Hannah Regel

The various, the contradiction + the interpretation in on my island none of this would be true group show at Arebyte, Feb 1 – Mar 17

29 January 2018

The on my island none of this would be true at London’s Arebyte opens February 1 and is running to March 17.

Curated by Chris Rawcliffe, the featured artists include Naama Arad, Guy Ben-Ner, Verity Birt in collaboration with Holly Graham and Richard-Forbes Hamilton, Edgar–Walker, Gery Georgieva, Joan Jonas, Terence McCormack, Hannah Regel and Mike Seaborne.

The first show of Arebyte’s 2018 programme, which will focus on the theme of ‘Islands’ through a number of shows and residencies, presents a multimedia installation explores “the various interpretations and contradictions that islands summon in our minds” from freedom, holidays and Brexit to forge empires and forgotten lands.**

Visit the Arebyte website for details.**

 

 

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Over 30 artists examine the line between individual experience + political statement in (X) A Fantasy at DRAF, Sep 7 – Oct 7

4 September 2017

The (X) A Fantasy group exhibition is on at London’s DRAF, opening September 7 and running to October 7.

The show brings together over 30 artists examining the question, “when does the individual experience become a political statement?” Keren CytterPaul MahekeTala MadaniHannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, and more are among the respondents exploring the boundary between the public and private, like “living, eating, dancing, seducing, reading, watching films, going online.”

The opening night will feature performances by choreographer Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, and artists Hannah Regel and Urara Tsuchiya, as well as a DJ set during the afterparty by New Noveta. Upstairs will feature Zoe Williams ‘voluptuous banquet’ in ‘Ceremony of the Void.’

The exhibition is the last in DRAF’s Camden space, as they move onto new territory and spaces around London.

Visit the DRAF website for details.**

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“She hosts the battle in her gut.” Moving through the intestines of Hannah Regel + Esme Toler’s Spectracide at ZONA MISTA

21 August 2017

Hannah Regel and Esme Toler presented two-person exhibition Spectracide at London’s ZONA MISTA, which ran August 4 to 13.

Hannah Regel, ‘What Transpire in the Field of a Body that is the Base of Her’ (2017) Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Zona Mista, London.

The installation used a number of materials, including walnut and poplar carvings, unfired terracotta, baby powder, light fixtures, synthetic hair, earthenware ceramic and appropriated 18th Century Linenfold. 

An accompanying text by Bronte Dow contextualizes the work from within a visceral and intestinal place, moving from anti-age serums and side-effects to sick cows, capitalist production and the rooms inside a house:

“…She hosts the battle in her gut. A bitter leak through split gutter. Imperial fish slipping in the silvery acid cream.

The fat on our tongues oxidises, turns rancid and sharp, as a lance that shoots down the throats of the men. It tastes like a pitchfork with nails. The men vomit themselves up, and the ancient anatomies of government are metabolised back into her body, our house.

Every gurgle of her gut is a war cry booming through the house, her cells forcing through the walls, splattering onto the pavement a crowd of floorboards, ribs collapsed in shooting pain. Collected weapons…”

Hannah Regel + Esme Toler’s Spectracide was on at London’s ZONA MISTA, running August 4 to 13, 2017.

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SALT. in conversation @ Tenderbooks, Jun 30

30 June 2015

The editors of London-based feminist magazine SALT. are coming to Tenderbooks for an in-depth conversation from 4 to 6pm on June 30.

Three of SALT.’s editors—Jala Wahid, Thea Smith, and Hannah Regel—will introduce their intentions and process with SALT., discussing past issues (including their Manifesto issue which we recently reviewed) and how the magazine links to their wider artistic practice. While SALT. is a magazine, it is also an ongoing research project, and the editorial acts as a mini manifesto expressing their selected themes, just as the project’s events act as platforms for new debates around the paradigms of contemporary art and feminism.

The event is a Three Letter Words and Tenderbooks one done in collaboration with the ‘Publishing/ Writing’ module, MRes Art: Theory and Philosophy, at Central Saint Martins, and discussion will be followed by an informal Q&A with the audience and with MRes Art’s students.

See event page for details. **

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Trace Bodies @ ICA, May 16

13 May 2015

Group participatory performance Trace Bodies is taking over London’s ICA on May 16.

The series of live performances, running as part of the Looks exhibition and curated by ICA Student Forum members Liam Crockett, Grant Bingham, Will Guy and Perry-James Sugden, examines “affective online alienation in relation to corporeality and identity production and consumption”.

