The Muse
Gallery & Studio Residency Competition Maiada Abaud Kelvin Atmadibrata Marie Aimée Fattouche José García Oliva Shir Handelsman Camilla Hanney Louis Loveless Naira Mushtaq Catriona Robertson Jessica Wetherly
2021
Edition VII January 2021 Editors Damian Rayne Gosia Malawska
About... Whats on
3................................................................Maiada Abaud 4........................................................ Kelvin Atmadibrata 5...................................................Marie Aimée Fattouche 6............................................................José García Oliva 7...........................................................Shir Handelsman 8..............................................................Camilla Hanney 9................................................................Louis Loveless 10............................... .............................Naira Mushtaq 11.............................. .......................Catriona Robertson 12.............................. ............................Jessica Wetherly
Welcome to this year’s residency competition. We’re proud to be working alongside ten successful applicants to deliver the show in early 2021 (dates to be confirmed). We must congratulate all participants for their flexibility and tenacity over the past months – all will be exhibiting. The residency is at the core of our organisation and was established to provide a grace period of six-months; time for graduate artists to build practice and professional development – begin the transition from academia to the professional world. The opportunity encompasses experiential insights into all facets of life as an independent artist; invigilation, curation, studio practice, sales & marketing and extensive opportunities for community networking – essential to build relationships for life as a professional. As a result of the award, three to four artists work on site; we host two group shows and the opportunity to work alongside industry professionals set on delivering first-hand experience and full time support.
Welcome to the smallest gallery on planet earth… an annexed space curated by a full spectrum of arts professionals. Throughout the year, visit us for new work (albeit one piece) from the best of contemporary visual artists working in London. Our events and outdoor openings are every two months with occasional live performances from spoken word artists and street musicians. To book or browse go to:
www.thebox.earth
We’ll look forward to seeing you at The Muse for the beginning of the 2021 residency program in the not too distant future. In the meantime, garlic and ginger like there is no tomorrow… The Muse was established in 2003 as an artist-led organisation, supporting both gallery and studio elements. Our gallery is situated in the heart of North Kensington, amongst the Georgian houses of Portobello Market. We host an annual residency programme with subsidised studio space and further show opportunities for recent graduates. Throughout the year we open our doors to artists, curating the space to present a balance of emerging and established professionals.In 2020 we are proud to support three new residents and a diverse list of national and international artists. We hope you enjoy a collection of work in this periodical; hopefully collectable images, whether online or printed — accessible art for our readership.
The Muse in 2021 Residency 2021 Competition
The MUSE Gallery (UK Charity for the arts No.1162300) 269, Portobello Rd. London W11 1LR www.themuseat269.com info@themuseat269.com Twitter: Muse_Gallery Instagram: Muse_at_269
Yuichiro Kikuma Artist in Residence 2019
Claudia Boese Jane Frederick Gosia Lapsa-Malawska Mary Romer
Paul Smith
Maiada Aboud
Maiada Aboud, Ascension, Live performance act for the camera, medium: video - possible also as a print,
Award winning, versatile, committed educator and artist with 17 years experience in art, education, solution implementation and leadership in small to worldwide teams/environments; leads efforts to develop creativity through art innovative approaches to complex contemporary topics at all organizational levels.
