Andrew & Eden Kötting: Excuse me, can you help me? I'm terribly worried

9 Jun-30 Jul 2022

PV 9 Jun 2022, 6-8pm

Overview

New Art Projects are delighted to present the first London solo exhibition by Andrew and Eden Kötting. Excuse me, can you help me please? I’m terribly worried brings together their work collaborating in one capacity or another for over 34 years. Questions of authorship can be raised: Who made what? Who instigated what? How did this magical world arrive and from who’s universe? While this uncertainty can be questioned, here it is celebrated and laid open, as ownership and authorship are replaced by a creative partnership, with startling results.

Working across a wide variety of media, the artists employ it to stand as a portal that cuts through different cognitive worlds and uses it to break down barriers and lazy definitions between traditional visual and neurological pathways. The exhibition includes drawings, collages, paintings and sculptures that were made before during and after the production of their award-winning film Diseased and Disorderly, which will also be shown. Tell-Tale Heads from the film are let loose through the galleries en route to the Tell-Tale Rooms Virtual Reality Experience which will also inhabit the gallery further breaking down the barriers between the artists and the worlds they have created.

This exhibition aims to firmly confront the idea that this kind of collaboration is unequal and instead looks to celebrate diversity within collaboration and to let every voice rise up equally. Here the freedom to create is an open door through which many people can enter in their own way. The exhibition not only gives a platform to the different voices that come to us in singular and complex ways it gives you access to the diverse world people around you inhabit, which are so often overlooked.

“They make art as they breathe, hard and fast and memorable; paintings, postcards, installations, rants, poems and freewheeling film ‘songs’…. Eden ventriloquizes her father to provide the written text for her drawings and paintings that are already replete with meaning…. she provides a commentary and series of foot-notes for the Grand Projects that her father is undertaking…. An agenda or appendix in a different form and much truer or closer to the original sign makings and drawings on the walls of caves….”

— Iain Sinclair

“Andrew Kötting has been making films for a long time. But are his films even films at all? Or are they by-products, documenting other processes, their purpose known only to the artist himself? To me the film Gallivant seemed immediately one of the greatest things any human being had ever made. We spend a lot of time peering over our shoulders at the artists we’ve lost, forgetting that, if we look for them, some of the greatest are amongst us now.”

— Stewart Lee

Andrew and Eden Kötting are part of The Project Art Works collective, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. As part of their Turner exhibition they showed a constructed space that held a physical and digital archive from over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists and makers over two decades. The archive embodies a visible trace of people who are often hidden in the world.

Andrew and Eden Kötting were the focus of two episodes of Radio 4’s Film Programme in 2021 when they moved from their studio in the Old Town Hastings to their new one on The Ponswood Industrial Estate in St Leonards-on-Sea. LISTEN ONLINE NOW

Diseased and Disorderly is a film released in 2021 directed by Andrew Kötting in which Neurodivergent artist Eden Kötting, who was born with Joubert Syndrome, takes the viewer on a journey into her reality through her collages, self-portraits, and still-life drawings. It was funded by the BFI and the National Lottery.

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