Unexpected: continuing narratives of identity and migration
Working in collaboration with Counterpoints Arts, our new exhibition, Unexpected (until 24 April 2016) explores narratives of identity and migration with the emphasis on the contemporary response. This follows Ben Uri’s centenary exhibition, Out of Chaos, held at Somerset House in 2015, returning us to our permanent location at Boundary Road, NW8. Works by Ben Uri artists including Frank Auerbach, Eva Frankfurther, Julie Held and Josef Herman are shown alongside those by invited contemporary artists – all from migrant backgrounds – across a range of disciplines and media. This includes paintings by Tam Joseph and Eugene Palmer, drawings by Behjat Omer Abdulla, sculpture and installations by Ana Cvorovic, Joyce Kalema, Jasleen Kaur, Fokowan George Kelly and Zory Shahrokhi, photography by Güler Ates, James Russell Cant, Juan delGado and former Community Partners Oxford House, textiles by Salah ud Din, an audio-visual piece by Jessica Marlowe and an HLF commissioned film responding to Out of Chaos by Edwin Mingard. Both individually and collectively, the featured works touch on themes of journeys, displacement, loss, memory and identity, evoking powerful and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions and responses.
Both individually and collectively, the featured works touch on themes of journeys, displacement, loss, memory and identity, evoking powerful and sometimes unexpected juxtapositions and responses. The Upper Gallery examines direct responses to identity and migration; the Lower Gallery focuses on landscape and textiles as two differing metaphors, widely interpreted, allowing these artists to examine these themes in more detail.
A number of related events will run alongside the exhibition on Tuesday mornings and Thursday evenings. These will include free curatorial tours, a weaving workshop led by Salah Ud Din and a screening and Q&A session with filmmaker Edwin Mingard. Events will be regularly added to the programme, so please see our website for further details.
Labels
Salah Ud Din (1986 Multan, Pakistan – lives London, England)
Invisible Movement: Kaleidoscope,2014, handwoven fibre optics, Salah Ud Din
Invisible Movement: Halved Drop, 2014, handwoven fibre optics, Salah Ud Din
Central St Martins graduate and refugee, Salah Ud Din specializes in hand-woven textiles, exploring his reactions to culture and society, and centred on concepts of transformation. In Invisible Movement, the fibre optic installations are inspired by light photons recorded using a camera and then translated into handwoven textiles illuminated by an external light source.
Tam Joseph (1947 Dominica – lives London, England and Nimes, France)
The Hand Made Map of the World,2013
Acrylic on board
Tam Joseph
Central School and Slade School graduate, Tam Joseph was born in Dominica and migrated to Britain in 1955; he lives in London and Nimes, France.Beginning with his 1960s’ whirlwind nomadic tour of Europe, Asia, and Africa, the eclectic spirit of the Bohemian has played a definitive role in Joseph’s multifaceted exploration of contemporary realities. His work explores the many inspirations, aspirations, and contradictions that shape those realities. The Hand Made Map of the world playfully reorders conventional geographies, blurring boundaries and suggesting new and unexpected possibilities.
Frank Auerbach (1931 Berlin, Germany – lives London, England)
Mornington Crescent, Summer Morning II, 2004
Oil on board
Ben Uri Collection
Acquired in 2006 from Marlborough Fine Art with the assistance of
the artist, Marlborough Fine Art, the Art Fund, the MLA / V&A Purchase
Grant Fund, Pauline & Daniel Auerbach and anonymous donors
German-Jewish émigré Frank Auerbach came to England as an evacuee from Nazi Germany and later settled in Camden, north London, where he has now lived and worked for more than 60 years. Auerbach deliberately restricts his motifs; often foregrounding the area around his studio and its distinctive features, including the landmark chimney. Painting with characteristic heavy impasto, he transforms the choking London traffic into a vigorous surge of vibrant pigment. The date ‘2004’ scratched into the paintwork suggests the urgency and transience of both life and art.
