UNTITLED Exhibition Guide by New Art Exchange

EXHIBITION GUIDE

ART ON THE CONDITIONS OF OUR TIME

UNTITLED

UNTITLED: art on the conditions of our time is a major new touring exhibition produced by New Art Exchange, curated in collaboration with NAE by Paul Goodwin and Hansi Momodu-Gordon. UNTITLED is an exhibition conceived as an open platform that invites visitors to experience a survey of contemporary practice by Britain’s African-Diaspora artists, without a pre-determined thematic or restrictive framing. The use of ‘untitled’ refers to a longstanding practice in modern art where artists choose ‘Untitled’ in order to keep interpretations of their work open. In the context of this exhibition the term is used to resist the usual curatorial impulse to frame artists from so-called ‘culturally diverse’ backgrounds through the narrow lens of identity or personal biography. This exhibition places the art works and creative process at the centre of the project rather than as a supplement to an overarching curatorial statement.

We live in times as yet untitled, grasped through hyphenated buzzwords and hashtags, with ‘post-truth politics’ fuelled by a ‘post-fact’ media machine, which transforms stories of the past and events of the present into abstract pieces of a scattered puzzle, right before our eyes. The means by which histories are written and disseminated, has entered a new mode of operation, driven by seemingly unaccountable corporations and ruthless political agendas. At this time, the need to see through these structures of power takes on new urgency. Our world is being reshaped and restructured in ways we are yet to understand. Long-held certainties around race, class and gender identity are being challenged and redefined alongside demands to ‘decolonise’ classrooms, institutions and monuments that represent the old colonial world order. The European project is upturned, as Britain exits; and racial divides are resurfacing. In February 2016, a Muslim grave dating to the eighth century was identified at a burial site in France; at the same time Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia shut their borders to migrants trying to reach Northern Europe, as if it were possible to draw a line between ‘Us and Them’. We in the West believe that we enjoy untold freedoms, paid-up by the self-renewing currency of our personal data. Advances in artificial intelligence have enabled a computer

programme to beat a human World Champion at the board game ‘Go’. causing upset and thrill in equal measure at the possibilities of technological innovation. Yet as ultra-Right architects vie to give (un)creative direction to these new, as yet untitled times, let’s turn to artists, who lend us alternative visions, informed by observation, research and excavation in an ongoing dialogue across past-present-future. UNTITLED presents a variety of contemporary artistic practices, across over 20 works of art that speak to the complexity of the times we are in. UNTITLED positions artists and their artworks as agents of our contemporary moment. ‘art on the conditions of our time’ is an invitation to the public to view these works as creative proposals for coming to terms with some of the key questions and concerns of our present cultural condition. The range of works in the exhibition enables the public to consider questions such as: how can art engage with the technological transformation of (post)human identities through the prism of radical postcolonial ideas? (Achiampong & Blandy), how do painting and drawing convey the ongoing relevance of history and memory to contemporary life? (Donkor, Walker), what are the legacies of African influence on Western

KIMATHI DONKOR Nanny of the Maroonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fifth Act of Mercy, 2012 Oil paints on canvas 210cm x 165cm

Modernism and vice versa? (Lewisohn), how does the creation of spaces of sociality and resistance reflect the fluidity of gendered identities? (Ifekoya), what is the status of materials, images and objects in commodified, global popular culture? (Okon, NT, Offeh), what are the ways in which artistic practice is represented and how can we open up new perspectives? (Asante); how is the transnational migrant crisis transforming urban and public space? (Boswell); and how can juxtaposition, gesture and the performance of found materials speak to the urgency of the present moment? (Boakye-Yiadom). Many of these questions and concerns overlap across and between artworks. UNTITLED does not present fixed answers to these crucial questions. It invites viewers to contemplate, wrestle with and draw their own conclusions by engaging directly with the works and their juxtapositions in the gallery space. With a focus on foregrounding creative strategies and research on materials from some of the most innovative artists working in Britain today, UNTITLED marks a radical, bold approach to presenting the art of our time. Paul Goodwin and Hansi Momodu-Gordon