Ph.D. in Performance, Sheffield Hallam Institute of art, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield. 2016 Masters degree with Honors of Letters, Coventry University, Coventry. 2008 B.A. in Art with Honors in the College of Letters, Haifa University, Israel. 2006 B.A in Criminology Psychology with Honors of Letters, Bar Ilan University, Israel 2003 SELECTED EXHIBITIONS Solo EXHIBITIONS Manjam Gallery- Haifa Israel 2018 ‘After the last sky’, festival opening, Berlin 2016 ‘We’ art festival, Jerusalem, Israel 2013 ‘The Space’ Program Unit 4- Coventry 2012 SIA Gallery – Sheffield Hallam University 2011
GROUP EXHIBITIONS Recall, Reflect, Return- Khalil Skakini Cultural Center 2018 Queer Fun, London 2017 Maiada Aboud | 3 Qalandiya International, People Of The Sea, Ramallah, Palestine 2016 Walking On Thin Ice ,Beit Hagefen art gallery –Haifa, Israel 2016 Qalandia International : Manam ‘dreams and belief’ in Haifa, Israel 2014 The Industry Of Forgetting, Leeds 2012 Bodies of crisis, Millburn Studio, University of Warwick 2012 Luxury Goods Festival, courtuard theatre, London 2012 Crestfallen: Beit Hagefen Art Gallery, Haifa- Israel 2012 Sommer Contemporary Art Gallery, Tel Aviv 2011 Moment Exhibition, Coventry 2008 The Thing About Machine art festival, Coventry 2008
Kelvin Atmadibrata
Kelvin Atmadibrata (b.1988, Jakarta, Indonesia) is the first recipient of Ivan Ladislav Galeta Prize, awarded by Academy of Arts in Osijek for his touring performance, Forcing Hyacinth in Meounarodno studentsko bijenale, Zagreb, Croatia. The awarded work has also been presented in performance and fringe festivals in thirteen cities around United Kingdom and Europe since its London premier in October 2018. He is also the finalist of the national Indonesian Art Award in 2015 followed by Bandung Contemporary Art Award in 2017. Kelvin completed his Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Interactive Media from School of Art, Design and Media in Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and has been practicing, exhibiting and participating in exhibitions and festivals since 2010. In 2017 he established Sepersepuluh, a performance-focused gallery in Jakarta, Indonesia which currently focuses as nomadic curatorial, collaborative and investigational project since he moved to London in 2018. His works have been collected and presented at festivals and exhibitions in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, Bangladesh, India, Australia, Crotia, Greece, Latvia, Hungary,Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland, United Kingdom and United States of America. In 2020, he graduated with Master of Art in Contemporary Art Practice (Performance) from Royal College of Art, London, United Kingdom. With the endorsement from Arts Council England, he is currently based in between Jakarta and London. Kelvin Atmadibrata recruits superpowers awakened by puberty and adolescent fantasy. Equipped by shonen characters, kohai hierarchy and macho ero-kawaii, he often personifies power and strength into partially canon and fan fiction antiheroes to contest the masculine and erotica in Southeast Asia. He works primarily with performances, often accompanied by and translated into drawings, mixed media collages and objects compiled as installations. Approached as bricolages, Kelvin translates narratives and recreates personifications based on RPGs (Role-playing video games) theories and pop mythologies. As an expansion of his post graduate study, he is developing the language of queer abstraction and minimalist erotica in his illustration of the mecha and transhumanist fantasy. As an apprentice tattooist, he has also been experimenting on the process of image markings on skin as a continuation of his attraction to living sculptures, breathing mannequins and bodies as pedestals.
Marie Aimée Fattouche (b. 1991, Paris, France) Fattouche’s research emerges from her attraction to structural mechanics: mental, bodily and environmental. Between repair and improvement, a minor dysfunction to breakdown, a precarious impulse to stability, the mechanics of movement implies a margin of uncertainty. Without fracture of the line, the leg or the thought, there can’t be any pivoting possibilities. Her assemblages take inspiration from her Egyptian descent and her childhood in Paris. Her work actively questions themes such as femininity, visual narratives and beliefs systems. After completing her MA in Fine Art in 2016 at Chelsea College of Arts London, Fattouche was granted the Mercers’ Arts Award. In 2017, as one of the winning artists of the Red Mansion Art Prize, she was invited to spend one month’s residency in Beijing. Her work was exhibited at the Hockney Gallery, Royal College of Arts London, in 2018. In 2019, she was honoured to be part of the artists’ shortlist for the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award at Standpoint Gallery London. Fattouche lives and works in Pantin.
José García Oliva (Caracas, 1995) In my practice, what I am continually observing is the collision of identity, place and labour, as all these themes I have myself experienced since I arrived in Europe in 2013. These interrelationships are explored from personal observations to a broader spectrum of perspectives. Taking into account, socio-political context; the living colony’s ashes — and its hierarchical echo embedded in our contemporary society. My practice is research-led and situated. An essential part of my research process, and sometimes my starting point is conversations/dialogues. As opposed to interviews, conversations are two-way streams where the personal and public can meet, cross and mingle. It is a crucial part that helps set ethical boundaries for my projects. My work becomes about these conversations and their translations. In my process, I take into account the commons, the site/time specificity and the audience. These are what at the end will shape the Final outcome; and not the other way around. Some of my main projects have been participatory performance, installation, digital intervention, print and drawing. To sum up, the approach of my practice aspires to raise awareness through visual confrontations and site-specific interactive platform where participation and collective antagonism attempt to activate the public sphere. The aim is to stimulate non-existent conversations and evoke empathic actions that amplify marginalised voices, reveal invisible labour and unveil stories hidden in the backstage of social constructions (society of the spectacle). I see the artist as an active member of society, more than a mere observer, his role is to question, agitate and make.
