Felipe Ehrenberg, Latin American Artists and the Beau Geste Press
10 October – 14 November 2016
In Association with Cambridge University Library and Trinity College
Curator: Erica Segre
The Mexican mixed media, conceptual and performance artist Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion co-founded the Beau Geste Press collective in Devon (1970-1976) with English artist and art historian David Mayor. It became one of the most influential avant-garde independent presses of the post-war period and is regarded by art historians and contemporary artists as one of the most significant transnational collaborative projects of the 1970s.
This exhibition showcases a collection of these provocative and original limited editions often made using unconventional materials and ‘arte povera’ techniques of production and distribution in an unusual variety of small-scale formats. It explores the legacy of indiscipline of the BGP’s uniquely communal and discrepant artefacts.
Lala Meredith-Vula is showing a series of photographs that mark her personal journey of rediscovering her roots and her own identity during the past 25years, including the aftermath of war in Bosnia and Kosovo. Lala will also feature works from the blood feud reconciliation movement in Kosova from 1990 – 1991 and the incredible time in the Kosovar history when people decided to bring an end to blood feuds and to stop the killing which lasted for over a hundred years and sometimes until all men of the two involved families were killed. The blood feuds were often influenced by the fifteenth-century canon of Lek Dukagjini, a set of traditional Albanian laws.
Lala Meredith-Vula was born in Sarajevo in 1966, to an Albanian father and English mother, and came to Britain in the 1970s. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London University (1985/88) and was awarded a Yugoslav scholarship at Pristina University, Kosova (1988/90). Her first show was in Damien Hirst’s landmark exhibition “Freeze”, London (1988) that is famous for launching the YBA Young British Artists. She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007) representing Albania, as well as nationally and internationally with many solo shows including at the Photographers’ Gallery London, in Germany, Italy, Albania, and in numerous group shows in the UK, USA, and China.
Both exhibitions run from 11 July – 25 SEPTEMBER 2016
The Private Views for both exhibitions take place on Wednesday 13 July from 5.30 – 7.30PM
PeterHawksby‘s exhibition ‘Personal Space’ is showing works which mark a return to a style he first adopted in late 1960’s, using acrylic paint on watercolour paper, applied with a blade. The works explore the spatial tensions between the illusion of the design and the paper as object. The colour schemes are an intuitive response to the design and evolve as the work progresses until they are in harmony with the structure.
Object Objectbrings together objects, made and found, to reflect the everyday lives of its seven participating women artists. Working in isolation from each other, the women came together to curate the objects, in the expectation that shared concerns and experience would lead to common themes, and it is these that have informed the grouping of objects. The artists have been brought together by Jane Hellings.
On Saturday 10 September Object Object will host a multi-disciplinary symposium; Objectification and Gendered Violence, bringing together frontline workers from Women’s Aid and Cambridge Rape Crisis, with visual artists, performers, poets, filmmakers and musicians to explore the role played by objectification, in the perpetuation of gendered violence. Further details will be available on our website shortly.
Jill Eastland‘swork is research based, usually growing from a social, political or environmental issue. She enjoys collecting things and these collections are often incorporated into her work. Jill is founder of Rebel Arts, presents on Rebel Arts Women’s Radio and organises Eastern Bloco Arts Area at Strawberry Fair.
Jane Hellings often works collaboratively, sometimes with Up t’Arts women artist’s collective and also with Rebel Arts, on acts of creative resistance.From her studio at home, she uses low-tech processes and everyday materials to make work about daily life. She has a first class honours degree in textiles from Bretton Hall, Leeds University and an MA in Print from Cambridge School of Art.
Susie Johnson graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art. From her studio at Cambridge Artworks she creates clever, quirky work in which she explores the taxonomy of shape, the mathematical treatment of movement and the tension between nomothetic and idiographic views of the world.
Alison O’Neill has a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art and an MA in Feminist Theory from Leeds University, where she studied with Griselda Pollock. Her concerns are class, gender and motherhood and her work incorporates drawing, installation and video.
Eirini Kartsaki is teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Eirini writes and devises performances which she shows nationally and internationally and is currently working on a book entitled Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. She also makes things, primarily, but not exclusively, as performance props.
Jane Waterhouse graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art, she then added to this, a distinction in MA Print. Jane combines traditional techniques with her own innovative processes to make exquisite prints. Her subject matter; daily soundings, wayfaring, belonging, tokens, imbue her work with a poetic quality.
