LONDON.- Pump House Gallery relaunches in April with The Grounds We Tread, a series of consecutive individual performative works and solo exhibitions that dynamically transform the Gallery and the spaces beyond. New commissions and existing works by Jiří Kovanda, Lloyd Corporation, Ilona Sagar and Cara Tolmie explore the fascination with tracking our health through technology; the manipulative power of live singing; amateur forms of advertising and announcement in public places; and the negotiation and use of public and private areas.
The Grounds We Tread exhibition leads a new programme of the same name by international and emerging contemporary artists including Lawrence Abu-Hamdan and Samara Scott responding to Battersea Park and the rapidly changing urban landscape of Wandsworth and Nine Elms. Exploring ideas of public space and intimacy, the programme also celebrates Pump House Gallery as a new contemporary art space for London. The Gallery is managed by Enable Leisure & Culture on behalf of Wandsworth Council, and the programme is supported by Arts Council England.
Jiří Kovanda (20 – 28 April) is best known for his pioneering performances in Prague during the Communist regime using his body to create disruptive public actions ranging from the bizarre to the barely noticeable, and often challenging social taboos. His best-known work, Kissing Through Glass (2007) at Tate Modern, allowed members of the public to kiss him – mouth to mouth - through a large glass window. Kovanda opens his exhibition at Pump House Gallery with a playful spontaneous performance, and new interventions comprising objects usually designed to hold something such as a plinth, photo frame and flagholder, but which are left empty and perceived invisible. Kovanda’s 1970s actions are also presented on the walls of the Gallery as unframed works, produced on the in house printer.
Lloyd Corporation (6-15 May) is a collaboration between artists Ali Eisa and Sebastian Lloyd Rees encompassing sculpture, installation, print and video. Their work explores the processes, objects and materials of industrial production, construction, interior design and commercial display in the contemporary urban environment. For The Grounds We Tread, they have assembled a group of artists, amateurs and enthusiasts through a diverse range of networks to represent the rapidly changing urban landscapes of Nine Elms and Battersea through media such as watercolour painting. Alongside the exhibition of these works, displayed in unexpected areas of the Gallery, is material gathered from a new classified advertising campaign initiated by the artists, and from their archive of classified adverts and flyposters.
Ilona Sagar (24-31 May) has a practice spanning performance, film and assemblage that responds to the social, historical and cultural contexts of occupied private and public space. For her new live performance and multimedia installation, Sagar draws on contemporary medical and neurological research and archival material relating to progressive medical, social and political experiments undertaken in the early twentieth century.
Cara Tolmie (8 – 19 June) brings The Grounds We Tread to a close with We Touch Talking the Hum, the artist’s long-term project investigating fundamental questions about what it means to sing live in front of others, and how the use of the voice as a rhetorical, seductive agent might be corrupted and re-configured through experimentation in performance making. For her installation, performance and workshop Tolmie extends her research towards consideration of the body that enunciates and the sounds that accompany this singing voice.
Ned McConnell, Exhibitions Curator for Pump House Gallery, said “The performative nature of the artistic practices featured in The Grounds We Tread takes on important ideas about public space, how we inhabit it with ourselves, our social relations, our languages, and our technologies. The public sphere is always governed in some way and this exhibition complicates our understanding of space, action and voice through its dynamic format.”
The Grounds We Tread also presents a series of In-Conversation events, performances and live music bringing together artists, academics and other cultural practitioners to explore the concepts presented in broader programme. Artist Rosalie Schweiker will be working with local residents in the Gallery’s Project Space.
A new website for Pump House Gallery launches in April 2016.