Education MA Visual Communication (Distinction) – Royal College of Art, London BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class)– Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid Selected Group Exhibition Fountain of Hygiene, The Design Museum, London. Next Generation, Please – Bozar, Brussels. WIP show, Royal College of Art, London. Anti-Promo, Bussey Building, London. Conversations, Arlington House, London. Via Art Prize, Embassy of Brazil, London. Neonorte, Exposed Arts Projects, London. Typography Singularity, Courtyard Gallery, London. Comand, Control, Communicative, Walmer Yard Cultural Centre, London. Brexibition, Courtyard Gallery, London. Brexibition, Dyson Gallery, London. Native Instinct, The Cause, London. Control and Nature, Centro Cultural Isabel de Farnesio, Madrid. Emerging Artists, Espacio para el Arte, Madrid. Selected Awards The Augustus Martin Prize, Innovative use of print – Royal College of Art, London DIY – Live Art Development Agency (LADA), London Image of the year 2020 – Next Generation, Please. Bozar, Brussels Society Prize (Window Cleaner Society) – RCA Student’s Union, London People’s Choice Award – VIA Arts Prize. Embassy of Brazil, London
Shir Handelsman
Shir Handelsman is a multidisciplinary artist, with a strong background in music, playing, composing, and teaching. His studio work involves video art, film, sculpture, drawing, installation and photography. In all music takes a significant part. In his practice, he research the connections between sound and visual image and explores the mechanics and dynamics of interpersonal intimacy. He tries to challenge the junction point of humans and sounds, and the presence of sound in all the mediums he uses. He interferes and manipulates images, shows broken apparatuses, out of order sound devices, and uses absurd situations as a base of his works. He examines human patterns, narratives, and mechanisms of intimate relationships, through the search of complex encounters between human subjects and sounds. One of his main goals is to explore the fragility of the image and to find human flaws by challenging the viewer’s visual and optical perceptions. As a part of his view of sound, rhythm and music as visual materials, he is always drawn to creating collaborations with sound designers, music producers, singers and musicians. He is intrigued by the possibility of using sound as a tool, material, theme, and mechanism, through which he can reveal humorous, surrealistic, contradictive, grotesque perspectives and new aspects of the human narratives in his works. These narratives are selected from their connection to a particular sound, a thought, movement or memory of sound, as an initial stimulation for the creation of an artwork. Seemingly trivial and everyday stories, life experiences and personal traumas alongside historical and universal myths, become grandiose, timed, orchestrated, and musically performed in his works. Often, the characters starring in these spectacles are people who are not used to be in the spotlight, acting as performers and musicians. Observing the mechanisms of sound production, focusing on the act of singing, and his interest in musical instruments as objects of investigation, are all embodiments of his constant attraction to the world of stage and performance, which he knew very well in his early life. Through the practices of documenting, directing and placing daily situations in artificial positions, he attempts to recreate and re-experience this world, which belongs to his history and identity, within his artistic present. Solo / Duo Exhibitions World, good night, with Marc Aschenbrenner, Art-Claims-Impulse Gallery, Berlin, Germany Selected Group Exhibitions The Crown Cinema, Hansen House, Jerusalem, Israel La Totale, Studio Orta - Les Moulins, France Power Play 2020: Invisible lines, The Arts House at The Old Parliament, Singapore Liminal Pavilion, Bangkok Biennial, Thailand 27th Slavonian Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts Osijek, Croatia International Video Art Festival Now&After, Contemporary Art Center Winzavod, Moscow, Russia The Biennial of Arts and Design, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel The London Group Open, Cello Factory Gallery, London, UK Charlottenborg Forårsudstilling, Kunsthal Charlottenborg Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark Awards and Grants Grand Prix – 27th Slavonian Biennial, Museum of Fine Arts, Osijek, Croatia Best Experimental Film Award Winner, Budapest Independent Film Festival, Hungary Excellence Grant Recipient from the America-Israel Cultural Foundation
Camilla Hanney
