OTHER FUTURES
Podcast
Resolve Collective
Amalia Pica
Bill Lynch
Jade Montserrat
Lloyd Corporation
Alexandre da Cunha
Nika Neelova
Flo Brooks
Katherina Wulff
Giles Round
Dog Kennel Hill Project
Franz Erhard Walther
Shifting Sands: Hybrid rituals and symbols in contemporary culture - Dr Lakra and Serena Korda
Live Art Performance
Bedwyr Williams | Hayley Newman | Olivia Plender | Johanna Billing
Glittering Ground
Karen Russo | Ketih Harrison | Roger Hiorns
Space in Architecture
Heather + Ivan Morison | WalkWalkWalk | Saki Satoum
For One Night Only
Sonia Boyce | Robin Deacon | Harold Offeh | Emma Woluka-Wanambwa
Sarah Tripp Radio Writing
Brown Mountain College of the Performing Arts
Buster Keaton Sculpture and the Absurd
Bas Jan Ader, Marcel Broodthaers, Alexandre da Cunha, Simon Faithfull, Fischli Weiss, Brian Griffiths, Emma Hart, Jeppe Hein, Sofia Hultén, Tehching Hsieh, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hayley Newman, Miranda Pennell, Ruth Proctor, Roman Signer, William Wegman, Richard Wentworth, Richard Wilson, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Ben Woodeson, Erwin Wurm, Angus Braithwaite, Andy Holden, Jefford Horrigan, Ruth Proctor and William Hunt
A Quiet Fire, the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Malawian artist Billie Zangewa. In her work Zangewa creates intricate figurative collages from hand-stitched fragments of raw silk that challenge the historical stereotypes and perceptions used to objectify and exploit Black women. Zangewa creates images of strength, independence and tenderness, often contrasted with darker moments of prejudice or distain to embody a combination of melancholy and hope which is both autobiographical and universal.
The exhibition features a new panoramic, narrative silk collage echoing classical frescos and history painting in its format, establishing a reframing of its subject. Alongside this new work commissioned by Brighton CCA, A Quiet Fire includes a collection of earlier works reflective of the artist’s work and practice over the last 12 years; chronicling her experience as a Black woman living in Johannesburg. These images, described by the artist as acts of daily feminism, are intimate and confident speaking powerfully of the artist’s sense of self and of female identity; domestic and professional personas, an inner life and public face. A Quiet Fire is a visualization of what the female gaze, through self-portraiture, could look like.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new text commissioned from author Deesha Philyaw and travelled to John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Tramway, Glasgow.
Billie Zangewa has been show widely in the United States and Europe. Her work is in several public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library, Preston, United Kingdom; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Boston, MA; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. She is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
The first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Malawian artist Billie Zangewa. In her work Zangewa creates intricate figurative collages from hand-stitched fragments of raw silk that challenge the historical stereotypes and perceptions used to objectify and exploit Black women. Zangewa creates images of strength, independence and tenderness, often contrasted with darker moments of prejudice or distain to embody a combination of melancholy and hope which is both autobiographical and universal.
The exhibition features a new panoramic, narrative silk collage echoing classical frescos and history painting in its format, establishing a reframing of its subject. Alongside this new work commissioned by Brighton CCA, A Quiet Fire includes a collection of earlier works reflective of the artist’s work and practice over the last 12 years; chronicling her experience as a Black woman living in Johannesburg. These images, described by the artist as acts of daily feminism, are intimate and confident speaking powerfully of the artist’s sense of self and of female identity; domestic and professional personas, an inner life and public face. A Quiet Fire is a visualization of what the female gaze, through self-portraiture, could look like.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new text commissioned from author Deesha Philyaw and travelled to John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Tramway, Glasgow.
Billie Zangewa has been show widely in the United States and Europe. Her work is in several public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library, Preston, United Kingdom; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, Boston, MA; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. She is represented by Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Summer House is an installation and programme of events by Croydon based RESOLVE Collective working with Black community practitioners and artists in Croydon and Brighton. The project asks how it might be possible to build recuperative and organisational spaces for those who are working to sustain their communities. To do so, Summer House appropriates the Brighton CCA gallery as an open space for generative rest, gatherings, and organising for this enduring work. Incorporating both sculptural and live elements, the installation centres on groups of ‘work and leisure’ furniture, built using salvaged materials from industrial and commercial sites around Croydon and Brighton. A public programme pairs three Brighton practitioners with three Croydon practitioners for a series of open events and closed exchanges, exploring the shared value in their respective work.
