Sammy Lee: Aviary
Tate St Ives
Until 9 January 2022
“Through the aviary portal between the physical and digital realms, artist Sammy Lee invites us to birdwatch in multi-dimensions. VIARY, Tate St Ives’s Winter Light commission 2021, is a virtual, data-driven environment by artist Sammy Lee. The computer-simulated birds are projected onto the ceiling of Tate St Ives’s entrance every evening and streamed online 24/7. The digital birds are directly connected to the state of our planet. Their flocking behaviours are determined by environmental events as they happen across the globe. From distant earthquakes to local flooding, real-time data capture nature’s order and entropy. The flight patterns of the birds respond unpredictably as digital information filters in. As symbolic carriers of information, cautionary tales, and wandering souls, each bird species has been selected for its historic and mythological association with Cornwall and the UK”
Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters
Levinsky Galley, Plymouth
21 October 2021 – 27 February 2022
“Experience ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture, told through more than 300 paintings and objects by over 100 different artists. Take an epic journey that crosses three states, three deserts and some 500,000 square kilometres. With ceramics, paintings, sculpture, installation and film, come and immerse yourself in an exhibition that uses the power of art and culture to connect us across time zones and international borders.”
Rachel Pimm: weeds by the moon
Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
11 September 2021 – 16 January 2022
“weeds by the moon presents an ongoing collection of images of edible and medicinal plants in the form of a thirteen-point lunar almanac, a diagram, or moon-dial. This is presented as a clock which is disobedient to the Gregorian calendar measurements of days, hours or minutes (introduced in October 1582 by the Catholic Pope Gregory XIII, the Gregorian calendar is now used across most of the world). The plants selected are all freely available growing wild across the UK, and therefore require no private land ownership, nor cultivation and so attention is redirected from commercial productivity into the gentle flux and natural cycle of changing growing seasons.”
Asian Art in London
The Mayor Gallery, London
21 October – 6 November 2021
“A selection of artworks by renowned Modern and Contemporary artists from China and Japan. The works on paper and paintings are the results of these artists' fascinating combination of traditional Eastern techniques and philosophy, combining the influences of Western Abstract Expressionism and geometric abstraction during the 50s and 60s.”
Ayesha Tan Jones: Dream Sigil, Stone Portal
Harlesden High Street, London
4 November – 12 December 2021, by appointment only
“Dream Sigil, Stone Portal presents a labyrinth of ritual objects from Ayesha Tan Jones’ performances, paintings and installations. Yearning towards ancestral knowledge, the exhibition maps portals for postmemory existence through a dystopian ecopoetics. The interactive installation Dream Portal Sigil Stones draws on the eco-trash narrative of Una Jynxx, a mystic blogger who is declared missing. Taking the form of a dream journey, the piece centres around queer circularity, rot and rebirth. As Una stumbles through shifting temporalities, they struggle to articulate their point of origin, looping, hitting dead ends and finding medicine in myths. They are rebirthed each day, their post-apocalyptic existence a soup of pre-birth memories. A displaced subject, they emerge through what Marianne Hirsch terms postmemory, the relationship to powerful experiences of previous generations, which transfers to post-generations as affective memories. They swim in this circular existence, trashing binary codes, navigating toxic vegetation, and fermenting firmware with tears.”
Jade Montserrat: Clay, Peat and Cage
York Art Gallery, York
1 October 2021 – 13 February 2022
“The triptych ‘Clay, Peat, Cage’ (2015) explores the North Yorkshire landscape, where Montserrat and Webb-Ellis have lived for the majority of their lives, and addresses issues around ownership of land, nature, and the body, as well as the notion of belonging or unbelonging. As well as the triptych, several of Montserrat’s sketchbooks are also displayed, revealing intriguing insights into her working processes and the trajectory of the films’ development.”
Wishbone Vision
Project Native Informant, London
10 November 2021 – 22 January 2022
“Including new works by the artists, the exhibition explores notions of subterfuge, shape shifting and storytelling to explore personal and collective histories.”
With Anthea Hamilton, Sophia Al-Maria, Zadie Xa and Benito Mayor Vallejo.
Ellie Kyungran Heo: Plantarians (2017 – 2020)
LUX, London
6 November – 11 December 2021
“Plantarians (2017-2020) is a rumination on entangled relationships between humans and plants in urban spaces. Divided into episodes, each follows individuals who cultivate, eat and accompany plants in celebration and grief. These everyday activities become strangely unfamiliar through unhurried attention to the moments of survival and resilience of plants between the cracks, on the peripheries of gardens and within human-made surroundings. The subtle shift in perspective elicits a sense of ambivalence, imagining how plants might endure, interact with and be vulnerable to the interruptions inflicted upon them. Plantarians poses a fundamental question around interdependent relations, both conflicting and intimate, and how we co-inhabit this planet with all living beings.”
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE
Arebyte, London
19 November 2021 – 19 February 2022
“SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE uses the artist’s recent series of DOTCOM works, blacktransarchive.com, blacktransair.com and blacktranssea.com as a starting point for furthering research on Archiving the black trans experience via interactivity and storytelling. The exhibition encompasses a new body of work that positions gaming at the forefront of ideas surrounding action, inaction, relation and archiving experience. In SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE, this methodology takes shape as an immersive point-and-shoot style arcade game asking visitors to question how their choices and actions (or inactions) affect others directly. The game uses the interactions of those who play it to recentre their understanding of responsibility; challenging them to see if their sense of when to act and when not to act is sustainable for black trans people.”