Artists are invited to explore themes of relevance to the global remit of our activities, whilst addressing the local context of our focus areas. We produce exhibitions, talks, commissions and collaborations, showcasing global creativity to our UK-based audience.
Archive of events
Play! Waheeda Malullah, video, 2005
Play! by Waheeda Malullah
Video screening
9-15 January 2009
Mon-Fri, 10:00-18:00
About Play !
In her diverse practice, that includes elements of video, photography, installation and performance, current international resident-artist Waheeda Malullah uses childhood playfulness to identify the rules of the social game. In Play! (video, 2005), Waheeda uses football to stage her feelings and the projection of her desires.
Waheeda’s interest in football goes back to her childhood dream of becoming a footballer. Given gender segregation at the time (Bahrain’s national football team was formed in 2003), Waheeda’s unfulfilled ambition became a recurring element of her work, and the motive for the ongoing, symbolic association between football, and the confrontation of her personal desires with the role assigned to her by society.
The binary dynamics evoked by team sports (usually involving two entities strategizing one against an other) often feature in Waheeda’ s works, as means to explore ideas around absolute opposites, and tensions between individual freedom and the requirements of being in a group – a team, a family, a society. Not unlike the rules of a football game, the laws of community living govern individuals’ everyday choices. For instance, looking at social interactions in Bahrain, through the prism of gender, the male/female dichotomy is reflected in colour-coded clothing habits, which Waheeda often refers to in her work: women traditionally wear Black while men wear White.
The association / evocation mechanisms on which the fragmented narration of Play! are based go back to earlier works such as Stopped Ball (installation, 2003). A short video-documentary, based on an interview with Waheeda, attempts to track the origin and development of these mechanisms back to biographical elements, through to the experimental period (both with media and art forms), which characterised Waheeda’s thought process for Play!.
Untitled (Digital print on Aluminium, 2003, 2009) is a indirect product of Play!. This photograph of Waheeda and the children who participated in the video, posing for the camera, is not to be seen as an artwork as such, but rather archive documentation. It was shot on location, during the production of the video.
This video screening is the last part of ‘with a small p’, a series of events and commissions, during which the Delfina Foundation invited six artists to explore how mechanisms inherent to children and adult’s games – association, transposition, transformation, exaggeration, disguise, appropriation, and interaction, can be used as a trickster to reveal absurdities and expose topical conditions.
Waheeda Malullah was born in 1978 in Bahrain. She studied at Riam Institute in Bahrain, and showed her work nationally and internationally, including the Cairo Biennale 2008. In 2009, she will showcase new work at the Sharjah Biennale,and Art Dubai.
Jeni Snell, MI-R-US, Installation-Performance, 2008
With a small p
Can playing be a political gesture?
Commissions and Events
13 November – 2 December To be continued in January 2009.
About with a small p
The Delfina Foundation invites six artists toexplore how mechanisms inherent to children and adult’s games – association, transposition, transformation, exaggeration, disguise, appropriation, and interaction, can be used as a trickster to reveal absurdities and expose topical conditions.
A short season of talks, interventions, exhibitions and new commissions, with a small p will affirm the unique contribution of ludic expression to the creative process. Participating artists build on the individual relations and interactions contained within games and recreation, to explore ideas around communication, learning and change. The rules of the artists’ playful artefacts aim to reflect or comment upon the social and cultural structures within which the “players” evolve.
Seeking to answer one simple question: “can playing be a political gesture?”, the audience will be invited to explore global perspectives on the relevance, and legitimacy of using the seductive interactions and accessible language associated with game-playing, recreation, and leisure, in order to produce socio-political critiques. Whilst directly acknowledging the privileged position occupied by Western artists working in this area, with a small p will explore ludicity as a necessary resourcefulness in situations where, like in Halabja, Northern Iraq, the act of game-playing integrates the symbolic realm, and connotes basic human rights and freedoms.
Programme:
Playground Battlefield Artist Talks
Part I: 13 November, 19:00-20:00
Jeni Snell in conversation with Barry Curtis
Part II: Halabja Adventure Playground
24 November, 19:00-20:00
Ixone Sadaba in conversation with Tom Carrigan
International resident artist Ixone Sadaba expands on her practice, which explores the body as a location of inner and outer conflict, to reflect upon game-playing as a an essential condition of the formation of collective identities. Following her two-week residency in Northern Iraq, Ixone gives account of her experience of the Halabja Adventure Playground project, led by photographer Tom Carrigan, funded by the Kurdish Human Rights Project and Spring Studios.