Josef Herman (1911 Warsaw, Poland – 2000 London, England)
Refugees, c. 1941
Gouache on paper
Ben Uri Collection
Purchased with the kind assistance of the ACE / V&A Purchase Grant
Fund and the Art Fund 2014 via Conor Macklin of the Grosvenor Gallery
Polish-Jewish émigré Josef Herman fled to Britain via Belgium and France, initially settling in Glasgow in 1940. Refugees was painted shortly afterwards, drawing on his eastern-European Jewish heritage and expressionist roots, to evoke a lost Warsaw set among moonlit spires. The family represents the universal plight of the refugee, uprooted and displaced by the traumas of war; the uncertainty of their fate symbolized by the mouse dangling from the cat’s mouth. Herman’s entire family later perished in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Eva Frankfurther (1930 Berlin, Germany – 1959, London, England)
West Indian Waitresses, c. 1955
Oil on paper
Ben Uri Collection
Presented by the artist’s sister, BeatePlanskoy, 2015
Eva Frankfurther fled Nazi Germany in 1939, settling with her family in England and later studying at St Martin’s School of Art alongside Frank Auerbach. Afterwards, already disillusioned with the London art scene, she worked evenings as a counter-hand at Lyons Corner House, Piccadilly, painting during the day: ‘West Indian, Irish, Cypriot and Pakistani immigrants […], these were the people amongst whom I lived and made some of my best friends’, she wrote. Her empathetic portrait of two Caribbean waitresses also documents the beginnings of the new postwar multicultural society in Britain.
Fowokan George Kelly (1943 Kingston, Jamaica – lives London, England)
Natty Roots, Natty Bongo, 2012
Bronze on stone plinth
Fowokan George Kelly
Fowokan (born Kenness) George Kelly has been a practicing sculptor since the early 1980s. He is mainly self-taught, having deliberately chosen not to be trained in western art institutions, which he considers too deeply entrenched in their own traditions with little or no understanding of African culture. His work is concerned with African celebration, revelation and repossession. Natty Roots, Natty Bongo is reminiscent of a period in the early 1970s when the Rastafarian ideals and lifestyle first arrived in the UK from Jamaica, with a transforming effect on the lives of many thousands of young people.
Jacob Epstein (1880 New York, USA – 1959 London, England)
Lydia, 1931
Bronze
Ben Uri Collection
Ethel Solomon Bequest
Russian-Polish Jewish émigré Jacob Epstein was raised in Manhattan’s multicultural Lower East Side and settled in London in 1905. A champion of direct carving, his controversial public commissions, including the British Medical Association building façade (1907−08) in London and Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Paris (1911), challenged prevailing notions of sexuality and beauty and favoured the non-European model. Lydia, a jazz singer and/or dancer, was working as a waitress at Epstein’s favourite Chinese restaurant in London’s Wardour Street when they met; this is the second of three busts of her created between 1929 and 1934.
James Russell Cant (1965 Essex, England - Lives London, England)
Divided to the Ocean, 2009
Keith: Savanna-la-Mar, Jamaica to London 1959
Donal: Belfast, Northern Ireland to Preston 1973
Kerttu: Urjala, Finland to Tilbury 1959 to 1960
Wallace: Birchip, Australia to London 1936
Digital C-type photographs, James Russell Cant
James Russell Cant has worked in London as a photographer since 1995. He is a senior lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts. Using the sea and tide as metaphors, Divided to the Ocean, a series of 11 photographs, considers the divisions of time, place, self and the potential for melancholy inherent in the process of migration. The subjects, who include the artist’s father, all migrated to England by sea. The images, their edges blurred, are composites made over a period of time. Ebbing and flowing, like the seas crossed on their arrival, the ocean both connects and divides them from their lands of origin.
Joyce Kalema (1988 Democratic Republic of Congo – lives London, England)
Untitled, 2016
Hair and glue
Joyce Kalema
Joyce Wadiahendo Kalema was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and lives in London. Her work draws on Paul Gilroy’s notion of English and Black identities as ‘unfinished processes’ and Stuart Hall’s theory on the mechanism of identity, which she considers to be ‘in a constant mode of transmutation’. She is interested in the dichotomy and friction arising from materials that have been ‘manipulated to deny their features, which allow the work to exist in an in-between-space and in the process of “becoming”’.
Güler Ates (1977 Eastern Turkey – lives London, England)
Home Performance I, 2014
Photograph
Güler Ates
Born in Eastern Turkey, Güler Ates has been living and working in London for the past 17 years. She graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Printmaking and is currently Digital Print Tutor at the Royal Academy Schools. In this performance, set in Lapa, Rio – a neighbourhood famed for its architectural monuments and Bohemian culture – a veiled figure crosses the foreground pulling a house behind her. Ates’ practice explores concepts of displacement, particularly the notion that we carry our ‘mental home … wherever we go’.
