LONDON.- HackelBury is currently hosting the group exhibition Medium & Memory curated by art historian and contemporary art writer Griselda Pollock. Medium & Memory stages four conversations pairing eight artists from different countries, generations, ethnicities, and personal histories, who all share a deep engagement with the materiality of their media—painting, drawing, moving image, photography and photo-collage—while focussing on memory—personal, historical, cultural, suppressed, discovered, restored.
Putting a still resonant, modernist medium-consciousness into tension with a post-modern sense of responsibility to ‘the burden of history’, these artists explore an ethical dimension in contemporary art—a refusal to forget—and the potential of contemporary art for aesthetic transformation of traumatic legacies of war, famine, genocide, colonialism and de-industrialization as well as the memory-effacing effects of the digital age.
The Conversations
I
Christine Taylor Patten works with a crowquill pen and black ink on paper creating abstract, meditative drawings that explore time, movement and change by a focus on the turning of a plane. Created by the accumulation of tiny strokes—the movement of her wrist making a single mark— her drawings build up densities that actually reveal light as her strokes block out the whiteness of the paper. This is evident in her monumental project micro/macro (begun in 1999) that pairs seven large and one monumental drawings (from 2 to 7 metres), all titled with reference to John Lennon’s dream for a peaceful world in his song ‘Imagine‘, with 2000 micro drawings, one for each year of the two millennia of the Common Era, and related tangents, each only 2.5 cm x 2.5 cm in size. This massive drawing project reveals infinite possibilities for this simple protocol of seeing where each drawing takes her, from the geometric to the organic, from the formal to the hilarious, as they unexpectedly discover what the scientists and mathematicians who write about her work suggest echoes their understanding of the unplanned unfolding of the cosmos.
HackelBury will exhibit Imagine 3 and 9 Tangents from the micro/macro series and paired drawings inspired by a phrase from Jane Austen.
Benjamin Hannavy Cousen has developed an abstract protocol for painting that materialises, and thus makes visible, the ‘colour unconscious’ we hardly notice in literature as seen in The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch, 1978) and 1984 #2 (George Orwell, 1949) and works from Asimov and Virginia Woolf. Systematically mapping the sequence of colour words occurring in his chosen text, the artist creates paintings by laying down a line of paint for each colour in the sequence of its appearance across the book. The paintings thus reveal the unseen, but, for the readers, unconsciously registered, coloured imaginary of major works of fiction, while the resulting physical build-up of his paint application creates an unexpected dimensionality where painting takes on almost sculptural form.
II
Judith Tucker works at the intersection of social history, personal memory, ecology and place through drawing and painting, often working concurrently with a poet sharing her concerns. In her early work, she explored inter-generationally-transmitted trauma of her family’s displacement and forced migration. Her recent paintings and drawings focus on a British history through ‘Fitties’, historically the holiday cottages and gardens, used by Northern working class communities, on the Lincolnshire coast and plotlands, themselves tragically at risk from climate change and environmental degradation. Alongside her atmospheric night paintings of Fitties, for this exhibition she has produced a series of new drawings working from archival photographs from the 1930s of the workers’ holiday cottages and caravans, thus layering, in different media, memories of memories while speaking to the present.
Asel Kadyrkhanova combines installation, embroidery, moving image, sound and drawing to confront what is termed ‘the post-Soviet condition’ of many, radically different societies, all emerging after 1989 from the repressed trauma and unexamined legacies of both Imperial Russian colonization and mid- twentieth century Stalinist totalitarianism. As a post-generation artist, she explores the paradox of the unspoken weight and cultural absence of the memory of a mass famine and the deporations to the gulags in Kazakhstan during the 1930s. In her hand-drawn animated film All the Dreams We Dream (2017-2020), the artist draws on childhood memories of travelling through the famine-ridden steppes that she has discovered in rare memoirs referencing the famine. Making drawings from their words exposes the artist herself to the traumatic horror she is bringing into visibility. Evocatively animated, the film takes us too on a journey over the deserted steppes in snowy moonlight, entering emptied yurts to encounter shocking, almost indecipherable chimeras created by starvation, clothed now in the compassion of her ‘aesthetic wit(h)nessing’.
