A group show that I’ve curated as the result of my 2021 residency in Swiss Church London, with work of artists Nicola Arthen, Rory Beard, Georgina Hill and myself. What connecting the works is that they originate investigations into individual family tales, relating these to material structures, both animated and symbolic, performing an act of historicisation and shared memory.
The exhibition brings together:
Four building blocks that were intended one hundred years ago to form a museum, which in the end was never built. The story narrated in the accompanying audio piece traces the existing memories of this delivery.
One replica Victorian era steel structure programmed with Arduino – a memory and a material artefact from the shared environment, a technological apparatus taking the role of human. Alongside two stained glass panels standing against a wall made in an exchange between the artist and her mother.
An inflatable textile object that transforms the discipline demanded by state systems into a spontaneous internalisation of the body.
A video essay made by Ling and Kai Wang, shows a conversation between the artists and several second-generation immigrants from Christian families, set in a local fish and chip shop run by one interviewee’s parents.
A self-acting lift ladder, which indeed, the artist’s father designed and manufactures. Usually a functional object, commercially sold, helping people to reach their most heavenly room by descending from a ceiling gap. In the exhibition, it is turned upside down, lifting upwards.