Studio International Art Magazine

‘The vessel shapes speak of the different cultural and trade networks in the Arabian and Gulf peninsula’ The industrialisation of water infrastructure and its damaging environmental impacts underpin Alia Farid’s work, vast sculptures in the shape of water vessels that speak of different trades, cultures and eras Several of the large, pale and glowing vessels by Alia Farid (b1985) line one of the upper galleries at the National Museum Cardiff. Looking for all the world like marble monuments from some ancient era, they are referencing the problematic issue of drinking water in her native Kuwait. Before this young nation discovered oil, its drinking water had to be fetched from the rivers in the south of the region. With the nation’s rapid wealth, industrial development and “advancement”, desalination plants were set up to repurpose water from the sea, but with devastating impacts on wildlife and the environment. These sculptures are replicas of public drinking fountains, some scaled-up and reimagined from classical ceramic vessels of the region, others conjured from a commercial catalogue of public drinking fountains typically spread throughout Kuwaiti cities. The giant polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle in their midst, however, is a universally recognised vessel – now a symbol of mounting plastic waste, as well as shrinking natural resources. Farid’s work seeks to expose the mismanagement of resources in her home region, as well as the impacts on place and people of extractive capitalism. In a darkened room beyond, there are two films showing from the same series, Chibayish (2022), commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 2022 Whitney Biennial, exploring fluvial bodies and oil. Filmed at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and made collaboratively with residents of the surrounding marshlands, the second film is an update on the first. Farid’s work is underpinned by a continuing research project mapping Arab and South Asian migrations to Latin America and the Caribbean. She traces not just the movement of people, but also adaptations in everyday designed objects, architectural styles and ornamentation. Farid has a master’s in museum studies and critical theory from the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, an MSc in visual studies from the Visual Arts Programme, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BFA from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico. She has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, in 2020, and has a solo show coming to the Chisenhale Gallery London in December, which will travel to CAC Passerelle, Brest, in early 2024. She received a Creative Capital Award in 2022. Alia Farid: Artes Mundi 10 National Museum Cardiff 20 October 2023 – 25 February 2024 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘Four months ago I was in a coma… if I’d died, I’d be the only dead female artist in 250 years showing at the Royal Academy!’ With a half-century retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts – the first main-gallery solo show for a female artist in the RA’s 255-year history – and a five-day “Takeover” at the Southbank Centre, performance artist Marina Abramović is making quite a splash in London. She is here in person, too, and Studio International caught up with her in a bathroom backstage at the Southbank’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as she was about to open the Takeover. Marina Abramović: Institute Takeover Southbank Centre, London 4 – 8 October 2023. Marina Abramović Royal Academy, London 23 September 2023 – 1 January 2024 Marina Abramović’s opera, 7 Deaths of Maria Callas ENO, London Colisseum 3-11 November 2023 Interview by JULIET RIX Filmed by WILLIAM KENNEDY

In her studio in Dalston, east London, Pam Evelyn talks about the push and pull of making one of her large-scale abstract paintings and learning to live with its contradictions and tensions. The most recent artist to be welcomed into Pace’s notable stable is the London-based painter Pam Evelyn (b1996), who also works with Massimodecarlo in Italy. The announcement, made at the end of July, came in the run-up to her debut exhibition with the gallery, A Handful of Dust, which comprises a suite of new gestural paintings, some more than three metres in height. Evelyn, whose work is often compared to abstract expressionism, spent seven months of 2022 on a residency at Porthmeor Studios in Cornwall. The studio, designed and built by Stanhope Forbes, and later used by John Wells, afforded her a view over Newlyn and the fishing harbour, and this setting, along with the work of her forebears – also including Prunella Clough and Peter Lanyon – inspired Evelyn, feeding into her new work. She spent so much of her time in Cornwall drawing, that her body, she says, acquired something like muscle memory, meaning she has been able to work with paint in her studio in an instinctual manner, not needing to plan too much in advance. Although her paintings are abstract, her interest is landscape-based. What ends up on the canvas, however, is much more an event than a static view. Evelyn spends a lot of time with her paintings – six months being the typical duration – and for every layer of paint applied, she scrapes as many away. The accumulation of traces and the ghost of the all-important first mark form the character of the work, which, at times, becomes a sentient being, taking the lead in its own creation. Evelyn is certainly not absented from the process, however, and she describes