Video still from FF Gaiden ESCAPE, 2017

LARRY ACHIAMPONG & DAVID BLANDY FF Gaiden ESCAPE, 2017 Video The Finding Fanon project, a collaboration between Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, is inspired by the lost plays of Frantz Fanon, (1925-1961) a psychiatrist, revolutionary and writer whose work explored the mental distress caused by colonialism and the consequences of decolonisation. Achiampong and Blandy draw on Fanon’s ideas, and examine how race politics and decolonisation impact society and shape popular culture in an age of new technologies and globalisation. These themes are played out in their work through scripts that combine found texts and personal testimony, and a central aspect of the Finding Fanon project is the use of the software engine of the popular computer game, Grand Theft Auto (GTA). GTA gamers explore virtual cities, landscapes, seas and mountains through the use of personalized human avatars or game characters often in the context of

constructed ‘missions’ or stories set by the game designers. Achiampong and Blandy have effectively ‘hacked’ this game engine and appropriated it so that other stories can be told within the beautiful and haunting locations of the virtual worlds of GTA. Achiampong and Blandy are the main protagonists in the core Finding Fanon video works, however here we present a newly commissioned work in the Finding Fanon Gaiden series. ‘Gaiden’ is a term synonymous with Japanese anime and videogame culture meaning “sidestory”. In the spirit of gaming and internet philosophies of sharing software or open platforms, the Gaiden series enables the artists to open up their creative journey of ‘finding Fanon’ to wider communities who have been marginalized and left voiceless by the impact of globalization, the postcolonial condition of racism and the search for identity. In previous versions of Finding Fanon Gaiden, the artists worked with veterans and prisoners in Liverpool, migrants in Oslo and young people in Newcastle. Through a series of creative workshops and conversations with the artists, participants directed characters,

scripts and storylines for the video works, reflecting their own histories and experiences. For Finding Fanon Gaiden ESCAPE, Achiampong and Blandy worked in the same way, but with members of the Women’s Cultural Exchange, a local support group for women refugees, asylum seekers and those with a migration background. Through the workshops a range of issues pertinent to the participants’ lives were revealed including tales of migration, frustration at the existing social order and the trauma of Female Genital Mutilation. Retold through their personalised avatar who in the video work journeys freely through their landscape of choice, ESCAPE weaves together a complex tapestry of true stories of identity, cultural history and social change. A sense of travelling through a dystopian alternate reality is created through a synth-driven soundtrack that contextualises the intense, high definition visuals and narratives, and a physical installation that incorporates abandoned technology and materials.

BARBY ASANTE A Genealogy of Practice, 2016 Barby Asante is a London based artist, curator and educator whose work explores space, place and identity. Asante often creates spaces for dialogue, collective thinking, ritual and reenactment. Using archival material in the broadest sense, she is interested in breaking down the language of the archive, not to insert or present alternatives to dominant narratives, but to interrupt, interrogate and explore the effects and possibilities of the unheard and the missing. Asante’s newly commissioned work A Genealogy of Practice has evolved alongside, within and in response to the development of the exhibition UNTITLED. Beginning in conversations with the curators about the proposal to

bring together twelve contemporary African-Diaspora artists, problematising the intent and implications of the move and reflecting on what an exhibition such as this may be attempting to ‘do’, A Genealogy of Practice has unfurled into an expansive research project in collaboration with young people from Nottingham and London. A Genealogy of Practice asks questions about the ways in which artists are represented— through exhibition making, publications, in conversation, online and elsewhere; collating information such as the artists’ mode of practice, their social and art historical concerns and influences, and their place of study— and considers how that information can be explored through an archival process of collecting and mapping this data. Accessible both in a gallery and online as a specially made website, A Genealogy of Practice is

driven by an investigation of the different ways in which knowledge is created, and through their collective research and shared experiences, Asante and her co-researchers are challenging our given knowledge of things. Visitors are invited to expand on their experiences of the works in the exhibition by clicking on the map to find their own routes through and between the artists in the show. The material offered in the shared space of A Genealogy of Practice extends beyond the limitations of the exhibition format to offer alternative ways of thinking through the artistic practice of the artists in UNTITLED, broadening perspectives on the positions from which the artists speak. Image: Baldwin's Nigger Reloaded, Barby Asante & sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, Iniva 2014 Photo by Barby Asante

