Dates:
10 Mar 2023 - 10 Jun 2023
People:
Location:
Block 336, London
Project:
Opening Times
Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm (or by appointment)
Opening Event
Friday 10 March, 6 – 8pm
Diaspora Pavilion 2: London features two new, site-specific, solo installations by artists Sonia E Barrett and Kashif Nadim Chaudry.
The exhibition is the final iteration of a series of peripatetic events that form ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2 (DP2) project. This trans-national, collaborative project advances ICF’s engagement with diaspora as a critical concept following the first Diaspora Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. DP2 interrogates and complicates the term diaspora across various curatorial formats as part of an ongoing mapping of the rich and complex material cultures, mythologies, alternative histories and re-imagined landscapes that are born from the distinct and yet shared reality of belonging to a diaspora.
For the exhibition, Sonia E Barrett presents Here Tell, Quantum Black, which consists of a new sculptural installation and moving image work addressing the material histories of flint, the black sedimentary rock used in Britain to construct tools, property and weaponry.
Found in abundance in the fields around the artist’s home in the South of England, it is a material Barrett has been collecting for years. Barrett assembles fragments of flint to create a suspended installation of hand-gathered, hand-painted flint fragments in the gallery’s centre. In the lead-up to and during the exhibition, Barrett invites members of different communities to paint pieces of the flint with her in the gallery space, contributing to a growing constellation.
Barrett addresses themes such as property, extraction, violence, and humanity through her engagement with flint. In addition, she is seeking to foster trans-national narrative connections between the animal and plant life (that predates human history now chrystallised in the flints), the fatalities of working-class people in Britain’s flint mining industries, and the deaths across the British Empire where weaponry was fired using gun flints.
In her film, Barrett brings together archival materials documenting sites like Grime’s Graves, a large Neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk, England and the process of flint knapping to create gun flints, alongside aerial footage of her collecting field flint near her home. Through this installation, Barrett creates space for communities to meet, co-create and contemplate a celestial, quantum black.
Kashif Nadim Chaudry has designed the multi-work installation Char Bagh. The Char Bagh is a Persian and Indo-Persian garden design based on the four gardens of heaven mentioned in the Quran. This particular design reached its apotheosis with the Mughal empire on the Indian subcontinent in the 16th and 17th centuries. These gardens symbolised paradise on Earth, and as well as being used for monumental tombs, were also designed for pleasure.
For his installation Char Bagh, Chaudry brings together new and existing sculptural works to stage his first solo presentation in London. Spanning over ten years of his practice, these works showcase Chaudry’s long-term engagement with the colourful and sensual fabrics of South Asia, as well as his fascination with embellishment, adornment and decoration. A family heritage in tailoring has been very influential for Chaudry’s work and has focused his creativity around the importance of materiality and craftsmanship.
Chaudry’s design of the exhibition reveals the influence of art and architectural histories on his practice; while some of the references he relays are the result of a growing awareness of the intersections of his own identity, which has brought him to this particular point in his practice. Negotiating his sexuality as a gay man within different cultural and religious spheres has been a fertile ground from which Chaudry’s practice has taken root and continuously draws inspiration.
With each work in the exhibition Chaudry celebrates beauty and splendour, while provoking allusions to what lies beneath these glamorous surfaces. His introduction of architectural and kinetic elements enables him to play with scale, movement and light in new ways, and he employs humour and play to subvert traditional associations with the materials and forms he uses.
The exhibition is curated by ICF Head of Programmes Jessica Taylor
View Exhibition Leaflet
People:
Project:
Opening Times
Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm (or by appointment)
Opening Event
Friday 10 March, 6 – 8pm
Diaspora Pavilion 2: London features two new, site-specific, solo installations by artists Sonia E Barrett and Kashif Nadim Chaudry.
The exhibition is the final iteration of a series of peripatetic events that form ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2 (DP2) project. This trans-national, collaborative project advances ICF’s engagement with diaspora as a critical concept following the first Diaspora Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. DP2 interrogates and complicates the term diaspora across various curatorial formats as part of an ongoing mapping of the rich and complex material cultures, mythologies, alternative histories and re-imagined landscapes that are born from the distinct and yet shared reality of belonging to a diaspora.
For the exhibition, Sonia E Barrett presents Here Tell, Quantum Black, which consists of a new sculptural installation and moving image work addressing the material histories of flint, the black sedimentary rock used in Britain to construct tools, property and weaponry.
Found in abundance in the fields around the artist’s home in the South of England, it is a material Barrett has been collecting for years. Barrett assembles fragments of flint to create a suspended installation of hand-gathered, hand-painted flint fragments in the gallery’s centre. In the lead-up to and during the exhibition, Barrett invites members of different communities to paint pieces of the flint with her in the gallery space, contributing to a growing constellation.
Barrett addresses themes such as property, extraction, violence, and humanity through her engagement with flint. In addition, she is seeking to foster trans-national narrative connections between the animal and plant life (that predates human history now chrystallised in the flints), the fatalities of working-class people in Britain’s flint mining industries, and the deaths across the British Empire where weaponry was fired using gun flints.
In her film, Barrett brings together archival materials documenting sites like Grime’s Graves, a large Neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk, England and the process of flint knapping to create gun flints, alongside aerial footage of her collecting field flint near her home. Through this installation, Barrett creates space for communities to meet, co-create and contemplate a celestial, quantum black.
Kashif Nadim Chaudry has designed the multi-work installation Char Bagh. The Char Bagh is a Persian and Indo-Persian garden design based on the four gardens of heaven mentioned in the Quran. This particular design reached its apotheosis with the Mughal empire on the Indian subcontinent in the 16th and 17th centuries. These gardens symbolised paradise on Earth, and as well as being used for monumental tombs, were also designed for pleasure.
For his installation Char Bagh, Chaudry brings together new and existing sculptural works to stage his first solo presentation in London. Spanning over ten years of his practice, these works showcase Chaudry’s long-term engagement with the colourful and sensual fabrics of South Asia, as well as his fascination with embellishment, adornment and decoration. A family heritage in tailoring has been very influential for Chaudry’s work and has focused his creativity around the importance of materiality and craftsmanship.
Chaudry’s design of the exhibition reveals the influence of art and architectural histories on his practice; while some of the references he relays are the result of a growing awareness of the intersections of his own identity, which has brought him to this particular point in his practice. Negotiating his sexuality as a gay man within different cultural and religious spheres has been a fertile ground from which Chaudry’s practice has taken root and continuously draws inspiration.
With each work in the exhibition Chaudry celebrates beauty and splendour, while provoking allusions to what lies beneath these glamorous surfaces. His introduction of architectural and kinetic elements enables him to play with scale, movement and light in new ways, and he employs humour and play to subvert traditional associations with the materials and forms he uses.
The exhibition is curated by ICF Head of Programmes Jessica Taylor
View Exhibition Leaflet
Dates:
10 Mar 2023 - 10 Jun 2023
Location:
Block 336, London