III
Sutapa Biswas, born in India and arriving in Britain aged 3, registers another journey through the medium of film in Lumen (2021) from which HackelBury exhibits independently created, framed photographic works. While still a student in the early 1980s, she became a leading figure in the Black Artists Movement in Britain. As a conceptual artist deeply engaged in critical rethinking the legacies of colonialism and endemic racism, her work addresses in several media the entanglements of class, race, gender and memory. Her film, Lumen (2021), imaginatively retraces the journey made by her mother, with her children, to the UK from traumatized post-Partition India, evoking her sense of loss and displacement when arriving in a virulently racist Britain. Set in an Elizabethan mansion, reminding us of the material gains Europe acquired through colonialism, and featuring a single woman delivering a shakespearean monologue (played by Natasha Patel), Biswas layers evocatively filmed footage of her return to India today with archive footage and photographs of British colonial rule in India. Also in the show is her haunting short film about love and loss, punctured by exploding birds and the sound of children’s laughter, Magnesium Bird (2004). It mourns the death and transforms memories of the artist’s father, a political intellectual whose forced exile from post-independence India led the family to its relocation in Britain.
Bracha L. Ettinger works through a past she unconsciously inherited in transgenerational transmission by transforming a selection of archival images of world wars and genocide using a new medium she developed—an interrupted photocopying process that is then touched with paint. As a result, her works on papers bear only a ghostly trace ‘in ash’ of rare photographic documents of scenes of mass murder during the Shoah whose newly created surface she then colours in her present with a brush to ‘clothe’ the traumatic freight of the image and the past with aesthetic wit(h)ness and fascinance—her terms for a prolonged compassionate re-gazing and openness to being with, and refusing to abandon, the pain of the past. HackelBury will show Matrix Borderline Case no.3 (1990) and the trilogy Nichsapha (Yearning)– Lapsus (1991). Fragmentary papers from the interrupted photocopy process are assembled into glass- mounted standing ‘figures’, which cast their imageless shadow upon the wall. One ‘document’ to which Ettinger has repeatedly returned, is a rare record of one mass murder of women and children in Ukraine, under German occupation in 1942, painfully resonating with the violence against women and children occurring worldwide, in war and in Ukraine today. Ettinger writes: ‘Art not only evokes memory but it creates memory for the future’.
IV
In Revised Edition American artist Coral Woodbury uses sumi ink to paint portraits of women artists (from all eras) over the pages of her own copy of an infamous art history textbook, H. W. Janson, A History of Art, which included no women artists in its many editions from 1963 to 1986. Image by image, Woodbury restores the erased cultural memory of creative women, matched to the historical images on the page selected for each artist’s re-inscription into an expanded and inclusive history of art. Also included in Coral Woodbury’s Revised Edition, and in this show, is US-American artist Joanne Leonard who is one of the first women included in a revised edition of H.W. Janson’s A History of Art in 1986 with her work, Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal (1972).
Joanne Leonard uses photo-collage to create ‘intimate documentary’. HackelBury will exhibit selections from Leonard’s on-going project, Newspaper Diary (2006 - ) that involves another kind of memory work—a pairing of press photographs from newspapers with images from art history and other illustrated books that remind us of older media, soon to be archaic memories, such as printed newspapers and hardcopy books. Leonard’s newspaper diarying performs a commentary on personal associations and on cultural memory traversing the space between the museum and the news and now digital media revealing a shared visual imaginary—the cultural store of images and image-memories—that shape the way we understand our present in pre-coded image repertoires of bodies and scenarios. Her daily practice of connecting images from the news with paintings and historical images from books also serve to mark time in her own life. Their creation enables her personally ‘to register the day’s
About Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock has curated exhibitions at Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam (1980), University of Leeds Gallery (1978, 1999, 2006, 2015, 2019-20), The Drawing Centre, London (2006), Freud Museum, London (2009), and as part of 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015). She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, most recently with a special focus on issues or trauma and cultural memory. Recent publications include Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory (London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University Press, 2022), and co-edited with Max Silverman, Concentrationary Art: Jean Cayrol, the Lazarean and the Everyday in Post-war Film, Literature, Music and the Visual Arts (Berghahn, 2020), her chapter focussing on the recent work of Scottish contemporary sound artist Susan Philipsz.
