Tag Archives: London

Portico Quartet Ensemble with Hannah Collins.
Terrain: The Earth Beneath My Feet.
Barbican Centre, London.
29 Sep 2022, 8pm.

 

 

Hannah Collins is collaborating with London-based instrumental group Portico Quartet on an audio-visual work which will be performed at the Barbican Centre.

 

“Mercury Prize nominated Portico Quartet and Turner Prize nominated artist Hannah Collins present the world premiere performance of their new audio-visual work ‘Terrain: The Earth Beneath My Feet’.

 

In this profound, collaborative audio-visual performance of ‘Terrain: The Earth Beneath My Feet’, Hannah Collins’ sensitive, mesmerizing images of Las Campanas Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile, find a gently resonant dialogue with Portico Quartet’s 2021 album ‘Terrain’, a body of work that represents one of the most complex and beautiful pieces the band have composed, shifting through different musical worlds with an insistent pulse and horizontal movement.”

 

 


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Screening of Sarmento’s work and a talk by the director

Bush House Lecture Theatre 1,

King’s College London

6.12.2019, 18-20h

 

A special screening of some of Julião Sarmento’s work that openly opposed the Salazarist state repression and the profound cultural conservatism of the era. The screening will be followed by a very special talk with the director himself chaired by Bruno Marques and Érica Faleiro Rodrigues.

 

Programme of films:

 

Legs (15*). Fixed frame shooting of a sequence centered on the bare pubis of a female body. A slow and sensual alternation of forward and backward leg movement repeats indefinitely.

Portugal 1975 Dir. Julião Sarmento 3´45´´

 

Copies (15*)

Two naked women face each other replicating self-directed gestures and caresses. Near the end, the director steps out of his voyeuristic shadow, to turn his hand to playing the exhibitionist.

Portugal 1976 Dir. Julião Sarmento 14´23´´

 

Faces (15*)

Close up of an endless kiss between two women, centered on their mouths and the movement of their tongues.

Portugal 1976 Dir. Julião Sarmento 44´22´´

 

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I will make up a song (desert entrance-1), 2018

 

Opening March 14th, 7 pm | Exhibition March – May 2019

 

Next Thursday, March 14th we will open the sixth exhibition by Hannah Collins at Galeria Joan Prats, where we will present her most recent work I will make up a song, 2018; along with The Fertile Forest, 2013-5 project and the photograph Family, 1988.

 

The title for this exhibition is a part of the title for Hannah Collins’s new film, I will make up a song and sing it in a theatre with the night air above my head, created with musician Duncan Bellamy, which will be shown at Fundació Tàpies next June.

 

I will make up a song talks about the work of the Egyptian Modernist architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989), who drew on traditional sustainable mud constructions to create new towns New Gurna and New Baris. Fathy tried to find a new way forward through sustainable practice, using natural earth materials, and to create a new context where a theatre would be a normal part of rural life in a country with ancient roots. His ideas have urgency today, as we look for a sustainable future. Through these images, Hannah Collins explores the relationship between human body, scale and history, and shows the modest but meaningful materials she encountered while making the work in the Egyptian desert.

 

Finding new ways forward is one of the central themes of Hannah Collins’s exhibition created at a time of global focus on the choices and forces at place in contemporary Western existence.

 

The Fertile Forest is a work that also deals with tradition and the need to establish new relationships with our environment. It is an ongoing project to document the way a tribal group understand the surrounding forest, which is in fact more like a garden as they use over a thousand plants for their everyday wellbeing. Hannah Collins spent a month with the Cofán tribe in the remote Colombian Amazon basin, photographing the plants according to their teachings. The texts accompanying the photographs are the result of Hannah Collins’s conversations with the leader of the tribe under the influence of yagé (ayahuasca). The mirrored vitrines contain gold mirror that reflects us back at ourselves through the plants.

 

The earliest Family is a black-and-white image of a group of silent speakers that were commonly used for street music, especially reggae, created by West Indian in London, but which were photographed in Hannah Collins’s studio.

 

The exhibition gives an anxious but simultaneously optimistic view of our times and our need to preserve knowledge and created bridges at a global scale. All the works focus on the act of communication and the desire for poetry and beauty. The work of Hannah Collins makes visible the need for the preservation of meaning and nature, both threatened by their invisibility.

 

 

Hannah Collins (London, 1956). From 1989 to 2010, she lived and worked in Barcelona, exhibiting at Galeria Joan Prats since 1992, and today lives between London and Almeria, Spain. In addition to having obtained the Fulbright scholarship and having been nominated for the 1993 Turner Prize, she has recently received the SPECTRUM 2015 International Photography Prize, awarded by the Foundation of the Lower Saxony, which included an exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, travelling to the Camden Art Centre in London and the Baltic Centre in Newcastle. Among other museums and art centres, she has exhibited at Centre Pompidou Paris; FRAC Bretagne; Fotomuseum Winterthur; Museo UNAL, Bogotá; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; MUDAM Luxembourg; Tate Modern, London; Seoul Museum of Art; VOX image contemporaine, Montreal; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Fundació La Caixa, Madrid and Barcelona; La Laboral, Gijón; Artium, Vitoria; CAC, Málaga.

 

For more information and images, please contact galeria@galeriajoanprats.com

The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), 2016-18

Serpentine Lake, London

18.6 – 23.9.2018

 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba 1958–2018

Serpentine Gallery, London

19.6 – 9.9.2018

 

 

Christo has created a temporary sculpture in Hyde Park, London. This is Christo’s first major public, outdoor work in the UK. The temporary sculpture coincides with an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, which includes sculptures, drawings, collages and photographs spanning more than 60 years. The sculpture and the exhibition both draw on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s history of using barrels to create works of art.

 

Since the late 1960s, Christo has sought a suitable site for a floating Mastaba. The temporary sculpture in Hyde Park consists of 7,506 horizontally stacked barrels on a floating platform in the Serpentine Lake. It is 20 meters high x 30 meters wide (at the 60° slanted walls) x 40 meters  long. The standard 55 gallon barrels, 59 x 88 cm, have been specifically fabricated and painted for this sculpture. The sides of the barrels, visible on the top and on the two slanted walls of the sculpture, are painted red and white. The ends of the barrels, visible on the two vertical walls, are different hues of red, blue, and mauve.

 

The sculpture’s floating platform is being made of high-density polyethylene cubes anchored to the lakebed with weighted anchors. A primary steel scaffolding frame was constructed on top of the platform and the barrels are attached to a scaffold sub structure. The total weight is 600 metric tons. The footprint of the sculpture takes up approximately 1% of the total surface area of the lake.

 

As with all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects,The London Mastaba, Serpentine Lake, Hyde Park, 2016-18 is being funded entirely through the sale of Christo’s original works of art. No public money is used for Christo’s projects and he does not accept sponsorship.

 

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daybreak

29.06 – 02.07.2017

Aslyum / AMP / Safehouses

 

Daybreak is an exciting project initiated by the RCA’s School of Fine Art to provide a forum for the practice-based researchers engaged in the School’s MPhil and PhD programme.  This is the first time the School’s student researchers have come together to work on an off-site project, working closely with each other, staff from the School with curatorial expertise and outside professionals.  The result; an exhibition, live event and research symposium, will happen over four days at the end of June and include contributions by over 40 research students.  

 

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