Modern Women

About

Works featured make use of site-specific installation, performance, photography, jewellery, video and textile media to create iconic, strong images that aim to provoke and challenge the viewer.

The exhibition also joins philosophical points of contact between Telese’s and Walia’s diverse body of work, both employing elements of real life and cultural background references, to create powerful messages around current social and political issues as well as creating a new collaboration between the two artists and Airspace Gallery, with a planned series of debates and events.

Emilia Telese’s works will feature Femminicidio, a site-specific installation about domestic violence; Elizabeth, a photographic series with performative elements about gender stereotypes in the South of Italy; and Sacra Famiglia, a large scale contemporary photography work reprising the Renaissance icon motif.

Binita Walia’s work is funded by Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England. The show will feature work from her installation series The Modern Woman, exploring cultural rebelliousness, gender heritage and women’s sense of duty, making use of video, textiles and everyday objects. In this exhibition, it will include Too Busy, an installation using a heirloom sari and gold as a symbol of cultural heritage, Secret Ingredients, a series of sculptural aluminium cooking vessels and gold leaf exploring the emotional value of food, Forewarned is forearmed?, a video piece illustrating a bride shopping for a wedding sari and Always and Forever, a jewellery piece making use of gold to elevate the mundanity of everyday chores.

The exhibition will use Airspace Gallery’s double window space as a billboard, showing the exhibition title MODERN WOMEN with each artist impersonating a film poster of their opposite cultures: Binita Walia as the heroine of an Italian movie, and Emilia Telese as that of an Asian movie.

The exhibition will be accompanied by debate events about the issues explored within it, such as Asian and Italian migration and gender stereotypes. 

I use list-making as an artistic process, feeding back and contributing to both personal life and artistic practice. Many people order and manage their complex life through lists. The potency of these lists to express the minutiae of life is evident and I elevate the ordinary feats of everyday tasks to a higher status by writing them and recreating them in gold.
Binita Walia

My work is concerned with the continuous questioning of social constraints and conventions. I try to generate knowledge through the visual representation of these questions, and the deconstruction of society's clichés. My work focuses on the way the mind and body are affected and transformed by external elements and impulses, and the inter-relation between intimate consciousness and public perception.
Emilia Telese