APPAU JUNIOR BOAKYE-YIADOM P.Y.T. 2009 Balloons, black penny loafers, ribbons Exhibition copy, original 2009 in the Family Servais Collection The Scream of Nature, 2016 Video (duration 4 seconds), speakers, TV monitor, straps, wooden pallet and netting Dimensions variable Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom’s art practice examines and re-appropriates collective moments and memories of the culturally familiar. Boakye-Yiadom meticulously researches and works with archive materials that include video footage, images, text and recorded sound, alongside ready-made objects, creating installations with multi-layered references. Amalgamated in often humorous ways, Boakye-Yiadom exploits the performative possibilities of cultural commodities, everyday objects, film, music and images. P.Y.T. (2009) uses widely accessible objects and subtle gestures, such as a familiar pair of black penny loafer shoes that are held on tiptoes by a cloud of colourful balloons touching the ceiling. A sculptural installation paying homage to Michael Jackson's iconic dance stance, P.Y.T.’s title references Jackson’s 1982 dance hit and evokes a sense of ethereal beauty that fades over time as the balloons inevitably deflate. The uncontainable ever-shifting temporality of all things existing in the world.

The Scream of Nature (2016) is a work that references another icon of popular culture, actor and comedian Whoopi Goldberg. The work consists of a 21” cube monitor surrounded by domestic shelf/standing speakers. The speakers and the monitor sit on a wooden pallet, covered with a net and blue ratchet straps tying all the elements together, mirroring the aesthetics of transported goods. On the monitor is a three second video clip of Whoopi Goldberg taken from her 1986 movie Jumping Jack Flash where she is being captured and dragged away in a public phone booth. This is superimposed with wordless singing from various soul and R&B singers. Sound escapes from the sculpture regardless of the restrictive netting. Goldberg’s character attempts to break free of her confined predicament, and the soundtrack continues to communicate a message even without articulated words. Collectively the different components of the installation explore ideas around containment and the uncontainable, and the unfixed nature of culture. The title of this piece takes reference from the popular painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream.

The Scream of Nature, 2016

PHOEBE BOSWELL Tramlines, 2015 Pencil on paper (mounted) and wall, 710cm x 120cm, with looped animation projection (9mins 12 secs) Phoebe Boswell lives and works in London. Born in Nairobi to black and white Kenyan parents, and brought up in the Middle East, her history is rooted in transient middle points and passages of migration. She combines traditional draftswomanship and digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations; layered visual languages through which she explores and communicates the complexities and multiple readings of our diasporic, fragmented narratives. Boswell’s approach of using many artistic mediums is a means of telling layered, global stories that are often too complex to tell in a single drawing, or a single screen film. Her drawing practice is fundamental to this and is often the starting point to creating larger, multi-media works. Tramlines was developed whilst Boswell was on residency in Gothenburg, Sweden in the lead up to 2015 Göteborg International Biennal for Contemporary Art. Prompted by a comment from her host that the city was very segregated, Tramlines envisions a metaphorical journey on a tramline, starting at Linnéplatsen where she was based, and journeying towards Angered, a predominantly immigrant suburb. Boswell took her camera and rode the trams, stopping to photograph the social interactions taking place in what she observed to be an increasingly tense public space. The process of translating these photos to drawings allowed Boswell the time to contemplate and observe the intricacies of the place and its people, and to express them through her own drawn lines as she came to terms with arriving in a city as a stranger. The physical dimensions of the work reference the length of the artist’s studio in Gothenburg and Boswell has combined drawing and moving image to question how we visualise and tell the stories of others, and to heighten the effects of different modes of viewing.

Tramlines, 2015

Images from left: When shall we 3? (Scenes from the life of Njinga Mbandi), 2010 Under Fire: the shooting of Cherry Groce, 2005

KIMATHI DONKOR When shall we 3? (Scenes from the life of Njinga Mbandi), 2010 Oils, linen, wood, staples 160cm x 105cm Loaned with kind permission from a private collector Nanny of the Maroon’s Fifth Act of Mercy, 2012 Oil paints on canvas 210cm x 165cm Under Fire: the shooting of Cherry Groce, 2005 Oil paints on canvas 121cm x 182cm Kimathi Donkor’s work re-imagines mythic and legendary encounters across Africa and its Diasporas, principally in painting, but also through drawing, video, assemblage, digital design, performance and installation. Under Fire: The Shooting of Cherry Groce, is an oil on canvas painting that depicts the inflammatory moment in 1985 when Dorothy “Cherry” Groce was shot by the Metropolitan Police as they raided her home looking for her 21-year-old son. This wrongful act of violence sparked the second Brixton Uprising in four years. The painting was created twenty years later and draws on Donkor’s activism in community campaigns generated by the uprisings of

