HOUSE 2014 presents Yinka Shonibare MBE
Date uploaded: April 9, 2014
HOUSE, Brighton’s festival of visual art and domestic space, presents Yinka Shonibare MBE as the Invited Artist for its sixth edition, in co-commission with Brighton Festival 2014.
The two festivals also showcase new work from Leah Gordon, Phillip Hall-Patch, Tobias Revell and Ester Svensson & Rosanna Martin, artists from the South East region selected by Open Submission whose work responds to the themes in Shonibare MBE’s commission.
Inspired by the immigration, migration and refuge themes of HOUSE 2014, Yinka Shonibare MBE’s The British Library is presented in the dramatic Edwardian surroundings of the former Reference Library in Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The Old Reference Library has been used for research for almost a hundred years by academics, historians, writers and local residents.
The British Library depicts the names of notable British immigrants who throughout history have made significant contributions to British culture and society. The names – including Henry James, T S Eliot, Ignatius Sancho, Hans Holbein, Kazuo Ishiguro, Queen Elizabeth II and Winston Churchill - appear individually on the spines of thousands of books bound in Shonibare’s trademark fabric and organised on the Library’s original wood bookcases.
For the first time HOUSE’s Open Submission artists feature in Brighton Festival in pre-determined spaces in the city.
Artist and curator Leah Gordon, takes her unfinished photography project Caste / Cast as her starting point, to explore shared Haitian and British histories and cosmologies in the dining room and library of The Regency Town House. Photographs investigating the practice of grading skin colour in eighteenth century Haiti are juxtaposed with a film of a journey along the Manchester Ship Canal. Travelling between a city born of the industrial revolution – Manchester - and another built upon the slave trade – Liverpool, Gordon highlights the shared economic and political histories of Britain and Haiti. Two other films depict machinery manufactured in Liverpool in 1818 that now lies ruined and overgrown in a former plantation in Haiti, and the other of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence stored in the National Archives at Kew.
Phillip Hall-Patch, an artist and architect, who investigates the tensions between transience and stability through ephemeral and time-based works, is producing Salt Field for The Brighton Waste House. The venue is a new low-energy pre-fabricated house built entirely from recycled materials and sited within the University of Brighton’s Grand Parade Campus. Looking at the global historic and economic role of salt, the work – comprised of a ‘field’ of readymade industrial salt blocks drip-fed by water - slowly dissolves substance mimicking migration as the displaced mineral reforms as new crystalline growths.
Critical designer and futurist, Tobias Revell’s interests include theoretical physics and failed architecture. The Monopoly of Legitimate Use at Lighthouse is a three-part film with individual vignettes named Blackspot, Bumper and Stateless in which Revell looks at near-future techno-political landscape. Each short film deals in turn with the control of citizenship political identity and border definition, within a complex, networked topology.
No One Owns The Land is the first collaboration between artist-makers Ester Svensson and Rosanna Martin, whose practices span ideas of travel, restlessness, identity and belonging in the context of ceramics and illustration. Made primarily from ceramic and glass, as well as thread, wire, sand, stones, glass wax, inks, soap, shower gel, nail varnish, paint, plaster and wood, the sculptural installation in the basement of The Regency Town House weaves together narratives of journeys and migrations, to create a sense of place and the imagined land, often an unattainable dream.
Asylum in the City is also in the basement of The Regency Town House - a photographic installation of personal experiences of migration and displacement created by photographer Alice Myers with those who have migrated to Brighton & Hove.
Guest Curator for HOUSE 2014 is Celia Davies, Director, Photoworks. HOUSE 2014 is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Asylum in the City is developed by Photoworks for HOUSE 2014 in partnership with Sussex Interpreting Services (SIS).
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