RachelWooller is interested in the power of materiality. She likes to juxtapose materials to create visual metaphors, which explore the structures we are bound by. She is drawn to issues of power, yearning and the intangible.
11 APRIL – 1 JULY 2016
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 14 APRIL 2016, 6.00 – 8.00PM
Sandra Scott is a Barbadian-born professional artist and teacher who has lived and worked in Cambridge for the past 24 years. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Barbadian National Cultural Foundation NIFCA award. In 1984 she won the prestigious Organisation of America States fellowship to study Art Education at the Edna Manley School of Art, then known as the Jamaica School of Art. Her early work used mixed media and sculpture and was strongly influenced by African art. Her recent works are further inspired by contemporary artists such as Klimt and Hundertwasser.
Scott’s current work combines her own hand dyed fabrics, batiks and prints, which form the basis for her machined stitched pieces. Keen to experiment with new ideas and materials, she has included her own printed papers and embossed foils with some of her fabric pieces. Drawn to the aged face and body, Scott is fascinated by what constitutes ideal beauty in different societies. This theme has been a prominent feature in her work, resulting in highly personal and symbolic expressions, and designed to reveal and bring these issues to the viewers’ attention.
11 APRIL – 1 JULY 2016
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 14 APRIL 2016, 6.00 – 8.00PM
Beata Zygarlowska’s photographic works explore senses of space created by, and around the human body. Utilising her background in architecture, Beata approaches the scale of the built environment in a free and abstract way. In combining it with the photographic technique of double exposure, she creates images which construct new relationships between an object and its surroundings. Poetic ideas are framed in space and time; the sensuous skin of a woman set against the cold skin of a modernist building, a male figure as the bedrock of a skyscraper or a spinning female dancer in a void. Unfamiliar representations of bodies in space transform our reality into abstract impressions, questioning our experience of what we know, or what we think we know.
Born in Warsaw, Beata studied in Copenhagen at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and at The University of Cambridge. She lives and works in Cambridge and London. For her photographic work, combining architecture and light, she has received several grants and scholarships, among others from the Danish Agency for Culture, the Anglo-Danish Society, the Sophus Fonden by Louis Poulsen Lighting (for her studies on V. Hammershøi), and the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation.
Leaflet Installation
Room 204, Centre of Latin American Studies
Alison Richard Building
24 November – 31 March 2016
This exhibition can be visited by appointment only, please contact Julie Coimbra (jac46@hermes.cam.ac.uk) if you wish to see it.
This installation brings together two poetic, political, and print projects resulting from the recent re-inauguration of La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. Today transformed into an exhibition space for the archive of anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and a print workshop, La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote was once the editorial office of an iconic satirical magazine from late nineteenth-century Mexico, known for its stand against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884-1911). Lending continuity to the critical praxis of this much-persecuted publication (whose contributors were often imprisoned and even murdered), today’s La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote has joined the local and international movement of solidarity with the 43 disappeared students from the teacher-training school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Iguala, Guerrero. The photographs on display here have been taken by five photojournalists (Italians Giulia Iacolutti and Valentino Bellini, Mexicans Mauricio Palos and Heriberto Paredes, and Canadian Brett Gundlock) who have closely followed the aftermath of the “Iguala events”. To mark a year after the disappearance of the students, these pictures were reproduced, and then exhibited horizontally for people to take copies, at La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote using a modern version of the mimeograph, called the Risograph, that allows cheap mass-scale image reproduction. Alongside these photographs, the poetic and textual works exhibited here have resulted from the decontextualized quotation of some of the writings of the original founders of the magazine El Hijo de Ahuizote. In light of the human rights situation in contemporary Mexico, these texts are likely to have deeply unsettling resonances for today’s publics.
8 FEBRUARY – 1 APRIL 2016
ALL FLOORS OF THE ARB
PRIVATE VIEW 5 FEBRUARY 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 PM
‘Fulcrum’ presents the work of three painters from Cambridge. Their work ranges from the abstract to the figurative, from the gesture to the construct. Together they balance on the tipping point between representation and abstraction. Here we find more or less painterly ways of working, experiments in pictorial possibility that test the image against the abstract potential of the material and history of paint. In bringing the work together in one show we hope to provide an opportunity for viewers to explore this territory with us.
