Union Pacific

High Arousal @ Union Pacific, Aug 29 – 31

29 August 2016

The High Arousal: Choreographs and Works performance and event programme is on at London’s Union Pacific, opening August 29  and running to the 31.

Programmed by curator Jonathan P. Watts, the three-day event will feature works by Erica ScourtiAdam Linder, Mike Saunders, Andrew Hardwidge, Mary Hurrell and Paul Maheke, as well as a live ambient music set by ARD.

Multi-media artist Scourti will explore automated and fragmentary pieces of advice in her project ‘As long as whatever you are not true’. Linder, who comes from a dance background and works in choregoraphy, will perform ‘Perched but not provided for’ and Maheke, who also recently exhibited I Lost Track of the Swarm solo at SLG, will perform ‘Seeking After the Fully Grown Dancer *deep within*’ which will explore “Authentic Movement.”

Digital and analog instruments will be used in a live  ambient drone performance by Brighton-based Techno duo ARD who is Jack Elgar and Ed Chivers.

Visit the Union Pacific website for details.**

Paul Maheke, I Lost Track of the Swarm (2016). Exhibition view. Photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy SLG, London.
Paul Maheke, I Lost Track of the Swarm (2016). Exhibition view. Photo by Andy Keate. Courtesy SLG, London.

 

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MO’ TILE @ Union Pacific, Mar 18 – Apr 23

16 March 2016

The Mo’ Tile group exhibition is on at London’s Union Pacific, opening March 18 and running to April 23.

‘Motile’ is a word used to describe tiny organic forms of life that are able to move by themselves, i.e —spontaneously —as well as the movement of mental imagery that arises with bodily movements as position as opposed to as a reaction to images and other more externally sensory receptions.

Artists in Mo’ Tile are Neïl Beloufa and Cooper Jacoby whose solo show Stagnants is on at Berlin’s Mathew Gallery until March 19 and aqnb reviewed earlier this month set out to continue his exploration of “forms of capture nestled in ubiquitous interfaces”. Also involved is São Paulo-based artist Erika Verzutti, along with Marina Pinsky and Melanie Matranga, the latter of whom described her work as using and understanding “emotional structures” after installing a solo show at Palais de Tokyo.

See the Union Pacific website for (limited) details**

Marina Pinsky 'Gaussian Blur II' (2013). Courtesy the artist
Marina Pinsky, ‘Gaussian Blur II’ (2013). Courtesy the artist.

 

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KERNEL + What We Name… @ Union Pacific, Feb 28 – Mar 28

26 February 2015

London gallery Union Pacific is launching Bridge, the latest exhibition from KERNEL, as well as projects with Sasha Litvintseva and Lewis Teague Wright titled What we name, we can contain, both running from February 28 to March 28.

In Bridge, the Athenian art collective (founded by architect Pegy Zali and artists Petros Moris and Theodoros Giannakis) takes a peripheral event as its source of inspiration, re-imagining a critical narrative on the modern movements of matter, people, and energy. Built as a reference to a new railway transport bridge in the suburbs of Athens that was mysteriously sabotaged, the exhibition takes the form of “millions of microscopic fragments of phosphor-coated lamb glass, deformed metal and wood chips are still lying within the tunnel, mixed with the gray crushed stone of the railway”.

For What we name, we can contain, Litvintseva and Wright provide only an abstract lengthy text referencing things like “lashing blood-infused spit”, “beacher mermaid”, and “the void”. The text ends with:

Tongue and beans in broth,

Brick in a box.

I won’t take no for an answer,

I was born to be a dancer.

What we name,

We can contain,

Out here hanging brain.

See the Bridge page and the What we name, we can contain press release for details. **

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Events + Exhibitions, Feb 23 – Mar 1

24 February 2015

The Ryan Trecartin and Lauren Cornell-curated 2015 Triennial, called Sound Audience starts at the New Museum in New York this week, with the majority of events and exhibitions elsewhere opening within a few days of each other.

Two double exhibitions are opening across London, including one from KERNEL, Sasha Litvintseva and Lewis Teague Wright at Union Pacific, as well as Olivia Erlanger solo at Seventeen Gallery alongside a group show curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini and including Emanuel Röhss, Debora Delmar Corp, AIRBNB Pavilion, plus more.

