- Venue
- Middlesex University, School of Art and Design
- Starts
- Thursday, September 15, 2016
- Ends
- Thursday, September 22, 2016
- Address
- The Burroughs, Third Floor, The Grove Building, The Burroughs, London. NW4 4BT.
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Middlesex University, School of Art and Design
MDX MA FINE ART AND MA PRINTMAKING
PRESENT
IDENTIFIER
DEGREE SHOW
16 –22 September 2016
(10-6pm Monday to Friday, 11-4pm Saturday, closed Sunday)
Preview on 15thSeptember 6-9pm
Ghaida Alkhelaiwi, Corinne Charton, Sophie Cero, Esther Evans, Martina Geier, Fiona Quadmani, Fiona Wallace and Clare Walter
When thinking through these ideas several of the artists have begun to explore the role of gender. For example Ghaida Alkhelaiwi’s work addresses the image, role and status of women in society—which is particularly potent given that the society into which shewasborn, and to which she will return after her completing her MA, is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Sophie Cero also reflects on the role of women but within a domestic setting, creating artworks in which our perceptions seem at odds with our understanding. In her work a relatively straightforward photographic representation of a familiar domestic activity—cooking a pie—seem eerily unidentifiable, even otherworldly. Corinne Charton works across painting and digital film creating deceiving portraits and withholding close-ups of women that do not partake in a postmodern ‘emptiness of the image’ (Parveen Adams). Rather, an unexpected and disorienting plenitude flows out of these representational shells, that emerge from historical sources. By interacting with and interviewing
participants, and using their input in her art works, Fiona Wallace not only creates her own art context and reception (her own voice), but also instigates a new, active counter-public to thinkabout and act upon art and feminist issues. These artists also reflect on the role of place and language in the formation of identity. Walter Benjamin likens the unity between content and language to a fruit and its skin, whereby ‘the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.’ In Esther Evans’ text based works translation does not renew the life of the original; the fruit has been peeled, dissected, stuck to the walls, to the floor, hung out to dry, rot and decompose. Martina Geier has created artefacts intended to convey the haunting immateriality of memory itself. And yet through this process, she seems toremind us that such a mission must produce its inevitably Quixotic impossibilities. Fiona Quadmani’s practice also examines site as both place and memory, through a mode of interpretation that resembles an act of archeology, but an archeology of the present, an ever elusive ‘missing event’. This acknowledgement of the difficulty of any form of representation is also present in Clare Walter’s film where the social convention of making and drinking tea is an empty signifier, no longer sufficient to the emotional undercurrents spiraling out from the initiating event –its narratival inadequacy becoming itself the sign of loss.A publication will accompany the exhibition with critical writing by Jon Bird, Kimathi Donkor, Alexandra Kokoli, Nadia Quadmani and Suzanne van Rossenberg
