Yelena Popova, Ryan Gander, Bedwyr Williams, and Peter Liversidge. Until 23 August, by appointment.
Lindsay Seers, Nowhere Less Now 3, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, 26 September—26 December 2020
Lindsay Seers, Flying Saucer, 2020. From ‘Nowhere Less Now’,(2012–ongoing). Digital image. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London. Photo: Keith Sargent.
Nowhere Less Now 3 is an episodic work that addresses the dark legacy of British colonialism and Lindsay Seers’ journey through history in search of (the) truth. Presented in cycles, it is conceptually structured around Henri Bergson’s philosophy of memory. Seers builds on Bergson’s complex proposition of ‘intuition as practice’ to develop a specific method for the act of filming. Formed from his three fundamental propositions for asking the right creative question, her method is based on reenactment and evocations that are created to reveal qualitative relationships between things. These connections, which may be conceptual, historical or visual, emerge as she travels to relevant locations. The resulting installation has a multitude of narrative streams and a collage of imagery as time (past, present, future) is compacted.
The Sharjah iteration of this work, Nowhere Less Now 3 [flying saucer], significantly differs from the previous episodes in that it is embedded in a building of Googie architecture. The futuristic structure from the mid-1970s, formerly situated next to a British military encampment and acquired by Sharjah Art Foundation in 2015, is known as the Flying Saucer because of its shape. Basing her work on the Gulf Weekly Mirror’s 1978 report about a flying saucer hovering over Dubai, Seers uses the architectural elements of the building to narrate an alien tourist’s landing and its fascination with the forces impelling humans to move to a pulse, a rhythm. The alien attempts to understand something about life on Earth from geometry, gestures and movements. All the while, we are left to question whether we can find a way to move beyond language to nuanced deep thought that transcends cultural and biological stereotyping and reorders time as nonlinear—where the present is immanent and not defined by the past and the future.
Lindsay Seers, False Memory, Rugby Art Gallery, Online
Lindsay Seers, Extramission 2 (The Trilogy), 2005/10, installation view. Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Purchased with support from the V&A MLA Purchase Grant Fund and the Contemporary Art Society. © Lindsay Seers
Inspired by how photography and film induce and reshape memory, Extramission 2 (The Trilogy) investigates the loss of a memory that the artist could not personally retrieve, of a house she lived in Mauritius. Seemingly autobiographical, it tells the story of Seers’ upbringing on the island of Mauritius and addresses the artist’s early speechlessness; development of a photographic memory and eventual loss of this ability when she began to talk.
Co-curated by Seers, False Memory takes Extramission 2 (The Trilogy) as its beginning point.
Imogen Stidworthy, Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit 11, Riga, 4 September – 4 October 2020
Imogen Stidworthy, ‘Iris 1 [A Fragment]’, video still, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery.
Imogen Stidworthy’s 2018 film Iris [A Fragment] will be shown in Survival Kit 11, Riga. The eleventh edition of the festival is titled Being Safe is Scary and will be curated by Katia Krupennikova.
Being Safe is Scary takes its title from a site-specific piece created in 2017 at the Fridericianum Museum in Kassel, Germany, by artist Banu Cennetoğlu for documenta 14. By both repositioning original letters and adding newly cast copies, Cennetoğlu altered the name on the building’s facade so that it read ‘BEINGSAFEISSCARY’. The phrase comes from graffiti on a wall of the National Technical University of Athens, noticed by Cennetoğlu around the time of the signing of the EU-Turkey refugee deal in March 2016. Violating international law on refugee protection, the contract forced every irregular entrant to Greece to be handed over to Turkey, causing reception facilities and temporary camps on the Greek islands to be turned into detention centres.
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