11 - 14 August 2023 12 - 18 pm
Private View: 11 August 6 - 10 pm
Re-writing Us for the Future is a mixed media group exhibition that serves as a powerful tribute to artists, with a particular emphasis on immigrant women, highlighting and entwining their lived experiences and perspectives. Our mission is to break free from the confines of historically patriarchal narratives and bring forth stories that truly resonate with authenticity. Through the lens of creative autonomy, we reclaim our portrayal, offering a fresh perspective on womanhood with an emphasis on shared resilience.
In this project, the artists delve deep into their personal journeys, embracing the power of sorority, tenderness, and care. The title itself, "Rewriting Us for the Future," encapsulates the essence of our endeavor to rewrite the narratives that have confined us and pave the way for a more inclusive, dynamic society. We proudly present a manifesto that symbolizes unity and diversity, creating a tapestry of voices that beautifully interweave to form a harmonious whole.
Rewrite for the Future" is an act to declare a choice for change that starts with ourselves. Through the narration of the artists' experiences, they are able to recreate something new for the future. In this circumstance, "future" is a metaphor for a new beginning.
Re-Writing the future begins with the power of exploring and bringing attention to somebody's personal interpretation of past experiences. The word: “future” generates hope, and serves as a window into people's lives, fears, priorities, and perspectives, revealing through imagery, sounds, and dialogue what it means to be a woman.
Foil Drawing Workshop
Re-imaging Futures
Lucy Jane MacAllister Dukes
Zoe Ellen McIntosh
Saturday 12 August ,4 pm
Performative Workshop
The words that are about to come know things about us that we ignore about them
Lou Andrea Gachot Coniglio
Saturday 12 August, 2 pm
Lucy is a transdisciplinary artist and philosopher exploring the connections between humans and more-than-humans in the anthropocene across micro-macro scales. She holds an MA in Art & Science from Central Saint Martins and is currently artists in residence at Groundwork Gallery, Norfolk as part of AER Art for the Environment Residency in collaboration with UAL.
"To me art, science and philosophy are the same thing, there’s no place where one ends and the other begins, they’re completely interconnected".
@https://lucyjmd.wordpress.com/
@lucyjmd_/
Anum Lasharie is a London-based curator and visual artist with a notable journey in the art world. She earned her BFA with Honours from the National College of Arts. Anum's artistic skill has been showcased in prestigious galleries both in Pakistan and London, where her works have left a lasting impression on art enthusiasts.
In Pakistan, she held a captivating solo exhibition at Rohtas Gallery and participated in exhibitions at the renowned COMO Museum of Art, Lahore. Notably, Anum's talents extended to curatorial endeavours, and she made her mark with a prominent display in collaboration with the Lahore Biennale Festival in 2018. Lasharie ran her own painting Studio and project space by the name of Partner Painters
Upon her move to London in 2021, Anum's art has taken on new dimensions, reflecting the influence of her experiences and the vibrant art scene in the city. Her works have been featured in several galleries, including Muse at Portobello Road and The Print House Gallery and have been met with enthusiasm and appreciation from art lovers.
@anumlasharie
https://issuu.com/anumlasharie/docs/anum_lasharie_work
The work explores themes of uncertainty and anxiety, drawing the viewer uncomfortably close to a female figure who lies motionless, her gaze eerie and captivating. These voyeuristic scenes serve as mythology of a woman that embarked on a transformative journey, seeking a sense of belonging in unfamiliar territories. Along with intricate exploration of femininity, it focuses on her struggles with the absurdities of life, such as existence, love, loss, mortality, fertility and time.
The merging of the figure and intricate patterns creates a physical relationship that challenges the dichotomy of human existence. Amidst the stagnant and sombre tones of burnt umber skin, the presence of flowers and flora offers brief moments of freshness and respite simultaneously threatening and almost engulfing the figure. Through this juxtaposition, the artwork invites contemplation on the connection between physical comfort and inner peace.
Ekaterina Shcherbakova (born in Novorossiisk, 1990) lives and works in Paris. She is an artist, curator and writer, whose practice engages the potential of the invisible. Taking a deep dive into autofiction, she explores such themes as the female experience, motherhood, sacred and magic. The materials and objects she works with - menstrual blood, ashes, clay, bed linen, red threads - are chosen for their symbolic values. She sees body as a witness and container of fragility and violence.
Ekaterina is the alumni of Ecole du Magasin (Grenoble, France) and the art department of Paris 8 University. She has collaborated with such institutions as Typography Art Center, Parc Saint-Léger, Le CAP SaintFons, Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, Venice Biennale, etc.
Not Yet is series of ink drawings on bedsheets. The point of the reference for this work is the prenatal ultrasound imaging. It is the image of the something that is in process of creation, the future that didn’t arrive yet (and perhaps will never do).
Bedsheets, the object communicating the intimacy, the one that is close to the body becomes a screen for the possible future to emerge.
Babies is a series of sculptures. The dimension of the whole installation adapts to the space - they can be many and few. The clay sculptures are tied with fabric as if it needed to be healed. Each piece has an umbilical cord, knitted with red wool thread with a technique that I developed - one doesn’t need anything else to knit cords except their body.
