Matter as Actor, Lisson Gallery

Matter as Actor

Matter as Actor curated by Greg Hilty 3 May – 24 June 2023 27 Bell Street & 67 Lisson Street, London Opening and performance by Otobong Nkanga: 2 May, 6 – 8pm

Artists, across eras and geographies, have intuitively or consciously given form to material relationships in a unique way. The artwork is never a given and never an end point, but an emergence. Whether the artist aims to depict the material world or the world of the imagination, the work always lands between the two, characterised both by the precision of its presentness and the enigma of its status in the world. The art object is inevitably an instance of becoming, a contingent confluence of the multiple histories of matter.

On a broader human level, there’s a fundamental tension in our relation to the world which is usually easier to ignore in the interest of getting on. Rock, paper, scissors – what could be simpler? Yet the relational game in which these words representing things are invested with shifting power over each other – and the players of the game – signals the multi-dimensionality of our engagements with the world. Anthropologist Tim Ingold perhaps most concisely sums up these overlapping frameworks when he writes, ‘The properties of materials... are not attributes, but histories.’

The worldview in which Matter (the whole of the material world) can be seen as Actor (an active force for change, without necessarily implying intent) has been well established for millennia, evidenced in religious and philosophical traditions framed by the relationality of all things. More mechanistic views which separate the human mind from the material world – seeing the latter as something inert to be tamed and used by the former – have held more sway over the past few centuries of Western influence. But such assumptions, broadly challenged through disciplines as wide-ranging as anthropology and physics, seem inadequate to explain both our own feelings of engagement in the world, and the world’s self-assertion in the face of humanity’s assumed monopoly on agency.

The artists in this exhibition come from many parts of the world and critically engage with the materials associated with their respective cultural inheritances. Their work speaks to the challenges as well as the insights of engaging with the material world across and within distinct cultural frameworks. In giving shape to the conceptual insights of multiple situated knowledge systems, the artists and artworks in the exhibition – spanning both of our London galleries but each given their individual space – attest to the pluralistic grounds of contemporary existence.

Greg Hilty Lisson Gallery

For Dante, just as for Aristotle, space is only the structure of the relations between things, and that structure may adopt peculiar shapes.

—Carlo Rovelli, There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important than Kindness

If the composition of the air we breathe depends on living beings, the atmosphere is no longer simply the environment in which living beings are located and in which they evolve; it is, in part, a result of their actions. In other words, there are not organisms on one side and an environment on the other, but a coproduction by both.

Agencies are redistributed.

—Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime

So our humanity is not prior to what it creates. What is prior is the process of objectification that gives form and that produces in its wake what appear to us as both autonomous subjects and autonomous objects, which leads us to think in terms of a person using an object or an institution.

—Daniel Miller, Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture)

We say ‘the wind blows’, because the subject-verb structure of the English language makes it difficult to express it otherwise. But in truth, we know that the wind is blowing. Similarly, the stream is the running of water. And so, too, I am what I am doing.

I am not an agent but a hive of activity.

—Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations, not in the decision trees of self-contained individuals. Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.

—Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Jennifer Allora born in 1974 in USA Guillermo Calzadilla born in 1971 in Cuba Live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico

Allora & Calzadilla

Electromagnetic Field (July 27, 2020, Meter Number 96215234, Fuel Charge Adj 2,800kWh x $0.05534, Purchase Power Charge Adj 2, 800kWh x $0.046489, Municipalities Adj 2,800kWh x $0.004094, Subsidies, Public Light & other Subv HH, 2,800kWh x $0.008991, Subsi, 2020, magnetite on linen, 243.8 x 182.9 x 4.4 cm; 96 x 72 x 1 3/4 in

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Allora & Calzadilla’s Electromagnetic Field series, initiated in 2018, take electromagnetism, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, as its subject and medium. The artists experiment with electromagnetism to create forms that are at once abstract and referential. They drop iron filings on top of a canvas and place it above an array of copper cables connected to an electrical breaker in their studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico. When the breaker is turned on, the electrical current forces the particles into an arrangement of shapes and patterns governed by the electromagnetic field.

