No One Is Ever Going To Give You The Education To Overthrow Them

About

Humorously nodding to Dutch interior painting but also referencing the checker board Lino that Mckenzie found in his flat when he first moved into the estate where this exhibition is presented, No One Is Ever Going To Give You The Education You Need To Overthrow Them is a chaotic jumble of works that fight for space and attention. Drawings plastered to the wall, cardboard, hastily made paintings and found materials. The clichés of estate living are all here, discarded mattresses, gas bottles, a throw away BBQ set but also the claustrophobia of close quarter living, spaces that are managed and bound in the red tape of bureaucracy. The whole exhibition feels temporary and that it could all be swept away at any moment. to become yet more detritus. The laughing men in suits with their big grabbing hands are never far away from the borders of the estate with their cost-effective planning suggestions and ever more pernicious strategies of privatisation. But there is also deep joy to be found in these instrumentalized spaces, small resistances that force their way through like a flower growing through concrete...ahh...more clichés....

Jordan McKenzie is a performance maker/visual artist and academic based in London. Research interests include queerness and identity, presentations of class in contemporary Britain and the intersections of social housing, arts practices and socially situated art. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally in galleries, festivals and arts centers including Freud Museum (2018); Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2014); KASA Gallery, Istanbul (2014); Arnolfini Gallery (2011); Courtauld Institute (2011). His curatorial projects include LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art) a performance space run from a disused garage on the council estate where he lives in East London, co-curated with Aaron Williamson and Kate Mahony (2011-13); Look At The (E)state We're In, a major international conference about art and the council estate (2014); Live(E)lseWhere (co-curated with The Drawing Shed 2014). He has received major arts bursaries and awards from Arts Council England, Arts Admin and The Live Art Development Agency and been an artist in residence in numerous countries including I-Park Massachusetts, USA (2012), OVADA Gallery, Oxford (2005) and Sutra Arts, Nepal (2004). He is currently a lecturer in fine Art at The University for the Arts (UAL).

LUVA is a gallery, experiment, social hub and activist moment. Open for just one day a month and situated in a lock up garage on the Approach council estate in East London, LUVA is dedicated to exhibiting diverse contemporary UK artists. Co-run by Jordan McKenzie and students from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art, LUVA asks critical questions about the contexts that contemporary art exists within, its relationship to the geographical/ economic/social and cultural space (the estate) that it occupies and how cultural institutions can have meaningful dialogues with both local and non-local audiences. Being located in one of the poorer boroughs in the UK, Tower Hamlets, LUVA also acts as a local food bank collection point, providing material support to the community it is based within.