Slap bang in the middle of the GI Festival, DEATHANDDADA open the top floor of a tenement and invite you to their inaugural show, Aphrodite at the Water Hole. 17 European artists have been invited into 2 neighbouring family homes to create works that contend with domestic life in rented accommodation. Named for one of the most visionary totalitarian sculptures to fall through the floor of a flat, Aphrodite at the Water Hole invites the possibility of freedom, hope and disaster. Artists with precious little thought of a lease will take residence alongside 2 families and drip their egos all over the place. The opening on April 24th will include performances: live music by Wounded Knee and Noma on 25th.
DEATHANDDADA is a collaboration between artists Rachel Lowther, Amalia Theodorakopoulos and Fritz Welch.
Flats 2/1, 2/2, 5 Hillhead St, at the top of the steps from Great Western Road.
Open 2-6pm on two weekends (April 24th & 25th and May 1st & 2nd) and by appointment in between.
fungalhex@hotmail.com
Alex Baggaley has worked in sculpture, installation, performance, moon-gazing, film, collage, painting, and drawing. He has also worked in collaboration with, amongst others, the US choreographer/dancer Paige Martin and as one half of the group 'P1orn' with Ben Tomlinson. At present he is using oil on canvas to draw together the many strands of his practice in the form of documentary paintings including images of previous artwork and performances, aswell as an allegorical imaging of himself and his work's present position in the world of art. He presently lives in London and has shown and performed internationally at venues such as PAD Gallery, Preston, Alma Enterprises, London, spacestationsixtyfive, London, The Kitchen, New York, Citylights, Melbourne, and Thread Waxing Space, New York.
Malcy Duff (b.1978) is a cartoonist from Edinburgh, Scotland. His work includes 'The Blackest Gnome', 'The Heroic Mosh of Mary's Son,' the 'Rrobots' anthology, and 'The Caddy.' He has exhibited all over Britain, and in Melbourne Australia, and in 2008 he was awarded a Donald Dewar Arts Award for outstanding work in the comic book form. In 2003 he co-founded Usurper with Ali Robertson. They have toured throughout Britain, Europe and America. Duff continues to collaborate with Robertson, and contributes artwork for posters and album sleeves, including a cover and comic book set for their recent LP on Rel Records. He is currently working on his 43rd comic, and completing a drawing collaboration with artist Norman Shaw. www.missingtwin.net
Hannah Ellul Frequently employing culled artefacts and found footage, Hannah Ellul works predominantly in film and video and is interested in what you could call, in fittingly plagiarised terms, the ruptured psychogeography of the image, in its mute ambiguities and political deployments, in lost radicalisms and the undead. She is currently in the second year of the MFA at Glasgow School of Art. She is also a member of inepto-psych trio Helhesten and co-founded label Psykick Dancehall Recordings with Ben Knight and Jack Allett.
Peter J. Evans' practice spans installation, drawing, objects and performance. Despite the apparent plurality of his works, a diffuse holism can be found in his subtle and open-ended investigations into romanticized notions of relationships, memory, movement and beauty. Evans uses diagrammatic processes and patterns to explore these abstract notions, illustrated particularly in his drawings on graph paper which chart and delineate concepts such as human relationships in the form of ambiguous pseudo-scientific graphical tables.
Evans lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and recent exhibitions include: Feedbacker Spacex - Exeter, Seventeen - London, Workplace – Gateshead. Prospects and Interiors, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. You Shall Know Our Velocity BALTIC, Gateshead.
Marten Frerichs, born 1967 in North Shields, is working on a resumption of classic Pop Art themes in painting, drawing and collage. From 1993-1998 he studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. Marten Frerichs lives and works in Berlin. Recent exhibitions include High Society - Schickeria, Berlin, 2009 and Große Herbstausstellung - Kwadrat, Berlin, 2009.
Martin Hamblen creates installations, interventions and time-based media. He states, "My practise is democratic and egalitarian in its delivery and execution, reacting to and embracing the laypersons common criticism of contemporary art. Inspired by Duchamp, Beuys and the complementary criticism 'I could do that', I feel and think that actions speak louder than words; language is a red herring. My art practise is a visual philosophy." Past exhibitions include Heuristic (In Certain Places Artist-in-Residence scheme); From this filthy sewer pure gold flows Supercollider, Blackpool; Safer With Strangers, PAD, Preston. Martin has performed at Arnolfini (Private Pile) & Castlefield (Cleft)
Laura Harrington is an artist and producer based in Newcastle upon Tyne. She works with a broad range of materials and media to make works that are open to cross-disciplinary collaboration and numerous contexts. Projects both temporary and permanent typically engage with ecology and environment. Her practice often works alongside the methods of architecture and engineering within a wider cultural context in order to explore the idea of nature and environment as a complex working of human, natural and continuously changing forces.
Lena Henke, born in 1982 lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and is currently studying at the Städelschule in the class of Michael Krebber. In 2008/2009 she studied at the Glasgow School of Art. Henke´s works are motivated by an "interest" in girl power, high-class party culture and style. Henke poses the question as to how a young female sculptor can grapple with using podiums and columnar structures at this moment. Being aware of this question, combined with going to cocktail parties and liking to hang out, Lena Henke has managed to find some elbow-room in it. In copying and stealing ideas and narratives from art history she aims to witness their collision and loot the wreckage. Recent exhibitions include Un dimanche sans fin, 112 Hudson Street, N.Y. and sculpt!, Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt am Main (solo).
Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir (born 1969) makes interactive constellations, a group or cluster of related things, creating a dialogue between audio sculptures and video. Her projects have included fireworks made out of sound sensitive cold cathode lights, a frozen puddle in the middle of the summer, pop-up igloos and magic. She graduated from the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in 1994 and spent two years as a guest student at Städelschule, Germany. In 1997 she received a BFA and in 1999 a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. In 1998 she received a Fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Since 1999 she has actively exhibited her works internationally. She has taken on the role of a curator for several exhibitions and given lectures and seminars at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. Hekla is one of the founders of Kling & Bang gallery. She lives and works in Reykjavik.
Erling Klingenberg´s art is about the professional and existential questions of his chosen occupation. Klingenberg's mainstay is the myth of the male artist of the mid-twentieth century, based on the Marxist idea of the artist-as-worker, whose creation is directly linked to him physically producing it. It also relates to a notion that can be traced further back in art history, that of the male genius. He plays with these anachronistic clichés and merges them with the stereotype of the modern rock star. With his satirical manifestations of the attempt to create art, where all that comes across is the echo of their creator, Klingenberg continues to unsettle the location of origin and creativity. Erling (born 1970) lives and works in Reykjavik and is co-founder of Kling & Bang Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland. Klingenberg has recently shown at Reykjavik Artmuseum / Asmundarsafn, Reykjavík, Frieze Projects, London, and Model & Nilland gallery, Sligo, Ireland, 2005.
Achim Lengerer (1972) works with questions of language through performances and installations. In recent years Lengerer founded different collaborative projects: labelfuerproduktion (2005) is a collaborative, process-oriented art project that has presented performances, exhibitions and events at institutions like Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna or Kunstverein Braunschweig. He co-founded the artist-run space freitagsküche in Frankfurt a.M. in 2004, now in Berlin. voiceoverheard, is a collaboration with artist Dani Gal. Utilizing archived sound, mainly speeches, the artists have developed exhibitions and performances at INSA Art Space, Seoul, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, Portikus, Frankfurt and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Since 2009 Lengerer runs the travelling showroom and instant publishing house Scriptings. Lengerer is currently writing his first novel in script form, Zoooom I+II. In 2009 he took part in the show Invisible Square in Transmission Gallery.
Linda Molenaar is a sculptor and performance artist, living in Amsterdam, who borrows materials from a previous owner, the animal. She gives the animal "a second life as if it still exists, but in a different suit", and in her recent performances has begun to physically inhabit the body of the animal. Molenaar states,"I am in search of the mythological character in 'everyday' animals. In general, people do not love the animals they eat or eat the animals they love. My work gives me the opportunity to... think again about our relationship to familiar domesticated 'food animals' and show that each death marks not simply a meal, but the end of a life." She describes her work not as a moral statement, but rather a soft and hidden critique realized through play, suggestion and association.
She has recently completed advanced studies in performing arts at Das Arts, Amsterdam, and residencies at Skowhegan, USA, and European Ceramic Work Centre, Den Bosch, Netherlands and has shown her work throughout Europe and the USA. http://linda.molenaar.nu
Noma is Glasgow's preeminent practitioner of Destroyed Sonic Kitchen or DSK, also known as Textural Razor Drone. His live sets tend to be drone-based, with music being made by household appliances put through guitar pickups. Hairdryers and beard trimmers are preferred activation tools. The "music" ranges from euphoric and meditative to menacing and harsh. Noma has releases on Lea Cumming's Kovorox label and At War with False Noise among others.
Sculptor Sebastian Stöhrer (born 1968), works in a broad variety of mediums, ranging from cooking, to the kneading of pictures, to kinetic sculptures. His work is engaged in questions of scale, materiality and hierarchy in perception. All of his works are highly elaborate, whether "paintings" made of playdough, pigs in colourful bast fibre, or tiny nuclear explosions carved in ebony. By changing material and perspective, he subverts our view of reality. He is delighted with what we consider commonplace and elevates it with pomp and passion, or, as in Trinity (2008), turns spectacular light sculptures (mushroom clouds) into dense and concentrated miniatures. In doing so, he playfully investigates our economy of attention. Sebastian Stöhrer lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.
Amalia Theodorakopoulos (born 1971) studied in Karlsruhe and Frankfurt and now lives and works in Glasgow. The peculiarities and possibilities of painting, and a deep engagement with the history of painting, are a core of her body of work so far. In her paintings, pleasure and self-awareness battle for dominance. Beauty of representation and awareness of the medium itself create an atmosphere of asperity which attracts and repels simultaneously. On the canvases are major catastrophes, terrorists and Nazis (dead or alive), Jesus Christ and his mother or other seemingly unsuspicious people in embraces, or school scenes from another era. There may be beauty, or glory, but there is constant imminence, and there is no hope. Lately, Amalia Theodorakopoulos is especially attracted by the forlornness of the human effort to understand and communicate.
Eva-Maria Wilde´s attention focuses on the architecture and social structures of the world's largest cities. On her extensive, mostly unaccompanied voyages to cities like Beirut, Chongqing, Hongkong, Belgrad, Shanghai or Pyongyang she captures memory traces, material resources and independent worlds in thousands of photographic travel pictures. For the artist, constantly changing perspectives result from the movement through the vertical and horizontal grids of the cities; proportions and relations are displaced and rebalanced again and again. The architecture that she redesigns in her paintings, collages, objects and installations has not only the violent destruction or insidious decay inscribed within it, but it is also relentlessly driven into the future, and is thereby strongly influenced by futuristic ideas from the past. Eva-Maria Wilde was born 1972 and lives and works in Berlin.
Wounded Knee is Drew Wright, a singer and experimentalist from Edinburgh. His exotic, esoteric and downright erotic distillation of diverse influences conjures up some heady musical brews; sonic stravaigs that crossfade from gusty sea shanties to abstract rhythmic vocalisations before you know what's what and where's where. The bearded fella also sings acapella, sometimes even when you don't really want him to, and is building a fine repertoire of atavistic anthems.