Attraction and repulsion, strength and weakness, accumulation and dispersal are some of the tools the artists employ to find formal resolution in the electromagnetic works. However, the rhythmic balance achieved does not mute the pulsing forces that condition the very appearance of the artwork – from stock market cycles to fossil fuel combustions. The parenthetical component of the work’s title, a lengthy sequence of numbers and letters that they took from their studio electric bill, refers to the politics related to the generation, ownership, and distribution of electricity.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Allora & Calzadilla have an ongoing interest in using electricity to probe the many facts and figures involved in energy consumption in Puerto Rico and beyond, from the oil futures market and transnational holders of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority’s bond debt to the local consumers who suffer the consequences of the bankrupt power authority’s fiscal mismanagement. Their artistic experiments with electromagnetism are in equal part an exploration of formal principles and a way of confronting the complex nexus that is the energy grid.

Michelle White, head curator of Houston’s Menil Collection and the artists’ solo exhibition ‘Specters of Noon’ in 2020-21, remarked on their approach in her essay: “From the beginning of their partnership in 1995, the duo have explored how socioeconomic inequalities in our contemporary moment collide with the natural world, with all of its marvels and increasingly frightening and overwhelming phenomena. They delight in this discordant and illuminating interaction, which delves into unlikely connections and ignites revealing conversations. Pulling substances, materials, and sounds out of particular contexts, histories, or sites, these works move the viewer through wildly divergent temporal, material, political, and theoretical terrains.”

Born in 1977 in USA Lives and works in New York, USA

Lucy Raven

Untitled, 2021, framed shadowgram; silver gelatin contact print, 35.6 x 27.9 cm; 14 x 11 in

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This selection of works from a series of more than 60 unique silver gelatin shadowgrams, entitled Socorro! (2021–22) by American artist Lucy Raven, record the elemental pressures of air and raw materials from a number of explosive events by exposing photosensitive paper for micro-seconds after detonation. Her empirical experiments, using a stroboscopic flash within a custom-built, room-sized black box at a Ballistics Sciences Lab, resulted in these subtly inflected abstractions, rendered as silhouettes with occasional impact marks created by flying debris. Raven’s images are witness to the unseen forces of blast waves as they radiate away from the source towards the surface of each unique shadowgram, transforming material forces into abstract marks and physical remnants in the wake of these extreme events.

Raven constructed her purpose-built camera obscura on an explosives range in New Mexico, typically employed as a test site by the US Departments of Defense and Energy, as well as by private munitions companies. The town where the explosives range is located was given its name, Socorro (meaning ‘succour’ or ‘relief’), by ailing Spanish settlers when Piro Native Americans welcomed them with water. Raven became interested in this location, which is also close to the very first sites of nuclear weapon testing, while filming for the second of a cinematic trilogy of latter-day Westerns, each of which investigates properties of pressure, force, and material transformation in relation to the Western United States, past and present. Writing on these films, Lucy R Lippard noted that “Raven is a master of slow time and mesmerizing close-ups contrasted with flashes of surrounding action, following the industrial alchemy by which fluid materials turn to solids and vice versa.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------Lucy Raven’s distinct and methodical practice combines an extended and interdisciplinary enquiry into the form, function and apparatus of the moving image – whether animated, digital, mechanical or cinematic – with an ongoing appreciation for the landscapes, labours and myths surrounding the American West.

Whether through audiovisual collage or phenomenological experience, Raven’s important deep-dives into systems of power, imagemaking and filmic history are reflected back upon by the viewer as self-generating narratives forged by their means and manner of production.

Born in 1962 in China Lives and works in Beijing, China

Zhan Wang

Match Openings: Particle No.6, 2022, stainless steel, 122 x 133 x 98 cm; 48 x 52 3/8 x 38 5/8 in Match Openings: Scrawls of Visions No.10, 2022, ink on rice paper, 34 x 34 cm; 13 3/8 x 13 3/8 in

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Zhan Wang’s presentation, collectively titled Match Openings, following the first positions in a chess game, includes his latest body of sculptural works and ink paintings. The sculptures are an evolution of his stainless-steel artificial replicas of the ‘scholar’s rocks’ traditionally found in Chinese gardens. Zhan applies the philosophical concept of the Dichotomy Paradox to the segmentation of each stone, before reconstructing the fragments to make an ever-expanding set of new modules. The mirrored surfaces of these previously organic objects are arranged on a tessellating grid of nine plinths that rotate and morph on a weekly basis, in formations that represent light, air, earth/ocean/plant, star, fish/insect, human/animal, and finally, rest. This conceptual and lyrical bed of stones stimulates philosophical slippage between the natural and manmade worlds, between the technological and the archaeological, but also between energies, elements and materials.

