February 2022

Current

Mike Nelson, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction) at Matt’s Gallery, Bermondsey. Open Fri-Sun, 12-6pm until 27 March 2022, by appointment only

Marking 26 years since Mike Nelson’s first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction) is now open. For his sixth exhibition at the gallery, Nelson has created a new intervention to reimagine the space.

Crafting a domestic interior out of the 3x3x3m gallery, the space consciously carries echoes of Nelson’s previous works. It harks back to The Coral Reef, shown at Matt’s Gallery in early 2000, and reiterates the dichotomy of escape and entrapment in the work. It also directly builds upon a section of the 2001 exhibition Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted., at the ICA, London, which attempted to break the continuity of time through the manipulation of the mundane and unwanted – this alchemical experiment is continued at Webster Road.

Originally scheduled to take place in the summer of 2020 and delayed by successive lockdowns, Nelson’s piece has developed and evolved in response to these shifting times. What is presented sits on the boundary of claustrophobia and imaginative freedom – an oasis, perhaps, or a self-made prison depending on the visitor’s perspective, but more likely a hallucinogenic mirage alluding to both. As such it may be reflective of the experience of many over the last two years – a time when travel and human contact became inaccessible and abstract, as did our accepted vision of the planet we inhabit.

MattFlix

Hayley Newman, Gravity, Gluts, Pennies, Pillows and Ray, Until 5.59pm 18 February 2022

MattFlix presents Gravity, Gluts, Pennies, Pillows and Ray, a 5-week retrospective screening of video works by Hayley Newman leading up to the launch of her new novella Ray in 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, the 2011 financial crisis and the artist’s experience of having Covid-19 in March 2020.

Week 1: Soundgaze, 1999
Week 2: Café Carbon by The Gluts, 2009-13
Week 3: Crisis Cabaret, 2013
Week 4: Pillows, 2020 – present
Week 5: Ray, 2021

Pillows is a piece of writing started by Hayley Newman in April 2020 after being treated for Covid-19 at home in March of the same year. It is the name the artist gave her flat, a small two-bedroom, inner-city home. At the time it was a sanctuary, a place of refuge, protection and care, which she imagined extending out into society in recognition of the right of every person to rest their head in safety and peace and to belong to the place they choose to sleep.

Artists’ News

Imogen Stidworthy, Balayer – A Map of Sweeping (v.2018), Museum Dr. Guislain, Ghent. 12 February – 29 May 2022

For Balayer – A Map of Sweeping (v.2018), Imogen Stidworthy visited Jacques Lin and Gisèle Durand’s community in Monoblet. They were part of the ‘network’ that Fernand Deligny began in the Cévennes, in the south of France, to take care of children with complex problems, most of whom were on the autistic spectrum and non-speaking. The emphasis was on experimentation: he created a small community in stark contrast to life in an institution, replacing institutional isolation with living with others in the countryside. The adults had no special training, and withdrew from spoken language when with the children. Deligny created an environment in which aids such as maps, photography and film, took the place of language. These helped the adults ‘to see’, to catch traces of meaning in the gestures and ‘wandering lines’ of the children; they were also tools for shaping relationship with them.

For one year, the Dr. Guislain Museum will be drawing inspiration from the French educationalist, philosopher, writer, film-maker and artist Fernand Deligny (1913-1996). Deligny’s approach to care, upbringing and social work is based on fundamental criticism of the intention to improve and change people. From 12 February 2022, the exhibition Circonstances, with a selection of maps, photos and excerpts from the film Ce gamin, là, makes way for Imogen Stidworthy’s Balayer – A Map of Sweeping. The Deligny studio, which Simon Allemeersch is shaping together with young people from the Ghent psychiatric community, continues to grow and evolve. The question ‘How can Deligny’s ideas inspire us today?’ will be central throughout the year.

Graham Fagen, Art is the Antidote, Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands, On display now

Graham Fagen is showing neon work GUERRE JARDIN (2014) in group exhibition Art is the Antidote at Museum Voorlinden, Netherlands, which features works from the museum’s collection. 

Director Suzanne Swarts: ‘Art is a medicine: it recharges you, gives you energy and shows you that things can be different. In these complicated times, this exhibition feels like a real breath of fresh air.’

Art is the Antidote includes work by Bob and Roberta Smith, Etel Adnan, Bernard Frize, Zhanna Kadyrova, Johannes Langkamp, Jeff McMillan, Yayoi Kusama, Bob Bonies, Jean Tinguely, Charles Avery, Merlyn Paridaen, Alicja Kwade, Imi Knoebel, Lyle Ashton Harris, Piero Manzoni, Subodh Gupta, Guido Geelen, Sean Scully, Tom Sachs, Graham Fagen, Zoro Feigl, David Batchelor, Ai Weiwei, Thomas Scheibitz, Folkert de Jong, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Marcel Broodthaers, Inti Hernandez, Harald Vlugt, Dimitri Tsykalov, Joncquil, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Axel Hütte and Loris Cecchini.

Watch Lindsay Seers, No Money is Included, 2021 

In her film No Money is Included, Lindsay Seers discusses the pay and conditions of artists working for publicly-funded institutions, a longstanding issue that has received greater attention since the start of the pandemic.

Seers is a leading voice on this issue as a member of CVAN South East’s Steering Group and as co-founder of a new independent alliance, Frank.

David Osbaldeston, The Serving Library Collection, Ravisius Textor, Nevers, France, Until 9 April 2022

David Osbaldeston is showing his 2008 work Another Shadow Fight alongside other works by artists and writers from The Serving Library Collection at Ravisius Textor, Nevers until 9 April. The Serving Library maintains a collection of framed objects, each the source of an illustration that has appeared on the pages of the regular journal Bulletins of The Serving Library (2011–17) and Dot Dot Dot (2000–10). 

Jordan Baseman, A Different Kind of Different, Big Muddy Film Festival, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA, 24 – 27 February 2022

Jordan Baseman’s short animated film A Different Kind of Different is selected for this year’s Big Muddy Film Festival, which takes place at The Varsity Center at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, IL. All screenings are free to attend.

If you’re unable to make it to Big Muddy, you can watch the film, plus an accompanying series of illustrated online talks, and read texts by the artist and writer Maeve Connolly at kindofdifferent.org

Hayley Newman, Where There’s Space to Grow, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Until 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. Until 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.

Michael Curran, CAMBERWELL BLUE MOON, 2018

A blue moon is the name given to the second full moon to occur in a single calendar month.

On Saturday 31 March 2018, during the second full moon of that month, Curran donned a long flowing dress embellished with pink roses and a mask of his literary heroine Muriel Spark and began to dance – channeling Spark’s many nights in Camberwell . From 1955-65 she lived in a bedsit on Baldwin Crescent writing several of her key novels – before The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie propelled her into literary stardom. Curran is one of many people who have campaigned for a Blue Plaque marking the author’s residence in Camberwell, as yet without success.

Michael Curran’s vinyl record The 9 Lives of Muriel Spark was mixed and mastered on the same street, five doors up. Click here for more info and to purchase.

Anne Bean, The Ignorant Art School | Sit-in #2: To Be Potential, Cooper Gallery, 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.

The exhibition will tour to Hatton Gallery, Newcastle 19 March – 21 May 2022. Click here for more information.

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, Until 28 February 2022

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.

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