The Arnolfini gallery in Bristol has just announced its programme for the first part of 2020!!
Two internationally renowned female artists, Angelica Mesiti and Amak Mahmoodian, who will come after the experience of 'Still I Rise', a large exhibition on feminisms, gender and resistance.
I've had the chance to meet Angelica and to listen to Amak recently, amazing prospects ahead! And more writing soon :).
Details here:
ASSEMBLY – ANGELICA MESITI
Saturday, 18th January 2020 to Sunday, 26th April 2020, 11:00 to 18:00
Open Tuesday - Sunday, closed on Mondays.
Free
Open Tuesday - Sunday, closed on Mondays.
Free
An immersive video installation exploring a new democracy of movement, poetry, and song.
“At a time when the inhabitants of this planet are more mobile than ever before, non-verbal forms of creativity can facilitate profound interactions between strangers. This is the beating heart of Angelica Mesiti’s work. With great sensitivity, she has portrayed the talent and individuality of various members of migrant and refugee communities via performances of rare beauty.” – Jennifer Higgie for Frieze.
Angelica Mesiti’s three-channel video installation opens with the ‘Michela’, a 19th century machine modelled on a piano keyboard and used in the Italian senate for official parliamentary reporting, to ensure transparency within the democratic process. Here, Mesiti has re-purposed the Michela to translate an abstract musical score – a lilting thread of stops and starts, taken up by a shifting ensemble of musicians; zaffe drummers, Iranian santūr, choral ensembles, and dancers – a community of multiple ancestries that gather, grow, disassemble, and reunite. In ASSEMBLY, this communal gathering is a means for making those with authority recognise the collective power of the people.
“Through both the metaphor of translation and the act itself, I am exploring the very human and increasingly urgent need we have to assemble in a physical way, in a physical space, in these complex times,” – Angelica Mesiti
ASSEMBLY originally formed part of an internationally acclaimed presentation at the Australian National Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. ASSEMBLY begins as an evolving set of translations from the written word to stenographic codes then music, and performance. Filmed in the Senate chambers of Italy and Australia, the three screens of ASSEMBLY travel through the corridors, meeting rooms and parliaments of government while performers, representing a multitude of ancestries, gather, disassemble and re-unite, demonstrating the strength and creativity of a plural community.
Angelica Mesiti’s ASSEMBLY lays out a series of foundational arguments for our Winter/Spring 2020 programme – that communication is difficult and requires an ongoing effort of clarification; that communities are ever-changing, with members joining and falling away constantly; that this rotation and change means the project of society is never fixed and must always be responsive; and that harmony is hard-fought, never guaranteed, and – in fact – in order to resist stasis, requires the risk of new sounds and new provocation.
ASSEMBLY was commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts on the occasion of the 58th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia, courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Australia and Galerie Allen, Paris.
Angelica Mesiti (b. 1976) lives and works between Paris and Sydney. She has previously held solo exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo Paris, MAXXI Rome, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, O Space, Aarhus, Williams College Museum of Art Massachusetts, and Nikolaj Kunsthal Copenhagen. Her work is held in national and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, FRAC Franche-Compté France, and Kadist Art Foundation Paris/San Francisco. ASSEMBLY was presented at Biennale, Venice in 2019. Angelica Mesiti is represented in Australia by Anna Schwartz Gallery and in Paris by Galerie Allen.
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ZANJIR – AMAK MAHMOODIAN
Saturday, 18th January 2020 to Sunday, 22nd March 2020, 11:00 to 18:00
Open Tuesday - Sunday, closed on Mondays.
Free
Amak Mahmoodian’s Zanjir (Translation: “chain”) presents a body of photographs that cross great distances – reaching through history to bring the earliest images of Iranian photography into the present, across oceans to invite Mahmoodian’s family and friends; and across the border between life and death.
In 2004, Mahmoodian visited the Golestan museum and undertook an archival research project lasting two years. The Golestan Archives are located in central Tehran, which was once a home for Qajars, the kings’ wives, Harem women, and their relatives. Mahmoodian uses selected historical photographs as masks, asking her loved ones to hold the prints in front of them, framing her own kingdom and centering the sorrow of separation she feels for them as she lives and works three thousand miles away.
Still
in front of him
(his Camera)
The power that keeps her still
is not inward
She
sitting on a chair
her hair
clipped to her scarf.Amak Mahmoodian, excerpt from Zanjir
The images will be surrounded by fragments of an imagined conversation – between Amak, and Princess Taj al-Saltanah, an Iranian princess who lived at the end of the 19th century. Considered a trailblazer for women’s rights in 19th century Iran, she defied her family and government and advocated for equality and democracy. In al-Saltanah, Mahmoodian has found a mirror, and in each other, these women find the opportunity to be vulnerable; ruminating on their individual experiences of family, distance, powerlessness, yearning, and hope.
Amak Mahmoodian (b. 1980) is a photographer born in Shiraz and lives in Bristol, UK. In 2015, Mahmoodian completed a practice-based doctorate in photography at the University of South Wales, having previously studied at the Art University of Tehran. The artist’s work questions Western notions of identity, expressing personal stories that pertain to wider social issues which draw on her experiences in the Middle East, Asia and the West. Her previous project, Shenasnameh, has been widely exhibited internationally and the accompanying artist photobook won many awards and critical acclaim in publications as diverse as Time Magazine, Foam Magazine, and the Guardian.
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And here: https://arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/
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I've been chosen as the writer in residence as the Arnolfini art gallery, Bristol, to create a body of texts along their exhibition, 'Still I Rise' (September - December 2019). The main themes are feminisms, gender and resistance.
'Still I Rise' – Writing for the Arnolfini:
Here is the first text:
Episode I - The Stories Women Carry
https://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/2019/12/still-i-rise-writing-for-arnolfini.html
And the second:
Episode II - Women’s and Men’s Voices
http://melissa-on-the-road.blogspot.com/2019/12/writing-around-still-i-rise-episode-2.html
Episode III to come soon.
And Episode IV later in January, once these two exhibitions have opened.
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