TheWorldMadeNew

About

Pi Artworks London is pleased to announce The World Made New curated by Oliver Sumner. The World Made New is the fourth of five exhibitions that make up Pi Artworks London’s Curatorial Season that runs from October 2016 – July 2017. For the season Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, Alexandra Schwartz, Sacha Craddock, Oliver Sumner, and Morgan Quaintance have been invited to devise and develop their own curatorial project working with artists predominantly or entirely from outside the gallery’s roster.

The World Made New draws resonances in the work of five international artists (based in London, Glasgow, Cornwall, and Istanbul), through personal myths of history and landscape. Often departing from superficial reality, the diverse narrative practices of Sovay Berriman, Ilana Halperin, Iz Öztat, Lindsay Seers, and Michelle Williams Gamaker find another kind of truth in relation to land and time. Self-referential approaches blend autobiographical details with personal mythologies of birth, transfiguration, and constructed identity. Islands, markers, and symbols are recurring motifs, recalling land artist Robert Smithson’s visionary take on the post-industrial environment of 1960s New Jersey. Ritual and performativity emerge as points of connection. The viewer is taken on a journey through the natural environment and human society; fraught with disorienting coincidences, displacement, rupture, and imaginative leaps.

The title of the exhibition alludes in part to a reconception of the world as seen with each artist’s particular vision. But it may equally suggest the framing of consciousness itself, being as much about an imagined inner world transposed upon the world as they find it today.