Curators’ Series 12: The Season of Cartesian Weeping

Curated by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot

at DRAF, Great Titchfield Street

30 October–8 December 2019
Image description: an overall installation view of Johanna Hedva’s Failed Poet. A projector sits on the metal tiled floor of the white gallery projecting the text and images of Failed Poet onto a white wall. On the left, a pair of black headphones are hanging on the wall that play audio descriptions of the images projected onto the wall to enable people to access the work in different ways.
Image description: There are three works installed in a white gallery space with a metal tiled floor. There are two posters that are the astrological charts for Simone Weil and Robin Finck and one handwritten poster containing the handwritten definition of the word ‘Yield’. These are all made by Johanna Hedva. There is a model of Raven Row’s gallery space atop metal legs that has a small TV screen playing a video. Black headphones are balanced on the model’s metal legs. This work is made by the collective East London Cable.

Johanna Hedva, Reading is Yielding, 2019. Centre: Reading is Yielding, 2019. Right: East London Cable, untitled, 2019.

Courtesy the artists. Photo: Damian Griffiths
Image description: Stood atop black metal legs is a maquette produced by the collective East London Cable. It is a model of Raven Row’s gallery space. Inside the model gallery space, a small TV screen is playing a video. Black headphones are balanced on the model's metal legs. On the left of the image, a yellow A3 poster hangs on the wall, containing a handwritten definition of the word ‘Yield’ by Johanna Hedva.

Johanna Hedva, Reading is Yielding, 2019 and East London Cable, untitled, 2019.

Photo: Damian Griffiths

The group exhibition, The Season of Cartesian Weeping is the twelfth edition of the Curators’ Series, a platform to support independent curators, duos and organisations to develop and deliver thematic exhibitions with newly commissioned works. DRAF invites curatorial duo Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot who in turn invited five artist-collectives to explore the tools and protocols of how they self-organise with a focus on how our bodies and languages play a part in resisting oppression. The organisations are East London Cable, -f-r-i-e-n-d-s- with Mark Aerial Waller, OFFSHORE, Parrhesiades, who invited Johanna Hedva to produce a project across its four sites, and Am Nuden Da, who will launch the book Let’s Not Dispute The Useless (Rome, 2019).

The curators would like to extend their thanks to Anne Boyer for engaging with their project and kindly loaning them the title for the exhibition.

Image description: vinyl text applied on a white wall. The text is shaped as an organisational chart. The text details the schedule of the activities that happened in previous OFFSHORE events, including the time of events and their content.

OFFSHORE, OFFSHORE IN KINGSTON ROTA, 2019.

Courtesy the artists. Photo: Damian Griffiths.
Image description: On the left is the work Window cover presented by -f-r-i-e-n-d-s, a large canvas with green and white stripes. The green colour in the centre of the canvas has faded from the sun. From a distance, you might think the work is made of only one large canvas. However, as you get closer to the work you discover that the canvas is made of two parts: one canvas measuring approximately 1 metre in length and 2.5 metres in height and another canvas measuring approximately 2 metres by 2 metres. Hung high on the top right is a clock, which was used by OFFSHORE in previous events.

-f-r-i-e-n-d-s, Window cover, 2010–2019 and OFFSHORE, KEEPER OF SPACE AND TIME'S TOOL.

Courtesy the artists. Photo: Damian Griffiths

Public Programme

On 8 November, Johanna Hedva will deliver a lecture: ‘They’re Really Close to My Body: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and Their Resident Mystic Robin Finck.’

On 4 December, DRAF will host the book launch of Am Nuden Da, Let’s Not Dispute The Useless published by NERO, Rome, 2019.

Supported by DRAF Galleries Circle.

This programme is kindly supported by the Goethe Institut, Arts Council England, Arcadia Missa, The White Review.

Installation images

Image description: There are four works installed in a white gallery space with a metal tiled floor. Johanna Hedva's two posters that are the astrological charts for Simone Weil and Robin Finck are visible. Two pairs of black headphones are hanging on a wall that play an audio reading of the Simone Weil astrological chart. A projector sits on the floor projecting Johanna Hedva's work 'Failed Poet' 2015, next to it there are another pair of black headphones hanging on the wall that play audio image descriptions for the projected work. Lastly there is a model of Raven Row's gallery space atop metal legs that has a small TV screen playing a video. Black headphones are balanced on the model's metal legs. This work is made by the collective East London Cable.

Installation view of Curators’ Series 12. The Season of Cartesian Weeping. By Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, 2019.

Photo: Damian Griffiths

Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot

Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot work collaboratively with artists to produce text, exhibitions and live events. Together they have started non-profit galleries in both London and Berlin and have curated exhibitions in public institutions, project spaces and commercial galleries across London and internationally.

Hana Noorali

Hana Noorali co-founded RUN gallery in 2007, a non-profit project space and curatorial collective active until 2011. She curated Lisson Presents at Lisson Gallery, London from 2017-2018 and from 2017 -2019 she wrote, produced and presented the podcast series Lisson ON AIR. In 2018 Hana edited a monograph on the work of artist and Benedictine Monk, Dom Sylvester Houédard. Its release coincided with an exhibition of his work at Lisson Gallery, New York that she co-curated with Matt O’Dell. Hana has been a Visiting Tutor at Goldsmiths University and Chelsea College of Arts.

Lynton Talbot

Lynton Talbot is the founding director of Parrhesiades, a multi-platform project space for artists who work with language either written, spoken or otherwise performed. Lynton also writes specifically with artists and for exhibitions as a form of curatorial practice. He holds academic posts at Chelsea College of Arts and Kings College London in their curatorial departments and works within Tate Public Programmes to deliver ‘Museum Curating Now.’ He is also a sometime participant in OFFSHORE, an itinerant performance company and pedagogical structure, initiated by Cally Spooner in 2017.

