Stanley Picker Gallery

Launch Event Wednesday 10 May 5-8pm | All Welcome

*Extended Dates The exhibition reopens from 5-23 September as part of London Design Festival 2023 (details below)

Click here to download A World of Islands Exhibition Zine.

A World of Islands considers the movement of indigenous knowledge, practices, materials and people, and historical and current fabrications of tropical utopia and dystopia. Locating the ‘tropics’ as both a mythological and real place with shared colonial and ecological trauma but wildly divergent histories and cultures, the exhibition unpicks some of the clichés and relocates agency in the ‘tropical’ narrative.

This exhibition explores these themes in the context of one of the largest diasporic tropical populations, dispersed in over 100 countries through forced, government-sanctioned and voluntary movement across oceans. Here, A World of Islands brings together artistic perspectives and research on the Philippine archipelago, its climate, its people and their movement over seas and oceans.

Filipinos have played a disproportionate role in worldwide maritime trade, currently making up 20% of the international maritime workforce. The importance of the sea in a place where it makes up five times more space than land is explored through Derek Tumala’s work. The experience of contemporary Filipino life and diaspora is highlighted through artworks by Carol Anne McChrystal, Ronyel Compra, Alex Quicho and Stephanie Comilang that touch on memories, rituals and practices of home and community-making.

The exchange of plants and craft, building, food and medicinal knowledge during the period of the Manila-Acapulco Galleon trade between Mexico and the Philippines (1565 – 1815) had a significant impact on both places. Stanley Picker Fellow Ligaya Salazar’s project explores practices of ‘making home’ amongst Filipinos displaced by the galleon trade in coastal pacific Mexico through a collaboration with Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working in Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors.

Ronyel Compra is a visual artist who integrates the techniques used in local crafts production and trades into his practice as reflections of memories, history, and experiences of places and his hometown.

Carol Anne McChrystal is an artist whose materially-driven sculpture practice uses chemical processes and labor-intensive hand-making to explore the legacy of colonialism and trade, as well as the ways in which the climate catastrophe has compounded these histories of inequity.

Alex Quicho is a writer and artist in London. Her work focuses on multi-scalar violence and pleasure; affective experiences of technology; and resonances between pre-colonial spirituality and post-colonial futurity.

Ligaya Salazar is a curator focused on contemporary interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of design, art, craft and graphics. Her approach is shaped by an interest in how audiences can be positioned at the heart of curatorial practice, enabling a human-centred take on storytelling. Salazar was appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships in 2021.

Derek Tumala is a visual artist working with new emerging technologies, the moving image, industrial materials and objects. His practice revolves around the realms of science and nature meditating on the idea of interconnectedness.

Associated Events:

Extended Dates We are closed for the Summer break from Sat 15 July, and reopen A World of Islands from 5-23 September as part of London Design Festival 2023 with a special residency by Carol Anne McChrystal accompanying What Does a Design Residency Do? international forum staged in collaboration with IASPIS, Stockholm.

Residency: 9-19 September Ruined Cairn / Pinatubo Effect / Biak Na Bato by Carol Anne McChrystal is a mini-residency that will explore casting volcanic ash from the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo Philippines, as part of an ongoing series titled Sandstone Keepsake (Beneath the Paving Stones), in the Gallery’s Project Studio. Book free tickets via Eventbrite.

Online Salon: Pure Flow Thur 6 July 12:30-1:30pm Stanley Picker Fellow Ligaya Salazar in conversation with A World of Islands artists Alex Quicho and Derek Tumala to discuss their shared interest on water, climate and sovereignty.

Onsite Event: 27 June – 15 July & 5 – 23 September Accompanying A World of Islands, practitioner and educator at Kingston School of Art Angela Ford will present a Project Studio display Hemp, Earth + Politics and run a series of workshops exploring the relationships between design, nature, and foraging raw materials.

Workshop: Wed 28 June 12-3pm Earth Pigments: In this hands-on workshop, you will be introduced to the ancient craft of pigment making for paints, a primal method that ties us back to nature. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Workshop: Thurs 29 June 3:30-5pm Afterschool Children’s Botanical Plaster Casting: For children aged 7-11, this workshop will introduce the use of clay, plants, and plaster in the creation of a relief plaster cast tile. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Workshop: Sat 1 July 1:30-4:30pm Foraging and Cordage-making (wild string): This 3-hour workshop will introduce you to foraging for local invasive plants such as nettle, bramble, and dandelion. Book this free workshop via Eventbrite here.

