© Design, PANKOWCREATIVES, 2018 © Artist Image, Katharina Fitz, 2018
AFTER MFA students respond to Nottingham Contemporary Exhibition ‘From Ear to Ear to Eye’
Arit Emmanuela David Cantrill Jane Marie Williams Katharina Fitz Lou Robert MJ The Art Traveller Rebecca Fletcher Szilvia Ponyiczki
MATh
Lawrence Abu Hamden, Earshot, 2016. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London. Installation shot, From Ear to Ear to Eye, Nottingham Contemporary, Dec 2017- Mar 2018. Photo credit: Š Stuart Whipps, 2018 Š Nottingham Contemporary, 2018
About Aftermath Master of Fine Art Exhibition 10 - 13 May 2018 In collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, the 2018 iteration of the annual Aftermath exhibition features eight MFA students from Nottingham Trent University. The show opens in The Space at Nottingham Contemporary, the private view taking place on Thursday May 10th from 6-8pm, the exhibition running from May 11th to May 13th. This year the students are responding to Nottingham Contemporary’s winter exhibition From Ear to Ear to Eye.
From Ear to Ear to Eye was a group exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary that challenged the ways the Middle East is often perceived as a place of catastrophe and violence. It featured regional artists of diverse generations and backgrounds utilising music, speech, translation, and metaphorical materialisations of sound to highlight alternative perspectives of the current and historical state of the region.
Aftermath not only offers the eight student artists the chance to show their work at an art gallery of international standing, but also the opportunity to apply their own critical faculties in the creation of new work, utilising art as a means of both critique and discussion. Aftermath provokes ideas of process, deconstruction, language, translation, the senses, and nature through their multifaceted responses. The differing approaches of the MFA students to the original exhibition can be seen in the responses from three of them to the same work, Joe Namy’s Purple, bodies in
translation - part II of A Yellow Memory from the Yellow Age. Namy’s work discusses translation and the details that become lost through the use of subtitles. Szilvia Ponyiczki’s work addresses painting as a means of translation, portraying the messages of the unexplored world of the oneiric unconscious. Experimental portraitist, Arit Emmanuela explores the disassociation between self and culture when a language is cut off from future generations, and Katharina Fitz uses a series of sculptures that apply the casting and mould making process as a form of language by translating from one medium into another. Taking the exhibition as a whole, David Cantrill’s landscapes explore the sense of otherness in relation to the misplaced projection of cultural identity from one people onto another. MJ The Art Traveller, in collaboration with Nawara Zantah , likewise takes the overarching concept of From Ear to Ear to Eye into the composition of a travel documentary film that illustrates perceptions of equality, human rights, and sensory overload. Inspired by Etel Adnan, Lawrence Abu Hamden and Mounira Al Solh’s pieces, all dealing with the perception of differences, Rebecca Fletcher creates folded books called leporellos to provoke viewers to look more closely. Marie Williams, responding to Ziad Antar’s photography piece Intensive Beirut II draws landscapes that reflect her growing interest in the rhythm and patterns of nature. Lou Robert, an Erasmus student from Reunion Island, has been inspired by Joana
Hadjithoma and Khalil Joreige’s ISMYRNE, concerning the rewriting of history through cultural imaginaries, to create a video performance based on exotic memories in relation to the island from where she originated. The Aftermath exhibition features artists of diverse backgrounds interpreting their individual understandings through their art. The show offers insights into the influence that exhibitions can have on an artist’s creative process and challenges viewers to meticulously observe this process.
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Arit Emmanuela “We exist in so many layers that our identities can never fully be unravelled. Language as one of these layers holds the fluidity necessary to capture the movements of these identities, through expansion and loss.”
My Practice focuses on the different forms of portraiture and the abstract ideas of personality. I create imagery that combines the intrinsic ideas of culture, identity, self, and at times the loss of these things. We exist in so many layers that our identities can never fully be unravelled. Language as one of these layers holds the fluidity necessary to capture the movements of these identities, through expansion and loss. “Mother tongue” is about the languages of our identities. The mother tongue being the first language a person learns to speak can
be said to be the language a person feels most honest in. This piece discusses the disassociation created between self and culture when a language is cut off from future generations as well as the languages of regret, loss, shame, and emotion. English (the language that taught me regret, that I think in and feel in), Ibibio-Efik (the language I never had, that I feel the most loss in, that I long in, that I have removed from future generations), French (the language that follows me, that I used to hide my shame), and Spanish
(the language that taught me how to feel and that revealed pain to me) are used as a pillars for the passage of my language identities. The use of moving portraits in this piece are to juxtapose the movement and fluidity of language with the shifts through identities that we take.
