As part of the recent Art Licks Weekend 2016 programme, arts digital production company Video in Common commissioned a special interview with Daniel Kelly, founder of unisex salon and gallery DKUK.
The London-based artist and hairdresser opened the Peckham-area space in 2014 as another means to not only getting a haircut but also interacting with art. In an effort to make art accessible to all, DKUK presents an opportunity for viewing new works in the familiar space of a salon by a Toni & Guy-trained stylist and artist.
“It’s my art practice, it’s my business, it’s my life”, says Kelly, who here talks about the beginning of DKUK, alternative business models for independent spaces and encouraging non-arts audiences to engage with artists and their work.
Watch the video below and see the DKUK websitefor details.**
Header image: DKUK Gallery: ‘An interview with Daniel Kelly’ (2016). Video Still. Courtesy Video in Common, London.
Art Assassins are presenting Liquid Rye at London’s DKUKSalon, opening June 23 and running July 2.
The group who make up and host the young people’s forum based in South London Gallery weekly, have made a shampoo and conditioner inspired by the smells of Peckham named ‘Liquid Rye’ which will be used and sold in DKUK art space and hair dressers.
Art Assassins will also transform the salon into a promotional space for their product.
The group of 18 to 21 year-olds often run projects through an investigation of how it feels to be a young person living in south London have made collaborative works such as cassette tape, ‘WE ARE US AND YOU ARE YOU’ and the time when they gathered in a forest to broadcast throughout the night.
DKUK’s recent shows have included work by late artist Ian Breakwell, Holly Slingsby, a single hair dancing in disco lights installed by Jack Strange and an Xmas Bleach Party. Run by artist Daniel Kelly, the Peckham salon also participated in this year’s Manifesta in Zurich.
London’sDKUK Salon are putting on “Work” and other works by Ian Breakwell opening February 17 and running April 19.
Artist Daniel Kelly, who runs the Peckham hair dressing art space, has selected and curated a small selection of Breakwell’s work, such as ‘Continuous Diary’ (1984) and ‘Dialogues’ (1981), which will play softly to people through a directional speaker during the shampooing part of the appointment – after the initial hair consultation.
Much of Breakwell’s work was developed from diaries. Combined with the specific context of DKUK Salon the show looks to be a warm and intimate one, faithful to the work of the late artist.
Holly Slingsby takes over London’s DKUK Salon with a performance on November 18 to kick off a new live work that will run from November 19 to 21.
Slingsby’s new work begins with hair, tracing through a “look book” of pop icons and mythical figures for whom hair is integral to their narrative.
Showing a protagonist waiting at the hair salon while flipping between these figures as though she is selecting a guise for herself, the work explores the notion of image projection and the salon as a place where “identity is formed and performed”.
DKUK Salon is hosting a new performance and video installation by UK-based artist and writer Patrick Coyle, titled ‘Trim Your Tongue’ and running at the London space on September 2.
Drawing on “various theories of gossip and its connection to physical grooming”, Coyle developed a script that will be performed from an undisclosed location via a live-stream to DKUK Salon.
The initial performance will be recorded and this recording will continue to play opposite the clients of DKUK for another three days.
Art gallery and hair salon DKUK Salon is hosting the latest film from artist Stephen Hall as well the launch of ART LICKS Issue 16 on February 27.
Hall’s new film, ‘Bare Life & Biopolitics in Kennington Park’, documents the lives of underclass refugees and illegal migrants shot over five years. It shows their precarious and clandestine existence in an urban park, which Hall frequented and got to know over the half a decade, filming interviews and constructing stories. They’re interspersed with sound bytes from mainstream media coverage of issues like immigration, multiculturalism, and the stop-and-search bill.
The film premiere is accompanied by the launch of the latest issues of ART LICKS, which, together with being an organization and hosting an ART LICKS weekend of art, has been steadily putting out publications since its inception in 2010. The latest issue features work and writing from over 30 artists, including Margherita Huntley, Patrick Coyle and Gabriel Birch.
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.
Exhibitions and events of interest are more globally dispersed the week starting February 16. Highlights include a remotely assembled exhibition by Kareem Lotfy and political satirist Andeel at Cairo’s Nile Sunset Annex and A Form is a Social Gatherer group exhibition, featuring the likes of Adam Cruces, Tiril Hasselknippe, Philipp Timischl in Zürich.
Around London, Future Brown is playing the ICA, Slade students – including Sarah Boulton, Cristine Brache and Olga Koroleva – are presenting at Fictional Symposium at The Showroom and Patrick Staff is presenting at Chisenhale Gallery. In other UK cities Benedict Drew “& Friends” are performing Salon Dyslexic in Nottingham and Mat Jenner has an exhibition in Birmingham.
As for Berlin, Mirak Jamal and Santiago Taccetti are hosting a second Stoneroses exhibition, including the likes of Martin Kohout and Katharina Fengler, while elsewhere Angelo Plessas has a new solo exhibition in Athens and Leslie Kulesh is showing online with CosmoCarl.