Giulia Pirri was born on 24 December 1994 in Lecco, where she attended the linguistic high school. After graduating, she left her place of origin and chose to live and work in the province of Venice. She forms her thought through numerous journeys, often walking on the road; among the most significant she recalls a long stay in Peru. Traveling accompanies her in a process of searching for the authenticity of the place, but also for introspection and getting closer to herself. Between the common desire to photograph the countries she visits and the need for a new means of expression, Giulia discovers a passion for photography, used as a medium for personal reading and artistic research. In 2020 she enrolled in the three‐year course at IED in Milan, where she currently lives and works. Through her studies she discovers an interest in contemporary art, experimentation and the mingling of photography and other languages.
Giulia uses photography as a research medium, to investigate the themes of identity and human feelings and of the experience of the other, be it the object, the environment or other individuals. She moves in one intimist dimension, made up of everyday elements, which she portrayes in a domestic environment or decontextualized; as well as evanescent self‐portraits, in movement or reflections, expression of a attempt at self‐definition that has no resolution. Photography, in fact, is also a means of reading personal and introspective, which leads her to re‐think about biographical events, trying to re‐locate them through representation in a universal dimension.
What remains of the effort to objectify one ' s image through the self‐portrait representation? If "seeing is wanting to see " , one can better recognize oneself in an absence, made up of the traces of one ' s passage, transparent as the perceptions of a body that finally no longer has a volume.
@giulia.pirr.i
Photography has the ability to block the image, subtracting it from its natural evanescence. This is proof of existence in life for the subject, who becomes an index , while the infinity of imaginary opens up in front of the mirror. Photographing oneself is looking at oneself objectified in one's own image.
What remains of the effort to objectify one's image through the self‐ portrait representation? If "seeing is wanting to see", one can better recognize oneself in an absence, made up of the traces of one's passage, transparent as the perceptions of a body that finally no longer has a volume.
Jikke Lesterhuis was born in 1997 in Enschede, the Netherlands. She is currently based in Amsterdam. She works with different media such as animation, field recordings & sound design, drawings, poetry, and sculptures, that come together in installations, making her work multidisciplinary. She doesn’t like to repeat things.
“The experience of doing something for the first time, that's what it's all about for me, the victory over something you didn't know you could do before. One follows the other, I'm thriving on that.”
A central theme that recurs with persistence is her deep-rooted fascination for movement and a reference to man’s relationship with nature. Jikke is obsessed with the absurd; the fundamental disharmony between our search for meaning and the meaninglessness of the universe. Therefore, she believes in questions rather than answers.
‘Wind Dwellers’ arises from a deep fascination for one of nature’s most powerful yet unpredictable forces; the wind. The wind is a natural phenomenon that impacts on all of the body’s senses: it is tactile, produces sound, carries scents; it is like a cosmic breath that stirs, envelops and penetrates our beings. The blowing of the wind as such is invisible; its dynamic quality is detectable merely indirectly, by the movement of things – swaying trees, waving grass, fluttering textiles. The wind breathes life into the lifeless, but can just as easily take life away. It can sensually caress our skin or ruthlessly destroy the harvest @jikkelesterhuis
https://jikke-lesterhuis.format.com/
Wind Dwellers is an explorative crossed media installation, oscillating between different worlds; the physical and digital domain, nature and culture, macrocosm and the microcosm, man and the universe. It explores the sensory capacity of the wind, that can be perceived by our bodies in multiple ways. The animation questions the extent to which humans can identify with the environment around us and what effect this has on our behavior and our feelings of responsibility towards the planet and the challenges it faces. The landscape of the animation is based on topographic data of the mountains in Stöðvarfjörður, released by NASA Earth Observations (NEO). This data is converted into a 3D model, to create a realistic-looking landscape. The mountains are covered in a skin-like texture, made of scans from seaweeds (a material that closely resembles human skin) found on the shores of the fjord. The use of raw natural materials to mimic human features highlights how man and nature are inextricably linked, and how we are more alike than we think. In fact, nature gave birth to all of us.
Katie Law is a Hayling island born artist, who recently graduated from Winchester School of Art. Her work questions the position of people in context to the vast and unrelenting backdrop of nature, creating works where man is marginalised and uninteresting in respect to the larger image. Her main focus is on deforming and reforming what is known, in order to produce new synthesised ecosystems for her characters to exist within. With a key narrative focus her work delves into our relationships with each other, as well as our impact on the world around us with implications for the future.
"The piece focuses on the search for nature even in a time where nature is sparse. Exploring in particular my fear of the future and the experiences of future generations when it comes to our climate and the world in which we want to thrive. The piece pivots between my love of the unknown and my fear of what is to come. Allowing the piece to be very minimal in comparison to my other works, because to me the fullness creates conclusion, and so instead it felt important for this work to remain undecided and open ended. Delving into the relationship between mother and child i wanted the character to express the naivety that comes with ‘playing games’ with our world."