the many decisions she takes along the way, and how spending time looking at a work is as key as the application of paint. She listens to and holds the tensions of a painting sensitively, at times suffering painfully, at other times turning the attention-seeking picture to face the wall, or, in circumstances of extreme non-compliance, sending it to the naughty step. Evelyn welcomed Studio International into her spacious Dalston studio, while waiting for her works for the exhibition to dry, and talked about her process, her influences, and learning to recognise and accept the many different types of “finished”. Pam Evelyn: A Handful of Dust Pace, London 6 – 30 September 2023 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘It’s an invitation to think about skill and what it means in the body and in space’ The enigmatic and publicity-averse artist discusses his new work for Manchester International Festival 2023, gamesmanship, the ‘craft’ skills of cycling, football and musicianship, and how the pandemic has changed human interaction. The Guardian has called him “the Instagrammer’s nightmare”, but Tino Sehgal has made an art of keeping the visible manifestations of his work invisible. He famously “leaves no footprint”: no artefacts emerge from his pieces, all of which occur in and around the interaction of humans. There are not even photos or films because he bans the use of smartphones or official photography at his events, which sit somewhere between performance art, storytelling and dance. Trained as an economist, this London-born artist of German and Indian parents usually refuses to describe his work (so it hardly exists in print). His philosophy works against the commodification and consumerisation of art as object or collectible. At the age of 11, he “cancelled Christmas” because he felt the endless production of stuff was unsustainable. For Sehgal, the important thing is for the work to be experienced, in the moment. At its best, his work is a beguiling experience. In 2012, he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with more than 100 storytellers, mostly from local communities, and, for six months, they flowed around this vast space like shoals of fish, occasionally pausing to address the nearest onlooker with some tender and personal reminiscence. I remember my then 10-year-old daughter insisting we stay in the hall until we had been on the receiving end of one of these encounters (a wonderful story about someone’s Swedish childhood, when every summer they decamped to a rustic cabin in the woods with their family and friends). In 2021, he repeated that format, more or less, in the Capability Brown-designed gardens at Blenheim Palace. These works are not as simple as they may look and are far from exercises in serendipity. Sehgal is a master at gamesmanship and has talked about devising “algorithms” to choreograph his large, participatory works, to control the experience of the spectacle as well as opportunities for encounter. But he has also worked in a more traditionally choreographed way. In This Variation (2012) commissioned for Documenta 13, he trained 12 performers to sing and dance in the dark, as part of a kind of game in which the audience becomes a hapless accomplice (Adrian Searle in the Guardian described it as an “a cappella disco”). Sehgal has said it took him six years to hone that work to a point where it could be replicated endlessly and still be enjoyable. His work isn’t an institutional critique of the museum, as such, or so he told ArtForum in 2005. “I operate totally inside what you’d call the institution. I’m just trying to define the way in which it does what it’s there for … I am against its continuous, unreflected-on celebration of material production.” For This Entry, his newest piece, showing for this year’s Manchester International Festival 2023 at the city’s National Football Museum, he is in choreographic mode, picking his participants from specific and unrelated arenas that require great skill – violin-playing, trick-cycling (or “artistic cycling”, as he calls it in this interview), football and dance. He says: “We have three people with a strong and long-term relationship to a specific object. To play a violin is not easy, to master a ball is not easy. They are interacting like a dance quartet. At the same time, they are doing what they usually do, but I’ve also altered it and made it more dancerly.” This work will move from the football museum, where it premieres, to the Whitworth Art Gallery for the duration of the festival. It is the first in a series called The Trequartista – Art and Football United. Devised by the footballer Juan Mata and the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, the series brings together 11 contemporary artists and 11 footballers to produce work inspired by the “trequartista” style or position in football used to describe an advanced game/play-maker. At the festival launch, Sehgal said: “It’s a very beautiful meditation and invitation to think about skill and what it means in the body and in space.” Manchester International Festival, various venues 29 June – 16 July 2023 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘The stuff outside in the world is way better than anything you’ll find in any museum’ The artist explains why he is giving away free coins at the Manchester International Festival and how he hopes to capture the attention of the 99% of people who aren’t interested in contemporary art. The jingling of newly minted coins heralds the latest work by Ryan Gander, The Find (2023). He is a fan of disrupting the