January 2022

Opening soon

Mike Nelson at Matt’s Gallery, Bermondsey. 27 January-26 February 2022, by appointment only.

Marking 26 years to the day since Mike Nelson’s first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, Nelson’s new architectural intervention will open to the public on Thursday 27 January 2022. This will be the artist’s 6th solo exhibition at the gallery.

Due to the nature of the work and scale of the gallery, admission will be by advance booking only, which will open the week commencing Mon 11 January.

MattFlix

MattFlix Repeats, Until 5.59pm 14 January 2022 at mattflix.video

You can still enjoy the MattFlix back catalogue as part of MattFlix Repeats until 5.59pm 14 January 2022.

With works from Mania Akbari & Douglas White, Kathryn Attrill, Jordan Baseman, Dean Blunt, Bronwen Buckeridge, Beth Collar, Juan Cruz, Willie Doherty, Jimmie Durham, Paul Eachus & Nooshin Farhid, Graham Fagen, Oona Grimes, Joey Holder, Melanie Jackson, Tarzan Kingofthejungle, Rebecca Lennon, Luke McCreadie, Nathaniel Mellors, Charlie Osborne, RCA Contemporary Art Practice, Richie Moment, Sally O’Reilly, Janette Parris, Ben Rivers, Bryan Giuseppi Rodriguez Cambana, Frances Scott, Lindsay Seers & Keith Sargent, Tai Shani, Marianna Simnett, Jennet Thomas, Suzanne Treister, and Michelle Williams Gamaker.

Hayley Newman, Gravity, Gluts, Pennies, Pillows and Ray, 6pm 14 January – 5.59pm 18 February

Gravity, Gluts, Pennies, Pillows and Ray is a 5-week retrospective screening of video works by Hayley Newman leading up to the launch of her new novella, Ray on 11 February 2022.

Ordered chronologically and changing weekly, the series features works from 1999 to the present day taking in performance, sound, music, pop video, climate activism, financial crises and the artist’s experience of living with long Covid.

Artists’ News

Hayley Newman, Where There’s Space to Grow, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, 15 January – 12 March 2022

Where There’s Space to Grow is an exhibition curated by Celebrate Different Collective, a group of young people living in Sunderland, which creatively reflects on the industrial decline of the 1980s in North East England, while looking ahead to a shared progressive future.

Arts Council Collection artworks, including Hayley Newman’s Daisy Chain (2002), sit alongside new works created by local Sunderland residents which reveal stories that encourage us to dig deep. Championing diversity in a shifting cultural and physical landscape, this exhibition asks: how can we create space for all of us to grow? 

Susan Hiller & Robin Klassnik, Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. 8 January – 13 March 2022

The collaborative video work Running on Empty (2017) by Susan Hiller and Matt’s Gallery Director Robin Klassnik will be on view at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea as part of the forthcoming exhibition Not Without My Ghosts: The Artist As Medium. 

Not Without My Ghosts is an international exhibition ranging from the late 19th century to the present day, looking at how artists’ have engaged with séances, channelling, automatic writing and other paranormal investigations. The Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition, in partnership with Drawing Room, features around 50 exhibits spanning from paintings, works on paper, installation, video and animation.

Jennet Thomas, IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN, London Short Film Festival, Rio Dalston, 3.30pm 23 January 2022

Two billion years from now, the oceans are beyond understanding, yet undersea karaoke may still be possible. The ghost of an oyster holds memories of what happened. It sings to a scrap of cloth that fell to the bottom of the sea, trying to get a face.

Jennet Thomas’ video work IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN has been selected for the 2022 London Short Film Festival and will be screened as part of New Shorts: WTF: Outside the Box at Rio Dalston on Sun 23 January. There will be a Q&A with some of the filmmakers featured in the programme after the screening.

IT ONCE HAD A FACE, NOW IT WANTS ONE AGAIN was one of the first films screened as part of MattFlix in 2020.