Camilla Hanney (b. 1992) is an Irish artist living and working in London. She is a Graduate of Goldsmiths University where she studied the Masters of Fine Art programme (2017-2019) and also Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) where she graduated with a first class BA honours degree in Visual Arts Practice (2015). In 2014 and 2015 her work was selected for showcasing at the RDS student art awards exhibition in Dublin. She was the recipient of the Ormond Studios Recent Graduate Award in 2015 which culminated in a solo show. Her exhibition, Resurrecting Monuments to Moral Degradation, marked the end of her 2016/17 residency at A4 Sounds, an artist-run studio and gallery space with a particular focus on socially engaged art forms. Since moving to London, her work has been exhibited by a diverse range of galleries including the South London Gallery in conjunction with Bloomberg New Contemporaries, No. 20 Arts and The Rosenfeld Gallery. Camilla is the 2019/20 recipient of the Sarabande foundation studio bursary. She was granted the UK Young artist of the year runner up award at its inaugural award ceremony which was held at the Saatchi . She received the ‘Committee’s Choice’ prize at ‘Exceptional’ an exhibition of recent graduate work at Collyer Bristow Gallery and was recently recipient of the zealous: Sculpture stories prize. Her work has been featured in articles by elephant magazine, wallpapermag, Showstudio and Harpers Bazaar. Working through ceramics, sculpture and installation Camilla’s practice explores themes of time, sexuality, cultural identity and the corporeal, often referencing the body in both humorous and challenging ways. By subverting traditional, genteel crafts she attempts to transgress and contemplate conventional modes of femininity, deconstructing archaic identities and rebuilding new figures from detritus of the past. By materialising the familiar in an unfamiliar context her work stimulates our ability to rethink our relationship towards objects, threatening the natural order and toying with the tensions that lie between beauty and repulsion, curiosity and discomfort, desire and disgust. Goldsmiths University of London - Masters of Fine Art 2017/2019 ● Institute of Art Design and Technology (IADT), Dun Laoghaire, Ireland - Graduated with a first class honours degree in Visual Arts Practice 2011/2015
Louis Loveless
I am a multi-disciplinary artist and collage is at the core of my practice, it works as the main idea and image generator and starts my chain of questioning. I am currently working on a painting project which aims to disrupt traditions in oil paintings using the language of collage, technology and diagrams. The paintings vary in size from thirty centimetres to six metres. A pattern of interlocking geometric and non-geometric shapes of colour and mark-making form the background in which smaller images are interwoven. Some of the images overlap and disrupt each other whilst others sit alone in large areas of space but are all connected to one another in differing ways. The imagery includes references to the medical, the mystical and the gothic. The visual devices of scientific diagrams are used to dissect topics that are unscientific, such as conspiracy theories, religion and the paranormal. The compositions of the works are influenced by the structure of neural network diagrams and the language of forensic investigations. Many of the images that appear in the collages and paintings are sourced whilst trawling through strange corners of the internet and they are presented in ways that attempt to open up discussion on the way in which the internet is used by specific groups and the influence it has on certain aspects of contemporary society. In creating these works I am researching and thinking about the layers of consciousness discussed in psychoanalysis, the anxieties of the digital age and ideas of existential dread.
Royal Drawing School Foundation Year Exhibition Trinity Buoy Wharf, 2015 “Herding Cats” Group Exhibition AVA Gallery, 2017 “Spare Blems” Group Exhibition AVA Gallery, 2017 “Time Team” An Exhibition of Bronzes, Group Exhibition AVA Gallery, 2017 “Victim of the Arts” Group Exhibition, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, 2019 “Not for the Faint Arted” Group Auction The Nunnery Gallery, 2019 “Data Fatigue” Solo Show E5 Process, 2020
Naira Mushtaq My practice is focused on history, memory, and social commentary stemming from a desire to understand grief and memory and how memories are formed as affect. What happens to the memories as time goes by; time plays a fundamental role in wearing down these memories of our experiences; they diverge, they mold, evolve, or dissipate- such is the play of time. Our memories deceive us, pliable, and ever-evolving. We are left with fragments of truth, distorting records of our making. My practice examines these questions by looking at the socio-political and cultural context. In most instances, this comparison’s backdrop is my home country of Pakistan - the concerns under item are broader. Which memory is being remembered, who is it being remembered by, and the context of remembrance. How one memory merges with another, the multiplicity and singularity of memory, what narratives we tell, what we choose to remember, and what is the value of the narratives that we choose to remember if at all. Drawing from these areas of interest and I examine memory as a form of the impalpable archive while the tangible photograph or sourced materials aid to its inaccuracy, a palimpsest of truths and half-truths. My work comments on more than loss and memory; it talks about exile and longing and the constant state of displacement. The fate of many resting in the hands and on the whim of those in power and the realization that dissent is always met with erasure. 2017– 2019 University of the Arts London: Central Saint Martins MA Fine Art – Distinction-Vice Chancellor International Scholar 2009 – 2013 National College of Arts Bachelors of Fine Arts (Painting) summa cum laude 2006 – 2008 Kinnaird College For women Intermediate in Interdisciplinary arts.
