Zoë Mendelson, 'Kitchen Table Solo Show', 2021
INTERIOR/INTERIOR
Please see below for biographies and references - for curators and contributors to INTERIOR/INTERIOR
Zoë Mendelson and Anna Bunting-Branch would like to thank all the artist-contributors who have sent work/worked with us on this series of events, and all those less visible hands who crafted it with us/supported us with it.
Anna Bunting-Branch
Anna Bunting-Branch is an artist and researcher based in London. Moving between different practices–including painting, writing and animation–her work explores science fiction as a methodology to re-vision feminist practice and its histories. Her solo presentations include Warm Worlds and Otherwise, QUAD, Derby (2020) and Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018), and The Labours of Barren House, Jerwood Space, London (2017).
Recently, Anna's work has been presented in group exhibitions and events at Bergen Kunsthall, CCA Derry-Londonderry, FACT Liverpool, Helsinki Contemporary and ICA London, and she has published work in Fandom as Methodology (Goldsmiths Press, 2019), MAP Magazine and Art Licks. Anna is currently undertaking a practice-related PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, supported by the AHRC London Arts & Humanities Partnership. In 2019 she was awarded an Arts Council England Project Grant. She is Associate Lecturer in Creative Research and Painting at CCW, University of the Arts London.
above: Anna Bunting-Branch, 'Recipes for Disaster', 2021
below: Zoë Mendelson, 'Kitchen Table Solo Show, 3', 2021
INTERIOR/INTERIOR is curated by
28 October 2021
Dr Zoë Mendelson
is an artist and writer with an expanded field practice that owes its spatialisation, historical narratives and compositional framework to painting. She is Head of Painting & Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art. Her work incorporates hand-driven animation, collage, drawing, installation, painting, performance and fiction writing. She engages collation as a methodological framework for creating networks between psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapeutic practice, spatial theory, fine art and critical practice.
Zoë Mendelson's specific research interests as an artist are focused on disorder - in psychological terms - as a culturally produced phenomenon, in parallel to its clinical and spatial counterparts. She is interested in how culture co-opts psychological and medical motifs and spectacularises them, leading to complex and widespread mis-readings. This has led her to produce artworks in direct response to imagery produced or used within medicine itself - particularly in diagnostics.
Mendelson’s PhD, at Central Saint Martins (2015), was titled Psychologies and Spaces of Accumulation: The hoard as collagist methodology (and other stories). This research located and spatialised systematised archiving alongside seemingly pathological object relations, and included relationships drawn between urban space and wellness.
In 2015 Zoë was a selected member of the AHRC/Wellcome Trust funded New Generations programme for researchers in the Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. She has made works that consider the clinic as cultural site; histories of hygiene; wellness and the city, our relationships to waste, and commerce as a viral metaphor.
Zoë co-curates the network paintingresearch with Geraint Evans and and is co-founder and editor of The Edit, an online and inclusive, de-canonised bibliography for students in Fine Art and related fields, now used in Arts education internationally.
Mendelson’s work has been shown/performed regularly nationally and internationally in public and commercial spaces. These have included Fondation Cartier, Paris (2005), Chapter, Cardiff (2006), CRAC, Alsace (2008), Barbican Centre, London (2015), Kunstmuseum Olten, Switzerland (2015) and Science Museum London (2018). Her writings on painting in the expanded field include a catalogue essay for Fully Awake (2019) and forthcoming chapter with Tom Cardwell and Geraint Evans, ’Painting as Technology’ in Teaching Painting: Painting the New (2021, Cambridge Scholars Press).
Zoë has a profound interest in ill-being as a place of potential agency and advocacy - at odds with a current focus on well-being as a ‘success’ narrative.
the OCCUPANTS
artist-contributors:
Marita Fraser
is an artist, writer and researcher exhibiting nationally and internationally.
Institutional shows include a solo survey at Städtisches Museum Engen as well as exhibitions with Kunsthaus Vienna, Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen, MU Eindhoven, Pumphouse London and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She was awarded the ArtReview Casa Wabi Residency Award and has completed residencies with Museums Quartier Vienna (Q21), Saltzamt Linz and Cité internationale des arts Paris.
Fraser's essay ‘Careless Reply’, was published in Careless, MA Bibliotheque, this year and she has contributions in the upcoming publications I Care By … , RCA Research Communiques, and PROVA 6, research journal. Her recent practice examines the spaces between the artist, the school run and working with the body, text and painting. She asks where does friendship sit within movement and painting practice? How does the muteness of abstraction speak? How might conversations be had?
Marita Fraser
Film Still from Speaking With, 2021
Digital Film
Marita Fraser - references and supporting texts:
NO Manifesto (1965)
- Yvonne Rainer
No to spectacle.
No to virtuosity.
No to transformations and magic and make-believe.
No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image.
No to the heroic.
No to the anti-heroic.
No to trash imagery.
No to involvement of performer or spectator.
No to style.
No to camp.
No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer.
No to eccentricity.
No to moving or being moved.
An article on Yvonne Rainer’s Passing and Jostling While Being Confined to a Small Apartment appeared in the New York Times in March 2020. Here is a link to it.
Working from her No Manifesto Rainer created the movement work Trio A 1966. She made a film work of this in 1978.
