Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 travels to Leeds this November from Jerwood Space in London featuring new film works from Soojin Chang and Michael.
Within the gallery, Michael. will be co-curating an exhibition of artworks from the Leeds collection, responding to themes in his work cleave to the BLACK including the question ‘what would it be like to live on a land that loves you back?’ and featuring artists including Helen Chadwick, John Constable, Tacita Dean, Hamish Fulton, Runa Islam, Richard Long and Veronica Ryan. Artist and collaborator Ashley Holmes has produced a new sound work that will play in the space. Soojin Chang will premiere Sacrifice to the Seaworm, a new multi-part film installation featuring a reading, a purification rite, and a burial mound.
Michael.'s film cleave to the BLACK echoes the art-historical tradition of the painted triptych in a three-screen video projection that offers a panoramic perspective on the legacies of the past that continue to leave an indelible mark on contemporary Black male experience. Alluding to episodes from the Bible and stories from African folklore and cosmology, the piece brings a subtle overtone of parable and myth to its carefully composed and quietly haunting scenes.
Soojin Chang's Sacrifice to the Seaworm remaps an interior landscape to the processing of pain and violence through the vehicle of sacrificial practices. Formed collaboratively with Tenzin Mingyur Paldron (writer) and Jade O’Belle (artist), the exhibition features Paldron’s work on self-immolation and suffering, which follows a historic letter and parable shared by peace activist and Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the actions of 170 Tibetans. Created with specimens borrowed from the Natural Science Collections at Leeds Museums & Galleries, the offering imagines a meeting of death practices to facilitate our multispecies fate, which is very much at stake.
Soojin Chang’s Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 commissioned film BXBY will also be exhibited off-site at Project Space in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds hosted by the Centre for Audio Visual Experimentation (CAVE). The film will be exhibited in Cave until Sunday 4 December 2022.
BXBY is a year-long performance project that merges forms of semi-fictional documentary and ritual practice, following Chang as a hybrid, shape-shifting being trying to learn to reproduce. Drawing from chimeric figures within creation stories of the British Isles and the diasporic cultures of Chang and her collaborators (Choulay Mech, Jade O’Belle, Anika Ahuja, and Aditya Surya Taruna a.k.a Kasimyn), Chang positions her own hybrid body – part animal, part woman, part alien – as a site of technological interaction and as a locus of ongoing experiment.
Content note: BXBY contains graphic reproductive content, direct reference to terminated pregnancy and imagery of the culling and dissection of a deer.
Following a nationwide call for applications at the beginning of 2020, each selected artist was awarded £25,000 to develop a significant new moving-image work with Film and Video Umbrella (FVU).
Selectors: Hetain Patel, artist; Rehana Zaman, artist; Susanna Chisholm, Programme Development Director, FVU; Harriet Cooper, Head of Visual Arts, Jerwood Arts; Holly Grange, Exhibitions Curator, Leeds Art Gallery.
The Jerwood/FVU Awards 2022 are a collaboration between Jerwood Arts and Film and Video Umbrella, in a new partnership with Leeds Art Gallery. They were established in 2012 in response to a need for significant major commissions for early-career moving-image artists, the awards contribute to an ongoing dialogue around urgent or timely concerns within moving-image.