The event, starting at 7:30pm at the ICA Bar, will feature performances by writers Elizabeth Holdsworth and Hannah Regel, artists Cristine Brache, Caspar Heinemann and Max Trevor Thomas Edmond, as well as poet Devawn Wilkinson with Kris Beaghton, and Lawrence Uziell. The evening will also be accompanied with music from Exxist (Endless) and Kamixlo (Krysaor).

See the ICA event page and the Trace Bodies website for details. **


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SALT. Issue 6: Manifesto reviewed

5 September 2014

One night a few weeks ago, I sat at a beat-up table in Neukölln across from two friends and said to them in a subdued but resolute tone that if a man raped me, I would castrate him. The two men almost choked on their beers. No one laughed. If they can’t control their dicks, I continued, paraphrasing an essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett, they don’t deserve them. They looked at each other uneasily, thought fleetingly about arguing back, then quietly settled back into their chairs, albeit with a different posture, one more dormantly aware of a part that could be lost. Good, I thought, women have lost so much already.

There has always been an undertone of wild and unwieldy rage to feminism, a bra-burning, misandrous disquiet that alienates those not immediately within its purview. The primary feeling one gets reading SALT.’s recently launched Manifesto issue is of rage, at once focused and untamed, cleverly instrumental and yet unapologetically tempestuous. The thin book, less than 50 pages in total, reads like a punch to the face. Does my rage scare you? it seems to ask. It should.

'let's pretend he's alive' by Kay Law and Giulia Tommasi.
‘let’s pretend he’s alive’ by Kay Law and Giulia Tommasi.

There is no revolution without free love, as Milena Dravic’s character yells from her courtyard in W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, but there is also no revolution without bloodshed, and sometimes the blood shed is of language itself. “What SALT. does, wants to do, and encourages, as a political project, is a wilful misreading of dominant culture to serve our own ends,” write its editors in a manifesto-like editorial letter that precedes the tangle of manifestos that follow. “To wilfully misread is to deliberately defy,” they continue, referring to the “writing out” of feminist work throughout history and at the same time to the very nucleus of revolution, which is nothing if not a wilful misreading of future possibility.

Abandoning the potential of physical violence, perhaps not so much ideologically as logistically, SALT.’s Manifesto turns to language as the site of revolution. “In a climate where traditional modes of articulating refusal through physical action become criminalised or dangerous,” the editors write, “language, and furthermore what can be done with it, becomes the only potent weapon left.” Instead, SALT. turns (or returns) to José Muñoz’s conception of utopia as the acts of failed speech, as the incomprehensible speaking in tongues that epitomises all of history’s witches and all of pop culture’s women under the influence.

'Tongue' by Jala Wahid.
‘Tongue’ by Jala Wahid.

In ‘Notes on Wildness: Towards a Manifesto [1]’, found in SALT.’s Manifesto, Jack Halberstam writes: “The Wild, in this manifesto, will stand for an unrestrained, un-civilised, disorderly, ferocious and anti-colonial relation to thought and to being.” If patriarchy subsists as structural violence, Halberstam continues, the first move, it follows, is to dismantle the structure, to upset the imagined order of language so that the “wild may arrive and touch you, wound you, find your core”.

The wild that Halberstam invokes knots its way through the poems of Vicki Tingle – a savage ode to castration called ‘i dare you to oppress me some more (a think-piece on dick-chopping)’, the quietly devastating ‘Play Pussy and Get Fucked’, and the brilliant ‘GPOY’, which brings the totally faultless line “um excuse me, would like some hetero sex with your oppression? – through Hannah Regel and Freya Field-Donovan’s ‘Parasite Manifesto’ and Eve Lacey’s ‘Manifesto Medusa’, and through the methodical absurdity of Villa Design Group’s ‘VDG Manifesto’.

Contributor Vicki Tingle reading at Manifesto issue launch.
Contributor Vicki Tingle SALT. editor Thea Smith reading at Manifesto issue launch (2014) @ White Building, London.

It abandons the clear narrative structure of language, turning instead to the unrestrained glossalia of writers like Clarice Lispector. They are, as Mali Collins writes in her poem ‘On a Manifesto’, only responding to what the world gives them, which “isn’t that much”. When Field-Donovan and Regel write in Parasite Manifesto “the ways in which we…relate to our futurity resembles a performance of disclosure; a betrayal of good faith. We understand that this seems cruel, and it is,” it is a necessary cruelty of which they speak. It is a quiet, defying one in response to the deafening cruelty women live, echoing the sentiment of a post-it note found towards the end of Manifesto that simply reads: “Her work was to be but one long scream.” **

SALT. Issue 6: Manifesto, edited by Saira Harvey, Hannah Regel, Thea Smith and Jala Wahid, was published by Montez Press in August, 2014.

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