prevailing spirit of art as an exercise in ever-escalating object commodification. So, for the Manchester International Festival 2023, he is minting 200,000 coins made of cheap nickel, which he says are “of no monetary value”, and dispersing them, with the help of 100 volunteers, throughout the city’s streets, parks and piazzas, free, during the festival. However, these coins do offer philosophical value. He has printed on each side two opposing concepts that he hopes may help people in their decision-making, or offer guidance: Solo/Together; Action/Pause; Speak/Listen. “It helps disrupt the kind of structural order that we’re all stuck in that we could escape quite easily,” he says. He tells Studio International: “The purpose of them is actually to remind people – to remind myself – that money isn’t our greatest value. When we start to question it logically, it becomes quite low on the scale for people. If you think about the ideas of time, of agency and attention, they’re of far greater value to us really than money is. But we’re all obsessed with things.” Gander says the simple choices offered on the coins are inspired by words of wisdom he treasures from his mother and father. He has placed a further philosophical quote of his father’s, “Time is your greatest asset”, in huge lettering across the front of Selfridges department store looking on to Exchange Square. Together with the daily scatterings of coins from The Find, he calls this Intervention Space. It includes a vending machine within the store containing pebbles that he has signed. Each one costs £10, and the proceeds will go to a charity of his choice. Further quotes from his parents will appear on billboards around the city during the festival, to alert Mancunians to this treasure hunt. It is the ordinary local people – “the 99% of the audience (that) has no interest in contemporary art, and don’t even realise these (coins) are contemporary art” –that he is most excited about reaching. “It’s more important to me because it’s a great introduction; it kind of de-stigmatises contemporary art.” Manchester International Festival, various venues 29 June – 16 July 2023 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘It’s an inward-looking invitation to contemplation’ Syed talks about Each Tiny Drop, her intervention in a city park, as part of Manchester International Festival 2023, that she hopes will help to build communities around a body of water. For this year’s Manchester International Festival, the Lahore-based artist Risham Syed has programmed a new public park, Mayfield Park, with songs and kinetic sculptures in a work entitled Each Tiny Drop, referencing the River Medlock that still flows along its edge, and honouring the community-building connections between vital water sources in Manchester and her home country of Pakistan. Part of a new development close to Piccadilly station, Mayfield Park is the first public park to be created in Manchester for 100 years. With a landscape reminiscent of the semi-wild rolling contours of the 2012 Olympic Park, or New York’s High Line, the intervention, directed by Angie Bual, includes kinetic sculptures and soundscapes. On the warm summer’s evening of the press run-through, the sculptures tinkle in the background. We are invited to pick up a small, unfired terracotta pot, then fill it with the water that drips from the sculpture’s assorted spouts (some of which has been taken from the Soan River in Pakistan), and then move around the park slowly, to the haunting strains of a sound work by Dan Jones embedded in planting. We finish our ritual by disposing of the water in the River Medlock. The experience, on an unusually sunny Manchester afternoon, is delightful, eliciting a quiet appreciation of the new, flourishing plants and grasses that fill this restorative new space. During the evening’s ceremony, the procession was to be accompanied by a singing from a local choir, and by Syed herself. Syed talks to Studio International about the age-old tradition of gathering, building communities around a body of water, and of the rituals that become embedded in that community through repetition. She hopes that this work, in a new park, in a newly regenerating part of Manchester, will help to draw a community around this precious green space and its watery assets. As to the rituals, she hopes new rituals will be sparked: “Such as … being mindful, being thoughtful of our daily actions. Those are the kind of rituals we should think about now. Things that you do every day, but being mindful of our connection with water and going back to where it all started from, and not taking it for granted. Syed completed her BA at National College of Arts in Lahore, and received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, where she focused on painting, including traditional miniatures. For her installations, she also uses drawing, embroidery, weaving and quilting. Various venues, Manchester 29 June – 16 July 2023 Interviewed by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘I'd often look up and ask the boss, “Mr Picasso, would you like that?”’ To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, the Musée National Picasso, Paris, commissioned a re-presentation of its extensive collection and invited the designer Paul Smith to be its artistic director. Studio International caught up with him at the resulting exhibition, Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light. The leading British fashion designer Paul Smith is well-known for his use of bright colours and combinations of patterns in his clothing and his shops, and he has brought that same design skill to bear in this new exhibition, for which he was given a free hand in which works to include and how to display them. Banishing the white cube, he has drawn out Picasso’s own colour and patterns in unusual ways. It was a risk, he admits, to place masterpieces by one of modern arts most famed artists on walls of brightly painted stripes and floral wallpaper, but it works. Smith is, in his own field, a master of putting a creative twist on tradition and he has done it again here, fulfilling his brief to show Picasso “in a new light”. Smith didn’t just design the show. He also selected the works from the thousands of pieces in the museum’s collection – the world’s largest holding of Picasso’s work – and decided what would go where. The designer shares Picasso’s eclectic taste in influences, his endless willingness to experiment, and his love of seeing one thing in another. Smith’s approach is at once serious and playful, respectful and fun. And it is proving a hit with everyone from children and students to top international curators. Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light The Musée National Picasso-Paris 7 March – 27 August 2023 Interview by JULIET RIX Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘I’m drawn to stories that have messy politics’ Tsang trains a postcolonial lens on Herman Melville’s 19th-century novel Moby-Dick for her immersive video installation Of Whales and beguiling silent film MOBY DICK; or, The Whale. She talks about the works, staged by TBA21, now on show at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. Wu Tsang: Of Whales Staged by TBA21 at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 21 February – 11 June 2023 The feature-length film MOBY DICK; or, The Whale, directed by Wu Tsang, will be screened on Tuesdays and Saturdays during the duration of the exhibition. Interview by ELIZABETH FULLERTON Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘I’m trying to bring these women back to life by painting them in flesh-like tones’ As Fortnum was at the Henry Moore Institute, installing her exhibition of paintings and drawings of sculptures of women connected to Rodin, she spoke candidly about her belief that the sculptor received a ‘bad press’ and about the slippage between the multiple layers of translation in her work The daughter of two sculptors, Rebecca Fortnum (b1963, London), despite the need to define herself as a painter, unsurprisingly has a deep interest in sculpture and the direct encounter this medium demands. Continuing her practice of drawing and painting from sculptures, this one-room exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds looks at female sculptors who were associated with Auguste Rodin’s studio in Paris at the turn of the last century. A research fellowship at the institute in 2021-22 formed the basis of her study, from which she has chosen 15 – and, she says, it could have been many more – names, most of which were unknown to her beforehand. These include Camille Claudel – perhaps the most tragic and well known of Rodin’s encounters; Sarah Bernhardt – known for her acting, but not for her sculpting; and the African American poet, painter, theatre designer and sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller. By choosing to make, not portraits of the women themselves, but paintings of sculpted heads of other women, made by the chosen 15, all using the trope of downcast eyes, Fortnum is not only putting the focus firmly on the status of these women as artists in their own right, but she is creating a multilayered translation. Her finished, two-dimensional, painted image is a translation of a three-dimensional, inanimate translation of a three-dimensional animate being (the original sitter) – and often there is another remove, as many of the sculptures no longer exist or are in private collections, and so Fortnum had to work from two-dimensional archival imagery. She describes her process of “colouring in the blanks” and breathing life into these phantasms, and she talks of her interest in the slippage between these material states and what is lost – and gained – at each stage. Alongside her small-scale, coloured paintings of these sculptures of women, she has made much larger-scale, black-and-white drawings of sculptures – again by these artists – of men. Made in dense carbon pencil, their presence is strongly felt. These centre – now literally as well as conceptually – around Claudel’s rendering of Rodin. Rebecca Fortnum: Les Praticiennes Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 3 February – 4 June 2023 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘I tried to make myself known as an ideas monger’ The Scottish artist discusses what fuels his inclination to work at scale and the importance of necessary extravagance when making art with the stuff of everyday life, from matches to shipping containers as well as architecture David Mach (b1956, Fife) loves to work at scales many would consider unfeasible. In 1983, a year after graduating from the Royal College of Art, he recreated a life-sized Polaris submarine out of 6,000 rubber tyres behind London’s Royal Festival Hall. Although vast tonnes of magazines and newspapers became something of a trademark material – at the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow in 2002, he used 15,000 copies of the Herald for his sculpture Bangers and Mash - he has deployed all manner of bulky everyday stuff in his sculptures and collages, including cars, furniture, shipping containers, aeroplanes and even a row of 12 