Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022: Soojin Chang & Michael.

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Within the gallery, Michael. will be co-curating an exhibition of artworks from the Leeds collection, responding to themes in his work cleave to the BLACK including the question ‘what would it be like to live on a land that loves you back?’ and featuring artists including Helen Chadwick, John Constable, Tacita Dean, Hamish Fulton, Runa Islam, Richard Long and Veronica Ryan. Artist and collaborator Ashley Holmes has produced a new sound work that will play in the space. Soojin Chang will premiere Sacrifice to the Seaworm (2022), a new multi-part film installation featuring a reading, a purification rite, and a burial mound.
 

Michael.- cleave to the BLACK – echoes the art-historical tradition of the painted triptych in a three-screen video projection that offers a panoramic perspective on the legacies of the past that continue to leave an indelible mark on contemporary Black male experience. Alluding to episodes from the Bible and stories from African folklore and cosmology, the piece brings a subtle overtone of parable and myth to its carefully composed and quietly haunting scenes.

Soojin Chang – Sacrifice to the Seaworm remaps an interior landscape to the processing of pain and violence through the vehicle of sacrificial practices. Formed collaboratively with Tenzin Mingyur Paldron (writer) and Jade O’Belle (artist), the exhibition features Paldron’s work on self-immolation and suffering, which follows a historic letter and parable shared by peace activist and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the actions of 170 Tibetans. Created with specimens borrowed from the Natural Science Collections at Leeds Museums & Galleries, the offering imagines a meeting of death practices to facilitate our multispecies fate, which is very much at stake.

Soojin Chang’s Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 commissioned film BXBY (2022) will also be exhibited off-site at Project Space in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds hosted by the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE). The film will be exhibited in Cave until Sunday 4 December 2022.

Content note: BXBY contains graphic reproductive content, direct reference to terminated pregnancy and imagery of the culling and dissection of a deer.