Mother tongue
Year: 2018 Media: Video WWH.264 HD format.
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Untitled
Image Ttitles: 1 – Untitled 1 2 – Untitled 2 Year: 2018 Dimensions: 8 foot by 12 foot for both images Media: Charcoal on fabric
David Cantrill “I work with landscape. My work explores the integrity of the manmade, in relation to nature. My work focuses on loss, memory, trace, disintegration of surface and the second-hand image, to suggest the facade of a copy or an illusion of the real. For this work I will be focusing on a sense of otherness, how a culture’s identity is projected onto another which may sometimes be lacking in truth.” My work is an exploration of the interrelationships between mankind and nature, between the natural and the man-made. I have always been interested in the landscape but rarely find myself within it. It has often been through the internet, social media, television and other media outlets that I have developed a relationship with an idea of what landscape is and how the natural world appears. In my own landscapes I believe I am exploring
a sense of artificiality and focusing on what is lost and gained through the reproduction and the repetition of an image from it’s original source. I investigate the notion of the facade, memory and loss that comes with creating two-dimensional representations of the natural world.
man-made. Charcoal is a very dusty substance which enables me to make traces, replicas of my drawn images, exploring the differences between them.
The medium I tend to use is charcoal as it is made from organic materials and relates to my concepts and complements this relationship between nature and something 9
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Jane Marie Williams “Lay of the Land reflects my growing interest in the rhythms and patterns of nature. This body of work seeks to explore my emotional and physical connection within the landscape.�
The impetus for my work comes from travelling on a regular basis through the Nottinghamshire landscape. I enjoy finding beauty in familiar places, pockets of wilderness on our doorstep that are usually ignored. My initial images are based on fleeting glimpses from my car window. Revisiting these places over a period of time, a personal connection is made and creates a sense of ownership. My response is to gather and record information by drawing outside using a range of media. Combining different materials (graphite, charcoal, pastel) provides
freedom for experimentation. The aim is to capture an emotion of being in a particular place. As the work develops I prefer to work intuitively and from a distance from the place seen. I create soft layers of painted textures using brushes, rags and palette knives. The formal qualities of colour and shape are established over a period of time as multiple layers are added. Taking inspiration from nature I am constantly asking broader questions concerning land formation, boundaries and the effects of weathering. I continue to
develop a close relationship with the landscape. When memories are made it can signify a visceral response rather than a direct representation.
Lay of the Land
Image Titles: 1 – 4 Untitled Year: 2018 Dimensions: Various Media: Mixed media (mounted and unmounted)
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Echoes
Image Titles: 1 – 3 Column drum Year: 2018 Media: Sculpture, Plaster, Clay, Wood, Plastic Dimensions: various
Katharina Fitz “I am a photographer and sculptor focusing on urban sociology and the interconnections between subjects reflecting upon their narratives.”
I work with different media such as photography and sculpture to explore themes surrounding urban sociology. These themes include the structures, processes, and problems that are part of social life and human interactions. Repetition plays an important part in my practice. It is a way of telling a story by outlining the differences and the interconnections between subjects. I classify objects into groups in order to appreciate their characteristics and reflect upon their narratives. For the Aftermath project, I have focused on Joe Namy’s
work “Purple, Bodies in Translation – Part II of a Yellow Memory from a Yellow Age” dealing with translation and recent conflicts in the Middle East. My response to this work takes the process of casting and uses it as a form of translation, from one medium into another. For the realisation of this project, I chose to work with the form of a column drum as a metaphor for stability, questioning the current situation in the Middle East by breaking down the drums into fragments. Columns remind us of the continuous changes of history, time and place and the construction of logic and order within architecture.
This is comparable to the structures of languages and the undergoing and constant transformation of the meaning of words in relation to their use in time. I was especially inspired by the essay “The Task of the Translator” by Walter Benjamin. Here Benjamin quotes:” Translation instead of imitating the sense of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language”
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From left to right: MJ the Art Traveller, David Cantrill, Szilvia Ponyiczki, Rebecca Fletcher, Lou Robert, Arit Emmanuela, Katharina Fitz, and Marie Williams. Photo credit: Š Simon Burrows, 2018.