the 80s. It also reflects Donkor’s ongoing interest in and engagement with the genre of figurative history painting. By deciding to capture the moment the bullet left the gun and allowing the viewer to witness its horror, Donkor retrieves a history that was widely reported in the popular press at the time and reinstates it into the public consciousness. Donkor’s painting style and materials also serve to raise and establish this event as a historic moment. This investment in history and the ways in which it is can be read in conversation with the present moment runs throughout Donkor’s work. Primarily a painter, his enquiry has led him to revisit the genre of history painting revered in the Western tradition by artists such as Reynolds, David, Caravaggio and others. While Donkor’s paintings engage with these artists’ classical visual language, he inserts the black (female) body and narratives from black history to produce monumental counter-histories. When Shall We 3? Scenes from the Life of Njinga Mbandi, 2010 and Nanny of the Maroons’ Fifth Act of Mercy, 2012 are two works from Donkor’s Queens of the Undead series. This series, which now includes eight paintings, explores the possibilities of figurative painting through the filters of history, legend and myth. Each painting is at once a contemporary portrait, an exploration of art history and a vision of an historic female military leader from Africa or

its Diasporas, celebrated for their role in liberation struggles. These two works are dedicated to the life of Queen Njinga Mbandi who led her armies against the Portuguese empire in Angola; and Queen Nanny who led the Maroon guerillas that fought the British in 1700s Jamaica. Each work contains a clear visual quotation or appropriation of the work of a contemporary figure who is portrayed. For example, with the painting Nanny of the Maroons’ Fifth Act of Mercy (2012) Donkor references a composition from Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Jane Fleming, later Countess of Harrington (1778); an aristocrat whose family was involved with enslaving people in the plantations in Jamaica. Fleming’s portrait is converted into the figure of her arch-enemy Queen Nanny of the Maroons. In When Shall We 3? Scenes from the Life of Njinga Mbandi (2010) a re-creation of Giovanni Cavazzi’s 17th century illustration depicting Queen Njinga negotiating with the Portuguese colonial Viceroy is rendered with a modern Pop Art sensibility. Donkor’s extensive research into art history has a strong relevance to our times, in his words: “Art can do something a bit magical with history, the two things aren’t separate. All artists work with history anyway and with the history of art. Whenever artists make a work, they are entering into the stream of our history.”

09 Video still from Nature / Nurture, 2013

EVAN IFEKOYA AfriMag Spread, 2009 Drawing on paper, 42cm x 29.7cm Nature / Nurture, 2013 Video, duration 6m 12s A Person of Indeterminate Gender moves freely across the room, writing a new Earthseed with each step, 2016 Light up trainers, white shiny fabric, clothes rail, print on paper (29.7cm x 60cm), thigh gun holster, shoulder gun holster, sequins Dimensions variable The selected works by Evan Ifekoya all raise questions about the ways in which we perform our identities – cultural, gendered or otherwise; how those performances can become defined and confined by the external pressures, and how they can also set us free. Nature/nurture sketch is an attempt to give language to a frustration through dance - 'take it out on the floor'. A frustration with categorisations and assumptions around what one should or can dance to, what forms are inherited and what is learnt through experience or desire. While in the earlier works the visual presence of the artist’s own body plays a central role, Ifekoya is increasingly moving away from being visibly present in the work, although their voice is often still heard in song or narration. Ifekoya’s current work uses film, sculptural installation, performative writing and sound.

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s classic text The Uses of the Erotic (2007) Ifekoya’s current work investigates how the erotic can be a source of unexpressed, untapped political power. The work explores the importance of language, performance and collaborative practices in the creation of alternative social spaces and identities. The contested and ever subjugated black body propels the artist’s thinking, even if the body itself is not physically represented in the work. A Person of Indeterminate Gender moves freely across the room, writing a new Earthseed with each step, is an evolving and expanding work which starts with the central drawing, a figure in flux. In removing themselves from the frame the artist explores performativity through gesture, mark and materials.