Behjat Omer Abdulla (1976 Kurdistan – lives Sweden)
In Limbo: Hajy Khalil, 2010
Pencil and graphite powder on paper
Behjat Omer Abdulla
Behjat Omer Abdulla (1976 Kurdistan – lives Sweden)
In Limbo: Zrng, 2010
Pencil and graphite powder on paper
Behjat Omer Abdulla
Behjat Omer Abdulla was born and lived in Kurdistan until 1997 when war forced him to flee to England, where he faced an 11-year battle to gain recognition as a refugee; he currently lives in Sweden. Haunted by these experiences, his art explores concepts of identity, displacement, uncertainty and falsification. His two over-life size graphite portraits are part of a series known as In Limbo and give a monumentality to subjects who are often invisible: Kurdish grandfather Hajy Khalil, was refused asylum in the UK and fled to Sweden, deported and returned to Iraq; he was shot dead by a gunman on his way home. Zrng, who fled Iraq for the UK, has been waiting for a decision on his refugee status for the past nine years.
Eugene Palmer (1955 Jamaica – lives London, England)
Nadine, 2006
Acrylic paint on canvas
Eugene Palmer
Wimbledon and Goldsmiths College graduate Eugene Palmer is a Jamaican-born British artist, who came to England as a child. His awareness of this dual cultural identity has shaped his artistic career. His practice explores cultural history using archival records, photographs and contemporary media. Nadine is part of a body of work examining portraiture as a document. Based on photographs from the recent past, the ‘look’ of the work inevitably raises questions about the relationship between painting and photography, particularly the labour of painting – engaging with the photographic image in a slow process of ‘stretching out’ the instantaneous.
Zory Shahrokhi (Iran – lives London, England)
Flying, 2011
Installation sculpture: wires, fabric and paper
Zory Shahrokhi
Zory Shahrokhi is a British-Iranian visual artist based in London. Her practice developed through a concern in exploring cultural/political agendas, employing performance in relation to installation and photography. Influenced by her background, her work is concerned with universal issues around the contemporary human condition and breaches in human rights. She is primarily interested in issues and perceptions around displacement, exploitation and gender oppression. The swallows in Flying are made from the cloth sent to the artist by her Iranian friends and family since she left.
Room 1. Landscapes of belonging
‘Landscapes of belonging’ explores the concept of landscape as the repository of memory, loss, community and culture. Unexpected dialogues are initiated between artworks such as delGado’s photographs of natural landscapes ‘altered’ by built structures, and Jasleen Kaur’s three touch-lamp ‘Cairns’, fashioned in stone. By contrast, the high-rise in the built environment in Ana Cvorovic’sDry Feel is a symbol of displacement and alienation. It is flanked by two buildings representing collective identity in John Allin’s retrospective cityscapes of the East End, home to successive migrant communities and the cradle of the garment industry, handed on to each new migrant group. Built as a Huguenot church, the Great Spitalfields Synagogue on the corner of Brick Lane, is today the Jamme Masjid mosque; its famous sundial above with its Latin inscription (blank in Allin’s depiction) reading ‘Umbra Sumus’ / ‘We are Shadow’. On the right, the spire of Christ Church, Spitalfields, just glimpsed in the background, is one of the best-known symbols of London’s East End. It is echoed here in a series of photographs, known as Postcards from Aldgate East, reflecting the multicultural history of this vibrant part of London. The final photograph of Georgian silk weavers’ houses leads us into a room exploring the legacy of the textile industry.
Labels
Christine Hall
Postcards from Aldgate East: Brick Lane Mosque
Juan delGado (Spain – lives London, England)
Altered Landscapes: Stairs, 2009–12
Photograph
Juan delGado
Juan delGado (Spain – lives London, England)
Altered Landscapes: Balcony, 2009–12
Photograph
Juan delGado
Juan delGado was born in Spain and lives and works in London; his own experience as a migrant has led him to focus on the universality of this theme. His practice encompasses photography, moving image and installation and he has produced an extensive body of work exploring landscape, migration, trauma, disability and gender. The series Altered Landscapes reflects on concepts of belonging, as part of the artist’s ongoing enquiries into the personal narratives of transient people whose movements are restricted, particularly those crossing from Turkey into Greece and Macedonia.
