Cajsa von Zeipel presented solo exhibition Insulting the archive at London’s Arcadia Missa, which opened June 24 and is running to July 29.
Cajsa von Zeipel, Insulting the archive (2017). Installation view. Courtesy the artist + Arcadia Missa, London.
Large sculptures of young androgynous women crowd the space of the gallery, and challenge and exaggerate what the press release calls “classical sculptural tropes [which] evoke images of museum collections and historical archives.” The statues are not passive, but return our gaze.
The exhibition marks a departure in previous ways of working by von Zeipel; while the artists’ figures used to focus on group dynamics and identities formed through subcultures, the works now explore isolation and the individual where “schisms form, group identities split, tribes become divided.”**
Amalia Ulman is presenting solo exhibition Labour Dance at London’s Arcadia Missa, opening September 30 and running to November 5.
The artist, whose work often looks at power structures and their associated aesthetics, confronts her own privilege through a dramatisation of her own position, and one that the press release calls “a position of criticality not accessible to all.”
The new work will expand on previous online and IRL project Privilege(2016) that featured as part of the Berlin Bienniale. The accompanying text also includes a quote by feminist theorist Kristeva, “One does not give birth in pain, one gives birth to pain”. The title is two-fold, nodding to politics as well as women in labour.
The selection of new works on show is a culmination of Edwards’ time spent during a one-month studio residency at the gallery. The press release is left empty and the accompanying image is pixellated with four figures holding a flag who are rendered abstract.
Previous works have seen the artist create images and videos that mash politics, the body, sex and music together in a way that complicates the female body and how it is packaged in contemporary culture. Edwards will be showing as part of this year’s 3hd festival exhibition under the theme ‘There is nothing left but the Future?’ in Berlin as well Info Pura at London’s The Residence Gallery in June.
‘Lessons in Anti Apathy’ is a panel discussion of four politically active organizing groups held at London’s Arcadia Missa on August 4.
The panel includes Sisters Uncut, Strike! Magazine, WHEREISANAMENDIETA, and Dysphoria Collective. It aims to discuss how to create, organise and demand change. It also intends to address the current political climate that the press release describes as “a split between those taking to the streets” and “those who have spiralled into a perpetual state of apathy, into stone cold coolness” in a “total lack of engagement”.
Other general topics of the discussion include feelings of powerlessness resulting from capitalism, racism and the patriarchy. The panel will discuss ways to fight back, attempt to dismantle these oppressive structures, and find ways to hold institutions of power accountable.
Babak Ghazi is presenting solo exhibition Lifework at London’s Arcadia Missa, opening July 1 and running to July 30.
The dubious title of the show suggests of Ghazi a type of practice that is outlined in an essay, specially commissioned and available at the gallery for the show’s duration by Dr Catherine Grant. A passage comes with the short press release, it reads:
“In describing the work, Babak emphasises his interest in various formalised relationships that can both allow mutual expression as well as court subjugation: that of photographer and model, teacher and student, analyst and analysand; which are then layered with the process of organising images as a form of narrative for the participants in the next formalised relationship: that between artwork/artist and viewer.”
Lifework is an ongoing archive of subjective experience made impersonal. Otherwise, the press release gives little away of how the work will be formulated and manifested in space. A Google search reveals a website subtitled ‘Lifework’ with some words scrubbed out and ‘not yet’ placed subtly in the tab.
Ghazi’s work installed in Arcadia Missa will be ready to sift through by the viewer, a comment on the way that the artist’s presentation can appear to find meaning with those who experience it upon encounter, and an apt mirror to a practice that finds its method in behaviour, interpretation, personal freedoms and limitations.
Most of the time, you don’t really know where you are in All The Things. It could be Berlin where author Sarah M Harrison is based; a park, a supermarket, something called a Simulated Employment Zone. Mostly, though, the novella, first published by London’s Arcadia Missa Publishing in February and now in its second limited run, is located in an apartment where main protagonist Tanya lives in the pantry while her AirBNB holiday-rental guests Beau and Brad smoke bongs in the kitchen. A person called Yoni talks at her from a floor down through the “shit pipe”, while Tanya’s ex Bonky’s pet rodent called Celia crawls over her “sore swollen hormonal tits”. Sometimes she’s comforted by Yoni’s stories. Sometimes they’re boring. Sometimes Tanya chats online with Eggie. Sometimes she sends emails of meaningful childhood anecdotes to someone called Cutlery Jane. Sometimes Tanya’s a lesbian. Sometimes, maybe not.
