Fabio Affuso
‘Safe Space’ is a series of photographs I shot in South Africa between May and August 2009. The project developed out of an uncomfortable urge to better understand the pervasive presence of the many fences, security wires and warning notices in a place where diverse voices and feelings regarding safety and ownership seemed to clash. While focusing on the necessity of order and self-regulation and questioning the strange relationship of fear and confidence, the images explore but don’t seem to be able to arrest my sense of disorientation as an outsider.
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Craig Barker
This image is my direct response to the Haiti disaster, created specifically for this exhibition. It is a single piece of paper with lines, not drawn, but comprising of thousands of tiny holes made by hand with a pin. The denoted line traces the exact contours of mountain peaks, which were formed by the strike-slip Enriquillio-Plantain Garden fault line on the Caribbean tectonic plate causing the earthquake and destruction in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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Richard Beenen
As a visual artist I am motivated by ideas based in science. My work derives from the processes of the natural and the man-made world. Its take-off point is inspired by Ellsworth Kellys' abstractioins. His abstract paintings are derived from the visible world not from pure invention. My photographs utilize props as subjects in a game of physics manipulated to the point of abstraction. These tentative installations are photographed and printed to scale. The relationship of mass, shape and vast planes of color suggest the workings of inner space on a cellular level.The images also have an inward-turning quality that suggest how the mind interprets space and time.
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Chris Brewer
An investigation into the way in which the human being interacts with its surroundings; juxtaposing the subject against commonplace objects which might be detrimental to their well being. I concentrate on the human beings anxieties and how they are exasperated through the processes of everyday life.
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Ho Ching-Chwang
‘Tiger’s map’
Jealous boy asks the Tiger
‘How is your sexual life?’
I want to draw a map of a vagina
For you, Tiger
Do not show this map to the other
Keep this knowledge a secret
Women whisper to one another
This is what makes us shiver
Show it
It shivers
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Selket Chlupka
In my installation work I am exploring the space in between the language I use and I want to find out what kind of possibilities the space in between allows. The space I am talking about originally was the one which occurred between the lines of a drawing and which I eventually started to cut out to make the gap in between visible. Even though the aspect of drawing is still very important for me I placed the elements into the third dimension. The different elements I cut out are arranged to create a spatial depths. The different elements are simply a fragment of the whole. I am not interested in creating singular pieces of art. This means that there is not one and only way how my work can be presented but rather lots of possibilities.
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Ugne Dainiute
The transition between light and dark, focused and unfocused vision enables the spectator to experience an unwelcoming immobilization, leaving us unsure whether it is possible or not to escape this prison.
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Fosca Democrito
I push the shutter release button of my Holga once. I swivel the camera and I push it again; two times, three times - all on the same frame. I process the film and I wait for the controlled accident to happen. In the images I reproduce another dimension that plays on the edges between movement and stillness, dream and reality; a place where hidden possibilities are allowed.
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Matthew Douglas
Douglas’s work is linked directly to his own beliefs and circumstance, as his environment and experience changes, so does his output. Douglas is chiefly concerned with questioning the perception of permanence and the inevitable attachment that results from such a perception. Work stems from these concerns and often involve ephemeral materials that are visually sensitive to their surroundings such as mild steel and untreated wood.
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Petr Dub
Once Swich is installed everyday action of turnning the light on and off turns into quite consciousnes act. Safe cover no
longer exist. There for the person who uses Switch must be aware of appropriate consequences. While using Switch one can be easily hurt or even accidently killed.
Constant nakedness of the electric power refers not only to constant dangerous, but also to the lelgacy of Dan Flavin and
to the main technical power of his work.
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Lorenzo Durantini
The work explores the difficulty I see in materialising aid from its ideal concept to physical food that alleviates starvation. This process often seems concentrated around individual generosity. I find this to be problematic because world hunger seems to me less a problem of individual avarice than one tied to the misguided policies of institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Moreover, the work interrogates my own limited knowledge of international aid and the apparent contradiction between aestheticism and meaningful critique. As an artist, this honesty is perhaps the best I have to offer.
