Contributors, Partners and Friends
Artists
Myriam Lefkowitz is a Paris-based performance artist. Since 2010, her research has focused on questions of attention and perception and explored the use of different immersive devices involving one spectator and one performer. Her performance comprises sending and receiving a dance through space with no other medium than our desire to listen and to connect. Since the beginning of the lockdown, Myriam and her collaborator Julie Laporte have enacted remote dance, exploring the notion of physical distance, how bodies respond and how humans navigate and co-create new fiction across space.
Selected exhibition and projects include: Lithuania and Cyprus pavilion at the Venice Biennale; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; MOT, Tokyo; De Appel, Amsterdam; Le Nouveau Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Bergen Triennial; Garage, Moscow; Centro Centro, Madrid; and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. Myriam was commissioned by If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, for their edition on Social Movement (2017-2018).
Julie Laporte is a contemporary dancer, based in Sète. Currently, she is working on specific projects involving perceptive experiences, especially with Myriam Lefkowitz’s projects, Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city), Et sait on jamais dans une obscurité pareille, La piscine (with seven other artists), Remote arts work and Le Book club. She is also involved in Lucie Tuma’s projects in Switzerland with Passiv movement, On the Rocks and JLP 2043. Bells.
Julie trained in ballet, jazz and contemporary dance at EPSEDANSE (Montpellier) and at P.A.R.T.S (Brussels). She participated in one chapter of Ex.e.r.ce (CCN, Montpellier) in 2009. In addition, she is also a shiatsu practitioner since 2014 (certified by Iokaï European Shiatsu), and has developed a taste for different practices like yoga, hypnosis tools transmitted by Catherine Contour, and singing with Violaine Barthélemy.
Zoë Marden is an artist, curator and writer. Zoë works with performance, video, text, sound, sculpture and installation to create alternate worlds and speculative futures. Her works are research-focused and are concerned with intersectional feminism, specifically where it overlaps with the postcolonial. Her intimate performances play with the voice, activating soundscapes of desire and vulnerability, while recent projects have investigated the mythologies of witches and mermaids and their resonance within contemporary culture.
Recent performances and exhibitions include: Gaze to the UNKNOWN, Mimosa House, London (2019); AMY/YMA, Serpentine Gallery, London (2019); Unbothered + Moisturised, Eaton Workshop, Hong Kong (2019); Equinox Light Cure, Exposed Arts, London (2019); CAMPerVAN Presents: The Trio, q|Lab, Milan (2017); Manifesta 11, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich (2016). She is part of the CAMPerVAN collective, a nomadic queer performance platform that has been active since 2016. For more information, see here.
Eduardo Navarro is an Argentinian artist who works in sculpture, collage, performance and installation. His work often involves the participation of specific groups, using art as a platform to explore social conditions and environmental parameters. His work on paper has been described as ‘figurative but frequently absurd or fantastic drawings that have a humorous or spontaneous quality.’ In 2006 Navarro was named as one of ARTNews’ Young Artists to Watch.
Eduardo’s recent solo exhibitions include: In Collaboration with the Sun, Mac Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro (2019); Instant Weather Prediction, PIVO, São Paulo (2019); Into Ourselves, The Drawing Center, New York/ DER TANK, Basel (2017/18); OCTOPIA, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2016); We Who Spin Around You, The High Line Art, New York (2016). His work has also been included in group show, such as Mercosul Biennial (2009 and 2013); the Bienal de São Paulo (2010 and 2016); Surround Audience: The New Museum Triennial, New York (2015); the Sharjah Biennial (2015); La era metabolica, Malba, Buenos Aires (2015); and Metamorfoses at the Castello de Rivoli, Turin (2018). For more information, please see here.
Anna Nazo is a London-based performance artist whose practice incorporates computing technologies, philosophy and science. Anna’s live AV performances involve AI poetry, drones, brainwaves, CGI and 360 video/VR and explore questions of intelligence, diversity and the ethics of the technological. Her work looks at artificial forms of intelligence and liveness in relation to nonconscious cognition, quantum reality and the sensuous.
Anna has exhibited and performed in the UK and internationally, including at: Ars Electronica Festival: KOSMICA Parliament, Linz (2018); Victoria & Albert Museum: Digital Futures, London (2016, 2018); Angewandte Innovation Laboratory, Vienna (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2019); Iklectik Art Lab: ArtFutura Festival, London (2019); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2016); Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2015); NYC Creative Tech Week, New York (2016); Copeland Gallery: NSF Crxss Platfxrm Festival of Street Culture, London (2018). For more information, see here.
Soundcamp are an artist collective based around Stave Hill Ecology Park in South London. They work with live audio streams in partnership with other artists, researchers and activists to make ecological connections across different scales. By placing live feeds in the public domain, Soundcamp make local sounds available to listeners anywhere in the world for their own projects and improvisations. This collection forms part of a set of places and practices that they refer to as the Acoustic Commons, an emerging sense of environmental sounds as shared natural and cultural resources.
Current Soundcamp projects include Reveil, a long-form radio broadcast of the dawn chorus; the Soundcamp series of micro festivals BIOM, an audio observatory with Biosphere Soundscapes and UN Live; and #acousticommons, a Small Cooperation project supported by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union with FON (Cumbria), Locus Sonus (Aix-Marseille), CONA (Ljubljana), HMU (Crete) and Cyberforest (Tokyo). For more information, please see here.