Sarah M Harrison, All The Things (2016). 1st Edition. Published by Arcadia Missa, London.
Time in All the Things is as difficult to place as location. Macro- and micro- states converge to create a kind of tension, where its era feels somehow stuck. Some parts are almost poetry –appearing in proto-form in an earlier publication of untitled poems and “excerpts from a novel” called Channels of Elimination in 2014 –others are monotonous and evocative gestures to meaningful moments of eroticism in repetition: “Hand anus hand anus hand hand finger anus hand anus hand anus anus cock anus cock anus cock anus cock hand cock hand cock cock cock cock…” and so on.
This first book by Australian-born Harrison is one consisting of fragments. A sort of snapshot of an existence that doesn’t ascribe to any notion of linearity or narrative, instead giving over to insight: “Yoni, it is not that I have anything against couples per-se, it is just that, they make me nervous, I don’t feel like I can trust them.” The existence presented here is one that’s funny yet bleak, familiar but different. It’s slightly off. The interwoven life of resigned cynic Tanya and the selfish, solipsistic people around her are presented in pieces of prose, poetry, dialogue, chats, emails, lists ordered alphabetically. Two-dimensional identities are blurred across bounds –personal, gendered, sexual, professional –and given depth despite their meanness: “She’s the sort of person who thinks that you become an artist by making art.”
Sarah M Harrison, Channels of Elimination (2014). Published by Publishing Puppies, London.
Harrison’s is a universe that’s astutely constructed within a sensory space that’s both dulled by the marketing language of MacBook Pros and workplace initiatives, and heightened by its attention to the minor details of mundanity on the margins: “Yoni and Tanya dress up in ugly, awkward, slutty outfits, then smoke several weak joints before leaving the house.” Sex and bodily functions are entwined here in an at times macabre but always droll depiction of modern humanity; shrink-wrapped faux meat products, and a clump of horrifying black hair in the shower drain that threatens to strangle them all.
Trapped somewhere between a notion of the present-day and a monstrous close-view of a very near future, All The Things carries its reader through the squeamish particulars of the drudgery of daily life and abjection. The people that live it here are vulgar and sometimes cruel, and the most felt feeling throughout is hurt: “Her pain took up all the space, all the things, everything always her pain.” It meanders with little plot and a deliberately unsatisfying end on a note that surely has meaning but also doesn’t, as testament, perhaps, to its own brilliant soft nihilism that languishes in misery: “Cigarette to scab”. **
Dean Blunt is presenting solo exhibition W44VEY at London’s Arcadia Missa, opening May 20 and running to June 25.
There’s little information on the theme of the exhibition itself, aside from some typically cryptic press release text, below, and a YouTube video featuring 40 seconds of noise and images piles cash of cash, screens and online purchases via bootleg branded outlets like ‘Pay_Pall’ and ‘HedEx’.
“Glam frieztgerald white suits Did calprio decide to go after chickens and pigeon eating them alive in front of ppl with friend they also trash the party by breaking all the windows They get ostracised ” W44VEY
The London-based artist, producer and musician, who became known first for his work with cult band Hype Williams has spent the last couple years carving out a career under his solo moniker and releasing an album as Babyfather in April, while also presenting exhibitions at Space, the ICA and, more recently, Cubitt Gallery.
Jesse Darling’s art is hard to describe in words. Perhaps it’s because the artist is already so generous with them, saying so much as an ever-present voice on both real and virtual planes: performative talks, poetry, social media. Darling carries one of the barest voices of London’s current art scene, and for better or worse, their persona always surrounds the work.
The Great Near, running at London’s Arcadia Missafrom March 19 to May 7 comes accompanied by an unconventional exhibition text blending ideas and fragments of socio-political processes. The artist releases a chain of interlaced thoughts which rephrase and (re-)create a life’s circumstances. The mechanism of a post-industrial society of singularity are processed and questioned. Handwritten, photocopied words that could be read as a tale of recent modern historyor the human condition —its meaning and appearance —is one of many materials processed by Darling’s rugged and playful practice. Led by a subject position that privileges artistic process over final product, Darling’s attitude becomes form, and words, and then it expands.