The ink paintings on rice paper shown alongside the sculptures are placed within two five-by-five matrices. Operating under a strict rule that the brushstrokes not overlap or touch each other, the artist seeks to paint with near-absolute spontaneity, resulting in abstraction and a similar, shifting mode of conceptual, time-based display that, in his own words, is “both accidental and inevitable”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Zhan Wang is widely recognized as one of China’s leading contemporary artists working today. Through installation, photography and video, his sculpturally-informed practice challenges ideas of landscape and environment, addressing the urban, rural, artificial and industrial. Zhan’s art is fundamentally anchored in his relationship to his own cultural heritage. In addition to his celebrated series on scholar’s rocks, the artist further explores his fascination with material and reflection in a series of works titled Urban Landscape in which Zhan recreates models of major cities, such as London, Beijing and Chicago using kitchenware and cutlery.

The process of miniaturising an urban sprawl through the use of domestic and ordinary objects calls forth the basic necessities of life, despite the rapid modernisation of contemporary society.

Born in 1979 in Kenya Lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya

Syowia Kyambi

Entity Costume, part of the performance series, Fracture (i), 2011, woven sisal, tea- and coffee-stained cotton fabric, cowrie shells, miniature clothes hangers with graffiti cross on miniature metal plates, beads, red paint stains, costume: 158 x 95 x 70 cm; 62 1/4 x 37 3/8 x 27 1/2 in, headdress: 99 x 90 x 70 cm; 39 x 35 3/8 x 27 1/2 in

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These works by Syowia Kyambi document a body of installation and performance work, known as Fracture (i) (2011–16). These performances think through the contemporary afterlives of British colonialism in Kenya and speculate on possibilities for personal and collective, as well as mental and structural, transformation.

Kyambi wears this costume made from sisal, which she constructed using the Kamba weaving method, conventionally employed for making kiondos (local handwoven bags). In doing so, the outfit juxtaposes the discredited transgenerational knowledges sedimented in these Kenyan handicraft traditions with the historical materiality of colonial sisal plantations.

These colonial plantations, besides intervening in and disrupting local ecologies, disenfranchise black Kenyans by dispossessing them of their land and their political and economic power. Covering her head while stepping on clay vessels filled with red paint as a stand-in for blood, Kyambi’s performance allegorises the intertwined structural, epistemic, and ecological violence wrought by these colonial histories, using the specificity of her gendered body to transmute their reverberations into the present day.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Syowia Kyambi’s artistic practice collapses past and present, interrogating the afterlives of colonialism and the ways they structure our contemporary political landscape. Her practice explores themes of race, perception, gender and family, demanding that viewers and participants bear witness to embodiments of collective social and historical experience. Enacting a politics of memory and hope, Kyambi’s work asks important questions about what is remembered, what is archived and how we could see the world anew. Also rooted in her practice is a deep connection with the land, the earth and the idea of home. In blending disparate concepts and elements, the artist allows her audiences and participants to observe how such varied components react, interact and metamorphose. As Kyambi writes, “I open my gullet like a pelican and try to digest the intangible.”

Born in 1937 in Germany Lives and works in Aachen, Germany and Stäfa, Switzerland

Irmel Kamp

Baelen, 1979, gelatin silver print, 30 x 40 cm; 11 3/4 x 15 3/4 in

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Irmel Kamp’s first large grouping of works, Zink (1978–82) began as a means of documenting a local building phenomenon in villages between Aachen and Liège and how the zinc cladding, mined at Kelmis on the German-Belgian border, shaped the landscape of the local area. The use of sheet zinc harks back to a 19th-century practice, when it was used primarily as a uniform roofing material for Baron Haussmann’s urban planning measures in Paris. In these images it has been used in various arrangements to protect the facades or sides of existing residential and commercial buildings in East Belgium – constituting a modern, material addition to existing architecture. Her serial and objective approach allows for cultural-historical, as well as sociological-atmospheric readings of the importance of zinc, an element also present in the human body.

