rivers, signals, miracles
Collective 22
A group exhibition of work from Collective 22 featuring: Leah Band, Adam Bennett, Simona Ciocarlan, Caitriona Dunnett, Susanne Hakuba, Pippa Healy, Phil Hill, Christian Jago, Elena Kollatou and Leonidas Toumpanos, Nieves Mingueza, Zara Pears, Nat Wilkins, Mandy Williams and Sofia Yala, curated by Anneka French.
The events of the last few years have radically altered the ways we inhabit and move through urban, rural and digital landscapes. rivers, signals, miracles unravels a range of contemporary socio-political themes. From the human body, the exhibition moves through domestic environments out to the landscape, encompassing technological, psychological and material worlds. Autobiographical concerns surface through the microcosm of a newborn baby, and intergenerational connections to history and architecture. Alongside digital and analogue photographs, we find practitioners experimenting with lumen prints, cyanotypes, found photographs and archives. The exhibition aspires to create a potent picture of a better place, tomorrow.
rivers, signals, miracles
Leah Band
Leah Band’s group of images titled Love for you to stay takes us on a series of autobiographical journeys, ones that Leah herself made during 2019, documenting the locations, encounters and bedrooms that she spent time in. Leah was, for a period of ten months, living without a permanent home. This body of work gives insight into her transitory experiences via a diaristic series that explores both personal and societal pressures relating to normative domestic structures. Fragments of written conversation and older family photographs are brought into the mix, offering new perspectives on place and time.
rivers, signals, miracles
Adam Bennett
Miracle on the Han River is a series by Adam Bennett exploring the location immediate to the Han River in Seoul and surrounding areas, a river which is formed from the confluence of two others originating in South Korea and North Korea. Bennett’s photographs offer views of the river’s significance in social, economic and geographical terms, charting both the rapid urban development of the site and the apparently unspoiled natural beauty of other proximate areas. The river curves around mountains and under high-rise rail structures, around joggers, picnickers and apartment blocks in a portrait of place under transformation.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Simona Ciocarlan
Simona Ciocarlan's images are not rooted within a certain project, they are fragments from various bodies of work exploring ideas that are at the core of the artist's practice, characterised by a continuous quest to elaborate a space where materiality and immateriality coexist, transcending photographic representation.
Repetition and text are integrated into this work as a visceral response to the realities of the 21st century, inviting to acknowledgment and collaborative action against war.
Simona's works exist in between the imagined and the experienced, shifting from poetical to the urgency of the present in the current socio-political climate.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Caitriona Dunnett
Loch Long is a series of cyanotypes made by Caitriona Dunnett on the shores of Loch Long, Scotland. The area once had a thriving tourist industry but operated as a torpedo testing range during the Second World War, with the home of the UK nuclear weapons programme just downstream. It was also a site of childhood holidays for Dunnett, whose father grew up on the loch’s banks. Dunnett’s father passed away just prior to the work being made. These conflicting uses of the natural landscape and these entangled memories lie beneath the surface of these seemingly tranquil cyanotypes.
rivers, signals, miracles
Susanne Hakuba
Wish You Were Here likewise utilises historic accounts and experiences. Susanne Hakuba’s series examines the shadows left behind by Nazism in her native Germany, especially the intergenerational trauma that continues to exist on a local and highly personal level, even within her own family unit. Hakuba’s challenging work emphasises the social and psychological damage caused by unprocessed trauma through an installation that incorporates domestic furniture and ephemera, black and white archival family photographs and projection to evoke a haunting and atmospheric narrative.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Pippa Healy
Pippa Healy’s emotionally driven work The Lake was made on the banks of Lake Altaussee, Austria, during a period of time following a brain scan and exhaustion. The dramatic landscape surrounding the lake echoes Healy’s physical and emotional state and is here captured using a Contax T2 35mm camera using film with a light leak. The experimental effects of the film are revealed on processing, presenting as series of colours, blurs and layers that are unsettling aesthetically and conceptually. Healy’s evocative distortions point towards the fragilities of both the human body and the landscapes that surround us. The work highlights the ways that one can profoundly inform the other.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Phil Hill
Day Zero is a new series of images produced by Phil Hill following the birth of his second child. The photographs show something of the emotionally charged landscape that children bring with them: the microcosm of caring for their needs and wellbeing. Hill’s photographs are reminders that people have the capacity to radically alter our perceptions of place, even if it is a familiar one such as a domestic home and even if they weigh only a few pounds. Glimpses of Hill’s children and home environment are offered generously, drawing attention to the shifting of places and spaces in the home, body, mind and family unit.