Ifekoya’s recent work has been presented at: IMT Gallery and Serpentine Galleries, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2016). Recent performances include Jerwood Space, London and Whitstable Biennial 2016. Collaborative projects include Collective Creativity: Critical reflections into QTIPOC creative practice and Network11. Upcoming exhibitions include 'All Channels Open', Wysing Arts Centre and a solo exhibition at Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh in May 2017.

CEDAR LEWISOHN Black Drawings (Large book), 2015 Hand pulled screen print and paint on paper, 100cm x 121cm Edition of 8 Wood Cuts, 2015 Plywood, 122cm x 122cm each

Black Drawings, 2015

The selected works by Cedar Lewisohn reflect his interest in taking disparate fragments from the history of art and bringing them together through renderings in his own visual language. The works in this exhibition include Black Drawings, 2015, a large scale bound book of monochrome prints, alongside a selection of woodcuts that explore the artist’s interest in the relationship between traditional forms of African art and Western Modern art. Lewisohn calls the visual language he has created to express this relationship “Cultural cannibalism”, which signifies the appropriation of images while one remains central to this process. As the artist explains “I’m interested in the way that Modernist artists such as Picasso appropriated African art and culture. My take on this is not a heavy critique of those Modernist artists, many of them I admire hugely. I am more interested in the way visual styles can become absorbed and how that affects the way large numbers of people understand those cultures.” Lewisohn's practice uses the physically laborious techniques of wood block printing, both for the performative qualities of its intensive process and its poetic and timeless aesthetic. Subverting and abusing the rules of craftsmanship, Lewisohn works directly onto large wooden panels, embossing his images by hand rather than using a print bed. The ink leaves its grubby traces and his figures defy their author, taking on a life of their own.

Much of the research for this body of work came from extensive visits to many museums around Europe and making copies of details of works. The artist admits to being obsessed by the act of engaging in constant detailed looking at artworks, describing himself as someone who suffers from scopophilia, literally the love of looking. In 2015, Lewisohn spent time at The Jan Van Eyck Academie. On arriving for this residency, Lewisohn immediately started to make a series of drawings that were virtually all black. He was particularly inspired by looking at a number of German Expressionist artists such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Beckman. Combining his ‘cultural cannibalism’ technique with intense looking and study, Lewisohn drew on Modernist icons of the past to create something new that speaks to our present moment: “With these black drawings I want to look deeper at these artists, and somehow suck out all the visual information I can from them, leaving “just” enough behind, so that a viewer might get a feeling of what I was looking at.”

HAROLD OFFEH

Covers Playlist, 2016 Video, duration 32 minutes Covers: Originals, Marlena, Grace, Amii, Melba, Denise, Gloria, Sarah and Millie. Album Sleeves, 2016 12 inch record album covers “I’ve always been interested in drawing references from popular culture. It’s my strategy for using myself as material. I’ve realised I’m a frustrated historian.” Harold Offeh, 2016 Harold Offeh is an artist and educator working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh often employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with an assessment of contemporary culture. In two new works Covers Playlist, 2016 and Covers: Originals, 2016, Harold Offeh revisits his body of work Covers (2008 ongoing) in which the artist uses photography, video and live performance to recreate album cover images by mainly black and female funk, soul and dance performers from the 1970s and 80s. Offeh began this evolving project with his photographic response to the singer/actor/model Grace Jones’ album cover Island Life, 1985. Drawn by the iconic image of Jones’ androgynous form and ‘arabesque’ pose, the artist re-created the image performing her stance in the domestic setting of his studio/apartment.

Video still from Covers Live: After Melba Moore, Burn, 1979. Live Performance at commissioned by Vivid Projects at MAC, Birmingham, 2015. Photo by Open Aperture UK

Offeh’s broader enquiry through this series is to question the authenticity of the photographic image, and in particular, the manipulation of images within popular culture. He often does this through the process of bodily re-enactment and performance of such images. The artist explains this in relation to the classic image of Grace Jones in the Covers project: “In its construction the image is also a fallacy: it is actually a composite. It’s really impossible to fully embody. My strategy with a lot of the ‘Covers’ series is to interrogate the mythology of the image through a kind of embodied experience of them. I use performance as a strategy to explore images.” Covers also examines the function of the album cover as a piece of design, with a clear purpose to promote and market the identity and music of the performer for commercial gain. As an illustrative form its aim is to construct, capture, present and disseminate an effective image. When placed into a historical, social and cultural context the album cover offers the possibility of operating like an artefact: not only reflecting the individual performer and its initial marketing aims but reflecting the wider cultural and historical discourse of the time. Offeh playfully unpicks the ways in which these images are created, humorously calling attention to the positioning of the gendered, racialised body within the capitalist systems of popular culture.

