Following on from the success of the inaugural Artist Self-Publishers’ Fair in 2015, this year brings over seventy UK and international independent artist self-publishers for the one-day fair. The second incarnation is bigger, features artist self-publishers only, and “continues to avoid the restrictions and market dominance of much contemporary arts culture”.
The publications are considered art works, however, affordable and available, with “the ideas, images and text produced and published by artists who understand the restrictions and freedoms of the printed page”.
Racheal Crowther and Dan Szor‘s Neither Happy Nor an Hour joint exhibition and the #MAZE group show is on at Manchester’sCaustic Coastal, opening June 30 and running to July 31.
Crowther has recently shown at Berlin’s M.I/mi1glisse and Szor at the Aspirational Living weekender Trace Program.
Art label Caustic Coastal has just opened three new spaces, and its curators have been prolific in the past few years gathering artists in group shows in both Manchester and Stockholm. Curator, Dean Brierley also runs an artist talk programme at Islington Mill, recently hosting Beatrice Loft Schulz & Laura Morrison.
The active Caustic Coastal Facebook profile has already posted some photos of the shows about to open.
Berlin’s M.I, run by Joel Mu, will host two one-night events in the Mitte space on March 9 and 10.
The first event, Closest Thing to Wearing Nothing is a group show featuring the work of Racheal Crowther, Benjamin Edwin Slinger, Nina Kettiger, who showed in the pop up Ying Colosseum event at Blacklands early last month that aqnb went to and reviewed,and Esben Weile Kjær.There will be a performance byWeile Kjær & fashion designer, Anne Sofie Madsen.
The second, There’s No Place Like Homes, is a screening of video by Magdalena Mitterhofer and Damian Machaj (pandamian), and a related performance “featuring a boy, shoes and hot wax”. The one night exhibition is by Saliva/Lukas Hofmann and the associated Ikea Made Fashion.
M.I rarely gives more information with their events than the bare minimum, leaving everything to be encountered in the space and on the occasion.
See the two M.I facebook events, here / here for (limited) details.**
Across Goldsmiths’ various venues, this year’s roster of artists at Degree Shows 2013have constructed passenger jet cabins, smoke-filled bathrooms and holistic waiting rooms scattered with everything from snakes to ultra-violet drawings. Each space is a result of a battle between students to bag a place in which to exhibit; all of them a showcase of where this generation’s interests lie. Undoubtedly the shadow of yesteryear’s alumni, such as the Young British Artists, still hangs over the south London College but the younger ones have also had their say into how their imaginations have been shaped.
In particular there are threads to be woven between Lucky PDF and graduates who play with pop-culture and post-internet theory, choosing to group themselves under the banner of Consensual Hallucinations. A term borrowed from science fiction author William Gibson’s book Neuromancer, they express a wish to engage with the ideal of individual ownership over a virtual reality, the power to connect or disconnect others and surf pleasurably with no physical threat.
Billy Howard, ‘Price Constant Elevation (2013). Video Still.
Rebecca Cooper has the same poetry for titles as Damien Hirst. ‘The Simultaneous Death and Birth of my Social Self: Part One: Preliminary’ cleverly uses a water cooler as a readymade. On its own, it’s a simple “one liner” of an artwork but, as part of an installation, it’s a key to a larger narrative focused on social networking. A built-in iPad links those who type out messages onto its screen to a larger chat room and wireless headphones hooked up to a soundtrack of Hip Hop and Dance music clips. They’re in turn linked to a mapped projection across a series of plains that garnered many laughs, and even a few people dancing.
Billy Howard also has a water cooler in his space, but this time as a prop to set the scene for a waiting room where spectators sit before being invited in for the main event. It turns out to be a high-octane music video filled with green screens, analogue effects and a knowledgeable character, (taken from a 1970s science show) whose dialogue informs us on mass-media theory, reveals the process behind the work’s construction and speaks on the importance of energy, as particles on the screen break up.
In contrast, Racheal Crowther uses a small television screen with a video of a snake sliding across the white tiled floor where the viewer is standing to create a hallucinatory effect, in which grapes are dipped in pink clay, synthetic fur creates a pool of dirt and a sense of past and present is disrupted.
Across Goldsmiths’ BA Fine Art show a host of strong students experimented with performance art, aural and visual crossover and even computer binary as language. Nevertheless, it’s here in particular that three individuals found a shared interdisciplinary interest, with a clear debt to predecessors but also a fresh eye on the future. **
