Born out of the earth photos series documenting Dartmoor and the Scottish Highlands, Terratypes is Tanoa Sasraku’s latest solo exhibition presented by Spike Island. 

Sheets of blank newsprint, hand-rubbed with foraged natural pigments, take on geological and geographical information in ochre, graphite and manganese. These Terratypes – inspired by the material structure of the Fante Asafo flags of coastal Ghana and geometric forms found in Tartan cloth, circuitry and pinnacles of rock – form the bulk of Sasraku’s work. These are then stacked, cut and stitched to form geometric compositions andthe paper is steeped in water then torn to reveal layers that expose and encrypt details about the materiality of the land. 

Paper, photographs, and bronzes build upon the artist’s ongoing research into hostile wildlands and themes of energy, mythology and memories stored within the British landscape. Torn pieces from the Terratypes are flattened, scanned and enlarged into Liths: monolithic structures that bring to mind Stonehenge and other standing stone formations. Giving and withholding, unknowing and mysterious, these structures seem as doorways to an alternate landscape. 

A series of cast bronzes complete the exhibition. Intense concentrations of pigment are held in their centres to reflect the energy flows of the land. Emotional memory runs through each of the works, dwelling on our understanding and connection to the rural environment. 

Tanoa Sasraku is a British artist whose practice shifts between sculpture, drawing and filmmaking. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2018 and is currently studying at the Royal Academy Schools. 

Terratypes is on display from Saturday 28 May to Sunday 17 July 2022 at Spike Island.

The impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February has reverberated across all areas of life, the art world included. Recognizing the risks and dangers Ukrainian artists now face, a group of international artists have come together to raise funds and support their peers through the sale of their works. 

Organised by Adam Broomberg, the initiative sees a group of contemporary artists donating an artwork each as an open edition print. Priced at €200, the profit from the sale will go towards emergency support for their peers caught up in the spiralling crisis. 

Originally launched in March 2022, another 60 artists have joined for the launch of the second round. In order to address the “hierarchy of empathy that this war has exposed” this round of proceeds will go specifically to BIPoC artists and their families. The non-profit organisations @eachoneteachone_official in collaboration with @savvycontemporary will help facilitate emergency travel, shelter, financial and longer-term support. At this point in the crisis, thousands have died, millions have fled, and uncertainty remains. 

Featured contemporary artists include Hito Steyerl, Pierre Huyghe, Nan Goldin, Isaac Julien, Thomas Struth, Tacita Dean, Rosemarie Trockel, Luc Tuymans, Elizabeth Peyton, Thomas Demand, Matthew Barney, Jeremy Deller, Laure Prouvost, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lisa Brice, Julian Schnabel, Camille Henrot, Subodh Gupta, Sam Durant, Fiona Banner, Anne Imhof, Cyprien Gaillard, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Since 2013 the non-profit organisation Artists at Risk has launched 26 residences for  persecuted artists around the world. Operating at the intersection of human rights and the arts, Artists at Risk is at the forefront of the refugee crisis as it affects artists and cultural workers. All artwork purchases will directly benefit artists fleeing war and persecution. 

solidarityprints.com

Typical art biennials take place in large urban centres. Considering forms of personhood in wildlife and landscapes, the Biennale Gherdëina is an exception to the rule, located in the unique setting of the Unesco World Heritage Centre of the Dolomites. Opening on 20 May 2022, BIENNALE GHERDËINA ∞ PERSONES PERSONS is a series of installations, performances, sculptures, sound pieces, textile works, walks and interactive experiences, all across and in response to the landscape. 

In its eight edition, the Biennale asks how artistic expressions contribute to the recognition of Earth’s rights and themes of migration, seasonal displacement and transhumance in the region and resonating landscapes. 

Doris Ghetta, founder and Director of Biennale Gherdëina explains, “we are living in what has been described as “the era of living creatures”….this means that, if we are to plan a sustainable society, we can no longer incline towards an anthropocentric worldview but need to centre our way of seeing reality around all living things: from air to plants, water, snow, animals and, of course, human beings”

The Biennale is curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, who works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems typically outside of the gallery format, and Filipa Ramos, Strategic Advisor for Ecology at Serpentine, London, and co-founder of the climate-justice focused non-profit, Radical Ecology. 