With the end of year wind-up comes the last surge of final shows to finish off November and December, so in an effort to give space to upcoming events that spill out of the schedule, we’ve rounded up show openings and events in the week ending November and leading to the New Year.
Beginning November 23 is Aimee Heinemann‘s second residential exhibition, Instable, at Grove House, as well as the Holly Childs-curated Quake II two-person show at Arcadia Missa, as well as Arca + Jesse Kanda performing an audiovisual collaboration at the ICA, as well as a group exhibition at EOA. Projectsthat includes a new light box installation by Monira Al Qadiri.
An exhibition and shop, in an art gallery and shopfront, French Riviera draws its title from its own Gallic origins to convey the ‘department store’ concept of Grand Magasin. It playfully examines, not just the links between art and commerce but the shaky tenets on which these apparent distinctions exist. Exploring and ultimately deconstructing these divisions, or ‘departments’, across “artists” and “non-artists”, artworks and objects, curator Nat Breitenstein presents work by 50-plus contributors in the tiny Bethnal Green space. It’s one you could hardly fit in to at its opening, being packed with people and objects; a mass of ‘things’ bundled on tables, shelves and walls. Artists and gallery owners Samuel Levack & Jennifer Lewandowski’s light blue ‘One Minute Disco’ caps are occasionally knocked off their hooks, while Harry Burden’s glazed ceramic pun of ‘Potential Accidents’ (Banana Skins 2013) arescattered around the floor and as precarious as the notion of permanence at an event described by its own press release as a “fluid process that develops, changes and grows as it goes along”.
Commodified and re-contextualised, with no information beyond a price tag, you might then miss concepts drawing from Virilio’s “integral accident” in Burden’s practice, or Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto in Leslie Kulesh‘s framed print, ‘As long as you love me’. Red-nailed fingers suspend a tablet featuring a hyper-realised Dakota Rose and remediating the “multiplicities of being defined” originally illustrated in the 2012 video ‘As Long As You Love Me: A love letter from Dakota to Donna’:“if you want to see me. Leslie. Just go online”.
Perspective and its reproduction is explored in Yuri Pattison’s reformatting of a reformatted format (about formats), in ‘Ways of Seeing PDF’. Here he reproduces his online PDF ‘ways of seeing WAYS OF SEEING’ in physical book form. Online, photocopies and scans, zoom in and re-present the original 1972 publication across windows and scroll bars, while sections of pages are outlined and underlined, drawing attention to passages like, “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at”. It’s a self-perpetuating loop of focus on established cultural norms that the John Berger-presented BBC series the book is based on, purports to challenge (“a large part of seeing is based on habit and convention”). But, in drawing attention to the ways in which technologies mediate these established habits, they only propagate them further. As technologies evolve, whether through photography or .pdf, these old formats and ideas persist, not only as the digital or a broadcast medium reapplied to the book form but in the question of what it is you’re paying for when you buy it: is it the information or the card it’s printed on?
Framing, perspective and the lexical shifts that come with it emerge on the silk surface of Fabienne Hess’s Unknown Face Fragments prints series. Here, artworks and familiar popular cultural portraits are fractured almost but not quite beyond recognition. Because archetypes persist and that’s mirrored by the protruding eyes of Levack and Lewandowski’s totemic Jesmonite and plaster ‘Pilgrim Shells’. The mystical connotations of their titles echo the primal impulse that Kulesh identifies as being behind the “cyborg stand in” of a social media avatar in the ‘As Long As You Love Me’ print, hung among them. Will Cruickshank’s‘Logs for Sale’ wood-cut print not only identifies the advertisement as the actual point of value in goods exchange, but mirrors the model of ‘artificial scarcity’ by making it available as one of only 14 editions –a sales model shared by art galleries and the Disney Vault alike.
‘Grand Magasin’ @ French Riviera. Image courtesy of the gallery.
The consumables at Grand Magasin aren’t limited to products though. There are edibles from Kitty Travers’ ‘Candied Citrus Fruit’ and services from Daniel Kelly’s DKUKpop up salon, coming on Saturday December 7. Another Kelly work, ‘Tunisia riots see 3, set to fly home’ reflects the distance, degradation and disconnection with the realities of a country from the voyeur’s perspective, virtual or otherwise. It’s an account of tourists being evacuated during civil unrest in the country through a browser view of a Daily Mirror headlinepartly obscured by a Google image of a burning resort, courtesy of Getty Images.
While the Grand Magasin pressrelease speaks not of the “difference but rather of divergence” of its unquantifiable conceptual and material elements, what’s more interesting is where they converge. Didactic panels give way to sales tags, the information limited to the name of its creator and a price arbitrarily applied by any number of nebulous considerations. Here, the distinction between artist and artwork, person and product collapses; context vanishes, and all that’s left is some things you can pay for. **
Grand Magasin is running at French Riviera from November 30 to December 15, 2013.