Brighton-based artist manager and youth worker Bobby Brown will meet London-based Ella Adu, architectural designer and member of Tanum Sound System; Carolynn Bain of the inspirational Afrori Books will collaborate on a photo exhibition and talk with Croydon-based photographer Theo Mettle, celebrating the lives and work of Black women in Brighton; and writer and curator Pacheanne Anderson will co-curate a multi disciplinary exhibition of student work, culminating in a public conversation with Croydon-born interdisciplinary artist, writer and teacher, Rosa-Johan Uddoh. Details of all events are available in the gallery and online at www.brightoncca.art
RESOLVE have twinned their Croydon base with Brighton to explore their commonalities and differences as communal sites of creative production. Croydon and Brighton are united by more than just a transport link. Family and friendship networks regularly extend from the shopping centres to the shores and what defines both places is frequently shared by a common public. More importantly, actively disempowered communities in both Croydon and Brighton are engaging in radical new forms of industry; world-building and organising work that supports their networks where mainstream provisions have failed. Through this project RESOLVE have sought to celebrate this work, and highlight the inequitable processes that require it, as they see friends and colleagues forced back and forth from the city to the shore by rising prices, hostile industries, and lack of work and opportunity.
Summer House is a vision of redistributed resources and tools for a more just future, manifested through a series of collaborations between these two locations.
Summer House is supported by Art Fund.
Special thanks to University of Brighton Design Archives, millimetre designers and makers, The Flint Wall Company.
RESOLVE Collective is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. Much of their work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas, whilst collaborating and organising to help build resilience in our communities. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society.
This commission from artist Amalia Pica continues the artist’s investigation into social constructs of joy, collaboration and the politics of labour. Following the 1949 Coastal Protection Act, removal of stones from Brighton beach is illegal. For rock comb Pica invites visitors to join her in creating a rock carpet using stones borrowed from Brighton’s iconic pebble beach, arranging them by colour on the gallery floor.
This shared action, echoing the often repetitive work of preindustrial labour or the production of Latin American flower carpets; will gradually transform the installation from a material pile reminiscent of a beach dune, to a carefully constructed image resembling a painting or woven fabric. A shift from exterior space to domestic interior. Through this collaborative process Pica is inviting visitors to consider the value of both individual and collective work and how individual choices can impact a wider group. The process of sorting is an application of knowledge and an articulation of how we understand our environment. So equally the art work can be read as a metaphor for knowledge; the ways we sort and order ourselves, how we locate authority in the world around us, and the responsibility we hold in that process.
As part of the evolving installation, there is a ledge running along the side of the gallery at a height and width of a mantlepiece above a domestic fireplace. Here Pica has placed a number of shells cast in bronze, recalling the displays of trinkets and keepsakes brought back from the beach. A further reference to the fetishization of objects and materials from the natural world within domestic interiors. They are also jewel like in both their material and form using a language of treasure and luxury.
Within the pebble dune Pica has placed a number of gilded rocks; particular stones covered with gold leaf from a different source. Should they be discovered, these can either be taken away by visitors or placed on the shelf to become part of the exhibition. Finding a gilded rock will be rare and not everyone will do so. For some they may be a motivation or a goal, for others an irrelevance or a distraction. They represent the possibility for sharing or enrichment, collaboration or private enjoyment.
At the culmination of the exhibition the work will be dispersed. The pebbles returned to the beach to continue their drift along the coast, the bronze shells to the artist’s studio and the gilded rocks to the homes of those that chose to take them away.
Special thanks to Brighton and Hove City Council Seafront Office.
Amalia Pica
Amalia Pica has made more than 40 solo exhibitions to date, most recently at The New Art Gallery Walsall (2019), including The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada; and NC Arte, Bogota, Colombia, (2017); Kunstverein Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany (2016); El Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Guatemala City, Guatemala; and Instituto de Visión, Bogota, Colombia (2015); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2014); Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, Neuquen, Argentina; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, United States; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, United States; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal; and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2013); Chisenhale Gallery, London, United Kingdom and Basis, Frankfurt, Germany (2012); Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, Sweden (2010).
Amalia Pica studied at the Instituto Universitario Nacional del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2003, and was a participant at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2005. She was born in Neuquén Capital, Argentina, 1978, and lives and works in London, United Kingdom. She is represented by Herald St.