Also in the UK capital, artist-run space Rye Lane Studios is closing with an RSVP event, while LEAP in Berlin is doing that same. Elsewhere in Europe, Amalia Ulman will be delivering a lecture in Helsinki, Neïl Beloufa is opening an exhibition at Zero in Milan and Clémence de la Tour du Pin‘s Hotel Palenque commission is happening in Frankfurt.

Desktop Residency and Opening Times are hosting new works online, while Sonic Acts 2015 in Amsterdam features performances by M.E.S.H., Vessel and TCF. Slavs and Tatars, Monira Al Qadiri and GCC have exhibitions opening across two galleries in the UAE.

There’s more so see below:

EVENTS

Milo Brennan @ Desktop Residency, Feb 23 – Mar 14

Speculative Writing @ Tenderbooks, Feb 24

2015 Triennial @ New Museum, Feb 25 – May 24

Joey Holder + Steven Ounanian @ Enclave, Feb 25

Luke Nunn @ split/fountain, Feb 25

Amalia Ulman lecture @ Exhibition Laboratory, Feb 25

Beau Rice @ Printed Matter, Feb 26

Sonic Acts Festival opening @ Stedelijk, Feb 26

Extreme Animals, Haribo &c @ Secret Project Robot Art Experiment, Feb 26

Sonic Acts Festival @ OT301, Feb 26

POLYVALENZ @ Kunstquartier Bethanien, Feb 27

NIGHT CLUBBING @ BRIXTON, Feb 27

Jason Bailer Losh @ Anat Ebgi, Feb 27 – Apr 4

Bare Life & Bio-politics in Kennington Park @ DKUK Salon, Feb 27

KRAUTROCK KARAOKE Vol.17 @ Café OTO, Feb 27

Future Brown @ Creamcake, Feb 28

Who is a ‘People?’ @ Goldsmiths, Feb 28

Rye Lane Studios closing party, Feb 28

LEAP closing party, Feb 28

Accented @ Maraya Art Centre, Mar 1 – May 16

OPENINGS

Kate Morrell + LTV @ Kendal Museum, Feb – Jun

Katharina Fengler @ Relaax.in, Feb 23

Hassan Hajjaj @ Newark Museum, Feb 25 – Aug 9

Anne de Boer @ Lunch Bytes, Feb 25

Neïl Beloufa @ Zero, Feb 26

Life Gallery @ Space, Feb 26 – Mar 15

Sean Raspet @ Société, Feb 26

Tiril Hasselknippe @ DREI, Feb 26 – Mar 28

Kimmo Modig @ Sorbus-galleria, Feb 26 – Mar 8

Labour in a Single Shot @ HKW, Feb 26 – Apr 6

Massimo Grimaldi @ 63rd – 77th STEPS, Feb 27 – Mar 25

Olivia Erlanger + Morphing Overnight @ Seventeen Gallery, Feb 27 – Apr 18

Ruler
@ SIC Gallery, Feb 27 – Mar 15

Josh Bailer Losh @ Anat Ebgi, Feb 27 – Apr 4

Taslima Ahmed @ Real Fine Arts, Feb 28 – Mar 29

Slavs and Tatars @ NYUAD, Feb 28 – Mar 31

KERNEL + What We Name, We Can Contain @ Union Pacific, Feb 28 – Mar 28

Sex Shop @ Transition Gallery, Feb 28 – Mar 29

Antoine Donzeaud @ Mon Chéri, Feb 28 – Apr 11

Clémence de la Tour du Pin @ Frankfurt Am Main, Mar 1 **

See here for exhibitions opening last week.

Header image: Katharina Fengler, ‘Cosmic Feces of Mercy’ (2015) @ Relaax.in.

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Alfred Boman @ Union Pacific, Nov 6-Dec 20

5 November 2014

Alfred Boman will be showing his latest solo exhibition titled Sales Executive Sex Goblin at London’s Union Pacific, running from November 6 to December 20.

The Swedish-born artist escapes definition, or so says the curatorial team behind his latest show, made up of Grace Schofield and Nigel Dunkley. “It is very hard to begin to describe his practice,” writes Schofield. “It is best to come into his world. And that’s what we have tried to create with the show. You have to experience the works in the flesh.”