Please Note: Gallery Closed Friday 7 & Saturday 8 April

Warning: Contains low and flashing lights and trip hazards. Live internet feed may include potentially offensive material.

The Cascades is a multi-channel installation that brings together an ongoing series of work by artist Daniel Shanken. The installation focuses on networks of information that run in the background of our lives, filtered and curated by intelligent algorithms that push bias and dissonance. 

Centering on the probing and prodding, dissecting and inverting, looping and prying of these networks and their manipulating algorithms, this project produces ongoing renderings of generative worlds, fortuitous narratives, animations, and objects, while considering their real-world impact and cannibalization of the natural environment. 

Incorporating live content feeds from multiple sources online such as YouTube videos and comments, internet radio, Google Image search, Reddit, and Twitch, the work builds an environment that fluctuates with incoming content scraped from the internet in real-time. Custom-trained machine learning algorithms respond to and alter the work, while offering insights through laser-projected text. Using randomness derived from physical sources such as radioactive decay and atmospheric noise, material is shuffled and displayed in unpredictable combinations that are never the same. This is in contrast to most search engines and hosting sites that control content and information through tailored interfaces that often exclude voices hidden in the noise.

The installation creates a spontaneous environment that allows viewers to enter through interfaces other than the normal internet screen space confronted on a daily basis. The work reflects the remnants of discarded technological production, oversaturated media landscapes, data centres, landfills, and mining tunnels. It draws on the intangible data-points, AI algorithms, and rendered objects often encountered in the periphery.

The Cascades was developed through research conducted during Shanken’s current PhD with the Contemporary Art Research Group (CARG) at Kingston University’s Centre for Practice Research in the Arts (CePRA). Shanken is due to publish a novel as a continuation of this project and his PhD.

Daniel Shanken is an artist working across disciplines and media. His practice explores the interplays between technology and cognition, examining their ongoing effects on the environment, consciousness, and culture. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Hong Kong Arts Centre, JCCAC in Hong Kong, Cloud Art Museum in Shanghai, ICA in London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery in London, CCA in Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA in Manchester, V Art Center in Shanghai, and Kiasma in Helsinki.

Bore Hole (2021) is a never-ending, procedurally generated hole with an internet browser at the bottom that only goes to a continuously refreshing Reddit “new” content page. The hole is littered with user-created 3D models downloaded from free hosting sites. A Geiger counter embedded in a granite-cased computer, influences the work through randomness created from the radioactive decay of the granite and particles in the natural environment.

Gaoler (2018-2023) is a video application that incessantly searches YouTube, randomly picking and playing videos while a walking figure traverses an endlessly generated desert. The figure is forced to read out snippets of comments and conversations happening under different user uploaded videos. Incoming video and text are mashed together in real-time reflecting the diversity and disparate nature of current platform users.

Machine Visions (2022) is laser projected text generated by a custom-trained Machine learning chatbot that is endlessly talking to itself. The chatbot was trained on texts and novels about the end of the world, technological breakdown, consciousness, and the singularity. The sentiment of the text influences elements of the other works in the space including lighting and search terms.

Internet Autosarcophagy (2019-2023) is a video application that continuously scrapes content from various search engines, audio streaming, and hosting sites, randomly dispersing that content within a live-generated environment. Sound, image, and text come in as fragments from different sources creating a disjointed and ephemeral space. At the centre of the program is an autonomous first-person shooter system that switches from a cell phone, displaying
incoming Twitch chat messages, to different weapons that initiate and react to the sentiment of the incoming information.

Flesh Projections (2022) are a series of GAN-generated (Generative Adversarial Networks) objects. A 3D-GAN was trained on thousands of 3D modelled and scanned hand tools and technologies from Palaeolithic stone tools to contemporary technologies such as cell phones and laptops. The 3D printed objects represent a cross section of the artifacts the GAN made while trying to recreate this human technological history. For this installation objects are buried in blackened sand and floating in the air creating a hierarchy based on imagined affordances.

Cinematic Garbage Dump (2023) is an AI generated wallpaper made from collaged parts of images created from the prompt “cinematic garbage dump”.