Himali Singh Soin is an artist who works across text, performance and moving image. She utilises metaphors from the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal non-linear entanglements between human and non-human life. Himali’s poetic methodology explores myriad ways of knowing, from scientific to intuitive, indigenous and alchemical processes. Outer space is often used as a place from which to navigate alien distances and earthly intimacy, rewiring ideas of nativism, nationality, nihilism and cultural flight. Her inspirations include the ancient Stoics and contemporary literature, travel diaries and ancient diagrams. By manipulating semiotic flows, Himali creates conditions for the observation of microstructures of social and geopoetic time. In the face of extinction, her work insists on resurgence.
Himali’s recent exhibitions include: Down to Earth, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020); Nocturnal Creatures, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2020); Quoz Art Fest, Block Universe in Dubai (2020); The Body Series: New Suns, Somerset House, London (2019); we are opposite like that, Swiss Embassy, India Art Fair, Delhi (2019); iilwimi lipsing, Primary, Nottingham (2018); The Particle and The Wave, ‘Archival Alchemy’, Abrons Art Center, New York (2018); and HELLO GIRLS!, No Vacancy, New York (2017). For more information, please see here.
Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths in 2016 with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are interested in the possibilities of writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies – of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies – as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. Linda’s current work consists predominately of writing, performance, film and sculpture, and engages with queer theory, science-fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire and revenge.
Linda had a solo show at Arcadia Missa, London (2016), titled A Dead Writer Exists in Words and Language is a Type of Virus and launched their debut novella, Virus, also at Arcadia Missa. Their work has been the focus of two solo exhibitions in Cape Town and has also recently been shown/performed at Nottingham Contemporary, Matt’s Gallery, Tate, The Showroom, a.m. gallery, the ICA, Gasworks, and Guest Projects in London. For more information, please see here.
Designer
Hyunsong Lee is a graphic designer based in Seoul and London. Recently she has worked as co-art director of the Seoul Design Festival in South Korea and as graphic designer at Pentagram London. Currently, Hyunsong runs Studio Remote with Joosung Kang, and Article Press for her personal projects. She researches the function of intentionally transforming image structure and is interested in the context of not the ellipse but the elliptical, and playing with two different languages and their function as information on the image. For more information, please see here.
Creative Technologist (Instagram Filter)
Costas Kazantzis focuses on finding new ways to engage with audiences within contemporary fashion and art ecologies. He works as a Creative Technologist at Fashion Innovation Agency (FIA) and he is an Associate Lecturer at the London College of Fashion School of Media & Communication. Costas is particularly interested in an experiential, multi-sensory approach to curating as well as in the immersive experience, often engaging with new technology and emerging media. He has developed collaborations with esteemed stakeholders, such as Microsoft, Kering, diptyque paris, Gucci, Ars Electronica, Sharon Wauchob, amongst others.
Sound Technician
Galina Rin is the creative mind behind Death Ingloria (Rock music, Comic Art and Animation). During the lockdown, Galina uses her skill to help other artists adapting their works online. She currently works as the technical manager for Disentangle Projects and the Art’s Council funded community project All Alone, Together. Please contact her for more information.
About Us
We are from the MA Curating Contemporary Art course from the Royal College of Art. Established over 25 years ago, the MA Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) programme is recognised as an international leader in curatorial education and training and for its commitment to collaborative group project-based work that integrates theory and practice. The CCA programme approaches the field critically, theoretically and through best practice in commissioning, curating and programming with London-based and international arts organisations and spaces. These partnerships ensure that the knowledge and understanding of these practices is grounded in the context of public audiences, urbanisation and the digital. CCA, led by Professor Victoria Walsh, is part of the RCA’s School of Arts and Humanities. For more information of the course, please see here.
Our Partner
For 25 years Gasworks has played a unique role in the contemporary visual arts sector by working at the intersection between UK and international practices and debates. It does so by providing studios for London-based artists, commissioning emerging UK-based and international artists to present their first major exhibitions in London; and developing a highly-respected international residencies programme, mainly working with artists based outside Europe and North America. All programmes are accompanied by events and participatory projects that engage local and international audiences with artists and their work. For more information on Gasworks, see here.
Our Supporter
Vauxhall One is a Business Improvement District (BID), established and run by local businesses to drive improvements in Vauxhall. Our key project areas focus on promoting Vauxhall as a destination, improving the area’s safety, carrying out innovative greening and undertaking daily cleaning. As part of our commitment to promoting Vauxhall as a cultural destination, we are delighted to support local art and creative talent, including the amazing programme at Gasworks in partnership with the Royal College of Art. For more information, please see here.
Acknowledgements
The CCA Gasworks curatorial team would like to express enormous gratitude to the artists and contributors to our programme in such challenging times. We would not have been able to do this without them. Their ceaseless creativity and generosity never stopped flowing throughout this journey and we cannot thank them enough.
We would like to thank the continued support from our partner Gasworks. Particular mention and thanks to Sabel Gavaldon for his insurmountable energy and guidance.
We would also like to thank our tutors Kelly Large and Amanprit Sandhu for drifting this journey with us and Gerrie van Noord for her meticulous proof-reading. Their immense support and kindness will not be forgotten. Finally, we would like to thank head of programme Victoria Walsh.
Harry Blackett, co-founder of An Endless Supply, gave us brilliant support throughout the building and design of this microsite, which we thank him for.
Kind thanks goes to the generosity of our external supporters, Vauxhall One.
Our Friend
Tamesis Dock Floating Pub is a quirky, floating pub/bar, permanently moored on Albert Embankment, serving food and drink throughout the week and showcasing a range of events, including gigs, quizzes, birthdays, corporate events and many more. With an eclectic decor, with a friendly atmosphere and funky vibe, this converted 1930s Dutch barge is a perfect spot for a drink on a summer’s day, or for a group gathering on the Thames for a celebration. For more information, please see here.