Silke Hohmann writes on the external influences brought to bear on Kamp’s otherwise scientific and completist endeavour: “In modern zinc processing, the term ‘preweathering’ is used, meaning that the material is subjected to wind and weather before its use. For Irmel Kamp’s series, the weather always plays an important role.

She waits for what she considers just the right lighting: high cloud cover, no sun. Only then can the velvety depth of the zinc present itself to the fullest. Its shadows, traces, and lesions are a process of storing information. A surface reaction, like photography itself.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------Irmel Kamp enrolled on a metallography course in the 1950s, only transferring her interest in the structures and treatments of metals and materials in built environment into photography in the 1970s. For over four decades, she has been photographing architecture, exclusively in black and white, conducting long-term research projects focused on singular styles or regions. Kamp does not employ a typological gaze in the vein of Bernd and Hilla Becher, rather, she portrays particulars, vernacular expressions, buildings embedded in their surroundings and shaped by their circumstances.

The buildings in Kamp’s photographs are distinctly ‘lived-in’ and not mechanical, imbued with a sense of place and time and a poetics of presence.

Revital Cohen born in 1981 in UK Tuur Van Balen born in 1981 in Belgium Live and work in London, UK

Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen

B/NdAlTaAu, 2015 (detail), neodymium, aluminium, gold, tantalum, dimensions variable

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Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen explore processes of production as cultural, personal and political practices. In their installation, B/NdAlTaAu, (2015) Cohen and Van Balen reverse the manufacture of hard drives, mining these devices for their natural, precious metals (as listed in the title: neodymium, aluminium, gold and tantalum), in order to create a new, manmade mineral.

Forty kilogrammes of destroyed hard drives were sourced from a data destruction service, a mountain of shiny deformed bricks that were scrapped out of the guts of computers. Mined out of soil, designed in the United States, made in China, destroyed in England.

Labour starts in reverse, dissolving the virtual into the fake from the other end of the consumption chain... Neodymium (Nd) magnets are shredded with a water jet, tantalum (Ta) is filed out of capacitors and the gold (Au) recovered with acids. The aluminium (Al) platters – still holding their ones and zeros – are melted and recast in a sand mould. An artificial ore emerges from the earth, unexpectedly black.

In a new publication, Not What I Meant But Anyway, Eva Wilson writes: “The salvaged minerals and metals at the core of Cohen and Van Balen’s excavations and circulations remain unscathed and immutable throughout their itinerant co-option into a constantly revolving system. After all, this global system itself similarly relies on the fundamental continuity of its patterns of consumption. The frenetic movements and even the language of a Western techno-hegemonic world order, most clearly legible in the term ‘developing country,’ ultimately describe a system that is designed in order not to change. But while Cohen and Van Balen uncover the core components of its mainframe, they also imply that these components can function beyond it. Something human-made can be undone, and something prehistoric can be engineered.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen work across film, installation and objects, examining the disconnect between man and technology, through the combination of natural and manmade materials, they reimagine production and assembly lines, reminding us of the globalised infrastructures that facilitate society. Their work traces processes of production in a cultural, social and political sense; looking at geopolitical, geological and biological aspects within the manufacturing industry and creating circumstances which engage the viewer to ask themselves how they feel about such processes and industries.

Born in 1987 in Saudi Arabia Lives and works in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Dana Awartani

Come, let me heal your wounds. Let me mend your broken bones, as we stand here mourning, 2019 (detail), darning on medicinally dyed silk, 477 x 136 x 15 cm; 187 3/4 x 53 1/2 x 5 7/8 in

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In her latest work, Dana Awartani meditates on themes of sustainability and cultural destruction. The work is composed of naturally dyed silk fabrics, handmade in Kerala, which have been stretched onto frames and displayed in a serial manner along the gallery’s walls. The fabrics are saturated with a multitude of natural herbs and spices that have specific medicinal functions in South Asian and Arab cultures. Awartani’s material choices speak to the work’s ethical and ecological terms of production, and further embody acts of resistance against mental and technological colonial violence given the dual emphasis on artisanal production and indigenous medicinal knowledges.