toppling red telephone boxes. The latter piece, Out of Order (1989), still stands in Kingston’s shopping centre – now a poignant reminder of those simpler days when the only phones we used were attached to a piece of cable. This penchant for the huge and unwieldy makes complete sense when you ask him where that impulse came from. As he reveals here, the Fife town where he was born, Methil, “was absolutely an amazing place to grow up”. Surrounded by 20th-century industry, with oil platforms visible out to sea, and components being constructed around the corner, he says that every day: “Something would come past the window of our house - the leg of an oil platform that was the length of three buses, with all these bits sticking off it.” In the 1960s and 70s, there was full employment, in mining, the oil industry, shipping and freight at Dundee’s active port. All this, he says, was “right on the doorstep of gorgeous countryside and stupendous beaches - the Riviera of Scotland”. He adds: “It gave me a sense of necessary extravagance. Let’s not be reasonable about this. Let’s go to town.” That extravagance is palpable in Brick Train (1997), a life-sized replica of the 1938 steam locomotive Mallard, which made of bricks, clad in a billowing brick smoke cloak, sits next to Morrisons supermarket in Darlington, a celebration of the region’s railway heritage. Or in Big Heids (1999), a public sculpture in Lanarkshire, comprising three upturned shipping containers, each weighing 18 tonnes, in tribute to the now defunct steel industry. His last major solo London show, in 2017 at the Griffin Gallery, involved a new commission (Incoming, 2017) comprising a Jeep surfing on a tide of timber flotsam across shoulder-high drifts of carefully sculpted newspaper. By the time he was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1988, he was up to his eyeballs in major, supersized commissions and so it continued until managing several simultaneous projects on multiple continents with diverse teams became too unwieldy. Around this time, Mach switched to a smaller – more collectable – scale, including his now famous/infamous matchhead sculptures, the first of which was accidentally set on fire by the collector who bought it. This led Mach to consider all future matchhead sculptures as performance art, liable to be (and even sometimes deliberately) set on fire. Now, for his solo retrospective at the Pangolin gallery in London, he will combine the very large with the more moderate, in multiple maquettes. Heavy Metal will feature his high-profile installations as well as unrealised and monumental architectural projects, in locations as diverse as Edinburgh, Mauritius and Syria. Mach studied fine art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (now part of Dundee University) from 1974-79 and then the Royal College of Art (1979-82). On graduation, he was snapped up by the Lisson Gallery, which gave him his first solo show in 1982. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1988, he didn’t win but was awarded the Lord Provost’s Prize in Glasgow in 1992. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1998, and an Honorary Member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 2004. He has been a professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools, and a visiting professor of sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. He lives and works in London. David Mach: Heavy Metal Pangolin London 25 January – 25 March 2023 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Sedira discusses her acclaimed French Pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, as well as how the sea became a leitmotif for transnational identity in Can’t You See the Sea Changing?, her solo exhibition at De Le Warr Pavilion and Dundee Contemporary Arts For Zineb Sedira, the personal is political. Over the course of her 25-year career, Sedira, who describes herself as “a film-maker at heart”, has mined personal history and autobiography to explore postcolonial memory, movement and relationality. Can’t You See the Sea Changing? is Sedira’s first solo show in a UK public gallery for 12 years. At consecutive coastal locations, the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and then Dundee Contemporary Arts, the artist presents a body of work that riffs on the sea as passage, border and site of displacement and perpetual motion. At the same time, her project for the French Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, Dreams Have No Titles, which received the Jury’s Special Mention, is preparing to travel to Berlin’s Hamburger Banhof. We meet in Sedira’s south London living room, which is uncannily familiar from models and dioramas that present the artist’s home as a sort of stage set or mise en abyme (an iteration of this work, Way of Life, was presented at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, in 2019, before Venice). Sedira notes that, with its 1960s furniture and vintage Algerian records and posters, the room is a stand-in for the sort of discursive spaces that allowed for debate, collaboration and, crucially, friendship, during the liberation movements of the 60s in Algeria. Zineb Sedira: Can’t You See the Sea Changing? De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea 24 September 2022 – 8 January 2023 and Dundee Contemporary Arts 29 April – 6 August 2023 Dreams Have No Titles (from the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022) Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 24 February – 30 July 2023 Interview by AMIE CORRY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘It’s