Kiss, Goodbye

About

Two weeks spent in close confinement, bringing together three artists with mutual and divergent approaches to tenderness and intimacy as momentum and locus for art making.

To afford to feel tender, to prioritise it, what is the strength a consideration in thoughtful touch bring to ourselves, our relationship with others and the physical world we occupy? What happens when these separate spaces overlap and co-occupy a certain time and place?

The ubiquitous intimacy of the goodbye kiss is framed in the empire of love as a moment that in its attempt to extend and reproduce care and love and autonomy also defines and encloses spaces and subjectivities.

Within liberalism love and violence are materialised as inherent opposites. Love is instrumentalised to make invisible certain violence, and austerity’s slow death is not framed as deliberate neglect, but as ambivalent universal truth.

Locating the self in relation to a community becomes harder within neoliberal individualist ideology, yet more crucial for survival as systems of support are privatised. The intimacy, care and love that that affronts and is afforded by these systems is imbued with anxious, awkward, uncomfortable, insecure, exhilarating and hedonistic affects. Tenderness becomes ever more fragile with its intensity.

Thinking through tenderness in the precarious threads linking time with touch, the self and the precarious object and performative living, care in affording inevitable stalls, breakages, breakthroughs to consider failure and successive work.

Kiss, Goodbye

Viola Zichy
Sam Cottington
Rebekah Bide

Private View Saturday 22 September 2018, 6pm - 10pm
Open 23 & 24 September 2018, 12pm - 6pm

SET Alscot Road
76 - 89 Alscot Road,
SE1 3AW