Artists
Benjamin Hannavy Cousen is a painter and a writer based in the North of England. He produces paintings that reveal the ‘colour unconscious’ he traces in literature. With his customised syringe, Cousen applies paint line by line, following the order of the colours mentioned in the book. He thus reveals a perceptual dimension in literature while also creating a physical tapestry of colour through medium and application that produces, unanticipated, a sculptural dimension from the materiality of paint.
Since 2015, Hannavy Cousen has been represented by Merville Galleries and had solo exhibitions at The Mall Galleries, Gallery 8, The London Art Fair, The British Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery, and the Corn Exchange, Leeds. He has a PhD in Cultural Studies on the Concentrationary Imaginary from the University of Leeds and has published widely on visual culture, from Picasso to the film Pink Floyd The Wall. He currently works from a studio in Otley just north of Leeds.
Christine Taylor Patten... Living and working in Taos, New Mexico, Christine Taylor Patten was originally a sculptor and a pioneer of laser art before turning to drawing as her major arena. Working with a crowquill pen and ink on paper, Patten makes drawings that range from the micro (2.5 x 2.5 cm) to the macro (2.3 x 7.3 m). Her ongoing project, a series of Peace drawings, creates an image for the word “peace” in 27 languages, each evolving from the preceding drawing in exploration of the infinite possibilities she discovers in relation to the turning plane.
Patten has exhibited regularly in the United States and was selected for the 14th Istanbul Biennial, Saltwater curated by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev in 2015. She has had solo shows the Drawing Center in New York curated by Catherine de Zegher (2007), The Drawing Galllery, London (2007) The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds (2007-08) and Leyden Gallery, London (2015), as well as recent more exhibitions in Albuquerque, Sante Fe and Taos, New Mexico.
Asel Kadyrkhanova... Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan and working across drawing, embroidery, photography, installation, moving image and animation, Asel Kadyrkhanova explores the signs and sites of unrecognized trauma and missing cultural memory in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. She investigates the impact on the ‘post-generation’ of missing narratives and images in post-totalitarian societies of events such as the Stalin-inflicted famines. Having studied fine art in Kazakhstan and Britain, she is currently the first postdoctoral artist in residence at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her choice of media and process explores embodiment, haptic visuality, place and language (especially working visually with the Kazakh, Arabic, Russian and European alphabets). Many of her works offer strong visual metaphors to address lasting Soviet and colonial legacies while also seeking to make visible aspects of pre-Soviet Kazakh society, language and culture. Her work has been exhibited in Hong Kong, Moscow, Baku, Istanbul, Almaty, London, Leeds, Wiesbaden and she was included in Focus Kazakhstan: Post-nomadic Mind at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London (2018) and Documenta 15 (2022).
Judith Tucker... Working with oil painting and large-scale drawing, Judith Tucker explores the affective freight in often- overlooked social histories, personal memory, geography and the meanings of place. Rendering the everyday uncanny through colour and composition, Tucker extends the long tradition of landscape art by her mastery of both colour in oil paint and the textured possibilities of black and white drawing by which she evokes, unsettles, and induces a response both to environment and to precarity of populations on the margins.
Tucker has been awarded the Jackson’s Painting Prize and shortlisted for the Westmorland Landscape Prize exhibition and the New Light Prize. Other exhibition venues include Arthouse1 and Collyer Bristow London and many regional galleries throughout the UK, and further afield in Iasi, Romania, Gdansk, Poland, Brno, Czech Republic, Vienna, Austria, Minneapolis and Virginia USA and Yantai, Nanjing and Tianjin in China.