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Lou Robert “With oniric landscape I try to give shapes to my memories. Nature is linked with spirituality, life, death and identity. I want to bring all these sounds, stories and images to show a mysterious and exotic vision of my native land.�
Through different stories, I try to show what my childhood looked like on Reunion Island and how different our cultural backgrounds can be. Creole, like a lot of slave languages, is an oral language, full of magical stories and spiritual beliefs. My performance includes stories connected with nature and how difficult it is to live in the middle of the Indian Ocean, far from everything. It also reflects upon the bravery of the enslaved, and the potential destructiveness of the forces of nature on this Island. By using photos, objects,
sounds, dances and stories, I share my fragmented memories, by creating a mysterious atmosphere within which the spectator can develop their imagination. This piece is also a reflection upon the human being, the importance of returning to the essentials, of reflecting upon our mortal condition and how we can transcend it. Whatever we find, some questions and experiences remain the same. How might those who are foreign to this culture understand it? How can they absorb it? What is the impact
of nature on the construction of our myths? Why is it so important to affirm our culture? All these exotic memories speak about what our memory can appear, how it can be fragmented but also how it defines our identity. The meeting with a new culture allows one to develop a new way of seeing and apprehending not only where we travel but also where we come from.
Shelter
Year: 2018 Media: Performance (10-15 minutes) Sculpture, dances and songs
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Documentary with Nawara Zantah/Persona Translation 22
Image Titles: 1 – The Documentary with Nawara Zantah 2 – Persona Translation 22 Year: 2018 Dimensions: H.264 HD format 50cm x 40cm (estimate) Media: Documentary Film Moving Images and Sound
MJ The Art Traveller “Time-travel stories allow us to share our version of events. Whether you’re living in a Middle Eastern country or living with autism from a young age”
MJ The Art Traveller is made up of a persona who uses art innovation to explore different cities and places across the world. He is a reflective and a skeptical person trying to understand how reality and freedom work together: MJ The Art Traveller and Nawara Zantah (“Nour”) have worked together to document a story about how their lives have evolved through time-travelling and self-discovery. “Nour” is a PhD research student at the University of Northampton, whose research interest is in Fine Art, particularly painting. During the war in Syria and after traveling from one country to another, her passion to paint and express the violence of the wars increased and has been the subject of her research and studies, finding out
different techniques to interrogate violence through painting.’ The experiments of sound transitions flow alongside Persona Translation 22.
autism art and to understand what is happening in the world today. Sampling sound from M.I.A’s music and his travel documentaries has helped him pull all of the components of this piece together.
Exploring the sense of unknown and travelling to different countries helps MJ The Art Traveller find a therapeutic mixture of these adventures. Looking at references in Art and Multiculturalism reflects how a persona can change unexpectedly, especially when one is attempting to problemsolve the environment. MJ The Art Traveller listens to M.I.A. (Missing In Action) for musical inspiration. Matangi “Maya” Arulpragism was raised in Sri Lanka before she became famous for making hip-hop music about the refugee crisis, politics, war and genocide. Listening to her music has helped MJ The Art Traveller express 19
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Rebecca Fletcher “I want my work to encourage people to pause, to provoke a reawakening of their senses, to change their perceptions in some way, even if only for a second, to meditate on their former reflections in relation to the work.”
I am a multi-media artist. I used to predominantly be a painter and photographer but now I am exploring a diverse range of media. I do not want to be tied down to a single medium. I want to investigate many things and question my emotions through a diversity of materials. My practice explores how my feelings about my life translate into something tangible, into something you can see and maybe touch. I use my practice to express my personal emotions over loss, life and love. By doing this I am exploring not only emotions that I have experienced but that have been felt by many people all over the world.
I want my work to connect with the viewer emotionally. I also want them to identify aspects of the work that I cannot see. I am fascinated when someone experiences my work in a completely different way to me. There is a multitude of ways in which a painting can be taken and experienced. My work stresses this premise for the viewer, emphasizing the diverse range a painting can be seen, experienced viscerally appreciated. With this work I reflect upon Etel Adnan’s piece “Leporellos”, her paintings poems and tapestries have mediated on displacement,
memory and loss. Adnan’s leporellos are accordion-folded booklets that fold out to reveal panoramic landscapes, songs, poems and paintings.
From Ear to Eye to Paper
Image Titles: Untitled 1 - 7 Year: 2018 Dimensions: Each piece flat is approximately: 146.5cm x 14.8cm Media: Paper folded with inks, pens and embroidery 21
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Purple Reflection I-II.
Image Titles: 1 – Purple Reflection I. 2 – Purple Reflection II. Year: 2018 Dimensions: 150cm x 100cm Media: Acrylics on Canvas
Szilvia Ponyiczki “My work addresses painting as a means of translation, portraying the messages of the unexplored world of the oneiric unconscious.”