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Convergence
Christian Jago
Christian Jago’s works titled "Convergence" began life as a response to a Saharan storm which bought grains of sand and an eerie orange glow to skies across the UK. First making cyanotypes with the sand collected, Christian later developed layered digital images of forests and plant life near to his home. Characterised by a fluorescent, hyper-real colour palette, Christian’s works feature sand dunes, flowers and trees constructed through combinations of his own photographs, virtual 3D landscapes, hand-built sets and archival photographs. The works bring together the subjects of climate emergency, geographical and digital borders, and the generative effects of world-building.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Elena Kollatou and Leonidas Toumpanos
Collaborative duo Elena Kollatou and Leonidas Toumpanos, specialising in long-term projects, have developed powerful and political work concentrated upon a dispute in Skouries Forest in Halkidiki, Greece, between local communities and the Hellas Gold mining company. Open pit gold and copper mining ongoing for more than ten years has resulted in significant deforestation and protests against the destruction of the ecosystem and the livelihoods of locals have been met with vindication and police brutality. The dramatic photographs they have created reveal something of the scale of the situation, and its continually unfolding human and ecological costs.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Nieves Mingueza
One in Three Women by Nieves Mingueza is a powerful series of images that see a combination of altered found and family photographs, emulated crime scene photographs and low-fi exposures of domestic interiors used to underline the traumas of gender-based violence. Hand-written notations, cuts, scribbles and crossings out are used by Mingueza to highlight the global scale of this issue through work that confronts it head on, and contextualises it amid UN data, the Covid-19 pandemic and recent social media awareness-raising campaigns.
Website
rivers, signals, miracles
Zara Pears
Zara Pears’ body of work The Sleeping Self Does Not Appear is preoccupied with the phenomena of sleep and wakefulness, exploring in rich textural detail the sensory aspects of these cyclical processes common to humans and the natural world. The damp darkness of a cave, glossy, spiked leaves, and the varied textures of skin and hair are palpably captured, gently dropping viewers into dream-like vignettes. A narrative can be traced through Pears’ photographs, moving rhythmically in and out of logic and between symbolic images in a way which feels familiar because it recalls the active process of dreaming itself
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rivers, signals, miracles
Nat Wilkins
Nat Wilkins’ work takes as its subject a group of volunteers recording biological data about English ecosystems for the Watsonian Vice County founded in 1852. This system divided the UK into 112 ‘vice counties’ (VC) and in this work, Wilkins has captured portraits of those who are working to record data on flora and fauna in Cumbria, Northumberland and County Durham out in the field. The photographic portraits of ornithologists, botanists and others are accompanied by hand-written letters written by each person, which speak to the future of the planet and to their future selves.
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rivers, signals, miracles
Mandy Williams
Chalk is a short experimental video that explores chalk from landscape to language referencing history, nationhood, tradition and mysticism.
The video, which was awarded Best Short Experimental Film 2022 at the Ramsgate International Film & TV Festival, explores the symbolic chalk landscape of the Kent coast as a site of contested ownership as opposing ideas about England are communicated by projection onto the white cliffs. The video ends by asking: which of these viewpoints will be seen to communicate the story of our country, are we looking back into history or can we look forward to create new narratives.
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Sofia Yala
Further following themes of the domestic, particularly in relation to the Black body, and to ideas of memory and archive is There is NO SIGNAL. This work by Sofia Yala picks up on the figure of her grandfather and his experiences marked by colonialism. In Yala’s photographs we find fragments of a female Black body shown through a small mirror in differing domestic architectural locations such as living rooms, bathrooms and a set of concrete steps. Glimpsed often through these reflected, isolated body parts, the photographs ask questions of belonging, home and intergenerational connection.
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10-14 Waterloo Place
Brighton
BN2 9NB
Map
6–30 October
Wednesday 11:00–17:00
Thursday 11:00–17:00
Friday 11:00–17:00
Saturday 11:00–17:00
Sunday 11:00–17:00