Jesse Darling, The Great Near (2016). Exhibition view. Courtesy the artist + Arcadia Missa, London.
The Great Near is a new series of works, including three floor pieces and six wall pieces, which each actualise the artist’s ability to give form to abject bodies as a way of questioning social conventions. Painfully direct and yet light and with humour, at first the exhibition seems like a gathering in an interior yet urban, public yet private, ritualistic, religious space. Three body totem shapes are scattered across the gallery floor. They’re assembled from various materials and encased by an outer skeleton, a welded steel architectural frame. Walking around these figures, poetic moments of amalgamated materials take form.
Placed with their back toward the gallery’s entrance, a body made from welded steel, wood, chain, castor called ‘Colonel Shanks’ is supported by an aluminium crutch. It could be its tail, a mutated phallus or a third leg. The object, designed to support injured humans, becomes a disfigured organ of power, pride and stability in this figurative animal-headed character. Its foam head looks as if it was torn into shape and has two steel horns sticking out of it. Placed on one of them is a bunch of plastic cherries, a kitsch remnant of mass production taking the place of nature in Darling’s world.
‘Temps de Cerises II’ bears a blossom made out of steel branches and foam flowers. Rising above its a pink board with its flora is a flashing safety light. The sculpture carries a sign saying ‘Private’ on its back, and the bottom is supported by two trolley wheels. This static piece projects a general feeling of instability and movement that is somehow in between ecstatic and frozen, or trapped. The body itself is unset, it refuses to be determined.
Around the periphery, materials and gestures repeat. Taking a central position, the wall sculpture ‘Saint Batman’ is a superhero in metamorphosis. The icon is crucified on a steel welded cross and decorated with a halo. His body is made out of a black bin bag with a leaf pattern and plastic foliage arching around his masked face. Mass-produced nature morphs between two and three dimensions. Here, low and high culture hang out, religion and capitalism are friends, again. In this assemblage, the desire to be saved meets human limitation in the form of a black lollipop stuck to a mask covered by pink foam. Hidden in one of the gallery’s corners is ‘What’s the hole in u Batman’, a painted C-type print mounted on a post. In the flat version the character seems as if his candy is transmuted to a hand-painted hole in his beatific body. Batman is transformed into a vulnerable, pathetic, superhero-saint.
Jesse Darling, ‘Saint Batman’ (2016). Courtesy the artist + Arcadia Missa, London.
Darling’s urban living creatures are planted in the context of our own haunted history. They tell us who we are, what we are composed of, how we turned out like this and what we wished to be. Their personal and political tone takes pleasurable form, capturing transformations while letting things be what they are.
What seems to be the most personal piece in the show, ‘Cavalry’, is a group of horse heads made of clay and sugar. The horse, a symbol of power, is made in the most organic material. The herd has lost one of its members to a higher position on top of the gallery’s wall. Their escape reveals a history of wealth, domination and detachment. The rest of Darling’s steeds almost seem like a field of flowers, a crowd of individuals waiting to be picked.
The Great Near gives fragmented form to a fragmented being, ending with what has become part of the the Jesse Darling signature. When leaving the gallery, one faces Arcadia Missa’s glass door covered in whitewash paint. It’s a reference to the city’s ‘Under Construction’ spaces or small businesses in foreclosure. The viewer is left with the feeling of abject bodies under transformation, thinking about the social lives of now and constant change as a process of construction and destruction.**
Linda Stupart is opening solo exhibition A dead writer exists in words and language is a type of virus. at London’s Arcadia Missa, opening February 26 and running to March 8.
The show accompanies and expands on the London-based artist and writer’s novella Virus, also published by Arcadia Missa, and follows the Stupart’s concerns with gender, language mutation and abjection in a “virulent and embodied critique of sexism and structural violence in art and artworlds.”
The exhibition announcement runs along a text that vividly evokes bodily analogies for exclusionary discourse and dominant historical narratives: “The same words again and again wearing out their throat their blood their muscles knotting, stomach filled with black oil, fingers tapping on the seat of every lecture theatre.”