Michael Curran, PAPERBACK WRITER GOWN and TRIP TO AREZZO (2018)

The Public Image – Scottish Lady Tiger was a response to the life and work of Muriel Spark by artist Michael Curran at GENERATORProjects, Dundee in2018. The artist created an environment in which a series of actions and performances inspired by the life and work of the author unfolded.

In the film PAPERBACK WRITER GOWN (2018) the artist’s mother, Ivy Curran, sews the covers from Spark’s 22 novels onto a formal white dress. A key reference here to the shared Schiaparelli dress of the residents of the May Teck Club in the novel Girls of Slender Means. It also acts as a reminder of the stylishness of Spark herself and her love of fashion and beautiful things. Allusions to the dress return in the album made to coincide with the show – called The 9 Lives of Muriel Spark – here the deadly role of the garment literally sizzles in Anna Cavic’s spoken word track – A DRESS MADE OF FIRE. The incomplete dress was exhibited in the space on a tailor’s mannequin with needles and threads adjacent to the large caravan parked there and close to the paper shredder where books were reconstituted.

TRIP TO AREZZO (2018) is an i-phone movie made on the road to Arezzo by painter and psychoanalyst Francesca Vincarelli – a pilgrimage to Muriel Spark’s home where she lived and wrote and ended her days. The road trip from Rome to Arezzo alludes to Spark’s novel The Driver’s Seat but there are no passengers and the driver is full of Joy as she sends messages back to Michael Curran in his preparations for the opening of his exhibition The Public Image.

Click here to watch PAPERBACK WRITER GOWN (2018)
Click here to watch TRIP TO AREZZO (2018)

Curran’s album The 9 Lives of Muriel Spark was made on the centenary year of the Scottish writer Muriel Spark’s birth as part of his tribute to the author. Click here to purchase the LP.

Thanet Tape Centre, Ultra Magnetic, Until 30 January 2022

Well Projects is excited to present Ultra Magnetic, an exhibition by Thanet Tape Centre featuring works by Adam Chodzko, Arianne Churchman, Benedict Drew and Plastique Fantastique; with audio loops contributed by Thanet Tape Centre associates. Thanet Tape Centre is a Kent-based music label that releases alternative and experimental music.

**Well Projects will close for Christmas between 20 Dec 2021 – 13 Jan 2022**

Anne Bean, The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #2: To Be Potential, University of Dundee, Until 19 February 2022

Declaring that our collective future is determined not by what we know, but by how we create and share knowledge, Sit-in #2: To Be Potential activates how artistic practice as pedagogy dares education, in the words of bell hooks, to be ‘the practice of freedom’.

Political in origin, radical in intent and emancipatory by nature, this radical pedagogy is an inherently social practice. Subverting hierarchies between ‘those who think they know’ and ‘those who assume they don’t’, artistic practice as pedagogy is a global phenomenon that recognises no conceptual, discursive or intellectual limits. Characterised by an ethics of equal access and an ethos of generous solidarity, together the radical pedagogical practices featured in Sit-in #2: To Be Potential transform knowledge from a capitalist commodity to an emancipatory power available to all.

Included in this group exhibition is a newly commissioned audio work The Ballad of the White Room by Anne Bean, Graham Challifour, Rita Donagh and Rod Melvin is installed within the reconstructed elements of The White Room alongside ephemera of the 1970 experiment and Drawing Life (1970) a series of collage works reflecting on the White Room by Anne Bean.

Nathaniel Mellors, POST PERFORMANCE VIDEO, PROSPECTIVE 1: LOS ANGELES, Carré d’art, Musée d’art Contemporain, Nîmes, Until 17 April 2022

Nathaniel Mellors is exhibiting moving image and sculptural works alongside artists Coleman Collins, Rodney Mc Millian and Anna Wittenberg in group exhibition POST PERFORMANCE VIDEO, PROSPECTIVE 1: LOS ANGELES.

