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- 40 - 49
Launching our first ever central London project space, Bow Arts is taking over 125 Shaftesbury Avenue for London’s Frieze Week with an action-packed programme including site specific exhibitions and immersive performances. We invite you to join us as east goes west, transforming a vast ex-office space into Frieze’s hottest new art venue.
The takeover includes the two site-specific and interactive exhibitions Take a Seat and Absurd Visions, together with an immersive evening of live performance. Collaborating with ‘non-fair’ Minor Attractions as on offsite event, participating artists include Rosie Gibbens, Tim Spooner and Mette Sterre.
Events
Tuesday 8 Oct, 6-9pm Take a Seat exhibition private view
Wednesday 9 Oct, 6-9pm Absurd Visions Live Performance Evening (performances will be durational and start from 7pm)
Exhibitions open for Frieze Week Wed 9 – Sun 13 Oct, 10am-6pm.
(then Thurs-Sun, 12-6pm until 3 Nov)
Take A Seat presents over 40 unique and sculptural artist-made chairs that mischievously merge the aesthetics of form and functionality, inviting audiences to both play and sit down across Shaftesbury’s vast open plan space. Absurd Visions will see mechanised sculpture, film and performance create a labyrinth of bizarre and technological discovery throughout Shaftesbury’s ex-offices.
Performances will include internationally renowned Mette Sterre’s G-string Theory – Attempting to Rise, 200 Imperfect fingers modelled on a full-body soft armour are pointing at someone…is that you? While Tim Spooner will present his chaotic little puppet show, an experiment in measuring the causes and effects between particular coordinates: the walls of the building, the fingertips, the shoulder blades, the toe-tips and the floor. Hongxi Li will be performing YES YES YES, which probes the intricate dynamics of control, rebellion and the cyclical nature of violence inherent within societal constructs.
Take A Seat is a collaboration between Bow Arts and curatorial duo ha.lf, (Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell). Several of the participating artists have created their site-specific chairs at Shaftesbury as part of a residency, responding to the building by both assimilating and rejecting the desolate office environment. Each day the artists’ chairs will be set out in a grid formation with visitors invited to reconfigure the show by pulling up a chair and taking a seat. The show was born from ha.lf’s yearning for somewhere to rest while looking at art; audiences will be invited to play, interact with and sit on these curious yet functional objects – exactly what gallery visitors are usually forbidden to do.
Rosie Gibbens ‘Parabiosis’. Credit: Jon Baker
Absurd Visions features work from Gibbens’ Parabiosis series and Spooner’s A New Kind of Animal which will weave themselves into the office detritus left behind in the Shaftesbury building. Parabiosis unpacks the pregnant body with sculptures that combine ‘puppets’ and machinery. The title refers to the surgical technique of joining two living organisms together to share a physiological system. Inspired by this process and theories about artificial robotic wombs, Gibbens creates various ‘birthing’ contraptions. Made during the third trimester of her pregnancy, these works also document a time of mixed emotions and extreme body changes. Spooner’s animal forms will be tangled and tethered by electrical cables, trapped under bits of remaining furniture, vibrating on empty lockers, and showing off in conference rooms. Originally made for Southwark Park and Bluecoat’s gallery spaces, this new iteration of A New Kind of Animal will be reborn to relate and inhabit the office spaces at Shaftesbury, alongside Gibbens’ ‘birthing’ contraptions which can become activated in performance.
Take a Seat exhibiting artists: Milly Aburrow, Haydn Albrow, Henrietta Armstrong, Isobel Attacus, Jack Barford, Mat Barnes, Eleanor Bedlow, Flora Bradwell, Benjamin Arthur Brown, Polam Chan, Tom Coates, Boudicca Collins, Sophie Cunningham, Alice Dawson, Annique Delphine, Emmely Elgersma, Ruth Falkner, Srabani Ghosh, María Camila Cepeda Gnecco, Caitlin Hazell, Flora Hunt, Selby Hurst Inglefield, Sophie, Lourdes Knight, Hathaikan Kongaunruan, Ty Locke, Daisy McClay, Lindsey Jean Mclean, Eleanor McLean, Heidi Pearce, Ned Prizeman, Moe Redish, Drew Richards, Beatriz Santos, Marten Schech, Alice Sheppard Fiddler, Naj Shirazi, Katie Sturridge, Roisin Sullivan, Sean Synnuck, Imrana Tanveer, Henryk Terpiłowski
Erika Trotzig, Arlene Wandera, Ella West, Poppy Whatmore, Chen Yang, Danny Young.