Exhibition Launch: Wednesday 16 November | 6pm-8.30pm

*Closed 20-31 Dec 2022 / Reopen 3 Jan 2023

At Home consists of four films which each explore a key theme of domesticity: shelter, identities, well-being and connectivity. Created by the artists, designers and researchers Martha Rosler, Noam Toran, Superflux, and Simone Niquille between 1989 and 2021, the films offer a critical reflection on the values and meanings of the home in the past, present and future.

The exhibition is the next step in an ongoing research project by Jana Scholze, Penny Sparke and Catharine Rossi, three members of Kingston University’s Modern Interiors Research Centre. It originated as At Home: Panorama de nos vies domestiques, an exhibition curated for the 12^th Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne (April to July 2022). Countering more widespread presentations of domesticity focused on consumerist visions or technological utopias, At Home instead addresses experiences of living in and creating a home, wherein exhibition visitors are as much the experts as the curators.

In particular, the films articulate growing concerns with the climate emergency, widespread inequality, the erosion of the boundary between the private and public self, and technological advances, and how these are affecting the domestic sphere. Conceived before Covid-19, researched during it, and exhibited in its aftermath, At Home also includes a reflection on the changing meaning of the home in light of the pandemic.

The exhibition invites all visitors – neighbours, artists, designers, architects, policy makers, students and staff – to join the curators in continuing their At Home research. Through the exhibition and accompanying programme it will explore ideas of shelter, identities, well-being and connectivity as core values of domestic life for humans and non-humans alike. At Home is also an opportunity to reflect on using exhibitions as research tools and what it means to bring an exhibition from one site to another.

Films:

Shelter: Martha Rosler, Housing is a Human Right, 1989/2017

Martha Rosler works in video, photography, text, installation, and performance. Her work focuses on the public sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment, especially as they affect women. Rosler has for many years produced works on war and the national security climate, connecting life at home with the conduct of war abroad, in which her photomontage series played a critical part. She has also published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and gentrification. A retrospective of her work has been shown internationally, and her writing is published widely in publications such as Artforum, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst. In 2012, she presented a new series of photographs, taken during her trip to Cuba in January 1981, and in November, she presented the Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at MoMA in New York. Her most recent publications include Culture Class (2013; Spanish trans.: Clase cultural. Arte y gentrificación, 2014), on artists and gentrification; Martha Rosler: Irrespective (2018), accompanying her survey show in New York; and La Dominación y lo cotidiano: ensayos y guiones (2019), a book of essays and scripts in translation. Rosler lives and works in Brooklyn.

Identities: Noam Toran, Desire Management, 2005

Noam Toran’s work involves the creation of intricate narratives developed as a means to disrupt hegemonic historiographies. Drawing from marginalised or neglected histories, Toran reflects upon the interrelations of memory, erasure, mythology, identity, and the essential force of storytelling as embodied in archives, film, literature, and performance. The work is materialised through dramatisations that take the form of installations, educational models, films, performances and scripts. Noam is currently working on his solo exhibition We Crave Blood for the Rawart Gallery in Tel Aviv (February – March 2023).

Wellbeing: Superflux, Mitigation of Shock, Singapore, 2019

Anab Jain studied filmmaking at the National Institute of Design before moving to London to gain her Masters at the Royal College of Art. In 2009, she co-founded Superflux with Jon Arden. She’s been awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Arts and is also the recipient of the Award of Excellence ICSID, UNESCO Digital Arts Award, and Grand Prix Geneva Human Rights Festival, as well as awards from Apple and the UK Government’s Innovation Department. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, V&A Museum, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China, Vitra Design Museum, and Tate Modern.She currently serves as Professor of Design Investigations at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. 

Born and educated in the UK, Jon Arden holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art. He leads the Studio’s conceptual and technical research projects. His work has been exhibited at the MoMA New York and V&A London on numerous occasions, and he has won prizes from UNESCO and New York’s Social Design Network. He has lectured at the Architectural Association London, MAD Faculty Genk, Belgium, and Kitchen Budapest Hungary. 

Connectivity: Simone C Niquille/Technoflesh, Homeschool, 2019

Simone C Niquille is a designer and researcher based in Amsterdam NL. Her practice Technoflesh investigates the representation of identity & the digitisation of biomass in the networked space of appearance. Her work has been exhibited internationally, most recently at HeK-Haus der Elektronischen Künste (2020), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019), La Gaite Lyrique (2019). She has published writing in Volume Magazine, AD Architecture and e-flux. She is Chief Information Officer at Design Academy Eindhoven. In 2016 she was Research Fellow of Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and is commissioned contributor to the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Niquille is recipient of the Pax Art Award 2020 and 2021/22 Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Center for Architecture. Currently she is investigating the architectural and bodily consequences of computer vision, researching the politics of synthetic training datasets.