My work brings together interrogations concerning identity, our personal and collective unconscious, and delves into the symbolism, messages and representation of dreams. Dreams can help us to gain better insight into problems, offer new and creative solutions, and lead to a new way of thinking. Not only because our brain can work freely during sleeping when there are no disturbances from daily life, but because it has access to both the personal and the collective unconscious. This inner world of ours, where a higher intelligence resides, can be a source of imaginative wisdom and understanding. Looking for the latent content of dreams, interpreting the messages of this symbolic language gives us the opportunity to find the meaning of life, to fulfil our true destiny, to make full use of our potential. Dreams make the unconscious accessible; showing us what we do not
know, what we do not notice. In the state of lucid dreaming, I use the capability of the unconscious to create snapshots related to a given topic or problem, and then consciously pick up on them. Interpreting these oneiric images alongside my dreams, with the help of a Jungian analyst, makes it possible to choose the ones that I feel are worth investigating and portraying either on their own or as a collection. I paint mainly with acrylics, incorporating text elements in different languages into my paintings as metaphors for the unconscious and as symbols of multiculturality and constant change which are important factors in my own life. The same way as these texts cannot be fully read or understood, the information from our unconscious cannot be completely retrieved. For the Aftermath Project, I have taken Joe Namy’s work “Purple, Bodies in Translation – Part II of A Yellow Memory from a Yellow Age”
as a starting point. His installation is based on two texts that discuss the act of translating war and resilience. It is designed as an immersive experience, “to create a reflective space for the audience to think through the intricacies of the wars in Syria and Iraq, mediated through testimony”. This is described as an internalized process with all the intricacy and complexity of translating someone else’s testimony into our own personal schema, with details lost in the conversion process. The interface between his work and creating my final dreamscapes consists of the process of translation and the difficulty of transferring information through the boundaries of language, culture and personal experience. This very much relates to the way I see the act of portraying dreams as smuggling information from the unconscious - an incommunicable inner world - to the real life; going beyond the manifest content through interpreting its language written in symbols and metaphors.
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A-Z
Contact Details Arit Emmanuela
Email: aritemmanuela@gmail.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/arit_emmanuela Website: www.aritemmanuela.com
David Cantrill
Email: davidalexandercantrill@gmail.com
Jane Marie Williams Katharina Fitz
Email: marie.williams447@gmail.com Website: mariewilliams.github.io
Email: fitz.katharina@gmail.com Instagram: katharina_fitz facebook: katharina fitz artist Website: www.katharinafitz.com
Lou Robert
Email: lou.robert974@gmail.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/slowground
MJ The Art Traveller
Email: mjsyellow@hotmail.com Video: www.dailymotion.com/mjthearttraveller Instagram: www.instagram.com/mjthearttraveller
Email: info@nottinghamcontemporary.org
Nottingham Facebook: www.facebook.com/nottcontemporary www.twitter.com/nottm_contemp C o n t e m p o r a ry Twitter: Website: www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
pankow creatives
Email: pankowcreatives@gmail.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/pankowcreatives Twitter: www.twitter.com/pankowcreatives Website: www.pankowcreatives.com
Simon Burrows Photographic
Email: simon@blindcolour.co.uk Instagram: www.instagram.com/blindcolours206 Twitter: www.twitter.com/blindcolours Website: www.blindcolour.co.uk
Rebecca Fletcher
Email: fletbec@gmail.com Instagram: www.instagram.com/fletcher.rebecca Twitter: www.twitter.com/fletbec Website: www.rebeccafletcherart.com
S z i lv i a Ponyiczki
Email: ponyiczki@hotmail.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/sponyiczki Website: www.ponyiczki.co.uk
Nottingham Contemporary
Nottingham Contemporary brings international art to an iconic building in the city centre. Designed by Stirling Prize-winning architects Caruso St John, it is one of the largest and most ambitious contemporary art spaces in the UK. Nottingham Contemporary works to attract new, diverse audiences to contemporary art through innovative a programme of exhibitions, events, family activities, and work with schools, youth and community groups. It opened in 2009 with 1.5 million visitors to date. Nottingham Contemporary is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and regularly funded by Nottingham City Council.
Ania Dabrowska, A Lebanese Archive (with the collection of Diab Alkarssifi c.1890-1992), 2013-ongoing. Courtesy of the artist. Installation shot, From Ear to Ear to Eye, Nottingham Contemporary, Dec 2017- Mar 2018. Photo credit: Š Stuart Whipps, 2018 Š Nottingham Contemporary, 2018
Nottingham Trent University
The MFA Fine Art course within the School of Art & Design has an excellent reputation for supporting students in introducing them to the professional world of Contemporary Fine Art. Designed as a springboard into professional contemporary art practice, the relationship between the course and Nottingham’s arts ecology is crucial. MFA students undertake work experience and live projects as part of the course, through strong links with Nottingham artists’ studios and galleries, including Nottingham Contemporary. Students are exposed to a multitude of approaches through the artists who comprise the creative team that teaches into and supports the MFA, as well as a Fine Art programme of prominent guest speakers. The outward-facing character of the course offers not only localised but also international opportunities. The course attracts students from a diverse range of countries and backgrounds, hugely beneficial in group critical seminars which seek to challenge student’s ideas and concepts in their practice. Teaching is focused upon the practices and specific needs of individual students, thus each artist’s journey through the course is entirely unique.