Catriona Robertson
Catriona Robertson is a British and Scottish artist born in 1987. She grew up in Frimley, Surrey then moved to London to do her Foundation at Chelsea College of Art and has since continued to live and work in London. Catriona graduated from Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art in 2010 and completed her Masters in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in 2019. Catriona was selected as international artist for a residency with PRAKSIS Oslo, Norway in 2018, received the Emerging Artist Award by the British Council Germany in 2019 to undertake research at the Liebermann Villa in Berlin, Germany and was also selected artist in residence at the MERZ gallery in Sanquhar, supported by Creative Scotland with a solo exhibition from JulySeptember 2019. In January 2020 Catriona was selected for a 6 week studio residency at Standpoint Gallery supported by the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award culminating in a final presentation of work, ‘A Sculpture of Site, an Object of play’. In summer 2020 she was in residence at the Koppel Project Campus, the old Central Saint Martins building at Southampton Row in London during July-September and she was recently commissioned by the Proposition Studios to create an installation as part of Terra Nexus in South London in October. My work explores architecture and the monumental; ruins of buildings, void spaces interwoven with the fast changing rising concrete landscape and urban geology. Working site-responsively I use collected detritus materials making and unmaking the work in the same space, in a performative interaction between the object audience and site. These monolithic assemblages take over a space involuntarily, often trying to hide or squeeze themselves into the voids to get out of the room or the window that they are growing too big for. The amalgamated cast surfaces reveal layers of repurposed construction site waste, plastic packaging, newspaper, metal, cardboard, Ikea bags, amazon packaging, that become the aggregate of a stone-like surface as a sculptural collage in an architectural assemblage. These are set with cement, concrete, plaster, clay and paper-pulp forming an imprint of a synthetic fossilised sediment. The unfinishedness of these materials suggests a temporality and fragility of their synthetic making, juxtaposed with their everlasting imprint on the environment as a re-imagined marble or stone surface. This draws to question what new plasticised deep time materials that humans are creating with layers of landfill, concrete and toxic chemicals, what materials are the new monuments of the future made of, pliable, plastic, concrete?
Jessica Wetherly My practice reflects a fascination with both science and symbolism examining how we experience the world and how the traces of past and future realities intersect. My work presents creatures in curious and surreal landscapes evoking questions of agency as we face the ecological and climate breakdown. The work observes the ecology, culture, and spirituality of the ordinary stories of people and places and the way they converge into folklore and science fiction. Using a playful range of everyday materials I build worlds that investigate the blindness of anthropocentric society, confronting the indeterminable future, not only for ourselves but for all living things. A training in figurative sculpture forms the foundation to her practice with traditional sculpture techniques of modelling, moulding and casting. Making by hand has become critical to my practise in a time where the duality of physical and virtual spaces define our reality. For the Muse Residency exhibition I am presenting ‘The Hangmen’ a virtual surrender to the suspended animation we have experienced during the pandemic. A body is held between the flattened cut out pixels of a 2D digital collage whilst mercurial sculptures of bats hang as symbols of the upside down, I wanted to capture this moment of reflection through a symbol of sacrifice and of dormancy as we enter a liminal space between ourselves and our digital avatar. Jessica Wetherly is a London based sculptor, graduated from the Royal College of Art in Sculpture 2019 with a fellowship from University of Texas, Austin 2018. Jessica became a QEST Scholar in 2015, her work has been shown nationally and internationally with her first solo show at The Visual Art Centre in Austin, USA. She was selected as the Winner of the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize 2019 and for the 2020 Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors. Last year she led a climate justice residency in Goa with Wild Biyoo and had two solo shows at Blackbox UCA Farnham and at Korai Project Space in Nicosia, Cyprus after her 2 month residency. She also won the international residency award for BilbaoArte 2020. Recent exhibitions include Ancient Deities at Arusha Gallery, ONE with Subsidiary Projects and San Mai Gallery and Emergency at Aspex Gallery.
Education 2017-19 Royal College of Art MA Sculpture Battersea, London 2009-13 The Art Academy Fine Art Diploma, London 2008-09 Central Saint Martins Foundation in Art and Design Contextual Practice.