Exhibition design by Plaid

Curated by Jana Scholze, Penny Sparke and Catharine Rossi

Dr Jana Scholze is a design curator and Associate Professor at the Kingston School of Art in London heading the MA Curating Contemporary Design in collaboration with the Design Museum. Her transdisciplinary research covers questions around formats of interaction and contemporary design practice engaging with society, technology and the environment. She is a Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum where she has been previously the Curator of Contemporary and Modern Furniture and Product Design working on acquisitions and exhibitions, such as What is Luxury? (2015). Publications include Medium Ausstellung (Transcript, 2004), Barber Osgerby Projects (Phaidon, 2017) and contributions to series such as Cultures of the Curatorial – Curatorial Things (Sternberg Press, 2019). She is on the advisory board of and peer reviewer for IDEA Journal.

Penny Sparke is Professor of Design History at Kingston University and the Director of the Modern Interiors Research Centre. Her research areas cover modern design, interiors, gender, identity, and nature, and her most important publications include An Introduction to Design and Culture, 1900 to the present (1986, 2004, 2013); Design in Context (1987); Electrical Appliances (1988); Italian Design from 1860 to the present (1989); The Plastics Age (1990); As Long as It’s Pink: The Sexual Politics of Taste (1995); Elsie de Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (2005); The Modern Interior (2008); and Nature Inside: Plants and Flowers in the Modern Interior (2021). 

Dr Catharine Rossi is Professor of Architecture at University for the Creative Arts Canterbury. Her research areas include contemporary design, post-war Italian design and architecture, craft, club culture, and feminism. Publications include Designing Craft in Italy: from Postwar to Postmodernism (MUP, 2015), and Post-Craft (Sternberg Press, 2022) and The Italian Avant-Garde: 1986 – 1976 (Sternberg Press, 2013), both edited with Professor Alex Coles. Exhibitions include Space Electronic: Then and Now (14^th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014) and the co-curated Night Fever: Designing Club Culture 1960 to Today (Vitra Design Museum, 2018). She is on the Advisory Board for the Journal of Modern Craft.

Originally commissioned by Cité du Design and Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne 2022

Public Events:

Online Salon – Wed 22 June 3-4:30pm Maeve Brennan discusses the broader context and implications of her collaboration with forensic archaeologists Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov. Watch a recording of this discussion online here.

Onsite Event – Wed 29 June 3-4:30pm Maeve Brennan in conversation about her current project and research-based practice with Kingston School of Art Professor Elizabeth Price. Watch a recording of this conversation online here.

illicitantquitiesnetwork.net

In 2014, 45 crates of looted antiquities were discovered at Geneva Freeport in a warehouse belonging to disgraced antiquities dealer Robin Symes. They contained tens of thousands of archaeological remnants worth around £7 million. Three of the crates were sent to forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis (Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies) and Dr Vinnie Norskov (Director of Aarhus Museum of Ancient Art) for research.

An Excavation consists of a new body of work derived from Maeve Brennan’s long-term research project The Goods. Carried out in collaboration with Tsirogiannis, the multidisciplinary project is concerned with the international traffic in looted antiquities. Brennan’s works trace the circulation of objects through layered temporalities, focusing on figures such as restorers, joyriders and smugglers whose material actions and practices tie them to wider networks, histories and economies. Brennan has an ongoing commitment to working slowly with people to allow complex narratives to form, attending to the thick and entangled nature of her chosen subjects.

Since 2018, Brennan has observed and documented Tsirogiannis’ investigations, mapping the illicit antiquities network from looters and smugglers to auction houses and museums. By some estimations, antiquities form the largest trafficking economy after drugs and weapons. Using data from police raids, Tsirogiannis has compiled a digital archive containing documentation of over 100,000 looted artefacts which he uses to identify objects of potentially illicit origin when they appear in auction houses, museums and galleries, often leading to the repatriation of objects.

Central to Brennan’s exhibition is a major new film commission An Excavation (2022). The film documents Tsirogiannis and Norskov’s investigation into a series of vases from the Geneva Freeport crates. Made in the 4th century BC by Apulian artisans, these vases remained buried in tombs for 2500 years before they were clandestinely excavated from their now irrecoverable contexts. The objects’ journeys through the hands of looters, smugglers, restorers and dealers are counterpointed by the hand-painted stories that adorn them. Made for burials, the vases depict scenes from the underworld – forensic and mythological narratives start to intertwine.