Jasleen Kaur (Glasgow – lives London, England)
Cairns, 2016
Found material, imitation stone, chrome plated abs, electrics
Jasleen Kaur, Project initiated as part of BALTIC 39 |
FIGURE THREE, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Jasleen Kaur is a third generation émigré of Scottish-Asian origin based in London. Fascinated by the malleability and hybridity of culture, her practice is craft-based. Influenced by memories of the family hardware store, she refashions objects; her work reconsiders the reality of materiality, usage and everyday routine. Cairns is a series of three touch-lamps inspired by her parents’ ritualistic lighting of a joth (ghee candle) within a brick shelter on derelict land near their house to ward off the negative energies caused by their son’s imprisonment. This highly personal project also explores the disparity between Eastern and Western rationales through an object that gives light, uniting cultural ideas, values and aesthetics.
Jessica Marlowe (1973 London, England – lives London, England)
1 DurmeQueridoHijico: A Sephardi Lullaby taught by ‘descendants of Marranos’ in Seville, Spain. May 2015
Audio
2 Interpreting Ladino with Grandma, January 2016.
Audio
Jessica Marlowe
Artist, singer, musician and oral historian Jessica Marlowe is a second-generation émigré of Sephardi-Jewish, Ladino-speaking origin. This piece, created in dialogue with her grandmother, who also provided the handwritten Bulgarian translation, is part of an art and heritage project exploring the nature of the Sephardi diaspora through its Ladino language, song and oral culture.
Oxford House Community Project
Project participants: FaridehAmirinia, Barbara Beasley, Alan Drew, Mike Elston, Christine Hall, MahmudaKhanam, Peter Lanes, AncaLungu, Muhammad Turan Miah, Stavarha Wilson and
Bill WrightProject coordinators: Graham Barker and Natalie Clarke
Postcards from Aldgate East, 2015
This collaborative project was developed during Ben Uri’s Out of Chaos Centenary exhibition in 2015 in partnership with Oxford House, Bethnal Green as part of a Community Engagement Programme funded by The Heritage Lottery Fund, inspired by the founding of Ben Uri. On a number of walks through Aldgate East, twelve local adult residents, led by project leader Graham Barker, photography teacher Natalie Clarke and film company Blueprint Film Foundation, documented East End street life, architecture, cultural landmarks, local residents and workers. Behind-the-scenes visits locally, as well as a trip to the Ben Uri archives also informed the photography, which illustrates the changing landscape and communities, reflecting the fluidity of migration to the capital.
The photographs became a series of postcards (a full set of which are available for viewing during this exhibition) as well as a short film which documents today’s East End.
Peter Lanes Altab Ali Park
Christine Hall Toynbee Hall and Studios
Peter Lanes Christchurch Spitalfields
Christine Hall Commercial Road
FaridehAmirinaPrincelet Street
Bill Wright WentworthStreet Textiles Shops
Stavarha Wilson Sandys Row Synagogue
Stavarha Wilson St. Georges Lutheran Church
Bill Wright Ben Eine on Middlesex Street
Mike ElstonTen Bells
Barbara Beasley Reflections on Street Art
AncaLunguAlmshouse, Puma Court
AncaLunguWhite Church Lane
Christine Hall How to Build a Universe
Stavarha Wilson Cutting Corners at Fashion Street
Christine Hall Word on the Street
John Allin (1934 London, England – 1991 London, England)
East End Series (Protest at Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street), 1975
Lithograph
Ben Uri Collection
Presented by Jonathan Stone 1982
John Allin was born in East London. He taught himself to paint while serving a six-month prison sentence for theft and achieved success within the Folk/Outsider Art movement in Britain, depicting scenes based on childhood memories. Part of the East End Series, Allin’s depiction of the 1936 anti-Fascist rally known as the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ shows banner-waving protestors gathering at Gardiners’ Corner – a famous East End department store – as local Jewish, communist, socialist, anarchist, and Irish groups, united against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
Ana Cvorovic (1981 former Yugoslavia – lives London, England)