A MEDIUM FOR ALL THE MOMENTS OUTSIDE OF TIME
2024. installation; ash wood, wool surge fabric, acrylic paint, projection mapping, sound
group show. with Beau W Beakhouse.
Here, at the edge, today., g39, Cardiff
27 January - 23 March
For ‘Here, at the edge, today’, Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed have designed a multi-media installation, creating an immersive prototype technology for association and communion across time. A Medium for All the Moments Outside of Time finds one form for the artists’ three month residency at the British School at Rome researching speculative architecture and social space.
Set in a future in which technology exists for dialogic and collective leisure experiences in ‘communing halls’, the work follows two characters on an interrelated journey through historic arboretums and botanic gardens; to future transport networks and marginal green ecosystems; onboard colonial ships and islands occupied by invasive plant hunters. Language and its potential for slippage, breakdown and revealing contradiction offer the potential for a new medium of interpersonal connection between and beyond these histories.
Inspired by research into conversation pits, radical unrealisable architecture and interior design, this prototype booth creates a space of leisure and relation that encourages a duo relationship, occupying the ghostly bodies of these fictional characters. The booth’s angled design is porous; allowing onlookers but only from a distance, creating an intimate space for the users’ encounter. Beau and Sadia’s past research into the Filipino board game Sungka; redesigning the game in response to the colonial histories of the Philippines to become a space of communication, play and dialogue in ‘rustic futures’; results in a new board incorporated into the booth, augmented by the interrelation of architecture, vertical projection and immersive soundwork.
Thanks to Alice Bucknell, James Clegg, Umulkhayr Mohamed, Peter Mutschler, Ben Orford, Anthony Shapland, Aled Simons and Wingshan Smith.
Curated by Anthony Shapland.
Supported by g39, the British School at Rome Fellowship 2023-24 and Freelands Foundation Fellowship 2022-24.
Images: Dan Weill
THE BRIGHTNESS OF METAL AND METALLIC THINKING
2024. sculpture; engraved steel
group show. with Beau W Beakhouse.
Betwixt: beneath, The Crypt Gallery (Freelands Foundation), London
17 February - 23 February
Betwixt is a celebration of emerging artistic practices across the UK, taking place across four sites in central and north London. It brings together works by 20 artists from Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and Sheffield in a vibrant week-long event. Four distinctive cultural spaces and venues each host a group exhibition focused on a unique theme: inching towards, beneath, beyond and held. beneath is a subterranean exhibition nestled in The Crypt Gallery at St. Pancras Church in Euston. Here, artists delve into the enigmatic, embracing the unknown as sites of resistance. beneath emerges from the shadows, a portal opening toward reimagined futures.
‘I myself have been attracted to Fanon’s name and voice because both have the brightness of metal. His is a metamorphic thought, animated by an indestructible will to live. What gives this metallic thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and the inexhaustible silo of humanity which it houses.’ Achille Mbembe, ‘The Year of Frantz Fanon’
The Brightness of Metal and Metallic Thinking depict speculative scenes in the lives of two anti-colonial figures: José Rizal and Frantz Fanon. Rizal’s imprisonment in Montjuïc castle, Barcelona, before his execution in the Philippines, is retold and contested in archives and biographies, including claims that Rizal was forced to climb the hill from the dock below, carrying all his books. Attempted assassinations of Fanon during a hospital stay in Rome are entangled with misreporting and political distortion, especially difficult to trace because of his use of a pseudonym.
Taking inspiration from utopian artmaking and the capriccio - a dream-like interpretation of a place that combines monuments, disrupts geographies and interlinks temporalities - these steel engravings form their own myths and memorials to moments of pause. Reminiscent of steel plates used in printing, the work holds a latent interest in the use of tools; iterations and states that can be edited to make and reshape reality. The intimate, unknowable, overlapping or conflicting narratives within the archive coalesce to create a speculative architecture, inspired by the futures of these sites and the layered narratives of their protagonists.
The works are also accompanied by Nest (bolo) and Nest (variable), two works from previous solo exhibition Ornaments of Prospect (2023), Catalyst Arts, Belfast. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Betwixt (2024) featuring a text by Alice Bucknell on Sadia Pineda Hameed and Beau W Beakhouse’s collaborative practice, also available on New Mystics.
Curated by Wingshan Smith.
Supported by Freelands Foundation, as part of the Freelands g39 Fellowship 2022-24.
Images: Andy Stagg
PORTAL
2023. installation; UV printed birch ply, pine dowel, linen thread
group show.
