Programme
They Are Here - 20/09, 16:30-18:00 Facebook event
Ieva Misevičiūtė - 04/10, 16:30-18:00
Marianna Simnett - 15/11, 16:30-18:00
Lili Reynaud Dewar - 12/12, 16:30-18:00
20 September 16.30: They Are Here
They Are Here (f.2006) is a collaborative practice steered by Helen Walker and Harun Morrison. They are currently based in London and on the River Lea. Their work can be read as a series of context specific non-narrative conceptual games. They generate temporary systems and cultivate micro-communities that offer an alternate means of engaging with a situation, history/future or ideology. Working across video, publications, sound and performance, the delineation of time itself can be a structural element.
As artists in residence in Finsbury Park, London, They Are Here initiated “Seeds From Elsewhere” (2016-ongoing), an urban gardening project on disused land that brings together young migrants (including asylum seekers and refugees), family, friends and other professionals (including architects, gardeners, photographers and carpenters). Each participant is supported to grow flowers, plants or edible produce from their respective homeland. Throughout the process they literally and metaphorically ask ‘What can grow here that’s not from here?’.
Institutions where They Are Here have developed or presented work include Camden Arts Centre, CCA Glasgow, Grand Union, Konsthall C, South London Gallery, Studio Voltaire, STUK and Tate Modern.
In collaboration with Iaspis, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual and Applied Artists.
26 October 16.30: Kira Nova
Kira Nova’s (birth name Ieva Misevičiūtė) artistic practice combines visual arts, physical theatre, dance, stand-up, Butoh, perverted academic language and sculptural work. She worked as a clown in the circus throughout her youth.
Nova has written about her practice: “I want to achieve tens of thousands of things, ask one million different questions and point to a confusing number of directions, accumulate and use endless influences, follow the path of many great artists. Because still it will never be enough — as we can only try to be as radical as reality is. The only thing that is left to do is to act insane.”
Nova is based in New York, and holds a research MA in Cultural Analysis and MA in Political Studies from the University of Amsterdam. She has presented her work in Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; Sculpture Center, Swiss Institute (as part of Performa 09) and MoMa PS1 in New York; dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel (with Michael Portnoy); Hauser& Wirth in Zurich; Time-Based Art Festival in Portland; de Appel art center in Amsterdam; Cabaret Voltaire in London; Playground Festival at STUK in Leuven, Belgium; Beursschouwburg theater in Brussels; Western Front in Vancouver; Swiss Sculpture Exhibition in Biel-Bienne in Switzerland; and Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, among other venues.
Nova co-curated Mindaugas Triennial – the 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art (2012) at CAC, Vilnius and curated a night of performances Alligators! at de Appel art center, Amsterdam. She was recently a speaker at the Sommerakademie im Zentrum Paul Klee and is a visiting lecturer at Malmö Art Academy in Sweden.
15 November 16.30: Marianna Simnett
Marianna Simnett lives and works in London. A trained musician, the influence of theatre and classical music on her work endured as she turned to film, installation and performance during her BA at Nottingham Trent University in 2007 and her MA at the Slade School of Art in 2013. Simnett’s work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions including New Museum (New York), and Wing-sleepers (Art on the Underground, London, UK) in 2018; Worst Gift, Matt’s Gallery (London, UK) in 2017; Lies, Seventeen Gallery (New York, NY) and Valves Collapse, Seventeen Gallery (London, UK) in 2016; Park Nights, Serpentine Pavilion (London, UK) and Blue Roses, Comar (Isle of Mull, Scotland) in 2015.
12 December 16.30: Lili Reynaud Dewar
Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances, writes, talks, teaches, makes movies, video installations, furniture, sculptures, feminist magazines, performances, alone or with her friends, students, family. In 2009 she co-founded, with Dorothée Dupuis and Valérie Chartrain, the art and entertainment feminist publication Petunia. She has been a professor at Haute École d’Art et de Design in Geneva since 2010.
She is part of the group Wages For Wages Against, a campaign launched by Ramaya Tegegne, that promotes fees for artists as well as a less discriminating art world. Reynaud-Dewar lives and works in Grenoble, where she has initiated the project Maladie d’Amour in her studio in 2015. Maladie d’Amour is a social and emotional experiment that brings a small group of young people around one-night long exhibitions featuring Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s artist friends from Paris, Geneva, Vienna and elsewhere.