Event
Up Is A Relative Concept: FOLD (Lab) Launch
09 May 2019
FOLD
London, United Kingdom
19:00 - 23:00
£5
What if your practice told all? This evening aims to question the concept of the finished work; where old work and new work feeds back on one another creating a type of ‘feedback as the production of a total environment’.
John Strutton and Karolina Magnusson Murray will perform live reconfigurations of past works. Strutton takes on a type of technological seance, exploring ideas of ritual and archaeo-acoustics with a revisioning of his ‘flatbed film’. Magnusson Murray will open up a confrontation between her practice and her mental health. The performances will be intercepted by Laura O'Neill latest film, and the night will culminate with Larry Achiampong film Ph03nix Rising: The 3rd Son.
Fold Lab’s most compounding event yet will experiment with our practices, re-mix our work and counter capitalist temporality on our own terms. By exposing the processes and the boundaries of making, we will disrupt and dismantle, perform in the present, and re-configure the past. What new works can be forged, free from temporal awareness and the constraints of a final finished piece? Work begins to take on a life of its own creating new meaning, leaving you confused or enchanted, tasting the delights of brutal honesty.
Can club culture provide unmediated, non-judgemental safe space for this type of art making? Can it help to reconfigure boundaries around artistic practice and deconstruct artistic prejudices? What if we were honest about how we feel about our relationship to work, the art world and our own mental health within our own practice? Can frankness become a political tool? Can we learn from the hedonism of the club and embody unapologetic expression?
Artist Biographies
Since 1999 John Strutton’s practice has taken the form of drawing, installation, video/animation and performance. The work often uses the strategy of accrual to deal with a visual form of veneration and cultural reclamation. The resulting installations of paintings, drawings and objects become a kind of makeshift memorial, an ex–voto offering where nostalgia becomes a form of revenge. The sedimentary process creates a convoluted cosmos of effigies, mandalas, portraits and trophies, a graveyard whose architecture is sustained by anxiety. Sometimes brutal, often absurd, his approach to figuration is fractured, automatic and schizophrenic. He shares a preoccupation with ritualistic process, debased iconographies and compulsive aesthetics with the likes of Austin Osman Spare and Antonin Artaud. He is currently Senior Tutor in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. He formed The Band of Nod in 1999 and was co–founder/director of 39, a project space in London together with Alan Miller. Since 2005 he has been writing and performing in his band Arthur Brick. Amongst other bookings, Arthur Brick have also gigged at the opening of The Manchester Contemporary and the first London Art Book Fair, at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2009.
Karolina Magnusson-Murray lives and works in London, UK. She has performed and exhibited worldwide; including Pierogi (The Boiler) New York, USA (touring performance event); Solo Show in Ladron Galeria, Mexico City, Mexico; Live Action 12 International Performance Art Festival, Gothenburg Sweden; Liverpool Biennial 9, Liverpool, UK; Christian Marclay: Reenactments of Full Bottle and Wine Glass by George Maciunas, White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK; Guangzhou Live Festival 5, Guangzhou, China. In 2016, she was selected for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition in ICA London, was shortlisted in 2017 for the Aesthetica Art Prize and awarded the Hotel Elephant’s Small Commission. She was shortlisted for the 2016 Solo Award and won the 2015 Ingram Collection of Modern, British & Contemporary Art Purchase Prize. She has also been granted a commission via the Southwark Art Council Fund.
Event
Up Is A Relative Concept: FOLD (Lab) Launch
09 May 2019
FOLD
London, United Kingdom
Screening
Fold Lab Presents Most Dismal Swamp
23 May 2019
FOLD (Lab)
London, United Kingdom
Event
FOLD Lab Presents: Everybody is a Moon
06 Jun 2019
FOLD (Lab)
London, United Kingdom
Exhibition
FOLD (Lab) Parties: Up Is A Relative Concept Closing Night
20 Jun 2019
FOLD (Lab)
London, United Kingdom
Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.