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Holly Falconer
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Alexander Franck
Alexander Franck is a Multi-Media Artist living between New York and London.
His visual work is greatly influenced by filmmakers, theater and modern dance productions, playwrights and music. He tries to capture an expressive moment rooted in movement and abstraction.
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Leah Gordon
Leah Gordon will be presenting her film 'Atis-Rezistans: the Sculptors of Grand Rue' (34 mins) every day during the exhibition. For screening times please see the events webpage.
Film Synopsis:
Grand Rue is the main avenue that runs a north-south swathe through downtown Port au Prince, Haiti. At the southern end of Grand Rue, near the municipal cemetery and amongst the labyrinthine warren of back streets that line the avenue, is a bidonville community that has a historical tradition of arts, crafts, music and religious practice. This close-knit community is hemmed in on all sides by the makeshift car repair district, which serves as both graveyard and salvation for the cities increasingly decrepit automobiles.
Contemporary Haitian artists Celeur, Eugène, Claude and Guyodo all grew up in this atmosphere of junkyard make-do, survivalist recycling and artistic endeavour. Their powerful sculptural collages of engine manifolds, TV sets, wheel hubcaps and discarded lumber have transformed the detritus of a failing economy into bold, radical and warped sculptures. Their work references their shared African & Haitian cultural heritage, a dystopian sci-fi view of the future and the transformative act of assemblage. All three artists pay particular homage to the Vodou spirit Gede, the master of the phallus and the guardian of the cemeteries. Their monumental sculptures incorporating human skulls and six-foot long phalli are liberally scattered around this slum area, leaning insouciantly against shack walls, transforming the clamorous area into an organic art installation. This multi-layered film is a portrait of this neighbourhood, the artistic community and a meditation of the links between sex, death and creativity as expressed through the Vodou spirit Gede, that influences all their work.
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Tomas Hein
The tempestuous photographs of the English Channel reflect the artists state of mind as an immigrant from Argentina in the UK. They work as allegories of separation and the space between a past that has become a memory, and a present that is yet not fully understood.
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Velika Janceva
I am interested in the notion of the world as a stage, where human activity creates a tale of contradictions and mystery.
My paintings are a product of certain kind of negotiation between the meaningful and the absurd, the personal and the objective perception of the world, which appears to be in a struggle with its reality. A world that is at once, invented yet real, amazing yet disturbing, settled but ready to collapse, organized within it’s chaos, absurdity and isolation.
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Natalia Janula
This work looks into emotional state of mind while urge for waiting is becoming impossible to resist. I think the lyrics from the song are the best statement for this image.
"Do you dream of me?"
Come down, slowly
I'm waiting by your side
Come down, carefully
I'm waiting by your side
I'll grab you when you fall
Down to the waking hours
Silent sweeps as golden corn
Down to the waking hours
How i wish that I could
Break into your dreams
Do I have the force I need
To break into your dreams
I hold you in my arms
Dimmed by scarlet morning red
I whisper in your ear
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Vladimir Kastil
Global warming is with no doubt one of the main concerns human race have to deal with today. (Or is it not?) It touches us all in our everyday life. Today we live in a society where the large part of community thinks only what is being served to them at the time of main news. We live in times where one can sell almost anything. Why not sell global warming?
Intention of this piece is not to simplify or discredit global warming. It rather tries to raise question whether there are other points of view.
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Bashi Kolibarova
Seba Kurtis
Seba Kurtis first arrived to europe as an illegal inmigrant from Argentina. His work explores issues of inmigration, as well as national identity.
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Marek Ladiver
When one is talking about what they see on an image, it often tells you more about the reader than about the image itself.
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Ilse Mikula
Attempting to find what links us to a place and a sense of belonging, occupies a lot of my work. When we are in a place, we are concerned with its materiality and spatial limitations, in a sense it’s contained. When we leave, we are left with memories, photos, reflections of it which becomes our link. This inherently is an abstract link. The result is that absence becomes the place.