‘Dreamy, haphazard, enchanting paintings of the American wilds…Brighton has a coup here’ –Laura Cumming, Observer 2022
Brighton CCA is delighted to present The Exile of Dionysus; the first major exhibition of works in a UK institution by American artist Bill Lynch (1960–2013). Largely overlooked in his lifetime, Bill Lynch was a painter of exceptional power and talent, whose work ranging across time and cultures continues to speak to us about the power of the past in the present moment. Assessing Lynch’s work in the New York Times in 2014, critic Roberta Smith wrote ‘Genius lands where genius will, and I’m pretty sure some alighted on Bill Lynch.’
The exhibition title is a reference to the Greek god of wine, parties, theatre, harvest, madness and ecstasy. As a young man Lynch arrived to study at Cooper Union in New York around 1978. Described by his friend the artist Verne Dawson, ‘he radiated a physical energy that was incandescent … of the Sufi bent – intoxication, whirling, playing the fiddle all in the service of connecting with the oneness of spirit and matter.’[1] Lynch it seems was a powerful force, but during his time in New York, he lived on the fringes – social, passionate, a huge fan of rock n roll and dedicated to his work, but never entirely embraced by the New York art world of the 1970s and 80s. He rarely sold his work and was never represented by any of the burgeoning number of galleries in the city at the time.
Dawson continues
‘He couldn’t have cared less about the minimalist music of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. He consumed and considered pop stars and movies, not the new issue of Artforum’.[2]
He might just as easily be found playing rock and roll records at a party, as in a state of revery drawing under a cherry tree in Central Park.
Lynch had considerable depth of knowledge in art history from ancient Chinese painting to contemporaries such as Warhol and Alice Neel who were both significant influences. Lynch painted primarily onto salvaged plywood sheets and other found materials. Partly from financial necessity and partly because of the contributions the grains, knots and marks afforded the work, often leaving areas raw and exposed. He depicted landscapes and wildlife, cultural artefacts and mythical symbols with instinctive and direct brushstrokes and a psychological connection to his subject matter. Lynch himself said
‘I have been forming the opinion that things religious, developed by Human obsessive observation of natures movement. It was good to be reminded how instinctual demands flavour the fruit of this root.’[3]
The Exile of Dionysus is an exhibition in two parts tracing connections in Lynch’s work between his wide-ranging interests spanning ancient cultures, mythology and art history. In the South Gallery, visitors encounter a world of lush vegetation, plants and landscapes interspersed with anthropological images and symbols. The work is heavy with both a sense of decay but also of magic, a visual language that resonates across time and cultures giving a sense of the layering of history, of long forgotten gods and pagan rites. The fertile growth and damp leaves suggesting a society of rich beliefs and celebration still there but only dimly remembered. He said
‘The idea is to give a glimpse at another world – the land of nods or possibly a more westerly location – by close examination of this one’[4]
Moving into the North Gallery, there is a collection of works born from Lynch’s deep interest in traditional Chinese painting. It is in the apparent simplicity of these works that the artists’ skill as a draughtsman emerges alongside his mastery of technique; using space and light to suggest form, movement and glimpses of narrative. There are echoes here too of the spirituality articulated in the landscapes of the Ming Dynasty which intrigued Lynch, using the painting as a space for reflection, for contemplating simplicity and form.
Across the exhibition there is a conversation between two spaces, between the spiritual and the earthly, the tension between a past and the current moment. The spirit of Dionysus is an embodiment of these conversations – what might seem like contradictions now – half hidden by Lynch’s tangled vegetation, pagan spirits and pools of light but not entirely forgotten.
This work is part of Brighton CCA’s Summer Commission programme, a series of public art works commissioned annually for Grand Parade. For her 2022 commission, Montserrat draws together combinations of image, text and colour responding to the violence, loneliness and exclusion of contemporary society, amplified in recent times by the pandemic, war, displacement of peoples and the struggle for equality. Within this context, and the isolation that has become such a feature of our society, the drawings act as a series of personal messages, poetic statements of solidarity and hope. Referencing the visual language of the urban street, the tagging and graffiti familiar in Brighton, each panel can be read as an expression of a communal experience; from a crisp morning in autumn to a feeling of vulnerability in the face of the unknown and the strength which can be drawn from a shared identity. Monserrat’s commission for Brighton is both a voice for hidden personal traumas and a reminder of what we all share.
The commission series is a collaboration with Brighton Festival and funded by Arts Council England. Supported by Omni Colour.
Jade Montserrat is an artist based in the North of England whose research-led work explores the interplay of art and activism through performance, drawing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, print and text.
Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom
This exhibition, was following a sustained period of research by Lloyd Corporation over the last 18 months, is formed of two related installations.
