Beacons | Flare

About

Pharos, Flare and Signs seek to communicate our experiences of time, existence and our bodies through empathetic exchanges with objects, emotional archives, traces left in artefacts; imagining futures and resurfacing histories.

“…a person I very much admire and respect once told me in an astrology reading that if theres any kind of community for a person like me they are all out there distributed across time and space. And that resonated a lot for me, and it seems to resonate with what youre saying here. This person explained that the things I make in the world will operate as beacons and the people w whom I am kin, twin, common – they’ll find me that way, like ships in a storm.”
Letter to a friend, Jesse Darling

Amshu Chukki's practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video and sculpture. In his ongoing engagements with the notion of fictionalized spaces and narratives of dystopias, he is interested in the manner in which the boundaries between the real and illusory can fold into one another, keeping in mind an understanding of the filmic and in particular, the tropes of film noir. Further, questioning the ideas of the ‘site’, ‘site specificity’ and ‘site informativity’, his work tries to invite and involve audiences to speculate on the meaning and nature of the fictionalized worlds brought to life.

Tai Shani's multidisciplinary practice, comprising performance, film, photography and installation, revolves around experimental narrative texts. Shani creates violent, erotic and fantastical images told in a dense, floral language which re-imagines female otherness as a perfect totality, set in a world complete with cosmologies, myth and histories that negate patriarchy. These alternate between familiar narrative tropes and structures and theoretical prose in order to explore the construction of subjectivity, excess and affect and the epic as the ground for a post-patriarchal realism.

Liv Fontaine attempts to subvert presented societal norms by pursuing truth in total madness, with video, photography and performance. Some topics she is currently interested in include strident stereotypes, inappropriate appropriations, expectations of shame, acceptance of shame, shame equivalencies, the female voice, nuclear war, Stockholm syndrome, total hysteria, Greek Mythology, suburban dreams, baby making and never ending pleasure faking.

Jenkin van Zyl is a multidisciplinary artist, with a practise comprising of performance, film, bitching and installation. The work rejects binarisms of the real and virtual, front and back stage, self and other, rationality and madness, surface and subtext, style and content, time and space. An ongoing preoccupation with the slip of identities and the pressure point at which barriers that set up the divisions of the original and the copy collapse is continued in these sculptural escapees from his ongoing project ‘As Yet Untitled Film’. The centrepiece takes the form of a repurposed wooden airplane reproduction from the perpetual and cyclical battlegrounds of Military simulation. ‘As Yet Untitled Film’ seeks to unpack forms of re-enactment in a 360° kaleidoscopic body horror, with the filming in disused trading floors and abandoned film sets setting the backdrop to a menagerie of voraphilia, inflatable fetishism, disaster tourism and homo historiographies.

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Curated by Rebecca Halliwell-Sutton

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