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Artists of the week: Hew Locke & Gayle Chong-Kwan

The exhibition runs from 4 June – 26 June 2011 and features artists Gayle Chong Kwan and Hew Locke, who have recently worked with Iniva, alongside Dave Lewis, Mike Marshall, Christopher Orr and Sophy Rickett.

ArtSway’s New Forest Pavilion is an offiicial collateral event for the exhibition at this year’s Venice Bienniale and features a number of new commissions. Each artist explores ideas relating to nationhood, ecology and landscape as seen within a modern global context. It looks like an interesting exhibition to visit if you are lucky enough to be in Venice this month!

Gayle Chong Kwan’s installation for ArtSway’s exhibition, The Obsidian Isle, explores ideas of collective history, the senses and memory, national identity, landscape and tourism. Chong Kwan documents an island which houses the lost and destroyed places of her native Scotland, referencing the 18th century fictionalized epic of Ossian, as well as her Mauritian heritage, an island whose landscape is being theatricalised and consumed through the global tourist industry.

Chong Kwan works with photography, video, sound, installation, and performance and weaves together documentary and fantastical approaches to explore ideas of collective and individual memory, history and expanded notions of and frustration between the senses.

Chong Kwan worked with Iniva most recently in summer 2010, creating an installation ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ for our Whose Map is it? New Mapping by Artists exhibiton. Her audio installation included clips from people interviewed about dancing the Rumba and was accompanied by a map of the movement and origins of the dance across the world, as well as dance cards for the more adventurous visitors who fancied trying it out for themselves.

Watch a video of Gayle speaking about this installation on our YouTube channel, where you can also find a 3 part series of the artist talking at Rivington Place about her previous work and practice in general as well.

Also participating in ArtSway’s exhibition is Hew Locke. Locke’s recent commission for ArtSway -Starchitect- is an installation constructed from cut and painted plywood sheets, featuring sculptural objects which for La Biennale is condensed into one room, presented as a ‘treasury’, linking to the former colonial standing of Venice.

Money, economy, value – on the mind of many artists

The End of Money exhibition at Witte de With, May – August 2011

The End of Money is a group exhibition about time and value. Bringing together works by a host of international artists, this exhibition and its parallel publication reflect upon the fears, hopes, and expectations associated with the end of money and its ominous consequence: the dissolution of an absolute standard of value.

Artist of the week: Nasreen Mohamedi

Reflections on Indian Modernism – new exhibition of the artist’s work opens

Iniva’s Senior Curator and Research Associate, Grant Watson, has been busy. Fresh from our recent Rabih Mroué exhibition he has curated (freelance) with Suman Gopinath Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes - Reflections on Indian Modernism at WEILS in Brussels which opens next week.

Nasreen Mohamedi (1937–1990) is regarded as one of the most important Indian artists of her generation, and her paintings, drawings and photographs, produced from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, constitute a key body of work within the modernist canon. Mohamedi studied in London and Paris during the late 1950s and early 60s, and then returned to India to teach.

Her drawings from the late 1970s onwards tend toward the resolutely abstract, they intimate cultural references, which become explicit in her photographs – in which historical architecture suggests an aesthetic link to both modernisation and an Islamic heritage. In Mohamedi’s diaries, made over a period of thirty years, textual and graphic interventions also attest to the close links between her inner life and her practice as an artist.

In 2000, her work was included in Iniva’s exhibiton, Drawing Space which brought together the work of three contemporary Indian artists, Nasreen Mohamedi, Sheela Gowda and N.S.Harsha (Both Harsha and Gowda have had recent exhibitions with Iniva at Rivington Place). Each artist’s practice encompasses visual forms from the West filtered through an Indian sensibility and uses the drawn line as a device for negotiating space in ways that are self-empowering, exploring the complexity of making and exhibiting work in an increasingly global context. A publication also called Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawing was produced to support the exhibition.

Artist of the week: Neeta Madahar

Artist Neeta Madahar opens a new exhibition exploring the construction of female roles through portraiture and role play

Role Play: Neeta Madahar & Madame Yevonde opens on 20 May at PM Gallery and House and features a series of works, Flora, by our artist of the week, Neeta Madahar. The works are inspired by the distinctive 1935 Goddesses series by Madame Yevonde as Madahar shares her interest in the construction of female roles. The artist invited seventeen female friends to pose as Flora, the Roman deity of flowering and fruit-bearing plants. The images produced are universal representations but also deeply personal reflections allowing the sitters to fashion their own idealised femininity.

Iniva, Fabrica and Photoworks commissioned Madahar’s first film, Falling, in 2005. In this film sycamore seeds tumble slowly toward the viewer in a dramatic moment that echoes naturally occuring phenomena yet enables the viewer to immerse themselves in stillness and intimate details. This ordinary scene is exposed in crystalline detail, albeit in an uncanny exaggerated form, reflecting on the dream-like temporality of nature and memory. Madahar represents the physical world in unusual ways enabling the viewer to immerse themselves in stillness and intimate details. You can watch a clip of this film here.

Neeta Madahar was part of Iniva’s Atlas season of exhibitions and events that map ideas and experiences largely drawn from uncharted territory

The artist also produced a limited edition print to accompany the film Falling, called Sky, Seeds, and Me. It is still available to buy through Iniva’s online shop.

Artist of the week: Leticia Valverdes

Photographer Leticia Valverdes creates a project exploring wedding dresses from the past, and their wearers.

I hope you weren’t thinking that royal wedding fever was over…! Leticia Valverdes has created a topical project which is certainly an interesting and thought-provoking look at one of the most important aspects of any couple’s big day – the dress.

Wedding dresses can be a reflection of both the bride and current fashions. For this (still ongoing) project, The Wedding Dress, the artist asked women who married more than three decades ago to be photographed wearing their old wedding dresses. Garments carry memories, particularly wedding dresses which are worn at a special time and which can embody the hopes of so many women for their lives and futures. The artist says, “For a few hours this dress, whatever color or design, makes its model once more the center of attention, brings moments of intimacy and memories, dreams and visions.”

Leticia’s work explores notions of identity, self esteem, belonging, memory and dreams and concentrates on interactions with people. She worked with Iniva on London Is The Place For Me in 2007, an exhibition exploring migration through photography and moving image. The exhibition was organised jointly by Iniva and Autograph ABP to mark the opening of Rivington Place and also featured artists Mona Hatoum, Keith Piper and Harold Offeh.

Originally from Brazil, she studied Fine Art at London Metropolitan University. Her work has featured in a number of group and solo shows in the UK and abroad.

Visit Leticia’s website

The BBC also wrote an article about the project, read it here.

Alternative Economies: Local Currencies

The Bijlmer Euro Project with artist Christian Nold

The project explores how a local currency can make a local economy more resilient to outside corporations.  The currency is a Euro note with an RFID (Radio-frequency identification) tag stuck to it, which is removable. This RFID tagged Euro allows it to be exchanged locally providing discounts in local stores as opposed to large supermarkets. The RFID tags make it possible to trace the movement of that specific euro, making it apparent how money moves in one area.