15 January – 1 April 2016, ARB atrium
Private View 5 February 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 pm
Force Majeure, French for a superior or irresistible power, is a term used in the writing of legal contracts, to free both parties from obligation in the face of extraordinary natural events or disasters, from war to hurricanes or earthquakes.
The ceramic work Mella Shaw is showing in this exhibition is concerned with moments of transition, tipping points, thresholds and edges. All the work is painstakingly hand-built from small component parts of colourfully stained porcelain. Shaw exploits porcelain’s material quality of pyroplasticity, where the clay body sags, warps or bends in the kiln when fired at high temperature. She is particularly interested in the moment when clay vitrifies into ceramics, where an object loses its order and momentarily gives way to chaos and chance, in the dark behind the closed doors of a kiln. The resulting forms are reminiscent of otherworldly ruins, caught on the verge of collapse.
Mella is Exhibitions Manager at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a role she combines with her own practice as an artist/maker, and with teaching and writing about ceramics. In 2013 she graduated with Distinction from the MA Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art, London, and was profiled in Crafts magazine, Ceramic Review and Axisweb. Residencies include three months at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, and a year as artist-in-residence and tutor at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kaolin Gallery, Stockholm, showing at both London and Milan Design Weeks and by Sarah Myerscough Gallery at STRARTA Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London. Mella exhibited at the British Ceramics Biennial 2015 as one of 11 artists selected to represent the best of contemporary British ceramics in their centrepiece AWARD show. She has recently been featured in Wallpaper* magazine and on BBC news as well as being selected by Culture24 as one of “10 artists you should be collecting now”.
Zanzibar, Christ Church Cathedral and the last slave market
A new Sideshow! exhibit at the Centre of African Studies, 3rd floor of the ARB, from 10 November to 15 December 2015
Christ Church Cathedral in Stone Town, Zanzibar, was built in 1879 on the site of the last permanent slave market in East Africa and is a site of international cultural and historic significance.
The slave market was closed in 1873 amid increasing pressure to abolish the East African slave trade. The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa purchased the site and built the cathedral under the leadership of passionate abolitionist Bishop Steere. Known as the ‘Slave Market Church’, the high altar was positioned over the whipping post.
Zanzibar’s tropical climate took its toll on the building and by the time World Monuments Fund Britain (WMFB) became involved the cathedral was in danger of collapse. In 2013, the Anglican Diocese of Zanzibar and the Zanzibar Government asked World Monuments Fund to help protect this site of conscience.
The cathedral and the former slave market were included on the 2014 World Monuments Watch, WMF’s biennial advocacy programme for global heritage at risk. WMF Britain was awarded a grant of €743,000 from the European Union to conserve the cathedral and create a heritage and education centre at the site commemorating the abolition of slavery.
Zanzibar’s Story: Remembering the Past, Securing the Future is a touring exhibition created to raise awareness of this internationally significant site and the reconciliation and tolerance WMFB’s project is helping to promote in Zanzibar, and to help raise additional funds to complete work at the site. To find out more or to pledge your support, visit: www.wmf.org.uk.
Forthcoming venues: Dr Johnson’s House, London, January – March 2016
This World Monuments Fund Britain project is funded by the European Union in partnership with:
Anglican Diocese of Zanzibar
Christian Engineers in Development
Zanzibar Stone Town Heritage Society
With support from: US Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation
Government of Zanzibar
A new Sideshow! project at the ARB, located in the foyer until the end of Michaelmas Term
This Portable Snowden Surveillance Archive is a replica of the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive – created and maintained by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and researchers at the University of Toronto. The suitcase here is two tools in one: it is an autonomous wi-fi network and web server that enables one to search all of the until-now published Snowden documents; and is a surveillance demonstration tool, replaying the Internet Protocol conversations that occur between the user’s smartphone, tablet, or laptop and the tiny server inside the suitcase.
It is the Creation of Dr. Evan Light, FRQSC postdoctoral Fellow at the Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, where he is a member of the ACT project studying communication tools and ageing.
Accessing the archive:
Connect to the Snowden Archive wi-fi network and browse to https://www.nsa.gov and explore.
Rhiannon Williams is showing some of her work in the ARB as part of the Art Language Location festival taking place in Cambridge from 15 October to 1 November 2015. The work can be found in the atrium and on the windows of the ground floor seminar rooms in the ARB. Find out more about her project ‘Critical cloth‘.
Patchwork quilt made from scratchcards by Rhiannon Williams