The four artists chosen for this project live in Los Angeles or were trained in the city. Post Performance is a concept invented by Marie de Brugerolle, curator of the exhibition, to qualify the legacy and impact of performativity on the visual arts after the 1970s. The exhibition is a choice of exemplary works of this, without labelling them. The link that connects them is a special relationship to the object and to the drawing, as a script, accessory, decoration or counterpoint to the projected image. At Carée d’art, Nîmes until 17 April 2022.

Graham Fagen, New Arrivals: From Salvador Dalí to Jenny Saville, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh, From 27 November 2021

We’re delighted to announce that Graham Fagen’s 2015 video installation The Slave’s Lament has been acquired by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

‘The Slave’s Lament’ was Robert Burns’ only work to empathise with the appalling hurt of the displaced, the trafficked and the enslaved. Replete with a moving score written by Sally Beamish, performed by the Scottish Ensemble and Reggae singer Ghetto Priest, and produced by legendary On-U-Sound founder Adrian Sherwood, Graham Fagen creates a fascinating soundclash, where Burns’ poetry finds a haunting bedfellow in Jamaican reggae music – and finds much common ground. This evocative video installation was curated by Hospitalfield, Arbroath and exhibited at Scotland + Venice 2015, when Graham Fagen represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.

Opening on Sat 27 November at Modern One, Edinburgh, the work will be displayed alongside a range of modern and contemporary work including painting, sculptures, films and more, by artists such as Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Oskar Kokoschka, John Bellany, Marie Harnett and Pablo Picasso.

Nicola Bealing, Bodies in Space, MIRROR, Plymouth, Until 26 February 2022

Curated by Ben Borthwick, Bodies in Space presents work by artists using the figure in painting and drawing to question and understand how we occupy, move through and negotiate the public and private spaces of daily life. The exhibition also reflects how figurative painting and drawing becomes more visible at times of wider social and political change.

Nicola Bealing will be showing four paintings in the exhibition, alongside works by Flo Brooks, Andrea Büttner, Andrew Pierre Hart, Nick Jensen, Claudette Johnson, Joy Labinjo, Bruno Pacheco and Charmaine Watkiss.

Mike Nelson, The House of the Farmer, Palazzo dell’Agricoltore, Parma, Until 12 June 2022

Palazzo dell’Agricoltore presents “The House of the Farmer”, a site-specific installation conceived by British artist Mike Nelson and curated by Didi Bozzini. The exhibition has its origin in the history of the building, reflecting on the political, economic and social role it has played over 82 years since its construction in 1939. The building history is reflected in its name — Palazzo dell’Agricoltore — and by the title of the exhibition, The House of the Farmer. The palace was the seat of the corporation that organised and facilitated agricultural activities under the Fascist government.

It occupies all its floors, drawing on the visceral and poetic power of the palace and the materials that inhabit its halls, taken from the wild landscape in the rural region surrounding the city; rocks, tree trunks, branches, and roots, and even the entire side of a hill has been moved inside the building as if part of its architecture. This way, Nelson leads you to imagine the building as a sculpture itself and attempts to provide a mental and material path between reflection and fantasy, between nature and culture.

Mike Nelson, Vogliamo tutto, OGR Turin, Until 16 January 2022

A group exhibition reflecting on the transformation of labor in the post-industrial and digital era, between awareness and disillusion, precariousness and empowerment, curated by Samuele Piazza with Nicola Ricciardi.

Fifty years after the publication of Vogliamo tutto – a novel by Nanni Balestrini about the struggles of the working class in 1969 Turin – does it still make sense to want it all?

The exhibition includes works by: Andrea Bowers, Pablo Bronstein, Claire Fontaine, Tyler Coburn, Jeremy Deller, Kevin Jerome Everson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Elisa Giardina Papa, Liz Magic Laser, Adam Linder, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Mike Nelson, and Charlotte Posenenske.

Vogliamo tutto. An exhibition about labor: can we still want it all? Curated by Samuele Piazza with Nicola Ricciardi.

Graham Fagen, New Symphony of Time, Mississippi Museum of Art, Mississippi, USA, Until September 2023