Sophie Seita & Claire Zakiewicz
HOXTON 253 art project space
253 Hoxton Street, London, N1 United Kingdom
4-26 February 2022 / Wed – Fri 1-7pm, Sat & Sun 11-5pm
Opening night & performance
Thursday, 3 February
Performance 6-7pm (booking required, free of charge)
Opening reception 7-9pm (no booking required)
| The performance will feature Claire Zakiewicz painting on canvas accompanied by composer and musician Kuljit Bhamra, playing the world’s first electronic tabla of his own invention. The music and painting will be improvised, with the artists collaborating in real time. The artwork produced during the performance will become part of the exhibition and on view throughout the run of the show.Doors open to ticket holders at 6pm Performance starts at 6.30pm Drinks reception open to public from 7 to 9pm |
Artists in conversation & performance
Friday, 18 February, 7-8.30pm
(booking required, free of charge)
| Sophie Seita will present a lecture performance, Reading the Rock, in response to her sound installation My Contact Aureoles (2020/2022), which is included in the show. Following the performance Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz will be in conversation with HOXTON 253 curator Zsuzsa Benke sharing insights into their respective practices and the works in the exhibition.Doors open at 7pm Performance starts at 7.15pm |
Family art workshop for Hackney residents
Sunday, 20 February, 3-4pm
(booking required, free of charge)
| In this workshop for families, participants will explore relationships between sound, words and drawing.Topics will include:Drawing in response to words and soundsReading shapes on a page to make musicWhere materials come from, how to use them and what they do (graphite, pigments, paper, found objects, etc.) |
| This is the first workshop connected to the exhibition currently on display at HOXTON 253, titled There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body. It will be led by the artist Claire Zakiewicz. The workshop emphasise a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Participants will be invited to experiment with spontaneous and intuitive ideas, embrace mistakes and imperfection, and focus on habits and repetition, voice, listening, curiosity, and joy. No background knowledge or artistic experience is necessary and all are welcome.Who is this workshop for? This workshop is for children aged 7+ and adults. Under 18’s must be accompanied by an adult. Priority access is given to Hackney residents. The gallery has step-free access and is wheelchair accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact us about any access requirements. |
Queer writing and performance workshop for Hackney residents
Thursday, 24 February, 7-8pm
(booking required, free of charge)
| In this workshop, we will take inspiration from queer, trans, and non-binary thinkers, writers, and artists, in guiding us towards a number of creative experiments, using:writingembodiment/movement (including: sitting, standing, walking, and simple performative gestures)reading and discussionsonic meditationThis is the second workshop in the context of the exhibition There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body which will be led by the artist and writer Sophie Seita. Who is this workshop for? Priority access given to Hackney-based queer residents aged 18-25. |
FULL EXHIBITION DESCRIPTION
‘There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body, beyond what’s graspable. I read and write to seek comprehension, to solicit unravelling. Seize what seems pliable to that action, that attention’Â – Sophie Seita, after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles (2020-2021)
This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewiczexplores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?
Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the exhibition also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.
Seita‘s video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.
‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
– Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)
Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines.
Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?’ Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.
