Iniva is delighted to announce its participation in London Art Fair 2019 within the Art Projects section and as a fair partner in two public talks and tours.
This year, Iniva will exhibit works on paper by Beverley Bennett and Jade Montserrat, with a presentation that focuses on the power and fragility of mark making in contemporary art. The stand will explore drawing and performance through intimate and radical gestures. Aspects of erasure and permanence, typical to mark making and drawing, create sympathetic conditions to express ideas around unspoken, invisible histories.
Jade Montserrat operates at the intersection of art and activism through drawing, painting, performance, film, installation, sculpture, print and text, while Beverley Bennett explores the interactions between drawing and sound, also working with film and performance. Both artists employ distinct processes of mark making and have an interest in translating drawing into other mediums.
BIOGRAPHIES
Beverley Bennett is an artist-filmmaker. She graduated from Middlesex University in 2009 and University of Central England in 2004. She makes monochrome, abstract drawings where layers of pigment and repetitive mark making add a sense of power and energy to the surface of the paper. Her artworks have been described as having an almost audible quality which inspired Bennet to explore how her drawings can influence and transform into other mediums such as sound. Bennett’s work has been shown nationally and internationally; venues include the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston, Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol, Metal Liverpool and New Art Exchange in Nottingham.
Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, (Race and Representation in Northern Britain in the context of the Black Atlantic: A Creative Practice Project) and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England. She was also awarded one of two Jerwood Student Drawing Prizes in 2017 for No Need for Clothing, a documentary photograph of a drawing installation at Cooper Gallery DJCAD by Jacquetta Clark. Jade’s Rainbow Tribe project – a combination of historical and contemporary manifestations of Black Culture from the perspective of the Black Diaspora is central to the ways she is producing a body of work, including No Need For Clothing and its iterations, as well as her performance work Revue. Jade was commissioned to present Revue as a 24 hour live performance at SPILL Festival of Performance, October 2018, a solo exhibition at The Bluecoat, Liverpool, Nov – 10 Mar 2019 and was commissioned by Art on the Underground to create the 2018 Winter Night Tube cover. Recent selected screenings, performances and presentations include: SPACE studios (2018), ICA Philadelphia (2018), Arnolfini, and Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Alison Jacques Gallery (2017) and Princeton University (2016).
Public Talks Programme
Talks & Discussion Theatre.
Thursday 17 January 2019, 12pm
The radical gesture: articulating invisible histories through mark making
Artists Jade Montserrat and Beverley Bennett discuss their practice in conversation with curator and writer Adelaide Bannerman. How are immaterial and invisible histories articulated through the gestures of mark making? What roles do research and performance play in this practice?
Speakers: Jade Montserrat, Beverley Bennett. Moderated by Adelaide Bannerman, curator.
Saturday 19 January 2019, 3.45pm
Drawing as Praxis: the reinvention of drawing
Expanded ideas of drawing and representation of line and form has shifted dramatically since the 1960s. Increasingly, drawing intersects with other artforms such as performance, moving image and sculpture, questioning the primacy of one form over the other. How does an evolving understanding of drawing relate to the ways in which an artist’s body of work is contextualised and collected?
Speakers: Dr Kimathi Donkor (Artist & MA Drawing course leader at UAL), Mary Doyle, co-Director of the Drawing Room. Chaired by Melanie Keen, Director/Chief Curator, Iniva.
Public Tours Programme
Led within the Art Projects section of the fair.
Thursday 17 January 2019, 1.15pm
Stand tour by Melanie Keen, Director/Chief Curator, Iniva
Saturday 19 January 2019, 3pm
Art Projects tour by Rodrigo Orrantia, curator, art historian and Iniva trustee