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Elisabeth Molin
Through photography I explore alternative realities. Inspired by everyday life and mental states I re-construct situations that encourage a particular mode of perception. By testing the potential of everyday life I attempt to discover spaces and places where fantasy meets reality, as either paused narratives or as portraits. Through these altered realities, I explore the surreal and the absurd. Like visual jokes immediacy, perceptual trickery and humour are important ways of inviting the viewer into these realities.
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Luisa Mota
‘Julie Series’ was the result from a performance entitled ‘Narratives of Flesh’. I worked with a group of actors and elements to instinctively create situations where external activity and improvisation were embraced as activators that would mould and orientate.
My work suggests narrative as a consequence to the development and pursuit of action through an instinctive layering of association and the use of archetypes.
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Vera Mulyani
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Marje Len Murusalu
The oil painting series "Perceptual Zones" started by Marje Murusalu in 2009 is being continued with a piece „18° 32′ N, 72° 20′ W“, created explicitly for the exhibition "Genesis: Art for Haiti".
The abstractions of landscapes accompanied by their factual coordinates on the "Perceptual Zones" series reflect geographical regions, contemporary states and nations´ territories as an intuitive mental image. Blueprint fragments constitute a distinctive overlay that conveys a subjective alternative scape.
Redefining of perceptions often depends on individual stance; causing the series to raise the question: whether the outcome is determined by a political power, the observing individual or other factors?
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Tim Plamper
Aware of the knowledge that the aesthetic agreements of both classic modernity and postmodernism aren't effectual anymore, it is always the question for the liability of the formal means in the genesis of images that drives Tim Plamper.
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Chantal Riekel
The life of my grandfather, the screenwriter and playwright Harald Bratt (1897-1967), has always been enigmatic to me. The little I knew about him came from his war diaries, which I occasionally glimpsed in my father's office at my parental home in France. Their position on a high shelf marked them out them as holders of secrets…These works are from my current project Der Große Schatten, which narrates the process of appropriating and questioning a hidden family past. The images invite the viewer into the search for clues of the past through visual and textual fragments, which question the origin and meaning of family secrets.
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Joanna Scislowicz
By avoiding conventional standardized shapes in my paintings/objects along with the application of intense colour I create and express the power and complexity of the most basic human emotions.
Through my abstract paintings or painting-installations, human emotions of melancholy, tragedy, elation, doom and awe are portrayed. And with contrasting colours and shape; a reflection of the complex nature of human emotions occurs with the viewer, birthing interaction on a more intimate level. The once separate, lifeless two-dimensional object is able to enter its own territory, connecting with the individual.
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Iain A Struth
His current work uses photography and constructions to present a series of propositions, these explore the space to be found between nature and the artificial.
It looks towards a polarized world, where the ‘made’ and ‘born’ are seemingly entangled together and yet in conflict, each endlessly set on consuming and overwhelming the other.
Utopian notions fill this rift, showing the possibilities of balance and convergence. Slight acts in natural spaces are instantly perceptible, tangibly fleeting and different. Future cities are built from and left within the land and life they inhabit. Seashell shards standing in place of starships just landed.
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Andrzej Strzalkowski
Pickles (After D. Hirst and Mother)
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Ding Yi
The three pieces of screen printing art works showcase the contrast between the reality and ideal life, how life is a mix of recurring events and new. One of the screen printings is sewed with cotton line, which reveals another pattern on the same paper. I want to use the stitch method to present how a 2D art work can become a 3D work of art, making audience blur the boundary of sight.
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Hyesoo You
I am interested in impossibility. I’d like to put myself as a scientist living in boundaryless dimension. The scientist is interested in elusive things, fantasy and mysteries, things that are hard to pin down and the struggle we produce to figure it out.
Recently I become interested in societies in the past; the importance of religion in ancient society, man made ideologies in complicated modern days and understanding of the exploding hope and courage people had during the process of constructing dream world.
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Dorka Zgrzeba
Secret Paths of London