Absurd Visions exhibiting artists: Rosie Gibbens, Hongxi Li, Tim Spooner, Mette Sterre.
A New Kind of Animal was originally co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London, and Bluecoat, Liverpool.
More about Rosie Gibbens
Rosie Gibbens (b.1993, London) makes performances, videos, sculptures and photographs that feature her body. Using absurd humour, she explores the slippery overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire. She often makes sculptures that combine household gadgets with sewn body parts. These are brought to life through low-tech chain reactions in the performances/ films. Rosie playfully blends bodies with objects to unpack and question the prospective future body as it becomes increasingly ‘optimised’ by technological augmentation. The mindset behind her work is of a nonsensical product demonstration combined with a perverse children’s TV show.
Rosie studied ‘Contemporary Art Practice’ at the Royal College of Art (2018) and ‘Performance Design and Practice’ at Central Saint Martins (2015). Solo shows include: ‘Parabiosis’ at the Bomb Factory (2024), ‘The New Me’ at Shoreditch Arts Club with Daata (2023), ‘Skin of my teeth’ at Midlands Arts Centre for Fierce Festival (2022) and ‘Soft Girls’ at the Zabludowicz Collection (2021). Recent group show highlights include: ‘Body Poetics’ alongside Helen Chadwick at Giant (2023), ‘Eye Body’ at TJ Boulting (2023), ‘The Amber Room’ at Matt’s Gallery (2023) and ‘Are you working now’ at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. In 2022 Rosie won the Ingram prize and was awarded a Sarabande residency. In 2023 she was chosen as one of nine ‘best young artists working in London’ by Eddy Frankel from Time Out.
More about Tim Spooner
Tim Spooner works in a mix of performance, drawing and sculpture, aiming for new strong flavours which are strange and alluring. Fundamentally interested in unpredictability, his work is an exercise in balancing control with a lack of it in the handling of the materials and processes he is working with.
His work has been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia including Battersea Arts Centre (London), b-side festival (Isle of Portland), Cambridge Junction, Mayfest (Bristol), MAC Belfast and DCA Dundee (for Hayward Touring), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Whitstable Biennale, Alfred ve Dvoře (Prague, Czechia), Terni Festival (Italy), TJP Strasbourg (France), Actoral Festival (Marseille, France), Internationales Figurentheater Festival (Erlangen, Germany), STUK (Leuven, Belgium), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon, Portugal), Culture Station Seoul (South Korea), Pesta Boneka Festival (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Macau Arts Festival (China). Many of his performance works are produced by Artsadmin.
Over the last few years he’s focussed on making several large-scale installations of moving sculpture. Most recently, A New Kind of Animal, a retrospective exhibition of painting, drawing, sculpture and objects used in performances, which was shown and co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London and Bluecoat, Liverpool. He lives and works in Cornwall, UK.
More about Mette Sterre
Let me recuperate The dance isn’t always the beginning The drive is never the winning
Mette Sterre’s creations escape fixed definitions. They exist in the in-between-spaces where our brain fills in the blind spots, the twilight zones; exceeding performance, installation and body masks. Diving into robotics, patterns as captured narratives of time and somatic disruptive experiences, we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes. She’s a Rijksakademie Alumna and has shown her work internationally at Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, Manifesta 14 Biennale in Kosovo, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Watermill Center in New York and the Frieze evening of performances at David Roberts Art Foundation in London. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Berlinartlink, Wall Street Journal, Wallpaper Magazine, Vogue, Dezeen, Hollywood Reporter, El Pais, Channel 4 and others.
More about ha.lf
ha.lf was born out of an artistic convergence between artists Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell during their time on the Slade MFA. The pair found delicious crossovers in their bombastic, irreverent works, which have grown both in ambition and scale since their graduation in 2021. This nascent creative partnership has continued to flourish in their shared studio at Bow Arts: each artist’s work calls to the other’s across the studio floor. After curating shows in partnership with Staffordshire St, Somers Gallery and The Crypt, the duo now join forces with Bow Arts to bring you Take A Seat.
Access Information
Shaftesbury Avenue has step free access throughout from street level, including to an accessible toilet. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email shaftesbury@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a seat near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
125 Shaftesbury Avenue London, WC2H 8AD
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