Quarantania features the work of three emerging international artists, Neha Choksi (India), Eva Kotátková (Czech Republic)
and Taus Makhacheva (Russia).
The exhibition narrates these artists' personal
lives and their social environments in
poetic and psychological terms. Everyday
objects, rituals, sites and social structures
are re-imagined and transformed.
Taus Makhacheva's filmed performances
reveal attempts to 'infiltrate' communities
through elaborate disguise, from illegal
street-racers to rural sheep flock. Though often highly playful in tone, Makhacheva's
works pose the question: what are we prepared
to do in order to belong?
Neha Choksi's short films, photographs,
collage and sculptural works depict scenarios
of erasure, exhaustion, detachment
and disappearance. Leaf Fall, for example,
records a single day's repetitive action of
stripping a rural peepul tree of its leaves,
save for a single, autumnal sprig.
The work of Eva Kotátková explores the
customs and codes of behaviour imposed
within our daily lives, from the school classroom
to the home.
She obsessively transforms these into visually striking – yet functionless – mechanisms
and installations, and a myriad of
collaged drawings.
The name Quarantania derives from a
work by artist Louise Bourgeois, which the
artist described as 'growing from the duel
between the isolated individual and the
shared awareness of the group'.
Quarantania is a John Hansard Gallery
exhibition curated by David Thorp,
organised in collaboration with
temporarycontemporary at Enclave.
|
Top to bottom:
Taus Makhacheva, Untitled 1, from the series The Fast and The Furious, 2011.
Neha Choksi, Leaf Exchange, 2007. Courtesy the artist
Eva Kotátková, Untitled, from the series Controlled Memory Loss, 2010
|
