Bow Arts Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover

8 Oct-3 Nov 2024

YESYESYES

Overview

We invite you to join us as east goes west, transforming a vast ex-office space into Frieze’s hottest new art venue. The takeover includes the two site-specific and interactive exhibitions Take a Seat and Absurd Visions, together with an immersive evening of live performance. Collaborating with ‘non-fair’ Minor Attractions as on offsite event, participating artists include Rosie Gibbens, Tim Spooner and Mette Sterre.  

Take A Seat presents over 40 unique and sculptural artist-made chairs that mischievously merge the aesthetics of form and functionality, inviting audiences to both play and sit down across Shaftesbury’s vast open plan space. Absurd Visions will see mechanised sculpture, film and performance create a labyrinth of bizarre and technological discovery throughout Shaftesbury’s ex-offices.

Performances will include internationally renowned Mette Sterre’s G-string Theory – Attempting to Rise, 200 Imperfect fingers modelled on a full-body soft armour are pointing at someone…is that you? While Tim Spooner will present his chaotic little puppet show, an experiment in measuring the causes and effects between particular coordinates: the walls of the building, the fingertips, the shoulder blades, the toe-tips and the floor. Hongxi Li will be performing YES YES YES, which probes the intricate dynamics of control, rebellion and the cyclical nature of violence inherent within societal constructs.

 
Take A Seat is a collaboration between Bow Arts and curatorial duo ha.lf, (Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell). Several of the participating artists have created their site-specific chairs at Shaftesbury as part of a residency, responding to the building by both assimilating and rejecting the desolate office environment. Each day the artists’ chairs will be set out in a grid formation with visitors invited to reconfigure the show by pulling up a chair and taking a seat. The show was born from ha.lf’s yearning for somewhere to rest while looking at art; audiences will be invited to play, interact with and sit on these curious yet functional objects – exactly what gallery visitors are usually forbidden to do. 

 Rosie Gibbens ‘Parabiosis’. Credit: Jon Baker
Absurd Visions features work from Gibbens’ Parabiosis series and Spooner’s A New Kind of Animal which will weave themselves into the office detritus left behind in the Shaftesbury building. Parabiosis unpacks the pregnant body with sculptures that combine ‘puppets’ and machinery. The title refers to the surgical technique of joining two living organisms together to share a physiological system. Inspired by this process and theories about artificial robotic wombs, Gibbens creates various ‘birthing’ contraptions. Made during the third trimester of her pregnancy, these works also document a time of mixed emotions and extreme body changes. Spooner’s animal forms will be tangled and tethered by electrical cables, trapped under bits of remaining furniture, vibrating on empty lockers, and showing off in conference rooms. Originally made for Southwark Park and Bluecoat’s gallery spaces, this new iteration of A New Kind of Animal will be reborn to relate and inhabit the office spaces at Shaftesbury, alongside Gibbens’ ‘birthing’ contraptions which can become activated in performance. 

Take a Seat exhibiting artists: Milly Aburrow, Haydn Albrow, Henrietta Armstrong, Isobel Attacus, Jack Barford, Mat Barnes, Eleanor Bedlow, Flora Bradwell, Benjamin Arthur Brown, Polam Chan, Tom Coates, Boudicca Collins, Sophie Cunningham, Alice Dawson, Annique Delphine, Emmely Elgersma, Ruth Falkner, Srabani Ghosh, María Camila Cepeda Gnecco, Caitlin Hazell, Flora Hunt, Selby Hurst Inglefield, Sophie, Lourdes Knight, Hathaikan Kongaunruan, Ty Locke, Daisy McClay, Lindsey Jean Mclean, Eleanor McLean, Heidi Pearce, Ned Prizeman, Moe Redish, Drew Richards, Beatriz Santos, Marten Schech, Alice Sheppard Fiddler, Naj Shirazi, Katie Sturridge, Roisin Sullivan, Sean Synnuck, Imrana Tanveer, Henryk Terpiłowski
Erika Trotzig, Arlene Wandera, Ella West, Poppy Whatmore, Chen Yang, Danny Young.

Absurd Visions exhibiting artists: Rosie Gibbens, Hongxi Li, Tim Spooner, Mette Sterre.

A New Kind of Animal was originally co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London, and Bluecoat, Liverpool. 

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Press

Bow Arts Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover press release
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