Laura Cooper

A public performance and urban ritual at Elephant and Castle, Upstanding is a video of an urban re-enactment of the Maypole folk dance. In this new environment, due to the poles’ uprooting and instability, the performance becomes more of a balancing act; a precarious exercise for those involved.

Laura Cooper’s art practice embraces performance, video, sound, drawing and installation. Her works are often documents of choreographed and repetitive exercises between individuals and groups of people. Cooper explores personal and collective actions that work to create contemporary forms of ritual. In structuring her performative interventions she often uses the structure and parameters of games or sequences. She engages performers and participants with a sense of play into sometimes absurd, poetic or transformative site-specific actions. Cooper received her undergraduate degree from Glasgow School of Art in 2006 and has recently completed her MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Art (UCL, London). She was an artist in residence in Bangkok (Thailand) from 2008 to 2009, where she worked on a number of projects in partnership with Shrewsbury International School and with the British Arts Council Thailand. She also took part in the SAP Seoksu Market International residency program in Anyang City South Korea in 2010. Some recent exhibitions include the group show Play, Game, Place, State at Collyer Bristow Gallery (London, 2012) and The Voice and The Lens at IKON Gallery (Birmingham) as well as the solo show Soft Revolutions at Space In Between Gallery in 2013. She has been awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund for the creation of a forthcoming performance in New York City 2013. http://www.lauracooper.co.uk/

Laura Cooper

Oliver Cronk 

Over the past three years, Oliver Cronk has been investigating notions surrounding his own productivity, satisfaction and potential happiness through a process of list-making, data collection and analysis. This process now exists in the form of three substantial books, and a very long graph. For Happiness, Now? Cronk is working in collaboration with three musicians – Nik Rawlings, Carrie Topley and Nena Zinovieff – to create an original musical composition that reflects the values of this process and explores its autobiographical content. The composition, Musical, will be performed live during the exhibition.  

Oliver Cronk’s practice reflects influences including performance, costume, text and sound. He has exhibited and performed in various cities such as Madrid, Cairo, Budapest, Los Angeles and London (including Central Saint Martins, the Barbican and the Old Vic), as well as founding independent arts spaces and working with educational and outreach programmes. Oliver Cronk was born in Denver, Colorado (U.S.) and raised in the UK. After obtaining a degree in Oriental Studies from the University of Cambridge he attended Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, where he graduated in Fine Art (2012). Alongside his artistic career Oliver Cronk is a translator and costume designer.

Petra Kubisova 

Oct 29

‘How strange: her voice, which I knew so well, and which

is said to be the very texture of memory (‘the dear inflection’),

I no longer hear.

Like a localized deafness…’

Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, 1977.

Her voice, which I know so well encounters the problem of loss and mourning through a photographic piece, depicting a mother and her daughter, on 4 hanging sheets of transparency. The mother figure is simultaneously lost and found in the act of recovering her image through a 4-dimensional photograph. The personal loss, embodied in this image is an attempt by the artist to recuperate the time that she never experienced with her mother – an act of mourning.

Petra Kubisova is currently on the MA in Photography at Royal College of Art. http://petrakubisova.com  

 
Petra Kubisova

Anna Lopez 

Anna Lopez draws from Buddhist philosophy in thinking about happiness as a never-ending process rather than an end point. In collaboration with music producer spherickal she has produced a guided soundscape that will be used in the workshops devised by the artist as part of her outreach programme The Oasis Space, which will take place in February-March at the Irish Migrant Women group, the Mental Health Carer group (Mind Yourself, Angel) and at the Women Refugee Centre (Dalston). Extracts from this track will be installed in the exhibition space.

Lopez graduated from London Metropolitan University with an MA in Fine Art (2010) and holds a degree in Psychology from La Cattolica, Milan. She works with participatory interventions as well as with installations of text, sound and images. Her practice is a commentary on the ever-increasing complexity and detachment in the way we relate to each other and our surroundings. Lopez’ manipulation of everyday space stimulates people to move differently through it: to stop and listen or to take part with their own personal stories. Lopez is also the co-founder of a project in Newham Royal Docks that promotes community empowerment by mobilizing residents and stakeholder groups (www.momentumproject.org.uk). In recent years, she has worked on several media campaigns to raise political awareness and critical thinking among sixth form students in East London. www.annalopez.net

Anna Lopez

Amanda Millis

I don’t know what to call her, even though we’ve been pregnant with her for 15 months. I’m really fat now. But it’s okay, though, because it’s in that skinny way—

the only thing I can keep down is Chicken McNuggets. Every time I eat them, I picture that Facebook meme with the pepto-bismol-pink playdough-chicken-parts poo thing coming out of that machine.
They’re the only thing I can keep down. Chicken McNuggets and Sprite.

The Coca-Cola Company has more union organizers murdered in third world countries than any other corporation… by a lot.

She is of the earth. Can you imagine this birth? This birth to the planet— the whole fucking planet screaming for light, bursting with destiny out of our tight, good-girl pussies?

It’s hard work.

