Susanna Davies-Crook‘s newest exhibition, Star Chamber, opens at London’s Res. running May 29 to June 13.
Star Chamber comes as the last of three solo shows produced by #temporarycustodians at Res., where the London-born artist and writer speaks through multiple bodies, both live and recorded, in a system of voices pointing to another, absent one. A series of closed workshops precede and continue during the exhibition, and Davies-Crook’s installation is composed of excerpts of the qualitative data gathered through these workshops.
The preview on May 29 brings a performance at 9:30pm, as well as a live set by Recsund (Clifford Sage) from 10-11:30pm, while the closing event on June 13 brings a live distributed script reading, as well as a response and research exchange between Sally O’Reilly and Davies-Crook.
Gery Georgieva is bringing her latest solo exhibition, Solo Romantika, to Deptford’s Res. project space, where it will run from April 24 to May 9.
The Bulgarian-born artist’s latest show is a mix of new performance, sound and video installation, and forms the second of three solo shows produced by the #temporarycustodians R&D platform (initiated by curator Helen Kaplinsky and artist Maurice Carlin) at Res.
With Solo Romantika, Georgieva gives us her own rendition of emotive folk and pop solos, performing alone in a studio as she lip-syncs and records a cappella versions of sad Bulgarian songs. As a backdrop to the performance, and performative in its own right, is an elaborate layering of references across props, costumes, and script parts.
Mutable project Res. is bringing artist Josephine Callaghan to its Deptford gallery and studio space for an exhibition titled Akhal-Teke, running from March 27 to April 11.
The new series of medium format, analogue photo-collages by Callaghan will be the first of three solo shows at Res. produced by research and development project #temporarycustodians, initiated by Helen Kaplinsky and artist Maurice Carlin. Kaplinsky, along with Sarah Jury and Lucy A. Sames, is also the founder of gallery.
The opening night will be accompanied by a DJ set from BAD SECTOR, and alongside the exhibitions programme #temporarycustodians will be “enacting the distribution” of an artwork by Carlin, inviting the audience to develop a legal and company structure for it to be co-owned by temporary custodian shareholders.
John Cage was apparently into mushrooms. Not only a composer and pioneer of indeterminate music, he was also a keen amateur mycologist, a branch of biology with its focus on fungi. London-based artists Anne de Boer and Eloïse Bonneviot have found a fascination in the field too, not only cultivating The Mycological Twist installation at London’s Jupiter Woods where the artists are growing their own mushrooms, but composing their own ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’ extolling on its benefits. Performing the audiovisual performance-installation from one of the “storage islands” in the “co-working archipelago” of Apophenia, the duo set a lo-fi projection of saturated images, words and instructions to a playlist that spanned New Age, trance, psychedelia and maybe a bit of funk, at Salford’s Regent Trading Estate on December 6.
Anne de Boer + Eloise Bonnevoit, ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’ (2014). Courtesy #temporarycustodians.
That VJ-DJ performance opened a night full of them at a provisional “industrial sculpture and storage park” constructed by artists-in-residence Josephine Callaghan, Susanna Davies-Crook and Gery Georgieva and carved out by equally ephemeral light in the Regent Trading Estate space. Guests invited to perform within the “jumble of assets” inspired by the experience of finding patterns and associations in random data (from which Apophenia takes its name), included de Boer and Bonnevoit, as well as New Noveta andPatchfinder, while Joey Holder contributed three Jacuzzi shells from the artist’s HYDROZOAN exhibition at The Royal Standard in Liverpool.
A DIY fountain made from black bags leaking water and being buffeted by bamboo only to burst on to its audience. A film of an Afghan refugee journey to Greece being intercepted by metal sheets reflecting the film back out into reality. A six-person focus group on ‘independence’ exploring the individual voice and its mass mediation. These are some of the ways the night-long event interrogated the idea of “the way in which our relationship to assets, from property to services and natural resources, is changing in a climate of scarcity”. It’s the first in a series of live events, curated by Helen Kaplinsky and Maurice Carlin of the #temporarycustodians R&D project, looking to create a “share economy” space among its ‘islands’ of storage.
“Mushrooms, like every sexually reproducing organism on this planet, can generate a limited number of cell division before vitality falters”, Bonnevoit warns in her live and intermittent notes on mycology throughout the ‘Shroom Music & Myco_educational_VJ-set’. That’s followed by the swelling, bulging and throbbing time-lapse imagery of fungi growing and reproducing, while a woman’s voice sings, “why don’t you lay your head back, open your lips and take a sip” over a tune that can only be described as ‘groovy’. It’s an un-Googleable song called ‘Fourth Dimensional’ by Aquafur, taken from what de Boer calls a “chillwave/psybient/triphop” compilation CD. Its jerky “fourth-dimensional, super-expressional, soul-continual, verging on criminal” refrain prefaces an eventual shift in mood, from awkwardly sexy ‘funkwave’ to angry industrial, as Bonnevoit puts out the appeal, “I strongly believe that the future health of the planet may well depend on the strains we preserve this century”. **
