Publication Launch: Momentary Glimpses: An Anthology on Contentedness

About

Momentary Glimpses brings together over 25 works by artists and writers from across the world in a collection that offers a response to themes that are shared with the exhibition and the accompanying essay by Johnny Golding. Each contributor has offered a work which when bound amongst other works will become object-like in a book, desperate to be unbound and laid out with no beginning or end. 

This publication, conceived as a collection of individual works resembles both an anthology and an exhibition in book form. It is an anthology of new and existing works on contentedness, memory, and identity, spanning the sentiments of live/laugh/love and tainting them from a diverse range of perspectives and contexts. We find, at their darkest and lightest moments that the works cross over into each other.

The works, which are presented here as an emotive body, are underscored inevitably by the personal as well as the political. Here we will encounter that quiet voice which can easily become lost in the pool and within the cloud of the contented. Revealing itself leaking from the pages are reflections on the situations and current contexts in which each contributor lives, writes and makes.

Amongst these works, Alex Culshaw’s postcards, like all postcards, fill the void of an absent person, whilst Ho Sin Tung presents 6 blank pages which mark a calm but restricted absence. This absence, in its silence, represents a loudness, raising questions about surveillance, freedom and protest whilst she joins thousands of campaigners on the streets of Hong Kong. These blank pages lay on top of a short piece of science fiction by London based collective The Idle Institute which revolves around secrets, lying, and the algorithm. Offering some comfort and optimism Paul Embry writes about feet and faith in response to the work I found there was, within me, an invincible summer, only for Laura Dee Milnes’ blunt poetic retelling of a memory from a funeral to squash us into an entirely other contented discomfort. 

The replay of a moment can recur over and over, long after that initial encounter, long after it is reconfigured as memory.

Ahaad Alamoudi  || Jordan Baseman || Timmy Chen Chih-Ting || Chow Chun Fai || Alex Culshaw || Shaun Doyle || Paul Embry || Chantal Faust || Silas Fong || Rebecca Fortnum || Charlie Gere || Johnny Golding || Ramona Güntert || Matt Hilvers || Adam Hines Green || Ho Sin Tung || Sarah Howe || The Idle Institute || Rebecca Jagoe || Tom Lovelace || Laura Dee Milnes || Sarah Thacker || Will Thompson || WARD || Hermione Wiltshire || Yim Sui Fong