She is of the earth; we made her, made love to make her, beautifully crafted her earth-sculpture with our feminine fingertips. We laboured, and she exists.

Amanda Millis has been getting away with art making since the age of four when she decided to draw a mural on her parents’ freshly painted wall right after one of her many childhood homes was redecorated. Amanda is a native Texan and now lives in London by way of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and NYC. Millis has a BFA in sculpture from California College of the Arts and she is undergoing an MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has shown her work at various galleries and also has an undying commitment to accessible art with all-inclusive publics. Some of these showings include: Long Beach Art Walk, 2005; Tremé Public Art Installation (New Orleans, LA), 2006; California College of the Arts (Oakland, CA) 2006-7; Magnet Gallery (San Francisco), 2007; The Eagle New York (New York), 2009; The Suffolk (New York), 2010; a couple street corners; a cemetery; a church; an abandoned frat house; and a lot of bathroom walls along the way.

Amanda was a 2011 grantee of the Brooklyn Arts Council, NY Department of Cultural Affairs Grant for her project Women’s Work – a collaborative textiles sculpture created by female identified rape survivors (exhibited at Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, in 2011-2012). She has been reviewed and published in The Bay Times (San Francisco, CA), The Body: The Complete HIV/AIDS Resource (New York, NY), The New York Daily News (New York, NY) and The Kinsey Institute’s Website: Kinsey Confidential (Bloomington, IN). www.m-amandamillis.com

Amanda Millis

Linda Stupart 

On our first visit to the gallery she walked in wearing perfect heels and sensible skirt: Career Woman. She rattled off the rules of the space: no branding, no noise, no using our name, no switching off this button, ever. She said you can’t make any new holes in the gallery walls, but you can use the holes that are already there.

You cannot make any new holes in the gallery walls, she said, but you can use all the holes that are already there considers, seriously, the simultaneous demand and restriction of its title in an affective exchange between art institution, body, labour and 554 depressions in the gallery wall. 

Linda Stupart is an artist, writer and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Art Practice at Goldsmiths College engaged in new Feminist critiques of objectification. Stupart has written numerous catalogue essays and contributed features to a variety of publications, including Art South Africa, Kaleidoscope and Art Review. Recently, she has contributed texts to Idioglossia (Hato Press, 2012), Cars and Girls (whatiftheworld, 2013) and Oh Wicked Flesh! (South London Gallery, 2013). In her practice Stupart explores relationships between bodies, sex, language, violence and signification – considering particularly how micro-politics of heterosexual desire both write and are written by broader art and political matrices.

Stupart has exhibited on a number of group shows including Bodies of Silence at Platform (London, 2013), A Shot to the Arse at the Michaelis Gallery (Cape Town, 2012), Alptraum at various spaces in Washington, London, Berlin and Cape Town (2011), Localities: Fact and Fiction at the Museet for Samtidskunst (2010) and Vex & Siolence at YOUNGBLACKMAN (Cape Town, 2010). Stupart has had two solo shows: ‘Who’s Abject Now, Bitch?’ at YOUNGBLACKMAN  (2010) and ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ at blank projects (Cape Town, 2007). She will be launching Trigger Warning, a year-long curatorial program in London later this year. http://www.lindastupart.com/

Linda Stupart

Mikey Weinkove - TALKAOKE (by The People Speak)

Thursday 21 March 2013 19:00-22:30

Talkaoke is a pop-up talk show that has been gaining popularity in festivals, clubs, galleries, conferences and other public urban spaces. It consists of an illuminated round table with a host sitting in the middle on a swivel chair. Participants sit around the outside and are passed the microphone whenever they want to talk, coming and going as they please. The conversation is a journey from one unexpected subject to another. It can be topical, funny, deep, out-there, or all of the above. The participants must come up with the topics and it is up to the host to keep everyone engaged. Talkaoke is a great chance to hear the latest ideas that people are talking about and to generate and discover new ones (http://www.talkaoke.com/). For Happiness Now? we have invited Dr. Nina Power (writer, activist and senior lecturer at Roehampton University) as featured guest.

Cofounder of The People Speak artist collective, Mikey is an artist, raconteur, inventor, and chat show host. He is the originator of Talkaoke and has toured the world hosting it in a huge variety of ods of nondirective discussion that are central to The People Speak’s ethos.

 

Dr. Nina Power is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University and the author of One-Dimensional Woman (Zer0 Books). She is the co‐editor of Alain Badiou's On Beckett (Clinamen) and the author of several articles on European Philosophy, atomism, pedagogy, art and politics. Nina also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers' Magazine. She also broadcasts on Resonance FM on Sundays (The Hour of Power) and runs a film club (Kino Fist) in her spare time.

Talkaoke
Nina Power © Sara Moritz

SCREENING: Body consumed: identification and appropriation in contemporary artists’ videos

Wednesday 27 March 2013 19:00-22:30

Videos by Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Johannes Evers, Oriana Fox, Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Niklas Laustiola and Nadja Verena Marcin.

The curators Giulia Casalini and Diana Georgiou will introduce the selected films.


Screening PR available here
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Niklas Laustiola