BIENNALE GHERDËINA ∞ PERSONES PERSONS features artists Etel Adnan, Chiara Camoni, Alex Cecchetti, Gabriel Chaile, Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Jimmie Durham, Simone Fattal, Barbara Gamper, Kyriaki Goni, Judith Hopf, Ignota, Karrabing Film Collective, Lina Lapelyte, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Eduardo Navarro, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Angelo Plessas, Tabita Rezaire, Sergio Rojas, Giles Round, Thaddäus Salcher, Martina Steckholzer, Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), Ana Vaz and Nuno da Luz, and Bruno Walpoth.

A fly-on-the-wall peep into Martine Rose’s latest runway show, the SS23 digital experience continues the legacy of “What We Do All Day”. Conceived and created in collaboration with International Magic, the website extends the aesthetics of the new collection and runway show into the digital realm. The footage is a CCTV-inspired 12-CAM viewing experience captured on cameras hidden inside the physical show held inside a railway arch in Vauxhall, South London. 

Referencing nightclubs, after-hours bars, and dark rooms, the footage gives viewers a taste of virtual voyeurism. As for the clothes, Martine Rose once again plays with proportions offering shrunken silhouettes inspired by “the feeling of wedging yourself into something a bit too small.” This is paired with explorations of larger volumes, playing around with the drape of a coat on a peg, and tension explored through tailoring, referencing “awkward Friday-night-office-drink-doorway-gropes”.

“Martine Rose is always interested in the relation between fashion and our ordinary realities, and this season we began with the everyday, unthinking tussles we have dressing and undressing; Fighting to get into your own clothes, or trying to get into someone else’s. Theclothing accidents involved in urgent sexual encounters or hurried dressing afterwards. Investigating how garments are pulled against the body and their resulting shape or attitude” notes the SS23 collection press release.

A real-time experience, the footage can be found looping perpetually at ss.23.martine-rose.com.

Creativity emerges from countless perspectives. That is the central message of Process, a temporary installation at Alexander McQueen’s Mayfair store. Helming the British label since McQueen’s death in 2010, creative director Sarah Burton invited twelve artists to respond to the Pre Autumn / Winter 2022 womenswear collection. Each artist was selected for their unique approach to art and offered complete creative freedom. The result? A rich dialogue between the work and the chosen designs that takes the creative process as its focus. 

Chilean sculptor Marcela Correa responded to the McQueen polyfaille party dress with hand-crafted miniatures on papier-mache dolls with faces collaged from fashion magazines. Jennie Jieun Lee took inspiration from a red leather dress to develop a ceramic sculpture with a reflective palladium glaze. Interpreting three looks, Ann Cathrin November Høibo created a three-dimensional weave in tea rose satin and grain de powder, apricot polyfaille, ivory tulle, wool, cotton and rayon.

Other artists who contributed include Guinevere Van Seenus, a model and photographer who has walked in McQueen catwalk shows since 1996, Beverly Semmes, Bingyi, Cristina de Middel, Guinever van Seenus, Hope Gangloff, Marcia Kure, Jackie Nickerson, Judas Companion, and Marcia Michael. 

“I wanted to engage in a new creative dialogue with the collection this season and see how the artists interpreted the work that we created in the studio. It’s been very interesting to see how creativity has sprung from so many different perspectives, and the outcomes that have been varied and beautiful,” Burton stated in Alexander McQueen’s press notes.

To celebrate the launch of the collection a 160 page zine detailing each artist’s personal story and engagement with the designs will be available in stores worldwide. Process is available to view at the Alexander McQueen Old Bond Street store until 21 June.

Deana Lawson’s work harnesses the tropes of family portraiture to create images at once intimate, familial, and spiritual. This week she has been recognised as the force she is, and awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for having made the most significant contribution to the world of photography in 2022.

The prize was awarded to Lawson at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, in recognition of her 2020 solo exhibition Centropy at Kunsthalle Basel. Fusing the family album with unsettling elements like ‘portals’ into other worlds, her photography reclaims the Black subject as “creative, godlike beings.” Though her sitters are mostly strangers, Lawson describes her works as the process of building “an ever-expanding mythological extended family” to explore intergenerational relationships and their effects within Black culture.