Awartani also creates tears and holes in the textiles, which correspond to the silhouettes of physical violence enacted on buildings in Arab nations at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Sourced from the Antiquities Coalition (an organisation that catalogues and protects these vulnerable heritage sites), the accompanying texts for each panel list the exact location and time of these traumatic events, as well as the cause and the group claiming responsibility.

Mending these punctures through a process of darning (tracing holes or rubble with thread), Awartani’s work metaphorises possibilities of collective healing while recalling a venerable tradition of repairing and revering objects.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Dana Awartani engages in critical and contemporary reinterpretations of the forms, techniques, concepts and spatial constructs that shape Arab culture. Steeped in a multitude of historical references, especially Islamic and Middle Eastern art-making traditions, Awartani’s practice straddles continuity and innovation, aesthetic experimentation and social relevance. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installations, Awartani’s commitment to historically situated and locally sourced materials lends a rare sensitivity to urgent political concerns of gender, healing, cultural destruction and sustainability. Consistent throughout the artist’s work has been her philosophical elaboration of geometric patterns as an alternative genealogy of abstraction.

Born in 1945 in UK Lives and works between London and Bristol UK

Richard Long

Richard Long’s terracotta slip work made for the Judd Foundation at 101 Spring St, New York, USA, 2016 (detail)

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Richard Long’s site-specific wall work continues a series of temporary murals in paint, clay and mud that date back to other previous large-scale examples, such as Red Earth Circle, made for the ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1989. Long manipulates the viscosity of this earthy, primal and colourful material against a backdrop or surface. Leaving behind gestural indexes of his explorative strokes, Long explores the interaction of multiple, conflicting natural and man-made forces.

He has made numerous other works referencing the colour red, including Red Walk (1986), which features a body of typographic text that documents a walk Long took from his home to Cornwall, picking out punctuations of red from a ‘Gypsies’ Fire’ to a ‘Cock Pheasant’s Face’. Another work from the same year, Red Slate Line, which was on long-term view at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, as well as the Guggenheim Museum’s earlier piece, Red Slate Circle (1980), were both made from a deep-red slate found at the border of Vermont and New York State. Long often employs mud from the River Avon, sourced from what he calls his ‘home’ river, which runs through Bristol, although he has, on occasion, also employed terracotta slip or a rich red clay from the region of Vallauris, the French capital of pottery and ceramic arts. He refers to the tactility and material simplicity of tidal and river mud, as well as its geological significance, having been created by the movement of water over millions of years. He sees it as: “a mixture of time, water and stone”.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Richard Long has been in the vanguard of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking over half a century ago in 1967, while still a student. Through this medium of walking, time, space and distance became new subjects for his art. He expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world and began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints or stone, often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites. His walks and temporary works of passage are recorded through photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.

Born in 1992 in China Lives and works between New York, USA and London, UK

Feifei Zhou

Flowing Toxins, 2020 (detail), digitally printed wallpaper, 168.8 x 300.6 cm; 66 1/8 x 118 3/8 in

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Flowing Toxins elucidates how infrastructures arrange water supply, sewage, and property into shifting relationships that variably reproduce structures of urban inequality in Jakarta, Indonesia. Across various scales, perspectives and dimensionalities, the drawing displays multiple narratives and material processes at once. The main map on the left-hand side of the drawing depicts Jakarta, where rapid land subsidence is occurring as wealthier strata of society and industry use private borewells to drill for deep groundwater – a cleaner and more reliable alternative to polluted, piped surface water. Meanwhile, industry returns severely contaminated wastewater back to Jakarta’s complex water channels, rivers and sea (the toxicity in water is highlighted in neon green). The apartment buildings, factories, and plantations represent three key sources of water pollution, which are domestic sewage, industrial effluent and agricultural runoff.