Taking as a starting point the history of the barrel as a unit of measurement, symbol of trade and embodiment of trading narratives; the work reflects on the implications of global economic policy for local economic infrastructures. How for example do global systems of production impact on small, marginalised economies and communities, creating underground markets and supply routes? In an economy built on production and consumption of the new, what mechanisms are used for materials and items to circulate outside the distribution chains which produce them? How do those systems impact the lives of those sustained but this exchange economy?
Together the installations are an exploration of material, political and social structures of trade and exchange and are part of a series of exhibitions at Brighton CCA focusing on social isolation, environmental change and economic marginalisation.
Describing the genesis of their research the Lloyd Corporation said
We were in a small flea market shop on The Lanes in Brighton, one of the only ones open on a non-market day, during the early phase of Covid lockdown easing … we’ve always been drawn to these kinds of places. Where piles of stuff cascade onto one another, a clumsy and ambivalent materiality that doesn’t call out to be seen. Messy and informal with an unruliness to its staging that at least appears to evade composition and discipline. What Jane Bennet calls ’vibrant matter’. One never knows how long these things have actually been there for, placing them somewhere between alive and obsolete, trash or treasure, transient but enduring, trade and collection, commodities or gifts; and back again.
In the South Gallery the visitor encounters a darkened room illuminated by the light from three slide projectors. Each shows a looping collection of signs, adverts and notices from the streets, photographed by the artists over years across multiple locations; London, Athens and Brighton among them. These places refer both to the site of the exhibition and locations in which the artists – separated physically – found themselves during lockdown. The images form a kind of visual conversation, documenting the artists’ respective attention to the city and the ways public spaces become contested sites of communication. Each collection is a snap shot of a place, a society, a history of activity frozen in a moment; a kind of infinite broadcasting of announcements at times urgent, at others redundant. Placed in order by the artists for the start of the exhibition, the motion of the projectors generates a vast, unknowable series of image combinations. The layering of narratives and images mirrors the experience of encountering new versions and announcements in the streets; creating a unique set of stories at each visit.
In the related installation in the North Gallery, Lloyd Corporation have constructed a sculptural work of five shipping crates. Each is filled with goods collected by the artists in the run up to the exhibition from auctions, abandoned storage units, internet sites, junk shops and street finds. The work is a reflection of the history, systems and culture which enable the movement of goods outside the mainstream; from barrels and blind auctions to shipping crates and the recycle economy. The installation suggests the inadvertent ways in which these assembled items create narratives around themselves and the lives they inhabit.
Through this exploration of object biography, of collections and material accumulation, the artists create a network of connections between the items themselves and the activities and circumstances that link them together; of both global capitalism and informal local economies.
As part of the commission, Lloyd Corporation’s evolving research process has been made available in the Studio Dialogues section of the Brighton CCA website. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a public programme of talks, screenings and workshops further developing ideas from the exhibition and related research within the University. In addition, a new text further contextualising and responding to the exhibition commissioned from Dr Nina Wakeford, artist and Reader in Sociology at University of London, Goldsmiths is available in the gallery and online.
Lloyd Corporation are an artist duo based in London and Athens.
Duplex is an articulation of da Cunha’s engagement with cultures of consumption, reuse, materiality and art history. Central to da Cunha’s practice is the ready-made and specifically, how perceptions of objects are affected by place, time and the results of labour. Da Cunha’s complex and subtle process of transforming materials and images create encounters with everyday objects that disentangle the instinctive responses inherent to particular materials, endowing the works with alternative modes of understanding; so cotton becomes marble, mops become tapestry, construction tools become mysterious relics and mundane objects echo art historical precedents. The result is a vibrant dialogue about the history and function of symbols and material in society, from park benches and umbrellas to cement mixers and beach towels.
The presentation echoes the form of a processional route through the galleries, so visitors encounter objects and motifs presented and revisited much as the artist approaches objects and materials in his work. In this respect the exhibition speaks to its location; resonating with connections to a familiar past. Visible from the gallery windows is Brighton’s North Gate, a stone arch built for the royal procession to pass through at the opening of the Brighton Pavilion, while each year the Brighton Pride march – the largest in country – also passes in front of the gallery windows. Duplex engages with these histories as movements through time and culture of the city; reappropriating old signifiers and embracing a more contingent, yet confident present.