Untitled (Air Pre-review), Plaster, acoustic sound underlay, softwood and WMNS Nike Air Vortex, 2014

IMA-ABASI OKON Put Something in the Air: The E-s-s-e-n-t-i-a-l Mahalia Jackson Blowing Up DJ Pollie Pop’s Chopped and Screwed Rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries - Military-Entertainment Complex Dub [Jericho Speak Life!], 2016 Polished brass, acoustic sound underlay, artist’s jewellery, OSB, tulip, polyurethane varnish (red mahogany) Ima-Abasi Okon’s diverse practice defies easy categorisation. The artist works across video, screen printing, sculpture, painting, and publishing often delving into questions of language, faith and theory. For UNTITLED the artist has devised a new sculptural installation that consists essentially of two polished brass vents fixed into the wall of the gallery, jewellery and a monochrome panel made from various types and grades of wood.

This enigmatic arrangement, fixed into and within the walls of the gallery, can be interpreted in many ways and visually refers to the artist’s interest in investigating the nature of systems. The brass vents inserted into the wall appears to link the work to the gallery’s ventilation system, a proposition that surreptitiously demands a change in the nature, source and even ownership of the resulting air circulation. Working with what is usually unseen, the installation casually introduces a mysticism, or a kind of magical incantation, as the air is now filtered through the sculpture. This is highlighted further by the artist’s jewellery and the fiction of its entry point into the space. Systems of art making and painting are also referenced here – the monochrome varnished wooden panel is reminiscent of minimalist painting and sculpture, whilst also suggesting a body, something incongruous and silent, acting almost as guardian to the charged activity within the vent.

There is also a concern with the way in which various materials produce symbolic meaning about the wider culture of Hip Hop and RnB. In Okon’s work it is the use of these rich and shiny surfaces, the seductive intimacy of these tropes as they appear in relation to the body that is of interest. The polished finish and the collection of jewellery refer to the customisation and re-crafting of standardised objects often serialised within Okon’s wider practice. A gesture used to offer alternative narratives. Here, this is done less as critique but more with the intention of utilising what is often overlooked to propose new ways to discuss the complexities of the culture’s role within a wider discourse. However, as the artist herself makes clear, her art is about exploring the multiplicity of meaning through an investigation of materials: “I mainly look for an opportunity to present a simple gesture that speaks to a range of things. A range of things that are each in themselves highly complex. So the works are never about a single thing.”

Video still from Imitation, 2013

NT Imitation 34/59, 2013, video (5m 10s) South more, 2014, video (5m 05s) Moore into you, 2016, video (2m 38s) For NT, the internet is a vast source of found material: 'readymades' for the digital generation (video clips, films, still images, memes, soundtracks etc). Drawing on film, sound and performance in her multifaceted practice, NT is very much concerned with how film and imagery can impact on audiences. The work presented in UNTITLED draws on a recent body of work that challenges audiences to look again and look carefully at the images that surround them. The artist uses appropriation - taking material or images from one context and inserting it into another - as a means of disrupting, re-interpreting and re-evaluating the viewers' relation to the past and present.

Video still from South more, 2014

Imitation 34/59, 2013, is a film created using clips from two versions of the classic Hollywood feature film Imitation of Life (1934 and 1959) that deals with the relationship between an African American mother and her lighter skinned, mixed heritage daughter who ‘passes’ for white to escape the stigma of racism in 1930s/1950s America. The film combines the visuals of the black and white 1934 film with the audio of the 1959 Douglas Sirk colour version. The focus in these original films is on the daughter, and the anguish and shame she feels towards her black mother in a society where race is still taboo. However in Imitation 34/59 NT’s selective edits shift our gaze to hone in on the pain and suffering of the mother. As a result, the film is driven by its soundtrack: that of the voice of the mother combined with the predominant visuals of the daughter. The work challenges the preconceived and societal views that viewers may have concerning the relationship between the two women; and as a subplot, raises questions about race.