Poor coastal kampung (urban villages) like Muara Angke, as mapped on the right side, are informal settlements for traditional fisherpersons. The pressures that burden the kampung, namely polluted water, informal land tenure and lack of access to water and sanitation infrastructure, are the same sets of interrelated pressures that generate anthropogenic subsidence. Subsidence, in turn, gives rise to coastal infrastructure (such as seawalls, depicted at the bottom of the drawing) and property-making schemes that threaten to displace informal settlements. The top of the drawing illustrates cultivation of pollution-hardy green mussels as informal labour, ecotoxicological concerns about bioaccumulation in mussels, and how coastal people use mussel shell berms and semi-permanent architectures to adjust to subsidence, eviction and encroaching infrastructures. There are many entry points to reading the drawing, showing the simultaneity and multiplicity of the ecologies through which the material landscape and structural inequality co-shape one another. (Written by Feifei Zhou and Kirsten Keller)

--------------------------------------------------------------------Feifei Zhou is a Chinese artist and architect exploring spatial, cultural and ecological implications of human built infrastructure.

Zhou is the co-editor and curator of Feral Atlas : The More-thanHuman Anthropocene, a collective work of more than a hundred scientists, humanists and artists, united in examining the non-designed effects of human infrastructures. In researching and studying how the natural world is impacted by the Anthropocene, she presents visual representations of often unpredictable solutions to perpetual environmental concerns.

Born in 1974 in Nigeria Lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium

Otobong Nkanga

Solid Maneuvers, 2015 (detail), various metals, forex plates, acrylic, tar, salt, makeup, vermiculite, 141 x 147 x 206 cm; 55 1/2 x 57 7/8 x 81 1/8 in

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Otobong Nkanga’s presentation centres around the installation Solid Maneuvers (2015), a manifestation of her encounters with an area devastated by mining in Namibia known as ‘Green Hill’, which, since 1875, has seen its mineral-rich soil hollowed out, leaving a scar in the landscape. Solid Maneuvers, a poeticized translation of Green Hill’s inverted, excavated topography – containing vermiculite, salt, make up, heavy mineral sands and shredded copper – serves as a poignant reminder of the ecological implications of capitalist accumulation. Integrating performance into the work, Nkanga considers how the machinery used for mining these landscapes are informed by the physical gestures of the human body.

The two vertical, sculptural Posts (2019) continue this exploration through photographic documentation of different regions of the world that Nkanga has encountered, allowing visitors to scroll through the carousels of graduating colour, beginning with the green flora and fauna before taking in the greys and browns of decay and abandon (returning, eventually, once again to green).

Two hanging works, Steel to Rust – Meltdown (2016) and The Rift (2023) allude to social, economic and industrial corrosion and its physical and emotional repurcussions for the human body and the environment.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Otobong Nkanga foregrounds ecological themes of relationality and becoming through a distilled poetics of entanglement. Her multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s researchbased practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter, Global North and Global South economies.

Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell.

Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry and non-Western knowledge systems. Her works’ allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity urgently gesture towards the possibility of more livable futures.

Born in 1978 in USSR Lives and works in Nottingham, UK

Yelena Popova

Promethean Chalice, 2020, jacquard woven tapestry, 190 x 140 x 1.5 cm; 74 3/4 x 55 1/8 x 0 5/8 in

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This suite of tapestries by Yelena Popova focuses on the prismatic social, political and physical effects of energy, place, elements and monuments. After visiting decommissioned nuclear sites around the UK, including those at Sizewell, Wylfa, Dungeness and Hinkley Point A, she created speculative designs for mausoleums. Popova incorporates the graphite cores of now defunct Magnox reactors, which cannot be moved for almost a century after their use, due to fear of radioactive contamination. Keepsafe I and II (both 2019) caution against historical and future repercussions of fission and fusion, reflecting markers not only for the advent of the Anthropocene – by some standards dated since the first nuclear explosions released excess radiocarbon into our atmosphere – but also for her own biography, having grown up in Ozyorsk, Russia, birthplace of the secretive Soviet nuclear-weapons programme.

Promethean Chalice (2020) combines ancient geometry, astronomy, solar power, mathematics and atomic fusion, proffering sustainable, ecological solutions for utilising nuclear energy. At the centre of the chalice is a torus, a continuous bagel-shaped vortex mirroring the human aura, in which energy flows through the head and loops down to the feet and back up through the body. Influenced by Popova’s mother’s architectural drawings and her father’s knowledge of electricity and chemical reactions, Ripple-Marked Radiance: after Hertha Ayrton (2019) also pays homage to a pioneering British scientist and suffragette, Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923), who became the first female member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers after her late nineteenth-century research into arc lighting.