MI-R-US
Installation from 17-21 November
Daily performance: 18:00-20:00
Inspired by her experience of growing up and playing amidst redundant military buildings in the Island of Guernsey, Jeni Snell’s MI-R-US (installation-performance) is a multi-piece wooden structure, which uses the tactile language of modular construction games such as PLaypax. Reverting into a state of play, the audience will be invited, to take part in an imaginary nation-building exercise, and build a fabulous city with the artist.
Rear Window
27 November and 2 December, 18:00-19:00
Andy Field is a theatre maker and writer. Rear Window (intervention) is a chillingly exiting social experiment, drenched in Hitchcockian suspense and rooted in Stanley Milgram’s cynical spirit of experimentation. Inviting participants to test their courage and their resistance to peer pressure, Andy dares the audience to find out how long it takes before one intervenes against the status quo...
A Rather Trivial Pursuit
27 November and 2 December, 19:30-20:30
Yara El-Sherbini is a London based artist whose playful and multi-disciplinary approach to art-making uses popular culture and humour to make engaging and accessible works. With A Rather Trivial Pursuit, Yara will invite the audience to participate in a board-game, which leisurely explores life, Art and relational aesthetics.
Wallsscreen/dreamland (work-in-progress), installation, 2008.
Wall Screen/Dreamland - Ismael Iglesias
Launch event: 30 September 2008
Exhibition runs until 17 October 2008
Ismael Iglesias blends the achievements of traditional pictorial avant-gardism with the computer screens’ opaque luminescence. In his practice, Ismael takes elements of graphic and digital design to create textures and screens, which, installed in the exhibition room, question the boundaries of architecture and of the paintings themselves. Whilst deriving from Ismael’s systematic search within the newest technology, and assimilating elements of VJing and popular culture, the intention is to comprehend the articulation – and speed of fragmented images, as well as their relation to the exhibition space.
Using elements of painting, video and installation, Wallscreen/Dreamland, Ismael’s first solo exhibition in London, is a disorienting experience, an exploration of the possibility of a New World based on the classic geometries of computer art and pictorial modernism.
Ismael Iglesias was born in 1974 in Durango, Spain.
He has won numerous prizes in Spain, and has recently exhibited his work at ARCO – Madrid, Artium Museum, Vitoria and Galeria ADN– Barcelona.
He currently lives and works in Bilbao, Spain.
Dry Ice - Manal Mahamid
24 July 2008
Manal Mahamid grew up in Muawiya, a village in the suburbs of Umm El Fahem, Israel, where the population is predominantly Palestinian-Arab. Her work embodies a struggle to confront and reconcile her childhood memories of the place as it was, with the reality of what it has become: two parallel worlds, in which time acts as a dividing wall.
Her private and emotional narrative provide an insight to the story of her motherland and its children. Although clearly personal, and rooted in her relationship to “home”, her work transcends geographical and cultural barriers, whilst embracing collective emotions as a mother tongue.
Drawing on nostalgia and the romantic relationship to one’s native soil, Manal uses, in her work, a metaphorical language, which sees the love letter, the flower, the wall, the pillar and vapour as signifiers of universal experiences. The evident dialogue between the artist and the surrounding architecture is paced by the unsettling tensions between presence and absence, past and present, material and immaterial, ephemeral and permanent, which punctuate her work.
Treno - video installation
4-11 July, Mon-Fri, 10:00 – 18:00
An immersion in the clamorous surge of Colombia’s Cauca River, Treno is a funeral ode alluding to human impotence and misfortune in violence.
In this video installation, Clemencia Echeverri attempts to capture: "the sounds that reach distances where the intimate fuses with the social, where the passing voice is symbolically filtered through internal and external spaces, where nature guards its own sounds and secrets of historical violence." Perhaps art is the witness that allows us to hear all this evocative and archetypal material.
The memory of a sound is a peculiar mechanism, and its resonance is shared collectively. Clemencia Echeverri explores the particular element of sound that, whilst echoing the present, conjures up past experiences through evocations, archetypal relationships and a sense of place.
Clemencia Echeverri studied at Chelsea College of Art and Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin, Colombia. She was an international resident artist at the Delfina Studio Trust, and has exhibited her work internationally. She currently teaches at the Universidad Nacional de Columbia and Universidad de Antioquia, Medellin. Clemencia lives and work in Colombia.
Space of Sound - talk
10 July 08, 19:00 - 20:00
Clemencia Echeverri in conversation with Gabriela Salgado (Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern): Sound, space, visuality and emotional geographies of violence.
Part of The Delfina Studio Trust artist-alumni series.