Senior editor at Creatrix magazine Claire Zakiewicz presents the first of a series of events at Hundred Years Gallery, Hoxton, London.
Hundred Years Gallery, Hoxton, London will be hosting a series of three Performance Art and Digital/Video Art screenings titled Some Loose Assemblies, curated by Claire Zakiewicz and the artist Sophie Seita. For the first event, five artists will present new works.
Pearl and Theory are two artistic personas created by Kate Clayton and Sophie Seita during a lockdown project of remote composting. Compost is their metaphor for intergenerational dialogue, for transformation. The compost-bed is tended by Pearl and fed digitally by Theory who contributes worm-arias from afar. In this video, Pearl and Theory share their pearls of wisdom, moving liberally through ideas likewormsthroughsoil. What’s the worm’s symbolic power? To quote Rebecca Solnit, marble lasts, but compost feeds.
Libby Heaney will screen Figures in Limbo (2020), an audio-visual animation exploring representations of the body in computer vision and parallels in (mostly western) art history. The work investigates how cultural and historical biases are now being translated into code and what this means. As the piece progresses, Heaney proposes an alternative (quantum) conceptualisation of the body, as boundary-less and form-less, and able to evade the machine gaze.
Claire Zakiewicz and Gerald Curtis will be performing a live collaborative drawing with music written for the duo by Ditagnan.
Note to attendees:
Following government guidelines, the venue asks audiences to follow social distancing and mask wearing. There will be reduced capacity with 10 people per time slot. Each 15 min. performance / screening will be presented twice for two different audiences, at 7pm and 8pm.
Audiences are invited to sign up for one of these two slots.
ARTISTS
| Sophie Seita is a London-based European writer, artist, and educator who often thinks about how text and the act of reading can be visualised and translated into movement, sound, space, costume, and performative objects. She’s shown her work at La MaMa Galleria, Printed Matter (both NYC), JNU (Delhi), [ SPACE ], Bold Tendencies, the Royal Academy, Queer Art Projects, Raven Row, Parasol Unit, Art Night (all London), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), the Arnolfini (Bristol), and elsewhere. She’s the author of a number of books, most recently, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020), The Gracious Ones (Earthbound Press, 2020), and Provisional Avant-Gardes (Stanford University Press, 2019). She is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, co-organises the Sound/Text seminar at Harvard, and is a tutor on both the Alternative Education Programme at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the MSt in Writing for Performance at Cambridge University. At the moment, she’s working on:The Gracious Ones, a philosophical ballet for women on imaginary running machines supported by the Dover Prize Fund at Darlington; and a public art and speculative research project with Naomi Woo in the form of The Minutes of the Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, funded by the British Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and Farnham Maltings. website: www.sophieseita.com/ Insta: @sophieseita |
| Claire Zakiewicz is an inter-disciplinary artist working in both London and NYC. She is interested in the (meta)physical relationships between sound, drawing, movement, how we read drawings and the processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. Mostly working with performance painting, Zakiewicz often works collaboratively and uses dance and acting methods as part of her drawing and painting practice. She has a background in improvised music and drawing as well as composition and inter-disciplinary scores. She contributed a chapter describing her drawing practice for the volume Aesthetics of Imperfection: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (Bloomsbury), 2020. Her past residencies have included Bill Young’s Dance Studio (New York), USF Bergen, (Norway), Cill Rialaig, Ireland and PointB Worklodge, (New York). Her works have been presented at galleries, performance venues and institutions including Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, for the exhibitions Tweet Me Up (2011) and Label (2012), at Landmark, Bergen for the performance piece Engastromyths Quakers and Shamans (commissioned by Ny Musikk, 2009) and most recently she produced a collaborative performance painting for Future Visions, Hounslow (2021), funded by the Arts Council, England Zakiewicz studied at Chelsea College of Art, Anglia Ruskin University and Sir John Cass School of Art where she completed a research-based MA in the physical and metaphorical relationships between sound and drawing, which had both practical and theoretical components. website: www.clairezakiewicz.com Insta: @clairezakiewicz |
| Libby Heaney’s post-disciplinary art practice includes moving image works, performances and participatory & interactive experiences that span quantum computing, virtual reality, AI and installation.Heaney’s practice uses humour, surrealism and nonsense to subvert the capitalist appropriation of technology. Heaney uses tools like machine learning and quantum computing against their ‘proper’ use, to undo biases and to forge new expressions of collective identity and belonging with each other and the world. Heaney has exhibited her artwork widely in galleries and institutions in the UK and internationally including solo exhibitions as part of the official program 2017 EU capital of culture in Aarhus and at the Goethe Institute (London 2019) and at RMIT Gallery (Melbourne 2021), Art AI Festival (Leicester 2021), Mutek ES+AR (online 2021), Etopia Centre of Art and Technology (Zaragoza, Spain 2021), Holden Gallery (online 2021), Somerset House Studios (online 2020), Arebyte Gallery (online 2020), LUX/Hervisions (online 2020), Tate Modern (London 2016, 2019), ICA (London 2019), Barbican (London 2019), Somerset House (London 2019), V&A (London 2018),. Heaney is currently a resident of the iconic London institution Somerset House. website: www.libbyheaney.co.uk Insta: @/libby_heaney_ |
| Gerald Curtis works across performance, painting and photography to produce multi-faceted bodies of work rooted in explorations of urban and rural environments. Gerald is interested in cross disciplinary research-based practices and the potentially new dynamic social spaces that these processes can inhabit. Primarily taking ideas of flux and flow as starting points, his practice can be described as being grounded in tactile material-based media while looking into connections between the landscape and memory. Recently graduating from the Royal College of Art, Gerald Curtis has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including Revolve Festival, Sweden and Lublin Performance Festival, Poland. His first solo show, Regeneration on Hounslow Heath (2019), was selected by Hounslow Creative People and Places to become part of their touring library programme. The exhibition incorporated a collection of photography, painting, video and performances. Most recently, he has collaborated with artist Claire Zakiewicz and Habib William Kherbek of the band Dirtagnan to produce a video performance, Writing the Future (2021) (forthcoming). Gerald Curtis is a recipient of the Time Space Money bursary from A-N and the Farnham Maltings No Strings Attached fund. website: www.geraldcurtisstudio.com Insta: @gerald.curtis87 |
| Kate Clayton is a performance artist based in Glasgow. Within her practice Clayton works collaboratively, collectively and individually. Her main focus is on the visibility of older women, in what is, in part, an attempt to claim agency for the over-60s (and now over-70s). Other themes include intergenerational friendship, and the collaborative process. Creative Scotland funded ‘Timefield’, a collaboration with four other ‘older’ artists who met while on a residency together at Cove Park. For Glasgow International, 2018, Creative Scotland also funded performances and workshops by XSEXCENTENARY, a collective of women artists, of which Kate and Katherine Araniello were two of the founding members. Kate’s work often involves artistic personas (Silver Swimmer, Art Scrubber, Bus Pass and Pearl Compost) performed in different contexts and environments. Silver Swimmer has performed in cabaret (Traverse, Edinburgh, and Tron, Glasgow). A portrait of Silver Swimmer by photographer Frank MacElhinney was shortlisted for the Scottish Portrait Award in 2017. Art Scrubber has performed tributes to artists and labourers she admires at the Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, and Platform, Easterhouse. Pearl Compost made her first public appearance at 201 Telephone Gallery this May, 2021, where she performed with the worms. Clayton’s art practice exists under the overall banner of ‘NOT DEAD YET’. website: www.kateclayton.co.uk Insta: @kat3clayton |