--------------------------------------------------------------------Yelena Popova works across video, painting, tapestry and performance, exploring the political, the industrial and the chemical.

Popova is interested in visibility in all its forms, but specifically political and physical and how these can often overlap. In her paintings and multi-panel installations, Popova uses earth and rocks from the land she inhabits – including soils with heavy mineral, chemical or symbolic properties – to create the pigments with which she paints, infusing her work with actual time and place.

Born in 1982 in Australia Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia

D Harding

I have learned your history, as well as my own, 2023, kaolin, crushed PrEP tablets, lapis lazuli, oil paint on linen, 180 x 150 cm; 70 7/8 x 59 in

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Occupying the gallery’s top floor, D Harding’s pigment paintings and site-specific interventions include white ochre pigment transported from Aboriginal lands in Central Queensland and store-bought yellow pigments. The artist uses these to frost the gallery windows up to head height, and flood the skylights with a yellowish hue, implying the artist’s embodiment of the reality of materials brought from thousands of miles away, representing not only culture and heritage, but also place, landscape and memory.

Two further paintings on stretched linen, again featuring Harding’s collected pigments and materials, incorporate not only a surface of crushed antiretroviral PrEP drugs and lapis lazuli oil paint, but also a deep red colour, made from earth gathered, on one side of a diptych, from the artist’s grandmother’s country (Ghungalu) and, on the pendant piece, from their grandfather’s country (Bidjara).

These works suffuse the spaces with a distillation of the knowledge and experience gathered across millennia by Harding’s ancestors, both ancient and recent, both pre-colonial and colonial. Harding’s considered and gestural acts both channel and render physical the autonomy of sites and substances of great importance to First Nations Australians and, by association, to the places and ecologies that have nourished human wellbeing. Harding’s grandfather identified the relation between people in place as yoonthalla.

--------------------------------------------------------------------D Harding is an Aboriginal artist and a descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal people. They work with a range of media exploring the social and visual languages of their ancestors, drawing upon and maintaining the spiritual and philosophical sensibilities of their cultural inheritance. Through the use of traditional techniques such as stencilling, Harding’s work evokes the spiritual and philosophical delicacy present in their heritage. This approach allows Harding to immerse themself in layered historical references, exploring themes of colonisation and globalisation, and looking at the residual attrition of their people.

“I used to work among what I described as ‘the burden of truth that is shouldered by those who are silenced.’ Perhaps I have learned that there are negotiations to be held when the opportunity to be witnessed and when urgencies of social and climate challenges are experienced simultaneously in the site of performance. Because these experiences are, I suggest, distinct from consolidated practices and places of being.”

To view a full list of exhibited works please scan here:

First published in 2023 to mark the occasion of Matter as Actor, curated by Greg Hilty Lisson Gallery London, 3 May – 24 June 2023 Image credits © the artist: Cover and p.6 Courtesy Lisson Gallery, 2020. Photography by Mark Waldhauser. p.8 Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography by Mark Waldhauser. p.10 Courtesy Zhan Wang. Photography by Yang Hao. p.12 Courtesy Syowia Kyambi. Photography by Aldine Reinink, 2015. p.14 Courtesy Galerie Thomas Fischer and Irmel Kamp. p.16 Courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, 2015.

Photography by Jens Ziehe. p.18 Courtesy Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Dana Awartani. p.20 Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography by Jack Hems. p.22 Courtesy Feifei Zhou. p.24 Courtesy Portikus Frankfurt. Photography by Helena Schlichting. p.26 Courtesy Lisson Gallery. Photography by George Darrell. p.28 Courtesy Milani Gallery and D Harding. Photography by Carl Warner.

Edited by Ossian Ward Research by Kojo Abudu, Johannah Lordan, Juyoung Yoon Design by Zoë Anspach Print by Roy Killen

3 May – 24 June 2023 London Allora & Calzadilla Dana Awartani Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen D Harding Irmel Kamp Syowia Kyambi Richard Long Otobong Nkanga Yelena Popova Lucy Raven Zhan Wang Feifei Zhou