Am Nuden Da

Am Nuden Da is a London based artist collective comprised of Adam Gibbons, Lewis Ronald and Jesper List Thomsen. Active as a group since 2008 their practice moves between the guises of artist, publisher, commissioner and curator. Frequently they collaborate with and host other artists through their projects. Just as often, they are invited to exhibit as an artist using the alias Am Nuden Da, under which they have participated in numerous group and solo shows both nationally and internationally.

East London Cable

East London Cable is Aoibheann Greenan, Dan Marre, Eve Stainton, Florence Peake, Jos Bitelli, Louis Brown, Sung Tieu and Wojciech Kosma. Since early 2018 the collective has been producing, platforming and commissioning moving image and performance works under the umbrella of ‘TV.’ Drawing from a wide range of sources including 70’s/80’s public access television which foregrounded local content and issues, ELC considers how live-to-digital and streaming technologies can enrich the contemporary production and consumption of this media. Furthermore, the collective is exploring the potential of the TV studio operating as a locus for community-building and knowledge exchange; hosting live events, screenings, panel discussions, workshops, and providing technical support to multiple groups and individuals. The collective’s curatorial outcomes manifest as a televisual series titled ELC TV Dinners. The patchwork event format of ELC TV Dinners emulates the eclecticism of channel-hopping. This preceded digital streaming and has largely vanished in our current media climate that is dominated by global corporations presenting homogeneity under the guise of choice. Since forming, collaborators and clients have included Goldsmiths University and Michelle Williams Gamaker, Harold Offeh, Healing Justice London, Science Museum, Stuart Hall Foundation, Sung Im Her, This Is Tomorrow and Voices That Shake!

-f-r-i-e-n-d-s-

-f-r-i-e-n-d-s- is a collaborative project and gallery space of sorts that began in Brussels in 2015. -f-r-i-e-n-d-s- is interested in its own invisibility, ambiguity and active forms of de-authoring and chooses not to provide biographical information or a CV. For The Season of Cartesian Weeping, they will be presenting some Wayward Cannon ephemera and related material as a set of reorganised physical architectures. The Wayward Canon was an artist-led platform for event-based interventions in cinematic practices founded in 2001 by Mark Aerial Waller.

Johanna Hedva

Johanna Hedva is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. They are the author of the novel, On Hell (Sator Press, 2018). Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Their fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Triple Canopy, The White Review, Black Warrior Review, and anthologized in GenderFail and Asian American Literary Review. Their essay ‘Sick Woman Theory,’ published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages. Their album The Sun and the Moon was released in March 2019. Two of its tracks were played on the Moon. In 2019, they’ve been touring Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a drone metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual.

OFFSHORE

OFFSHORE is an itinerant performance company, laboratory and pedagogical structure. Its aim is to draft new vocabulary and terms of how to organise, work and perform. Arriving from literature, theatre, and a messy, unrequited love affair with philosophy, OFFSHORE sits somewhere between a school for embodied knowledge, an engine, an alibi, a backroom, a rehearsal and some deliberate, unguaranteed, social plumbing. OFFSHORE is probably best described simply as an organisational structure. It enables a number of persons, some of whom will have met before, some of whom will not have met to maintain a state of rehearsal, over a number of days, in public. Comprised of a growing number of performers, academics, writers, scientists, psychologists, economists and philosophers, OFFSHORE has been information since 2017, when it was initiated by Cally Spooner. Her role in the project now continues as the OFFSHORE ACCOUNTANT, ALIBI BROKER, and LEGIBILITY COORDINATOR. OFFSHORE was born in 2017 through an initial grant from Corpus, an international network for commissioning performance-related work, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. A funded exhibition and event opportunity at REDCAT first set the stage for testing ideas. Among Corpus’ partnering institutions, the Playground Festival (STUK arts centre and M Museum) in Leuven and Bulegoa z/b in Bilbao then acted as generous hosts for research and rehearsals. The Stanley Picker Fellowship for Fine Art (in collaboration with Kingston University) has since offered the key sponsor to realise further research gatherings and live events. These were supported by public institutions and initiatives who contributed to the pool and offered public platforms: The Whitechapel Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; PS/Y Festival, London; Walmer Yard, London; Open School East, Margate; and NTU CCA Singapore, Singapore, Centre National de la Danse, Paris, and the Swiss Institute, New York, offer the financial support for OFFSHORE to remain itinerant and in rehearsal into 2019 and beyond.

Parrhesiades

Parrhesiades is a multi-platform project, working with artists for whom language, either written, spoken or otherwise performed, is an important component in the construction of their work. As an online platform, a physical location in SE5, an annual reader and with institutional partners for live events and launches, Parrhesiades actively considers the circumstances and curatorial support such practices need and re-thinks the conditions of exhibition-making that this necessitates. No single aspect or route to the encounter with art is privileged as superior. Language, as an event, in its multiplicity, resides across all of Parrhesiades platforms equally. This is an attempt to offer the exhibitionary-complex to artists in an ‘exploded’ or deconstructed form, allowing them to work through the different physicalities and temporalities that this offers and explore the possibilities for language that this presents. Artists are invited to make a single work or constellation of related ideas available to publics in a way that complicates a single reading of the work. Through 2019 Parrhesiades has collaborated with South London Gallery, Flat Time House, Camden Arts Centre with artists Sung Tieu, Jesper list Thomsen, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Johanna Hedva, Cally Spooner and Eva Gold.

Curators’ Series 2: Sculpture of The Space Age

Curated by Raimundas Malašauskas

at DRAF, Great Titchfield Street

Roberts Institute of Art

Curators’ Series 8: All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm

Curated by Christine Eyene

at DRAF, Camden

Roberts Institute of Art