Even so, a basic description will do, and Boman’s work tends to come through bright abstracted paintings and sculptures that walk the fine line between the sublime and what is traditionally perceived as being in bad taste. Described – to the artist’s bemusement – as stain glass windows, ‘African’ prints, and Aztec-inspired patterns, his canvases seem to effortlessly fuse the aesthetic influences of a globalised world.

See the Union Pacific website for details. **

afred boman 2

 

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Union (2014) @ Union Pacific exhibition photos

20 October 2014

On the way to new London gallery Union Pacific, there’s a health and wellness centre called Zen Clinic. It’s a title that’s emblematic of the the all-too-familiar contradiction of late-capitalist desire, where the privileged fallacy of ‘self-actualisation’ comes in the cryo-packed quick fix of commodity spiritualism; of body and soul subsumed by industry. It’s an idea that has occupied the minds of gallery founders Grace Schofield and Nigel Dunkley for a while now, the latter of whom explored the Western business model for Eastern metaphysics as part of the N/V_PROJECTS-curated The Fulfillment Centre at the The Sunday Painter earlier this year.

Union (2014) @ Union Pacific. Installation view. Courtesy the gallery.
Union (2014) @ Union Pacific. Installation view. Courtesy the gallery.

In bringing together the work of artists represented by Union Pacific, as well as those artists’ friends, and those artists’ friends’ friends, for its inaugural exhibition – aptly titled Union – a thematic thread, birthed from the eighth hexagram symbolising ‘holding together’ in the Ancient Chinese I Ching and borne along the Union Pacific railroad enterprise, emerges. Perdo Wirz‘s ‘Dials’ (2014), a rubber hose meant to be used as a pipe of sorts to be shared at the exhibition opening but turning out to be toxic is chained to the outer front window as a means to be taken, only to have the gallery roller-door down, blocking the potential for artefact and appropriator to come into contact.

Adriano Costa‘s simple sculptural addition, a concrete filled bottle with its plastic promise of ‘Little Miracles’ (2014) weighs down a pillow’s soft center, while Yves Scherer‘s tantalisingly jarring baby blue Tatami mat and perspex in the wall mounted ‘Sirens (Sauereien)’ (2014) glares across and down at Olga Balema‘s ‘Untitled’ (2014) fountain. Steel beams engraved with fragments of cryptic diary entries rust under a stream of water splashing indiscriminately out of its bucket and onto the gallery floor. Companion piece ‘Untitled (shaky blood stone)’ (2014) looks across from a corner; a motorised piece of red and hardened epoxy glue shivering in the chiseled niche of a solid granite block.

This is all a fairly familiar feeling of hybrid cross-cultural and corporate tropes drowning out any sense of individuality. Downstairs and in the dark Julie Born Schwartz‘s subjects in the ‘Love has no reason’ (2014) video literally embody this commonality by becoming transformed by the masks made from images of other people. Jan Kiefer‘s ‘Base: biz fed ecb’ (2014) sculpture nearby features a miniature model of the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, lovingly engraved into copper beech wood and topped with a traditionally made cone-shaped candle by Matthias Huber.

Back upstairs Max Ruf‘s ‘The monuments proved visible in the morning’ (2014) looms in three panels of paintings of corporate logos rendered unrecognisable in its abstract landscape that’s less location and more time and motion. Aude Pariset‘s inner anxiety of being a house guest is externalised in the woozy movement of an inkjet print on dry and cracking rice paper for ‘Bedroom Posters (To Leave)’ (2014). The gallery guestbook suspended beside it evokes Constant Dullaart’s thoughts on the ‘consumer experience’ of 21st-century travel: “hitching a ride is Uber, hospitality is Airbnb, and when you are interested, you are a follower”.

Another Kiefer screens a looping slideshow of brands and popular icons from a macbook. These are handpainted with black acrylic, then digitised and reconfigured into a childish stream of animal cartoons rendered familiar via repetition and reminding its audience: the religion’s in the ritual. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

Union group exhibition is on at London’s Union Pacific, running to October 25, 2014.

Header image: Aude Pariset, ‘Bedroom Posters (To Leave)’ (2014) @ Union Pacific. Install view. Courtesy the gallery.

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