A Thousand Normals

The First Of Two Shows By 2021 Graduates From Central Saint Martins

MA Contemporary Photography;Practices And Philosopies

Responding to Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Rhizome’ theory (non-hierarchal connection of ideas and ways of working), A Thousand Normals showcases experimentations in what art may be in a post-Covid society. The social restrictions of the past year and its effects on individual and collective behaviour will echo through life and art for decades. Recent graduates of MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies respond to and ask questions about the new normal we inhabit.

Normal is an image of the world, but it is merely one image of the world. The points and lines that form it are flowing and fleeing, territorialising other possible normals.

What is the relation of an art exhibition to the world? It is not an image of the world only part of a rhizome. The art exhibition de-territorialises the world, and the world re-territorialises the exhibition.

Any point can be joined to any other; the art exhibition ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.

The content above references A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

Dates for the diary:

Celebration: Saturday 7th August between 2-6pm join us when we will be celebrating the show, all are welcome.

Talk: Saturday 21st August 2pm when Matt Hale of Art Monthly will be in conversation with the artists, all are welcome.

Carlota dos Santos is a Portuguese multidisciplinary artist that works across the subjects of performance art, photography and installation, exploring the spaces in between the fields of Fine art, Performing Arts and Fashion. The human body, as both a medium and a research focus, unfolds the patterns behind her work.In her practice, the artist searches for sensations, through her bare feet. As her experimentation process evolves, there is a celebration of the human body with itself and the environment. The materiality of each piece translates itself through patterns of movement, inhales, flows, and contact between bodies of the most distinct natures. Materials, in addition to the human body, become a demanding performative task as they are always brought in in large quantities. And the concepts of time and space are continuously questioned, as the works are durational and go through a process of reinvention of each body in performance. The process becomes the artwork itself. Carlota has recently graduated from the MA Contemporary Photography at Central Saint Martins, in London.

Fengfeng was born in China in 1993, his background is art and philosophy. Rather than a contemporary artist, he considers himself as a temporary artist, a writer for fun and a collector of everyday experience and pleasure. He discovered that if two cup hooks are drilled face to face, there will be a heart. For the five-year practice he’s been trying not to become a grown-up and not to take sociocultural formulations for granted. Currently he is working on materials, machines and products. Judith Butler claims that gender reality is performative; it is the various acts of performing gender that constituted the idea of gender. For Feng a hammer’s reality or a jug’s reality is also performative, and  his  practice is about how to engage with this hammer and that jug in a performative enactment.

Dani Surname is a multidisciplinary artist based in London, specialising in Live Art, Photography and Printmaking. Originally from North East England, Surname uprooted to study a BA (Hons) in Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Interrogating the contradictions of her queer, neurodivergent identity, Surname’s practice currently explores Northern and femme identity through memory and sensory stimuli. Using performance to stage temporary freedoms from social constraints, her work focuses on actions that build to a climax through repetition or extension, often incurring discomfort or pain.

Surname’s written work is currently focused on Live Art in gallery spaces, researching the effects of post-white cube aesthetics and expectations on body-based artwork. This research is summarised in her MA thesis The Consumer is Present: Live Art and the Consumer/Commodity Dynamic, and continues to influence her artistic practice.

Ken Turner graduated in 2002 with a BA (Hons) in Critical Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s where he has just completed an MA in Contemporary Photography, Practices and Philosophies. In April 2019 he launched Tension an artist run gallery space in South East London. His practice is devoted primarily to drawing, informed by an engagement with experimental, speculations and investigations into the use of mixed media for the purpose of mark making. His practice is focused on developing a vocabulary and lexicon of imagery that generates a language of marks that expresses that which cannot be expressed by words alone. His practice is organised around the pictorial tensions that are generated by the relational aesthetics created through juxtaposition that are revealed and expressed through the sub-conscious gesture.

His MA research was focused on the primordial origins of mark making and abstraction in relation to 20th century land art and abstract expressionism.  He works with mixed media that combines drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, printing, video, photography, and digital media that includes augmented reality.

Leanne Wiggers is a Dutch Photographic and Installation Artist based in London. With the use of research and processes she explores Life in the form of movement, experimenting with breath, wind and air, and looks into new ways of seeing the inside and outside. By combining the natural and the human she creates new experiences of space.

Tension does not accept unsolicited submissions or proposals

NEW OPENING TIMES FROM 9th MARCH

Friday - Saturday
11am - 5pm

or

by appointment