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/
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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/
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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. Co‐founder 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 non‐directive 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.
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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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