Brett Rogers OBE, Director, The Photographers’ Gallery and chair of the Jury that named her winner, said:

“Deana Lawson is a deserved winner of this year’s prize not least for the sheer inventiveness and complexity of her approach to image making. Her work, which reframes and reclaims the Black experience, harnesses the traditional and the experimental and opens up a very unique connection between the everyday and the mystical. Her subject matter sits somewhere between the ‘here and now’ and the past, a person and a people, the staged and the naturalistic, in a manner which is not didactic or issue driven, but genuinely radical”.

The presentation at The Photographers’ Gallery marks Lawson’s first institutional show in the UK. The exhibition showcasing the four shortlisted artists for 2022 – Anastasia Samoylova, Jo Ractliffe, Deana Lawson and Gilles Peress – is curated by TPG’s Katrina Schwarz and will be displayed at The Photographers’ Gallery until 12 June 2022.

A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wakeup Song was the title of the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, curated by the collective DIS and director Andrea Bellini. Envisaged as a pilot season of myriad different broadcasts that aimed to interrupt the established order of the day, the exhibition was staged in a labyrinth of set-like screening rooms, over the three floors of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. This stellar list of artists alongside DIS included Mandy Harris Williams, Simon Fujiwara, Camille Henrot and TELFAR.

It’s for this Biennale that DIS created their first feature film, Everything But The World, which pertinently explores the potential of debunking and deconstructing information and narrative. This feature film is now the key piece in their current exhibition How to Become A Fossil. Billed as a non-linear natural history show, it included an alt-star studded cast including Leila Weinraub, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, Brontez Purnell and a soundtrack by Fatima Al Qadiri. The film veers from a skit on how to become a fossil to a sexed-up guide lead a tour of an Italian castle, inspired by Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch.

Alongside DIS in the Biennale, Mandy Harris Williams beckoned “Glamourise the intellectual” in her work Couture Critiques. Installed in a classroom scene, complete with wooden table and chairs, the video takes the form of an extended Instagram-inspired photoshoot, interspersed with clips of Edward Said speeches and José Esteban Muñoz excerpts. With a direct yet astute humour, Harris Williams problematizes the ways that we receive information through layers of media and performativity, questioning how hierarchies are created to legitimize different forms of knowledge. Speaking directly to the camera, she pronounces that through love, care and eroticism we can embrace the full and subversive power of ideas collectively.

Identity and its many discontents were a recurring theme within the exhibition. In Santa Sangre, an eight song story of redemption and self acceptance, Sabrina Röthlisberger Belkacem challenges the notion of Swiss national perfectionism. Moving from one music video montage to the next, and interlaced with poetry by the artist, the work draws on mysticism and pop ritual. Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable collaborated with And Or Forever to transform their 2019 performance Penumbra into an enthralling 3D visual. The work depicts a courtroom trial that pits humans against wildlife, interrogating the distinction between nature and culture and ultimately how social construct can limit our experience of reality.

Don’t miss a second chance to catch DIS.

How to Become a Fossil by Dis is on at Secession March 4 – June 12, 2022

Guest review: Anna Corrigan

Hot off the press, The Vulgarity of Being Three-Dimensional is an immersive new book of photography and sculpture by Danish photographic artist Tine Bek. Expect aesthetic experiments that reject hierarchy and structure. Shapes that run-over, flow, crumble and bulge. Sculpture where vulgarity strangely isn’t at all  vulgar.

Fruit, material, fabric and figures are brought together in a mix of still life, found forms and photographed sculptures. Elevating everyday objects as unassuming protagonists, Bekshe exposes and rejects material hierarchy. Who says marble is more impressive than foam? Why should a stone fountain take centre stage over a bathroom tap? Scratch beneath the surface and what separates these luxury materials from scraps?

In the text ‘Within the commonality lies the sparkling truth’ Isabella Rose Celeste Davey writes, “Vulgarity, from the Latin term vulgus, was the term for common people, an insinuation of the ordinary. We consider the vulgar to be crude, below our station, brash, crass, rough – terms that are charged with ill interest, with gall, with remorse. What if vulgar was not a bad thing at all, merely a removal of a mask. The slipperiness of expectation slinking away?

Bek’s primary mediums are video and photography, with multi-media collaboration at the heart of her work. She uses photography not just to record, but rather to produce artistic crossovers that open up new possibilities. 

The book has been awarded with the Hasselblad Foundation’s Photo Book Grant 2021 and is published by Disko Bay in Copenhagen, Denmark.