Can publications be porous? iniva, Stuart Hall Library, London
24 May - 28 July
Can publications be porous? invites audiences to speculate a trajectory from out-of-print black feminist books to possible notions of publishing futures, offering ideas for collective transformation. This exhibition (with Sadia Pineda Hameed, Amber Akaunu, and Fauziya Johnson, co-curated with artist and cultural futurist Lauren Craig) takes the Stuart Hall Library as an experimental space to question the porosity of publishing in conceptual, existential, and material forms. Its two principal aims are to explore how artists consider, experiment with, and reject concepts of collectivity and individuality, and to expand awareness of, diversify, and horizontalise knowledge systems.
This exhibition is the third phase of a project initiated by Lauren Craig in 2021 under the title HerStories // Shelf Life, which brings together B/black women’s and non-binary people of colour’s creative writing and publishing collectives. Highlighting collaborative and rhizomatic methods of regenerative cultural production and dissemination, it takes a peek at the shelf life of collective publishing, from printed matter to digital to audiovisual.
Portal continues Sadia’s interest in the resonances of archival and oral histories and their communication through speculation, dramatisation and fictionalisation. Starting with a photograph of Sadia’s mother, Luisa, taken at Manila Airport in the Philippines on a trip home from London, the work reconstructs this image across 513 interlinked tablets of a beaded curtain. The reverse side features a fictionalised version of the contents of Luisa’s bag from the archival image. Past and future mementos fall out of the bag, including a framed image of Pinoy love team Guy and Pip, Catholic amulets, the yet to be published Uncut Funk, a photograph with husband Asad and a library card from future home borough Brent. These objects represent the complex ways in which colonialism and migration rupture and reform identity, postcolonial strategies of resistance, and the many gestures of ‘thrivival’, love and joy. The beaded curtain becomes a portal through this archival material, an invitation to disrupt the static image and a way to enter an alternate narrative where chronologies, fictions and symbols disarrange, entangle and merge.
Curated by Lauren Craig and Beatriz Lobo (iniva)
Supported by Arts Council England and Freelands Foundation.
Images: Thierry Bal
ORNAMENTS OF PROSPECT
2023. sculpture, sound
solo show. with Beau W Beakhouse.
Catalyst Arts, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
2 March - 1 April
Ornaments of Prospect is an installation by collaborative duo Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed at Catalyst Arts. The installation sets out to reimagine tool making and methods of metal production, and how this might lead to collective and alternative modes of communication, knowledge and craft.
The installation expands on rural and agricultural use of tools, traversing alternative worlds of steel production and industrial backdrops of science fiction, to open a dialogue surrounding the complex and multiple approaches to tools, their manufacture and expanded use.
Through experiments in metalwork and heat treatment the duo investigate the potential of waste and the speculative futures that arise from skeletal cut outs rendered nonfunctional in the process of crafting tools. The work envisions the speculative tools and collaborations that can emerge from these spaces of absence, considering the new languages and actions that objects with an unknown function can unfold. The question what does a future look like in which tools are created without purpose? permeates the installation.
Tools and their use can also redefine hierarchies and create a foundation for considering anti colonial strategies of resistance, whilst acknowledging the complex role of tools in capitalist and western hands that utilise their designs as instruments of progress. Through reconceptualising the Filipino bolo, a tool used both for agriculture and warfare, the work in the exhibition questions how colonial tools can be subtly repurposed in small ways, remoulding ideas of profit, material maximisation, use and functionality.
Curated by Cecelia Graham, Director Catalyst Arts, with accompanying text ‘The Consolation of Carpenters’.
Supported by Arts Council Northern Ireland and Jerwood Arts New Work Fund.
Alongside the exhibition, multiples of the artwork Charms are available to buy (edition of 8). If you are interested in purchasing a Charm, please email catalystarts@gmail.com
Images: Simon Mills
BLUE SPACE
2022. three banners; silkscreen, text
group show. with Beau W Beakhouse.
Open Milpa Lab Living Room. Centrum Kultury ZAMEK, Poznan, Poland.
30 September - 9 August
A poisoned river, an excavated city, an algae bloom, a coastal village. The text, part mystery, part anecdotal diary, is set in an ambience of ecosystem damage, city planning and social unrest. It investigates present and inherited water infrastructure, geopolitical tensions, rurality, clear and less clear forms of protest. The work uses ASCII art to magnify the rumoured causes of water system collapse and considers textiles' inherent and historic relationship with water.
This work was created after residencies with Diego Gutierrez Valladares in Biella and Poznan, over shared interests and conversations about rivers, textiles and print.
Images: Diego Gutierrez