The film South more, 2014, depicts images of an iconic London estate on the South-East edges of the city. Drawing on the perceived alienation of the everyday environment - in particular council estates which are often predominantly associated with the working classes and more recently the underclasses - South more shows that even within the stereotypical negative views and anxieties towards these architectural spaces, that beauty and calmness can be found. Moore into you, 2016, uses footage of Henry Moore’s sculptures in order to address the ideas of both looking at and experiencing art; as well as the desire for and the obsession with works of art. Additionally, the medium of film is used to play with movement, shape, form and structure to parallel Moore’s own artistic concerns with those ideas. The visuals are set against a sultry soul music soundtrack that reflects and plays on the seductive nature of the curves of Moore’s sculpture and the ‘voyeuristic’ nature of looking at the forms.

Images from left: The Big Secret IV, 2015 Attitude, 1998

BARBARA WALKER Attitude, 1998, Private Face series, 1998-2002 Oil on canvas, 122cm x 213cm Polite Violence, 2006, Louder Than Words series, 2006-09 Oil on digital image, 81cm x 106 cm The Big Secret IV, 2015, Shock and Awe series, 2015- present Conte and white paint on paper, 159cm x 195 cm Barbara Walker is perhaps best known for her skillfully rendered drawings that portray, in monumental imagery, the communities in which she lives and works. From three distinct series: Private Face, Louder Than Words and Shock and Awe, Walker’s selected works for UNTITLED present a route through her practice that spans over twenty years of production. Walker’s earliest work on display, Attitude has not been exhibited before and portrays an intimate, emotive portrait of the artist’s youngest daughter. Attitude and the

broader Private Face series is pivotal for Walker as it is here that, two years out of art school, the artist first begins to explore her desire to work with oil paint, grappling with its status within the hierarchies of Western art history and the realities of working with it as a material. Walker’s earlier works were investigations of both media and subject, often using drawing and in depth research as a starting point. Louder Than Words is a series Walker began in response to a conversation with her son Solomon, during which he produced a West Midlands Police docket from a stop and search incident. The yellow paper record is enlarged in Polite Violence III and lays bare the systems of categorisation, profiling and State-level data collection embedded within text fields and check boxes. Not all the handwritten text is fully visible and the name reads ‘Solo Walker,’ poetically suggesting an alternative ‘motive’ for the stop. In the centre of Polite Violence, Walker introduces a painted image of the location at which the incident occurred. Within this piece there is a constant

tension between the imposed ‘order’ and formality of the State, and the violence which is acted out on the individual. The empty generic street scene with a church facade conceals the trauma of the event that took place there and the title of Polite Violence speaks to this concern. For her most recent series Shock and Awe, Walker undertook intensive archival research uncovering the contribution of black servicemen and women to the British Armed Forces and war efforts from 1914 to the present day. The series reflects upon contemporary British conflict alongside historical events of warfare involving Britain and the colonised nations of the British Empire. Meticulously re-imagined from poor quality photographic source material The Big Secret IV, depicts members of the British West Indian regiment who fought in WWI, Walker introduces white paint to the surface as a form of erasure.

UNTITLED: art on the conditions of our time Produced by New Art Exchange and curated in collaboration with NAE by Paul Goodwin and Hansi Momodu-Gordon.

14 January – 19 March 2017 New Art Exchange 39-41 Gregory Boulevard Hyson Green Nottingham NG7 6BE www.nae.org.uk info@nae.org.uk 0115 924 8630 Following the showing at NAE, UNTITLED will embark on a national tour. Please see NAE’s website for venue dates and details. UNTITLED was funded with support from:

PHOEBE BOSWELL Tramlines, 2015 Pencil on paper (mounted) and wall, 700cm x 200cm, with looped animation projection (9mins 12 secs)

Below: EVAN IFEKOYA A Person of Indeterminate Gender moves freely across the room, writing a new Earthseed with each step, 2016 Light up trainers, white shiny fabric, clothes rail, print on paper (29.7cm x 60cm), thigh gun holster, shoulder gun holster, sequins Dimensions variable

Front cover: APPAU JUNIOR BOAKYE-YIADOM P.Y.T. 2009 Balloons, black penny loafers, ribbons Exhibition copy, original 2009 in the Family Servais Collection

ISBN: 978-0-9932659-4-5