AFTERMATH

About

Aftermath brings together two new commissions by Sophie Hayes and Huma Mulji for the  first exhibition in Foreground’s Document and Location programme, which explores the  artists’ shared interest in how the representation of place can be used as a vehicle for the  communication of psychological and emotional states. 

Hayes and Mulji's new works are presented as two concurrent solo exhibitions in  collaboration with two of Bristol's newest artist-run venues KIT FORM and The Launderette,  which are situated less than 5 minutes’ walk from each other in the city's Stokes Croft district. 

Curated by Foreground director Simon Morrissey and emerging from an extended research  dialogue between the two artists, the project brings together Hayes’ new work - which uses  sound to radically author the viewers psychological perception of the photographic  representation of a mundane location - with Mulji’s site-specific installation that suggests  the devastated aftermath of human displacement through sculpture and material  intervention. 

Hayes’ new installation for The Launderette depicts a non-descript rural fly tip in an  unspecified location through two large scale photographs – the aftermath of illegal waste disposal. Piles of discarded domestic furniture that lie on the left and right-hand side of a  dead-end road are split into two images. These images are accompanied by an intrusive  abstract audio composition that dominates the viewer and projects a sense of mounting  anxiety and trauma into the uneventful rural location in the images. This composition is  accompanied by a second soundtrack in the adjoining rear space. Two small speakers  mounted on stands, which loosely suggest human figures, are positioned opposite each  other. Garbled sound emanates first from one speaker then the other – a mixture of  interference and distortion reminiscent of a broken conversation. Together, the seemingly  disparate elements of the installation build to suggest the gaps in understanding that result  from opposing viewpoints that fail to connect. 

At KIT FORM, Mulji will present a site-specific installation that conjures the idea of another  space, perhaps some form of workshop, that has been relocated into the gallery’s post industrial space. The windows that make up KIT FORM’s glazed elevation have been blanked 

out and are taped to hold its now broken panes together. Fragments of walls from other  spaces lie around the space discarded, electrical components hanging from them. Loops of  electrical wiring hang from the ceiling or are piled up. Crude wooden stools act as matter-of fact supports for a family of blunt blown glass vessels that nestle against burnt indentations  in the wooden objects, as if they have scorched the surfaces they rest on, on contact. It is  unclear whether these things are simply the results of industrial manufacturing, or laborious  repurposing processes, but the glass objects also suggest they are some form of traumatised  body inhabiting the scenario. Dislocated and displaced, Mulji’s installation talks of the  complex losses embedded in so much migrant experience – being made no longer part of  where you are from whilst neither belonging to the place you are now in. 

Colleagues and friends who met in Bristol in 2017 despite coming from very different parts  of the world, Hayes and Mulji engaged in an in-depth research dialogue during the making  of their new works for Aftermath. This dialogue saw them record the inspirations,  insecurities, pressures and preoccupations that made up the 8 months before the  exhibitions through candid ‘letters’ they wrote to each other over email. 

Shared as a screen-based text work at both the gallery sites and online, the letters between  the artists provide their audience with intimate access to the private intellectual and  emotional questions that led to Aftermath.