Coral Woodbury... The work of Boston-based artist Coral Woodbury evokes memory and absence, the layering of time, and the poetry of transformation. Drawings and oil paintings reverence the missing and mark encounters with artistic and personal histories. In her Revised Edition series, Woodbury brings this focus to the long line of women artists written out of official art history. H.W. Janson’s A History of Art, first published in 1962, omitted women entirely from its first 29 printings, even as it became the primary textbook in shaping an exclusionary Western canon and understanding of art. Portraits of women artists inked over pages torn from Janson’s myopic volume make visible those who were excised from record. Deeply researched and intentionally placed, Woodbury sets up resonant and dissonant visual dialogues between images of women as artists and images of art they studied and confronted. Across her bodies of work, Woodbury explores the power of art to reveal the invisible, express the ineffable, and hold the ephemeral. She has exhibited and participated in fairs, biennials, and residencies from New York to London, Kathmandu to Cuba, Italy to Ireland. Recent honours include Cill Rialaig residency; International Mother Art Prize, Finalist; and exhibition at Newport Art Museum. Her work is held in public and private collections, including Katrin Bellinger Collection and The Women’s Art Collection, University of Cambridge.
Joanne Leonard is an US-American artist renowned for her photographic work and photo-collage that explore the overlooked spaces, machines, conditions and moments within women’s working and parenting lives. Leonard’s early work was hailed by American feminist critic Lucy Lippard in her landmark collection From the Center (1976). Renowned for her daring reflections on heterosexual desire and its tragedies in the series Dreams and Nightmares, as well as images of the strange and often disturbing beauty of modern domestic appliances and kitchen spaces, daringly addressing pregnancy loss as well as fear for the safety of children in a world of nuclear weaponry, she has confronted the transformation of the minds and beings of those afflicted with dementia with its critical loss of memory and the ruin of the threads of shared memory that sustain us.
Leonard also created a book form with Being in Pictures: An Intimate Photo Memoir (2008). Leonard’s photographs have been collected by and featured in exhibitions at major museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography, all in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Harry Ransome Center, Austin, Texas. They have been both collected and are being exhibited (until Autumn 2023) by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Sutapa Biswas... Born in Santiniketan, India and growing up in Britain, Sutapa Biswas is a conceptual artist working with drawing, photography, performance, film, and installation. Her work explores both the challenging legacies of colonialism and the postcolonial renegotiation of the unrecognised dialogues between European and Indian art and culture. A major figure in Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, Biswas was selected for the exhibition, The Thin Black Line, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1985 curated by Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid. Biswas’s work has been regularly exhibited internationally and in Britain most recently in the Tate Liverpool and a double retrospective at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 2022-23. Her works are part of the Cartwright Hall Collection of British Asian Art, Tate Britain, London and the University of Leeds Gallery.
Bracha L. Ettinger is an international visual artist, feminist theorist, psychoanalyst and philosopher. She works across painting, drawing, assemblage, scannography, notebooks and video. Her artistic practice has generated an original reconceptualisation of subjectivity, aesthetics and ethics which she terms the Matrixial.
Bracha L. Ettinger’s work has appeared in prominent exhibitions, biennales and events around the world, including a solo exhibition of her notebooks at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2021); Espressioni: the Proposition at Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2020-2021); Psychic Wounds, The Warehouse, Dallas (2020); Eurydice-Pieta, Muzeum Slaskie, Katowice (2017), Bracha L. Ettinger: Medusa – Eurydice, Museo Leopoldo Flores, Univ. Autonóma del Estado de México, Toluca, Mexico, and Museum of City of St Petersburg, (2013), Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona (2010); Freud Museum, London (2009); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (2000); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (1995); MoMA, Oxford (1993) and Centre Pompidou (1990 and 1996). Her work has also been shown in solo presentations at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2018 and as part of Carolyn Christov Bakargiev’s Saltwater, the 14h Istanbul Biennial in 2015. Her work was included in Frieze 2016 and is currently on exhibition in Artists at War at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, where where a collection of her notebooks has recently been acquired.
HackelBury
Medium & Memory: Curated by Griselda Pollock
September 7th, 2023 - November 21st, 2023
