​'There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body' by Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz

About

EXHIBITION PROGRAMME

• Opening night & performance / 3rd February
  Performance 6-7pm, RSVP
  Opening reception 7-9pm (no booking required)
• Artists in conversation & performance / 18th February 7-8.30pm, RSVP 
• Family art workshop for Hackney residents / Sunday 20th February 3-4pm RSVP 
• Queer writing and performance workshop for Hackney residents  / Thursday 24th February 7-8pm, RSVP 

This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz explores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?

Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the multi-media exhibition featuring performance, painting, sound and moving image works also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.

Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling. 

Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines.
Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of  improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art. 

​FREE WORKSHOPS
The artists will offer two writing and drawing workshops for Hackney residents that explore the themes of the exhibition, one for families, and one centred around LGBTQI+ issues for adults. Participants will be invited to experiment with ideas around spontaneity and intuition, mistakes and imperfection, habits and repetition, listening, curiosity, and joy. Both workshops foreground a spirit of playfulness and exploration. No background knowledge or previous experience is necessary and all are welcome. If you have any access needs please don't hesitate to get in touch with the gallery.  Places are limited, please RSVP here.

Further information and full exhibition programme: www.hoxton253.com/theres-no-way-i-can-know-it

​The exhibition and associated programme are supported by and part of HELLO AGAIN, HACKNEY, the borough's cultural reopening initiative.