We Were Made in the Dark

About

We Were Made in the Dark

ASC Gallery

21st October until 4th November

PV Friday 21st October 6-9pm

JOKAklubi “ The Theory Show” performance Saturday 22nd October 4pm onwards

Showing work by Niina Lehtonen Braun, JOKAklubi, Adam Hennessey, Laura Wormell and Harriet Hill.

Drawing and painting and performance are in the fore in “We Were Made In the Dark”.It looks at the story of our lives and the sounds that become a backdrop to our lives.Taken from a “Hot Chip” record that fed into a series works by Berlin based Finnish artist Niina Lehtonen Braun, it holds the clue to this collaborative exhibition between Hilbertraum Gallery in Berlin and ASC Gallery in London. It is the third project that looks to connect and exhibit artists affiliated with both organisations, creating authentic links and dialogues internationally between both venues.

Niina Lehtonen Braun studied fine arts in Finland and Paris and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. Her artistic work includes collages, painting, installations, and performances. Kerber Verlag has published three artist books about her work, Mother Said (2014), These Foolish Things Remind Me of You (2016) and Let Go Girl (2021). Since 2015, Lehtonen Braun has been co-director of the project space HilbertRaum, Berlin. Her artistic works have been exhibited extensively in Germany and abroad. www.niina-lehtonen-braun.com

JOKAklubi is a group of visual artists and performers Niina Lehtonen Braun, Tellervo Kalleinen and Mirka Raito. JOKAklubi has performed and exhibited since 2009 at festivals, galleries, clubs and off-spaces such as Acud (Berlin, DE), West Germany (Berlin, DE), Fluc (Vienna, AU), Atelier Frankfurt (Frankfurt, DE), Opean (Munich, DE), Rauma Art Museum (Rauma, FIN), W139 (Amsterdam, NL) and Shedhalle (Zürich, CH). The group works at the intersection of performance, music, and visual art, and regularly invites other artists to perform with them. JOKAklubi's art touches the absurd and existential aspects of human life, creating unexpected communities here and now. http://jokaklubi.blogspot.com/

JOKAklubi has invited London based artists to share their theories about anything: Surprising ambiences, perspectives and approaches are created as the performers step into the absurd stage of JOKAklubi.

 The performance is part of the “We Were Made in the Dark” -exhibition by Niina Lehtonen Braun, JOKAklubi, Adam Hennessey, Harriet Hill and Laura Wormell. Curated by Darren O`Brien (21st October-4th November 2022). The exhibition is a project between HilbertRaum (Berlin) and ASC Gallery. 

  Adam Hennessey is originally from East Sussex and he currently lives and works in London. He studied on the Turps Banana Painting Programme where he won the Darbyshire Emerging Art Prize in 2015. He has been selected for the Creekside Open, Oriel Davies Open, ING Discerning Eye and most recently received Highly Commended in the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2019. His work is included in the Groucho Collection.

@adam_hennessey_painting   www.adam-hennessey.com

“ I make comics and paintings about impactful moments in my life in the aim to better understand these moments for myself. This dialogue with my personal life is the basis for the paintings I create in the studio. In my latest exhibition called Adam & Steve I explore growing up as a gay teenager in the 1990’s.”

Laura Wormell  “My paintings, drawings and films use the lurid, the humorous, the absurd, awkward, irreverent and phenomenal as a toolkit to charge imagery with something like an electric current. It’s a way to jolt myself awake from the addictive, soporific flow of media imagery that seems to increasingly saturate daily life. The act of painting especially, (perhaps because of its slow nature and long history) is a means for me to rebel against a despondency and apathy that I see as associated to this media secretion and the normalised absurdity it promotes. The words and imagery used in my work are sourced from films, nature books, fetish magazines, illuminated manuscripts, fashion magazines, google searches, old encyclopaedias and observations from day-to-day life. Through painting and drawing, these sources are ruminated upon and eventually “un-swallowed” in a series of symbol and slogan-like forms. These conglomerates create a bodily but removed perspective to look in on the vulnerability of being human and the strangeness of lives caught in and defined by specific cultural, historic and geographic contexts.”

Laura Wormell (b. 1987 in London). Lives and works in London. Studied at The Slade School of Fine Art (2006-2010) and Turps Studio Programme (2019-21) Recent Exhibitions Include: Blink Presents Room Share 3 at Safehouse 1, London, 2022 Things I Like I Lick, Terrace Gallery, London, 2022 Curation of I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, Room Share 2 at Safehouse 1, London, 2022 Deviations, House of Anetta, London, 2021 Into the Cosmere, BWG Presents, 188 Shoreditch High St, 2021 Your Foot in My Face, Kingsgate Project Space, London, 2021 Turps Studio Programme Painters 2020-21, Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, 2021 Banshee, Secret Siphon Club, London, 2019 In The Manner Of Smoke, Alice Black Gallery, Soho, London, 2018 Lexis Over Land: Towards a Feminist Geography, Tremenheere Sculpture Garden Gallery, Penzance, 2017

Harriet Hill creates sculpture, installation and interactive live art that responds viscerally to materials, physical space and sociopolitical situations. Making resonant words as letter costumes, she works with others to take these on walkabouts across the country to engage directly with a wide public.

Based in South London, Harriet has an MFA Textiles from Goldsmiths, 2007 and exhibits internationally.

‘Self Portrait as an Artist’ is a new work that plays on ideas around validation. Harriet will be bringing the costume back into the gallery setting, using it as an absurdist, performative tool to reflect personal scrutiny and provoke questions about the gallery as Establishment.

Harriet will perform a 5 minute action on her costume as part of Jokaklubi’s The Theory Show