MFA Students learning sculpture in Bonington Building, School of Art and Design. © Nottingham Contemporary, 2018
Simon Burrows
Simon is a fine art photographer studying for an MA at Nottingham Trent University. he is exploring the challenges of being a colour-blind photographer through the paradigm of the trace within photography. Burrows’ currently focuses on vision and how we perceive what we see. Building a relationship with the inhabitants of Pingelap (colour-blind island) he is examining the evidence of enhanced night vision within colour-blind individuals. The image “Flower Fly’s” is a simulacrum of how he sees at night. The inhabitants of Pingelap weave intricate patterns in rugs in a darkened room using subtle differences of thread, to an individual with normal colour vision the rugs look like plain rugs. To a colour-blind individual though, the beautiful intricate pattern is revealed when viewed in the dark. Burrows was the photographer for the Aftermath Exhibition catalog, his inspiration for the exhibition group image is a nod towards “las Meninas” by Diego Velazquez. The faint image on the wall From the left is of Vincent van Gogh with his missing EAR, even more faint to the right is also van Gogh with his Ear, and lying to the floor is a peacock feather representing an Eye.
Flower Flys
Image Titles: Flower Flys Year: 2018 Media: Photographic Print
PANKOW CREATIVES We at PANKOW CREATIVES have a long standing relationship through the love of art, one of our first endeavours as a creative partnership bloomed while exhibiting, assisting and creating promotional materials for the Art.Number23 ‘Stimulus’ exhibition at the Greenhouse, Berlin, Germany. This is where the word ‘Pankow’ (the second largest borough residing within the city of Berlin) comes from, we adopted this name while considering a title for our company, since then we’ve had a mutual love for Berlin thus the word Pankow was used for our company and our creative business had begun.
Our company prides itself within the creative industries, fashioning an array of welldesigned packages and services such as: Art Direction, Production, Branding, Exhibitions, Graphics, Illustration, Photography and Publishing, all tailored to suit your professional needs.
As an artist-led company we are able to draw upon our artistic practices, providing our clients with a thoughtful and unique approach, providing our clients with strong concepts and visually alluring designs. Our extensive knowledge and expertise of visual language allow us to enable our clients to express their creative currency, via the utilisation of our creative practice.
We offer a free consultation on all our services, enabling our clients to avail a piece of mind and the upmost benefit from our creative intuition. Photographs: Left - Gemma Land. Right - Ravinder Surah.
twilight tunnel
Image Titles: Twilight Tunnel Year: 2017 Media: Digital Illustration
acknowledgments + Credits
PANKOW
CREATIVES
SIMON BURROWS PHOTOGRAPHIC
Aftermath is an annual exhibition staged by MFA students at Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with Nottingham Contemporary, funded by both Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary. About Nottingham Contemporary Nottingham Contemporary brings international art to an iconic building in the city centre. Designed by Stirling Prize-winning architects Caruso St John, it is one of the largest and most ambitious contemporary art spaces in the UK. It opened in 2009 with almost 1.5 million visitors to date. Nottingham Contemporary is supported using public funding by Arts Council England and regularly funded by Nottingham City Council Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB, 0115 948 9750 www.nottinghamcontemporary.org Nottingham Contemporary opening hours: Tue – Sat and Bank Holidays 10am– 6pm Sundays 11am – 5pm. Closed on Mondays (except for Bank Holidays). Free admission. About PANKOW CREATIVES Pankow Creatives are an online artist-led design company, Co-Founded by Gemma Land and Ravinder Surah mid 2017. Their company prides itself within the creative industries, fashioning an array of packages and services such as: Art Direction, Production, Branding, Exhibitions, Graphics, Illustration, Photography and Publishing, all tailored to suit your professional needs. www.pankowcreatives.com About Simon Burrows Photographic Simon Burrows is a Photographer based in Nottingham, UK. Burrows studies MA Photography at Nottingham Trent University, his research profile focuses on colour blind individuals, studying their difference in visual perception. Colour blind himself, Burrows challenges the contrast between non colour blind and colour blind people, creating awareness using visual methods of photography. www.blindcolour.co.uk
© Design, PANKOWCREATIVES, 2018