Lou Andrea C. Gachot-Coniglio was born in Paris in 1991. They are a Franco-Sicilian artist and poet whose mediums include text, photography, drawing, installations and objects. Their work focuses on observing the counsciousness. They explore the possibility of rendering the present moment through embodied contemplation, being witness to all the transformations we undergoe as living beings in a search towards growth. Their prisms are queer radicalism, esotericism and spirituality, documentary and memory. They moved from Paris to Montreal in 2017. There, they published poems for several magazines and founded Grenades, a feminist poetry magazine about desire. Since being in Québec they lived in Venice, Genoa, Luxembourg, and then moved between France and Italy for four years. In Venice they created the artistic duo Teoria&Preda. The duo won the SMATH European residency with Tracciante, a graphic design project about pollution in the lagoon. Based in France since 2021, they are currently working in Nantes. Their poems were recently published in CENSORED magazine and read at the Fondation Thalie in Brussels. They just finished writing Gang de Chevelures, their first poetry collection.
Fine Art print on Rag+ Pearl 310g/m² paper
The title comes from a poem by Jacques Dupin in Coudriers. This serie of self-portraits depict the artist holding a bunch of their own hair, two years after shaving them. Hair are one of the only things with nails that keep growing after we die and their visible part is actually the dead part of the hair. They are the testimony of all that we went through. We wear our experiences on our head. Observing their reflection, the artist is looking at the self that freed itself from traumas narratives, watching these new reintegrated, individuated versions of the self.
22 pictures in 10x15cm
Print on Fujifilm Crystal Archive Suprême 236g/m² paper
This serie of photograms are extracted from a video performance. In the context of a life-time research about witchcraft and identity, the artist wanted to embody the experience of alchemy as a symbolic representation of the individuation process. Being one with dirt, wine, flowers and gold as a reminder of the stars the artist reaches out to the unconscious and transcendent nature of the psyche. It represents the parallel between physical components and mystical process.
Lotta Stöver is an emerging artist and designer in the fields of media, technologies and research. Her works are driven by a deep interest in the intersections and interdependencies of phenomena and matters aligning, disobeying, transforming, and mutating along with (new) techno-*-logies. She works in various media as installations, electronics, and publications. She is a founding member and co-editor of the ongoing technofeminist publication series href zine.
Since 2019, she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen (Germany), where she is currently based and continues her Master studies.
@lotta stoever
@https://lotta-stoever.net/
Latent Imaging and Imagining is part of an autoethnographic artistic research study to explore the concept of chrononormativity through an inverted perspective of nonconforming and how to negotiate a careful and queer mode of accessing childhood memories.
The photo series is based on a selection of personal childhood photos of the artist. These photos have been manipulated in a process of selectively re-imagining male-coded parts in the artist's appearance within the images using a commonly available out-painting textto-image AI tool. A few images have only been using the prompt "girl", others needed more specific prompts, such as "a girl with brown hair holding a bunny", etc. The resulting generated latent variations are printed on Polaroid film.
Tasalla Tabasom, (born '00, in Iran/ lives and works in London,UK) studied at the University of the Arts, London.
Tabasom's practice explores themes of race, sexuality, and identity through the use of the body as a medium to engage with human behavior. She works across a variety of media, including painting, performance and sculpture. She challenges the viewer’s perception of the human form by manipulating, distorting, and masking it in her work, aiming to create a psychologically charged space for the viewer to inhabit.
Tabasom confronts the formation of Iranian queer identity and gender inequality. Her work has been exhibited in various group exhibitions in London and Tehran.
"Four the Future" marries visual imagery and auditory enchantment.the soundscape features classical Iranian song; Avaz by Simin Ghanem and Javad Lashgari, from the album Abre Paeezi. This sensory synthesis invites contemplation on the interplay between tradition and progress, intending an immersive journey through time and culture, the crossroads of diasporic identity and heritage.
@tasalla.tabasom
https://www.tasallatabasom.com/
158x120 cm
Mixed media + sound
Your power was a lie Control was an assumption
All the pain you caused Death
Corruption
I reached out for freedom one night in a dream
She rejected my hand
In the name of money and land
She rejected my hand
I broke down crying I woke up in a foreign place
Dark Wet and cold
A fall from grace
A life long migration to the northern seas
Where we could feast
I reached out for freedom
She rejected my hand
In the name of money and land
She rejected my hand
""I am a current student at Central Saint Martins studying BA Fine Art. My practice surrounds digital work and digital manipulation using Photoshop. I am British Colombian, so I find it important to comment on my heritage throughout my work. The focus of my practice thus far has been exploring the relationship with symbolism, migration, conflict, sexual identity and archival femininity. My work looks at my cultural identity and explores the relationship with symbolism and iconography whether this be religious, societal or sexual. I like to combine the new and the old, the physical and digital to form digitally made collages/alternate realities/liminal spaces. A world where everything is so easily accessible, I feel inclined to challenge the ethics of advertisement and investigate political, social and sexual aspects of advertisement and imagery we see on a day to day basis.""
"Adiós Amigos III investigates the relationship with migration and the link with memories. Using family archival imagery as well as found imagery I composed these digital images which comment on my heritage that straddles two countries."
