Some Sort of Tenderness*

Presentations

Please note, for some of the timed presentations there is a limited capacity for audiences.

Aki Inomata (Library)
All afternoon, with demonstration by the artist between 14:30 – 15:00
Together with her customised 3D printer, Aki will be producing and presenting models of the previous day’s clouds suspended in glasses of water – a drinkable reflection on fleeting moments and ecosystem fragility.

Petra Matić (Dining room)
15:15 – 15:40
Petra will present The City That Has Peace, a short documentary film following the rise and fall of Zagreb’s International Student Friendship Club, active between the 1960s and the 1990s. Exploring topics of solidarity, war, and community, Sam Bushara and Mohamed Al Younis lead us through the largely forgotten history of Non-Aligned Zagreb.

Takuya Watanabe (Project space)
All afternoon, with screening of previous works at 16:00 – 16:45
Takuya presents footage of what is believed to be the first British specimen of Japanese knotweed, introduced by Siebold in 1850, currently housed at Kew Gardens. He traces the journey of Japanese knotweed which, while being native to Japan, is regarded as an invasive species in Europe. This exploration attempts to reveal how the spread of Japanese knotweed in Europe has been accelerated by human activities. Takuya is also screening his previous work, Factory Worker ‘K’ (21 min, 2017), which deals with modern views on labour, and Good Luck on Your Journey (24 min, 2019), a collaboration with a Japanese Brazilian living in Japan.

Tahmineh Monzavi (Dining room)
17:00 – 17:20
In conversation with her project collaborator, curator Dr Vali Mahlouji, Tahmineh will be sharing a film clip, photographic prints, and documents that relate to her project documenting a shelter for homeless women in Tehran, which she is revisiting and developing during her residency.

Merve Mepa (Project space)
All afternoon
Merve will present a generative work on language, weaving, and coding that she has been focusing on for about three years, but whose scope she has sought to expand during her residency.

Hyekyung Son (Project space)
All afternoon
Typically working in sculpture, Hyekyung will present a more research-based installation of her investigation into labour, industrialisation and the growth of capitalism. Through field trips to Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield among others, Hyekyung’s research explores the advent of modern manufacture and the factories that gave birth to capitalist production. Hyekyung’s inquiry goes further, about how people got expelled from the land during the “Enclosure Movement”, and the mode and history of labour movement against the capitalist labour exploitation.

Anna Housiada (Kitchen)
All afternoon
Anna will share a selection of her research conducted in London on the history of spices, focusing on pepper as the “king of spices” and its relation to colonialism. This will include archival images, books, spices, interview records with community participants, and she will be serving homemade snacks created from reference recipes.

Participating Artists

Anna Housiada (Greece) produces work that stems from both academic and artistic research and which revolves around the experience and expression of social and ethnic identity. Anna understands her practice as a rhizome, growing across questions of belonging, through participation and collective production of knowledge, writing, crafting and cooking, creating intersections with the potential to activate a historical, critical and political dialogue.

Aki Inomata (Japan) makes works in collaboration with other species; investigating the relationships between animals and human beings and the creations that emerge from them.

Petra Matić (Croatia) is a curator, artist, and activist. Oriented around the social and spatial politics of collective actions, hospitality, and conviviality, Petra’s current research examines the socio-political histories of the Non-Aligned Movement and its constituent choreography of movement, exchanges, and solidarity. Strongly rooted in anti-colonial practices and mutual aid, she makes welcoming spaces for communities facing violence and displacement and participates actively in anti-racist knowledge exchange. She is the founder and director of Jutro, a cultural organisation working across contemporary art, heritage, and human rights.

Merve Mepa (Turkey) focuses on intra-actions, ruptures, gaps, and interplays between theory and practice. She synthesises historical, scientific, and marginalised knowledge to create work within a complex system of diverse elements of production and labour. Research-practice synergies facilitate this process. This, intertwined with tradition, labour and technology, fosters a space for discussing diffractions within a complex system.

Tahmineh Monzavi (Iran) is a socially conscious photographer. She began her professional career as a documentary photographer in 2005 and has developed her own style to work across artistic and documentary photography.

Hyekyung Son (South Korea) in her practice focuses on the contradiction of the capitalist system, which essentially valorises itself through the exploitation of surplus-value, and the necessity of the overcoming of the contradiction, which is metaphorically structuralised. Hyekyung studies and researches the laws and principles of the capitalist system, and presenting this through the basic unit of the wealth in capitalist society; the commodity. Through her work she seeks to take and hold a materialist and dialectic approach.

Takuya Watanabe (Japan) is a visual artist. He makes video installations that unveil the intricate interplay of power and vulnerability woven into contemporary society. His work delves into a myriad of complex issues, spanning labour and violence to immigration and vulnerability. Through research and interviews within communities, he identifies subtle physical and linguistic gestures expressed in dialogues as a form of “representational object.” By doing so, he visualises the complexity of social structures and forces that underlie these communities’ experiences. Recently, he has been exploring social interactions beyond human society to include plants as other beings.

Credits

With thanks to the residency supporters of the participating artists: ARTWORKS, Japan House London Trust, Kunsthalle Praha, Knotenpunkt, SAHA, and SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation; Delfina Foundation’s Patron Networks for the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, and Asia-Pacific; and Alex Haidas and Yukiko Pajot.