In 1995, illicit antiquities middleman Pasquale Camera was killed in a car crash. Inside his glove compartment, the Italian police force discovered a stack of photographs of looted antiquities. This evidence led to a series of raids during which the authorities discovered a hand-drawn diagram by Camera, indicating the routes of looted artefacts from tombaroli (tomb robbers) to international markets. This diagram was the basis for a large-scale criminal investigation into key figures within the network, including notorious dealers Giacomo Medici, Gianfranco Becchina and Robert Hecht. In The Glove Compartment (Renault 21) (2022) the internal cavity of Camera’s glovebox milled into a block of limestone, his casual hiding place made visible.

Taking Camera’s organigram as its starting point, Illicit Antiquities Network is an ambitious digital project, developed throughout Brennan’s Fellowship, which follows a series of artefacts through the trafficking chain, from looters to museums. The data from each case feeds a centralised map that visualises connections across time, location, individual and institution.

An Excavation continues Brennan’s interest in forms of repair and reparative histories. Her film The Drift (2017) focused on three figures preserving objects in contemporary Lebanon, mapping converging lines between protected ancient temples, smuggled antiquities and traded car parts. This led her to an interest in subsistence looting as a form of livelihood in ‘source’ countries sustained by a demand in ‘market’ countries. The exodus of cultural heritage through underground trafficking chains can be viewed as a continuation of colonial and imperial extraction. The actions of looters and launderers become part of a tangible material process that pulls at the distinction between licit and illicit cultural traffic. Ariella Azoulay writes of museums ‘For these institutions to be transformed or reformed, it is essential that looting be acknowledged as their infrastructure.’ The Goods aims to make this infrastructure visible, focusing on the patient and meticulous work of Tsirogiannis and others to hold institutions to account and make some small repairs to the damage done by an extractive history.

Maeve Brennan is an artist and filmmaker, based in London, appointed to the Stanley Picker Fellowships at Kingston University in 2019. Working with moving image, installation, sculpture and printed matter, her practice explores the political and historical resonance of material and place. Brennan is currently participating in British Art Show 9 and was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award 2021. Solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London; The Whitworth, University of Manchester; Spike Island, Bristol; Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art in Turku, Finland; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria and OUTPOST, Norwich. Her films have been screened internationally at festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sheffield Doc Fest and FILMADRID (Official Competition 2018). Brennan was a fellow of Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2013 -14) and was the recipient of the Jerwood/FVU Award 2018.

Thank you Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, Dr Vinnie Norskov, Museum of Ancient Art & Archaeology Aarhus, Toby Christian, Black Shuck, Ben Rivers, Ali Roche, David Falkner, Rebecca Moss, Faith McKie, Somerset House Studios, Alex Stillwell, Guillermo Rodriguez Lopez.

An Excavation (2022): Film Credits

A film by Maeve Brennan
With Dr Christos Tsirogiannis and Dr Vinnie Norskov

Producer: Ali Roche
Associate Producer: Victoria Tillotson
Cinematographer: Jamie Quantrill
Editor: Ariadna Fatjo-Vilas
Supervising Sound Editor: Tom Sedgwick
Colourist: Jason R Moffat
Score: Beatrice Dillon
Kanun Player: Konstantinos Glynos

Additional Percussion: Morgan Buckley
Assistant Camera: Frida Martinsen
Production Sound Mixer: Tom Sedgwick
Camera Equipment: SLV, Minitech
16mm Film Stock and Processing: Kodak Film Lab, London
Credits Design: Fraser Muggeridge Studio

With thanks to Anders Bjerggaard, Jack Brennan, Toby Christian, David Falkner, Eloise Hawser, Therese Henningsen, Faith McKie, Rebecca Moss, Imran Peretta, Philomene Pirecki, Paul Purgas, Sophie Richmond, Ben Rivers, Somerset House Studios and James Wreford.

Commissioned by Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University.

With support from Arts Council England and Museum of Ancient Art and Archaeology, Aarhus.

Illicit Antiquities Network (2022): Website Credits

Produced in collaboration with Dr Christos Tsirogiannis.

Built by Black Shuck and designed by Rory Gleeson.

With support from Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University; Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.