Tracing Elsewhere presents new work from Kingston School of Art’s MA Photography Course at Stanley Picker Gallery. Eleven artists from around the world explore themes such as the rights of nature, isolation, exile, collective anxiety, precarity, loss and becoming.
The show includes Shoug AlAhmed’s Devoured that centres on the social bonds brought about by shared feasts; a significant ritual and a binding force within the Arabic culture AlAhmed grew up in. Jacqueline Ennis-Cole activates archives alongside personal encounters. In her installation, Breathing Space, she weaves three core threads together into one primal narrative: the rights of nature, human rights, and corporate responsibility. Charlotte Hockton’s 12,184 miles reflects on her childhood adoption from China; having been found in the street by a policeman and taken to an orphanage and a new family life in London. The work invites us to explore the gap between seeing and knowing – two distinct lives – before and after like two pigments flowing into each other across lines and borders. Jared Krauss, a compulsive photographer, accumulates archives of images from his everyday movement across both rural and urban geographical areas. In Waking A Late Sleeping Utopian, he traces several journeys through lead pencil, redacted journal entries and photographs. In The Shame of Being Afraid Ingrid Kvamstø’ invites us to view the streets of East London at night, using everyday scenes to represent human traits of disruption and anxiety as the social infrastructure of the city seems to fall apart at a crucial time of change. Matt Marsh’s Unmaking A Grey Person mixes charcoal drawing, photographs and scrawled verses that explore themes of marginalisation and exile. In Through The Wound Chen Meng’s intricate wounded plant forms are a mediation between traditional Chinese medicine and the wanton mistreatment of the planet. In The Map, Xuan Lei revisits the hospital of her childhood where she lived with her mother by torchlight. For Lei, born, old, sick and dead are not vague or unmentioned stories but potent visuals of life and death. Steven Liu Relationships is concerned with the complex interrelationships between loved ones stemming from the breakdown of his parent’s marriage and divorce. Athoiba Soubam retraces his family history and the loss of his great grandmother in Japan Lan, known in English as the Battle of Imphal (1944). With no family photographs or paintings of his great-grandmother, Soubam’s explores the British archives of the battle, and through family fingerprints and interviews constructs a portrait of his great-grandmother. Finally, in We Drift Like Floaters Yi-mei Zheng interweaves photography, animation, 4D cinema and sound in response to collective anxieties about the future of our planet.
The MA Photography teaching team commented, “We have been privileged to see this group of artists develop their ideas into significant bodies of work that explore a diverse range of subjects – all of which reverberate strongly beyond the personal”
Exhibiting Artists
Chen Meng / Jared Krauss / Shoug AlAhmed / Athoiba Soubam / Matt Marsh / Yimei Zheng / Steven Liu / Charlotte Hockton / Xuan Lei / Jacqueline Ennis-Cole / Ingrid Hjellbakk Kvamstø
MA Photography at Kingston School of Art encourages dialogue, dynamic enquiry and reflection on the social, technological, political and familial through the potential of expanded photography. Photography has been a key discipline for exploration and documentation within Kingston School of Art since the turn of the twentieth century.
For further information on this exhibition, please contact Dr Judy Price, MA Photography Course Leader, Kingston School of Art: j.price@kingston.ac.uk