Artist and Community Gardener
Tending...Waiting
DOING BETTER WITH WORSE - UGLY DUCK, London, UK
3rd March - 5th March 2023
March 2023
A path of soil connects a folding wooden house and a pond surrounded by soil and plastic purple flowers. Throughout the space dried flowers rooted in clay stand against the red light that floods the room.
‘Tending…Waiting’ is a durational piece that speaks of the restlessness and high velocity of a culture that prioritizes mass production over mental and physical well-being. Tending...Waiting traces the pressure for immediate result at the root of capitalist and exctractavist ways thinking and navigating the world. This performance is a visualisation of the exhaustion and frustration that comes with hearing bad news after another and seeming to feel like you're in a constant cycle of facing a dystopian future.
In the western world we have access to alot of things bc the work is being exported most things at our fingertips, strawberries when they are out of season, bananas from across seas, freshly cut flowers just days before they bloom and we are so removed from the process of growth and the patience that one learns from tending and nurturing the natural world which also links to our own emotional and physical journeys.
The house in this work is a direct reference to Peruvian Retablos which are portable wooden boxes that have been used by the Indigenous peoples of Ayachcho to depict cultural, religious and everyday events. Arriving in Peru as small portable altars used to evangelize the Indigenous population, this art form soon became a symbol of reclamation and a way to narrate stories imbued with Indigenous references and events recounted from and Indigenous perspective.
This work seemed very important in this time of rising tensions and violence inflicted against indigenous communities by the Peruvian State. In this way the work links back to the generational fight and resistance against oppressive colonial regimes that continue to take from local communities and grassroots organizations.
Viewers were invited to the space to speculate on the journey of the performer. I am interested in the ways we are able to spectate disaster from the sidelines and continue our lives with an underlying sense of fear and instability. However I am also interested in resiliance and our ability to get up and try again, a driv that is at the cenre of all life.
DOING BETTER WITH WORSE
Founded in 2018, A Particular Reality (APR) is an inter-institutional collective focussed on building creative learning environments upon values of anti-racism, care and collaboration. Formed by students, alumni, and educators from the Art Departments at Goldsmiths University of London, Kingston School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan and Middlesex University; APR is committed to providing a non-hierarchical space to support marginalised students and staff, within and beyond practice-based higher education.
The artists in this show have all, in some capacity, worked with APR undergraduate students tackling the large, unsaid questions that often go ignored in institutional learning.
Further reflecting on tese questions around self-advocation, self-protection and economic uncertainty, ‘DOING BETTER WITH WORSE’ is a freeform meditation on our tendency to turn towards speculative thinking to briefly circumvent precarity, uncertainty and burnout.
By dodging the constraints of the present and the real, these artists embellish/exaggerate/dress-up narratives around identity with folklore, mythology, pop-culture and science fiction. The result is a diverse selection of works that refuse to speak about institutional problems in institutional languages, pointedly preferring to create tongues of their own.
Participating Artists:
Marion Aschbacher
Hazel Blair
Christopher Bond
Lori-ann Burgess
Vittor Camilo
Johanna De Verdier
Leily Moghtader Mojdehi
Francesca Telling
Poster: Vittor Camilo
Text: Christopher Bond
Supported by: UGLY DUCK and Goldmsiths Exhbitions Hub
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‘Tending…Waiting’ is a durational piece that speaks of the restlessness and high velocity of a culture that prioritizes mass production over mental and physical well-being. Tending...Waiting traces the pressure for immediate result at the root of capitalist and exctractavist ways thinking and navigating the world. This performance is a visualisation of the exhaustion and frustration that comes with hearing bad news after another and seeming to feel like you're in a constant cycle of facing a dystopian future.
In the western world we have access to alot of things bc the work is being exported most things at our fingertips, strawberries when they are out of season, bananas from across seas, freshly cut flowers just days before they bloom and we are so removed from the process of growth and the patience that one learns from tending and nurturing the natural world which also links to our own emotional and physical journeys.
The house in this work is a direct reference to Peruvian Retablos which are portable wooden boxes that have been used by the Indigenous peoples of Ayachcho to depict cultural, religious and everyday events. Arriving in Peru as small portable altars used to evangelize the Indigenous population, this art form soon became a symbol of reclamation and a way to narrate stories imbued with Indigenous references and events recounted from and Indigenous perspective.
This work seemed very important in this time of rising tensions and violence inflicted against indigenous communities by the Peruvian State. In this way the work links back to the generational fight and resistance against oppressive colonial regimes that continue to take from local communities and grassroots organizations.
Viewers were invited to the space to speculate on the journey of the performer. I am interested in the ways we are able to spectate disaster from the sidelines and continue our lives with an underlying sense of fear and instability. However I am also interested in resiliance and our ability to get up and try again, a driv that is at the cenre of all life.
DOING BETTER WITH WORSE
Founded in 2018, A Particular Reality (APR) is an inter-institutional collective focussed on building creative learning environments upon values of anti-racism, care and collaboration. Formed by students, alumni, and educators from the Art Departments at Goldsmiths University of London, Kingston School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan and Middlesex University; APR is committed to providing a non-hierarchical space to support marginalised students and staff, within and beyond practice-based higher education.
The artists in this show have all, in some capacity, worked with APR undergraduate students tackling the large, unsaid questions that often go ignored in institutional learning.
Further reflecting on tese questions around self-advocation, self-protection and economic uncertainty, ‘DOING BETTER WITH WORSE’ is a freeform meditation on our tendency to turn towards speculative thinking to briefly circumvent precarity, uncertainty and burnout.
By dodging the constraints of the present and the real, these artists embellish/exaggerate/dress-up narratives around identity with folklore, mythology, pop-culture and science fiction. The result is a diverse selection of works that refuse to speak about institutional problems in institutional languages, pointedly preferring to create tongues of their own.
Participating Artists:
Marion Aschbacher
Hazel Blair
Christopher Bond
Lori-ann Burgess
Vittor Camilo
Johanna De Verdier
Leily Moghtader Mojdehi
Francesca Telling
Poster: Vittor Camilo
Text: Christopher Bond
Supported by: UGLY DUCK and Goldmsiths Exhbitions Hub
