As June brings more lockdown easing, Ignota shares a (non-exhaustive) list of shows we’re excited to see this month.
11 June – 24 July 2021
“Soot Breath // Corpus Infinitum is a film dedicated to tenderness. It reproduces a radical sensibility we learned from listening to the blues, from listening to skin, to heat, and from listening to echoes, listening itself.
We ask, could tenderness dissolve total violence? Could tears displace total extraction? Towards this we reimagine the human and its subject-formation away from predatory desire and lethal abstraction, away from the mind and eyes and noble senses, away from total extraction and its articulations as ethnography, border regimes, slavery, sexual abuse, trade and mining.
Instead we turn to skin, resonance, and tenderness as the raw material of our reimagined earthy sensibility. Remembering that to be tender is to soften like supple grass, and to attend to is to care for, to serve. Serving, we know is the opposite of slavery just as violence dissolves with care.”
Mercedes Azpilicueta: Bondage of Passions
Gasworks, London
19 May – 4 July 2021
“Calling herself a 'dishonest researcher', Azpilicueta creates work in conversation with archives and libraries, myths and legends. In pursuit of elusive historical figures, she uncovers queer, migrant and unheard voices from South America’s colonial past. Created in close collaboration with historians, dancers and craftspeople, her installations take the form of dramaturgy involving set designs, theatrical props, costumes and scores for a performance that doesn’t yet exist, and where the viewer is invited to take centre stage.
The exhibition offers a speculative vision of Catalina de Erauso, the so-called Lieutenant Nun. In the early 1600s, Erauso escaped convent life in the Basque Country and travelled to the New World, where s/he lived under several male identities and became a ruthless conquistador at the service of the Spanish Empire, obtaining the Pope’s blessing to pursue life as a man.”
Gary Zhexi Zhang: CYCLE 25
Bloc Projects, Sheffield
4 June – 3 July 2021
“From imaginary nations to the economy of the sun, the artist uses found artefacts, at once real and fictional, to explore the occult foundations of legal and financial systems. The exhibition takes its title from the number of the current solar cycle – patterns of magnetic fluctuation on the surface of the sun – which began in December 2019 and is expected to continue until 2030.”
Jade Montserrat: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Bosse & Baum
5 June – 24 July 2021
“…guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength, in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own”. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1972)
“Jade Montserrat’s first solo exhibition at Bosse & Baum, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, takes its title from Alice Walker’s text. The exhibition will include new works on paper by the artist. Walker’s text helps readers to locate Black women’s bodies as those shaped and ravished by a legacy of an inhumanity and centres the garden as a tenet of creativity towards healing. Convinced that there is a connection, or line, between ourselves and the earth, and that line, like our communications with one and another, is drawing, Montserrat works through these ideas as a way to harness acts of radical creativity.”
Tosh Basco FKA Boychild: Portraits, Still Lifes and Flowers
Carlos / Ishikawa, London
29 May – 3 July 2021
“Gathered from a never-before-seen collection of Basco’s intimate chronicle of daily life, these snapshots function as a record of a specific moment in the artist’s complex relationship to cameras. Flattened within the frame like pressed flowers, Basco describes the stacks of photos being like memory banks in which ‘everything is touching, rubbing into everything else…dancing and disappearing and reappearing like electrons in an atom, coming in and out of focus...’”