Film Still Trio A 1978
Yvonne Rainer
The quote from Carla Lonzi’s dairy comes from Shutup. Or actually Speak: Diary of a Feminist. (1978). The English translation from Italian comes from Clara Matteuzzi, and her 2014 article ‘Through the screen: Carla Lonzi and cinema’. In European Journal of Women's Studies, 21, 2014
Hazel Meyer
is an artist who works with installation, performance, and text to investigate the relationships between sexuality, feminism, and material culture.
Her work recovers the queer aesthetics, politics, and bodies often effaced within histories of infrastructure, athletics and illness. Drawing on archival research, she designs immersive installations that bring various troublemakers—lesbians-feminists, gender outlaws, leather-dykes—into a performative space that centres desire, queerness, and sweat.
Recent activations of her work have taken place at La Ferme du Buisson, France 2019, Glasgow International, 2018, Dunlop Art Gallery (CA) 2020, Progress Festival (CA) 2020, the Porn Film Festival Berlin, 2019, and Contemporary Copenhagen, 2021.
Hazel presently lives and works on the stolen and unceded territory of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations with their frequent collaborator and partner Cait McKinney.
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser)
Setting the stage for a gathering of friends
Setting the stage for a gathering of friends was made in the heart of the pandemic of 2020 in Delhi. It is about uncertainty, fear, chance, missed connections, false promises, a return to something we don’t know how to feel yet. a repetition of something we have never experienced. It charts the path of an Ensō, a depiction of a whole or a void, depending on the way you look at it, up-close or at a distance. the space that it leaves behind, the crack in the circle leaves room for a different cosmology, a reconfiguration of social formations and our ideas of collectivity. the circle holds together the improvised elements of free jazz and the disparate footnotes found in fortunes opened at random. It sets the stage for a gathering of friends and proposes that waiting can be a form of love.
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser)
'Setting the Stage for a Gathering of Friends', 2021
Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin & David Soin Tappeser) is a multi-media performance duo whose work combines experimental poetry and improvisational jazz drums in order to conjure borgesian, speculative futures or multiverses. H/D aspire toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—solid, stone, spirit or human—are equal. H/D’s sense of time and space is messy. H/D’s research orbits around (non)place and history as a lens through which to look upon the multiple materialities of contemporary existence. H/D is concerned with the (poly)rhythms of love and the bea(s)t of belonging. They use metaphor as an event, as a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together.
Nastja Säde Rönkkö
Nastja Säde Rönkkö is an artist living in London and Helsinki. She works with video, performance, installation, participatory art, internet and text. Her projects investigate the relationship between the digital era, power, humanity and the future of our planet. She is particularly fascinated with how concepts such as love, slowness or affection can be silent yet radical ways to be and act in the world. Her practice dreams about the future and explores presence through politics and poetics of emotion.
She has exhibited and performed internationally in places such as Somerset House, London, Sydney Opera House, Sydney, SXSW, Austin, TX, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Glasgow International, FACT, Foundation for Art and Technology, Liverpool, Museum of Moving Image, New York, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and BMoCA Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO. Recent solo exhibitions include for those yet to be, EMMA Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2020), Altered Breaths, Future Feelings at Tampere Art Museum, Finland and for your charred bones and restless soul, Aboa Vetus, Art Nova, Turku, Finland (2019). She has been artist-in-residence in Somerset House Studios, London (2018-2019), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018) and Matadero Madrid (2016).
Her work has been screened in festivals such as Love and Anarchy Helsinki International Film Festival and Ivy Film Festival, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA, both in 2018. She is the 35th recipient of the Young Artist of the Year 2019 title and award in Finland. Forthcoming projects include residencies at The Arctic Circle voyage and the Saari residence, Finland.
Xiuching Tsay
is a Thailand-born artist, currently based in London.
Tsay graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2019, and has exhibited widely; including solo exhibitions, A Haze in their Gaze at Daniel Benjamin Gallery, London (2019), Discovery of the ‘I’s, Ne’Na Contemporary Art Space, Chiangmai, Thailand (2018) and 3331 Art Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan (with AIR programme 2018). Her work was included in New Contemporaries in 2019 and in recent group exhibitions Soft Bodies at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, Myselves at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, and Crowd at Hannah Barry Gallery, London (2020). In 2019, she was the winner of the Dentons Art Prize.
Tsay has been developing works engaging a new kind of characteristic of language - both meaningful and abstract, to clarify an unclarity, to question clarity. She describes her process as simultaneously a search for logic within paintings, whilst seeking outside this logic.
In March 2020, Tsay spoke of her work:
My work usually comes from my personal visions towards objects that I have been experienced in the past, and their obscured images reside in my consciousness. They’re recurring images that won’t go away. These repeat themselves as a form with a limited meaning at first, until my curiosity questions their existence. In my practice, therefore, I want to reconnect with those images by accessing their inner world. The way I paint is to develop my relationship with these images and learn their traits. During the process of painting, I can then rediscover their hidden characters, and as well as my unconscious thoughts on these images.
Moreover, in my painting practice, I adopt the concept of hallucinatory fluidity to unleash my perception towards the objects that I portray, to become more liberal. Fluidity like water has the power to melt a solid form into an ambiguous form. This ambiguous form then allows me to experience different possibilities in narrative painting.
Xiuching Tsay, Romanticizing (stills), 2021
Zoë Mendelson, web layout/design 2021