Exhibition Launch: Wednesday 25 September | 6pm-8.30pm
t h e H O L D is an exhibition by the artists’ group We Are Publication (WAP) featuring contributions from over 50 artists. It consists of posters, a soundscape, a hand-woven carpet, and a series of live events all set within an expansive sculptural display structure occupying the gallery space.
The poster is a key production site for WAP and provides an important working-tool for collective visual and conceptual dialogue. Contributed materials are grouped and regrouped, with salient conversations between component parts gradually taking hold. At the Stanley Picker Gallery,this process of contingent reassembling is accentuated through a multiplicity of spliced and overlapped poster material.
The exhibition’s primary structure is formed from steel decking of the type commonly used for theatrical stage and exhibition design; its modular character mirrors WAP’s own combinatory approach to artistic production. Suggestive of a schematic mountain-scape, the structure grips and scales the gallery’s own vertiginous architecture, encouraging metaphoric ascents, descents and transversal movement.
Preoccupations with mountainous landscapes are further taken up by t h e H O L D’s soundscape whose indeterminate atmospheres take their cue from the secluded alpine sanatorium described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924). Individual sonic contributions are here re-imagined as if circulating within the spaces of a remote mountain refuge, where acoustic fragments pass and mingle via a series of rest-cures, breakfasts, luncheons and dinners, eventually to disperse in slumber.
Part home-furnishing, part-collage,a custom-made hand woven rug was central to WAP’s Notes on a Carpet project between 2017-18. The carpet itself re-alights here, as well as in the form of live-stream video documentation of one of its previous manifestations.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, t h e H O L D will host a series of live events with key performances taking place on the 6th of November and the 4th of December.
t h e H O L D features contributions from Sadegh Aleahmad, Jonathan Allen, Holly Antrum, Bill Balaskas, Sarah Bennett, George Charman, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Ilsa Colsell, Craig Cooper, Edward Dorrian, Volker Eichelmann, Abbe Fletcher, Adam Gillam, Keira Greene, Melissa Gordon, Bruce Haines, Felicity Hammond, Mark Harris, Ayano Hattori, John Hughes, James Irwin, Maureen de Jager, Gareth Jones, Simon Josebury, Marianne Keating, Dean Kenning, Lau Chak Kwong, John Lawrence, Bill Leslie, Anna Lucas, Stine Ljungdalh, Katy Macleod, Rachel Mader, Russell Miller, Christian Newby, Louis Nixon, Rupert Norfolk, Tom O’Dea, Alex Pollard, Elizabeth Price, Mónica Rivas Velásquez, Joey Ryken, Daniel Shanken, Andrea Stokes, Stephen Sutcliffe, Charlotte Warne Thomas, Andy Tam, Erika Tan, Maryam Tafakory, Mandy Ure, Sebastian Utzni, Roman Vasseur, Mark Aerial Waller, Steven Warwick, Matt Williams
We Are Publication aims to test innovative forms of contemporary art publishing. Originating at Kingston School of Art’s Contemporary Art Research Centre in 2014, the group consists of a changing constituency of current and past PhD candidates, staff members and invited contributors who share a sense of the possibilities inherent in collaborative research. We Are Publication is a shape-shifting laboratory. Its multi-layered publishing experiments relay the group’s interactions and exchanges. In flux and iterative, the group’s configuration as well as its outputs, signal divergent approaches to jointly conducted research.
The group has produced speculative publications in the form of a launch event (ICA, London, 2014), a 5-minute video (Stanley Picker Gallery, 2015), the 60-minute radio broadcast Diagram of an Hour (Resonance FM, London, 2016) and a vinyl record documenting the broadcast event (Curved Pressing, 2017). Between 2017 and 2018 We Are Publication produced Notes on a Carpet, a project that took the shape of a hand woven rug. In 2018 the carpet was presented alongside a series of readings and performances at Five Years, London, Black Tower Projects, London, Focal Point Gallery’s Unit Twenty-One, Southend-on-Sea and the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery. Earlier in 2019 We Are Publicationpresented the exhibition We.Are.Cut.Up. at Pratt Institute, New York. The We.Are.Cut.Upsoundscape has been transmitted as part of Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow in May and will feature on Art Licks Weekend radio station, run in partnership with TACO! and RTM from 17–20th October 2019.