Arch
In Arch da Cunha’s new work commissioned by Brighton CCA, this process plays out in epic scale before the gallery windows. The artist combines an iconic image of a black stiletto anchored within a concrete fairy cake: symbols of innocence and adulthood, indulgence and luxury, power and celebration. The work co-opts the language of advertising and consumption using the scale of the billboard hoarding; depicting its mysterious subject from multiple angles, rotating, much as we experience a display in a shop window yet without logos, price or explanation. In creating works for the public realm da Cunha is responsive to context. Grand Parade, the site of this work, was named for the processional royal route through Brighton, in the last year its has seen protests against police violence, marches in support of Black Lives and forms part of the Pride march route through the city. It is deeply connected to the act of walking. In the history of Brighton, as a centre of Pride and with a proud heritage of drag the image of the stiletto has a further resonance to the communities surrounding this work.
As with much of da Cunha’s work human presence is both central to it but also absent. The umbrella’s, walking sticks and shoes are all divorced from the bodies they serve and yet the works cannot be thought of without them. Arch is certainly no different, it is a celebration of human culture, an embrace of the absurd and the humorous as much as symbol of a collective history with all its glamour, oppression, hope and folly. At first glance Arch could be read as product placement from a luxury brand, but presented on the front of an art school, combining apparently unrelated objects and materials, it equally speaks to a process of experimentation and artistic vision.
Generously supported by Brighton Festival, Omni Colour and the Brazilian Embassy in London.
Beginning with Neelova’s interest in processes of geology; the gradual layering and transformation of materials, over the last 12 months Neelova has been working in collaboration with Brighton CCA and academics at the University of Brighton on a new body of work drawing on disciplines from archaeology and ethnography to literature, natural sciences and ecology. The exhibition title references the process in which materials suspended in water are deposited over time in pipes, at river mouths and estuaries. Silt is mineral rich, fundamental to shaping changing tidal landscapes and renewing fertility. It is also unstable, thick and a challenge to free-flowing waterways.
Entering the exhibition visitors find themselves in a subterranean world of archaeological strata. Fossils are strewn on the floor while sculptures cast from the interiors of ancient water systems are suspended throughout the space. Neelova cross references the veins and ventricles of the human body with the visual language of museology, transforming the works into the skeletal structure. Placing the installation within the exposed framework of the gallery, Neelova adds a further layer in which architecture itself is conceived as a kind of body, sustained by the water and air running through the pipes woven within it. The installation is suffused with the accumulation of time and material, of architecture above and below the surface, of people and cultures across time linked and shaped by the liquid flowing around and through us. Combing new work with research via installations, experimental and studio projects, Silt speaks to our shared relationship with water and the physical and cultural sediment this has left through history.
Alongside Neelova’s works, Carolina Caycedo’s film Land of Friends (2014) details the impact of the El Quimbo Hydroelectric Project, Colombia on the indigenous peoples who rely on the river and its tributaries for their physical, social and spiritual wellbeing. Rachael Champion’s installation continues her explorations into human interactions with geological time and the traces we leave on the landscape. In conversation with Neelova’s works these projects open a dialogue between the cultural value of our natural resources and their exploitation in the service of society.
Nika Neelova is an emerging Russian artist based in London. To date her sculptural works have been concerned with the narratives of architecture and materiality. For this new commission with Brighton CCA, Neelova has collaborated with the Centre for Aquatic Environments at the University of Brighton focusing on strategies found in the natural world to adapt to water scarcity and the infrastructures humans have created throughout their history to manage water supply.
Recent exhibitions include ‘EVER’, The Tetley, Leeds (2017); ‘GLYPHS’ Noire Gallery, Turin (2019), ‘drifts (there is always ground, even at night), MLF Brussels, (2018) and ‘She sees the shadows’ Group exhibition DRAF & Mostyn, UK (2018). She studied MA Fine Art Sculpture at Slade School of Art, London.
Flo Brooks’ practice encompasses painting, sculpture, collage, publishing and social engagement. For this major new commission with Brighton CCA, Brooks has expanded the scope of his work to present this suite of paintings within a sculptural installation for the first time. The title of the show, Angletwich, takes its name from a Devonshire dialect term for a worm used in fishing bait, but has evolved to describe a fast moving creature or child. It speaks to the frenetic layering of people and activity within the works as well as recurrent motifs of migration and the makeshift.
In weaving together this semi autobiographical narrative of queer and trans experience, Brooks has turned to the rural South West England where he grew up and in particular its marginalised spaces and communities. These new works centre on a series of rural archetypes; from the livestock fair and the post office, to a lonely bus stop, generating a simultaneous sense of familiarity and isolation. Each work in the exhibition is part of a wider whole; depicting characters, scenes and places which together develop a critical narrative of place and queer experience in Britain. The installation mirrors the environments found within the work, creating a dramatic context to more closely connect the world of Brooks’ painting with the experience of encountering them.