a meditative process, a layering of colour, sometimes 10 or 15 layers’ The artist discusses the enduring power of painting, the evolution of his watercolour technique, the influence of his childhood landscape on palette and subject, and the importance of persistence. Shanti Panchal believes in slow art. His painstaking and meditative technique with watercolour – a careful layering of colour mixed directly on to paper – can take up to six weeks for a portrait, and his mural at the entrance to Brixton tube station in south London, commissioned by Art on the Underground, took him six months. He attributes this thoughtful, time-rich technique to his upbringing in the rural wilds of North Gujarat. “I grew up in a remote village – not even on the local map – a very organic world,” he tells Studio International. “We had no water tap or electricity, or anything like that. When the monsoon came, we swam in the mud. Your whole body was very much with the earth. These organic elements stayed with me. The earth colours, the mud-wall houses, the red roof tiles.” Panchal arrived in London in 1978, on a British Council scholarship to study for two years at the Byam Shaw School of Art, after completing five years of study at the Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai. The bustle of 1970s London was a shock to the system; Mumbai was also a shock to the system, but he was able to get through his art studies thanks to the kindness of the art teacher at his village school, who was ambitious for him, and allowed him to sleep on his affluent Mumbai family’s office floor, paying his school fees in return for daily cleaning. Panchal returned to India after his studies and taught briefly, but resumed his life in London where his talents were soon recognised, in the radical, pro-diversity atmosphere of early-80s London in which other black and Asian British artists – including the now highfliers Lubaina Himid and Veronica Ryan – had carved out space for new voices and perspectives. The power of his serene, compassionate depictions of Asian culture and people surrounded by the sometimes- jarring accoutrements of western life, to highlight the universal and the particular in migrant experiences, helped to win him a commission to paint one of four anti-racism murals in 1984 from the then Labour left Greater London Council (GLC). Gavin Jantjes, Keith Piper and Himid were involved in the other murals, though Panchal’s is the only one that remains, in Shadwell, east London. Although his work draws inspiration from Indian miniature paintings - he cites William Blake, El Greco and Samuel Palmer as equally influential – he is equally confident with small projects and large-scale ones, including a 1993 tiled mural for the London borough of Harrow. For him, the key factor in scaling up and using different materials is achieving the desired intensity and luminosity of colour, which he usually evokes through the painstaking layering of one watercolour tint on top of another, mixing the colours straight on to the page rather than on the palette. While his work has been selected in major shows, and he has been shortlisted for, or won, most of the major portrait prizes, he admits to feeling out of step with the art scene since the Young British Artist movement, spearheaded by Damian Hirst, swept all notions of quiet, painterly observation to one side in favour of conceptual bravado and improvisatory chutzpah. But 2022 saw a commission from Art on the Underground (the commissioning arm of Transport for London) return Panchal’s work to the public gaze, adorning the entrance to Brixton underground station. Called Endurance, it is a community portrait of the people and places in Brixton, including the Black Cultural Archives, Brixton windmill and the Cherry Groce Memorial Pavilion in the nearby Windrush Square. Endurance Brixton Underground Station, London Until November 2023 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Grace Ndiritu: ‘Museums hold our collective past and they can hold our future’ Ndiritu talks about her show at the Wellcome Collection, where a Zen Buddhism-inspired temple allows visitors to contemplate her tapestries Repair and Restitution, and explains why reshaping the role of museums is so important to her Healing forms the bedrock of the British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu’s multidisciplinary artistic and spiritual practice. In 2012, she launched a body of work titled Healing the Museum, feeling that art institutions had lost touch with the public and the sense of “sacredness” that fosters critical thinking and understanding of their collections. Through shamanic rituals, meditation and holistic workshops, Ndiritu has sought to reactivate museums with the aim of making them living spaces of collective learning rather than places in which to passively observe objects. Ndiritu’s show The Healing Pavilion at the Wellcome Collection in London continues this line of action. Using walnut panels taken from the Wellcome’s now dismantled Medicine Man gallery, which housed ethnographic objects collected by the 19th century pharmaceutical entrepreneur Sir Henry Wellcome, the artist has constructed a Zen Buddhism-inspired temple for contemplation of her installation The Twin Tapestries. There are cubbyholes for shoes as one finds in some places of worship (although most visitors seem to be keeping them on). Inside are two enlarged photographs woven on tapestries titled Repair and Restitution, which hang on opposite walls. Repair is taken from a 1915 archival photo of staff at the private Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, the forerunner of the Wellcome Collection. Wearing formal attire, the staff pose stiffly as they hold various artefacts, including human skulls and masks. Restitution has an altogether different tone, based on a photo from 1973 showing casually dressed staff at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin arranged around an intricately beaded royal throne from the Kingdom of Bamum in Cameroon. Staged like a magazine photoshoot, with some people reclining, others leaning or sitting on the throne, hands jauntily on hips, there is a playful, lighthearted air that is in sharp contrast to the symbolic power originally invested in the throne. While Restitution is the more shocking of the two images, both underline the sense of entitlement and superiority that long characterised the western museological approach towards African collections. Together, the Twin Tapestries invite us to reflect on the relationship of these objects to their western guardians, how they arrived in these collections and the colonial violence that is bound up in their stories. “Repair and Restitution are two sides of the same coin,” says Ndiritu. “You need both processes to happen.” The installation includes an audio guide for visitors with breathing exercises and information on the works, which is intended to encourage a meditative mood. “The Pavilion I see as creating a safe space within the museum to talk and discuss difficult issues,” says Ndiritu, whose work spans painting, film, books, textile, installation and social practice. The artist has considerable experience nurturing such conversations around effecting constructive change. Under the aegis of the Goethe Institute, she spent two years from 2019 working with African and European scientists, academics, artists, activists and museums in Belgium, France, Germany and Italy on the topic of restitution of objects. Although concrete results can be hard to quantify with Ndiritu’s interventions, the impact of her project A Meal for My Ancestors (2018) at Thalielab in Brussels, part of Healing the Museum, surpassed her expectations. Having worked for four months with a group of migrants, refugees and activists and another group of officials from the EU parliament, Nato and the UN, Ndiritu brought them all together for a shamanic performance; afterwards, one of the participants was so inspired that she submitted a briefing paper to the EU parliament on changing the law around climate refugees. Grace Ndiritu: The Healing Pavilion The Wellcome Collection, London 24 November 2022 – 23 April 2023 Interview by ELIZABETH FULLERTON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

‘It’s hard to get a balance in the work: an equal amount of threat and an equal amount of softness’ The sculptor talks to us about her playful use of the domestic realm to explore feelings of belonging and culture identity Blending the soft with the spiky, comfort with threat, the domestic with hints of something wild, Permindar Kaur’s sculpture and installations explore the subtleties of belonging. As becomes evident from her new exhibition at The Art House in Wakefield, Kaur’s sculptural language has been remarkably consistent since she first emerged on to the British art scene in the early 1990s. Outgrown brings together works that take their formal language from the domestic realm, across three decades of Kaur’s career. The public space of the gallery, visible from the street through floor-to-ceiling windows, has been reimagined as a home, with spaces for sleeping, sitting, playing and dining. At the centre of the gallery, the spindly Overgrown House (2020) sprouts up toward the skylights as though it were an organic entity sending shoots out towards the sun. A cluster of small steel beams surrounding it suggests that this blatantly manufactured structure has also been sending roots out beneath the ground to generate a series of small clones. Kaur typically brings two materials together in each work – often textile and metal. In the case of Overgrown House, this gesture is particularly understated: rounded “sprouts” have been welded on to square beams, suggesting an arboreal evolution of the industrial material. Kaur also plays with scale in the earliest work in the show, Tall Chairs 1996 – a pair of leggy steel seats on which perch two soft yellow beings, their arms hugged self-protectively around their little legs. Other brightly coloured fleecy avatars appear climbing the legs of a spiky steel stool or weighed to the ground under a suffocating pile of blankets. A herd of colourful creatures are also clustered beneath a skeletal narrow bed. Bristling with copper spikes, they suggest the unspeakable horrors that assail us at night – the monsters under the bed – but also things pushed out of sight and out of mind. Stripped of all extraneous detail, the clean simplicity of Kaur’s work allows it to blend quietly into its surroundings: it is only as we start to pay attention that the oddness and implicit menace of the work becomes creepingly apparent. During a residency at The Art House ahead of her exhibition, Kaur worked with two local artists – Ranya Abdulateef and Ifa Mesfin Abebe – to develop a sculpture exploring the idea of home, to be installed in Wakefield Cathedral this autumn. Informed by experiences of migration, the work reimagines the bed – a mainstay of Kaur’s sculptural vocabulary – as a curving, pod-like structure that suggests a living, perhaps mobile, entity. Born in Nottingham in 1965, Kaur studied at Sheffield City Polytechnic and Glasgow School of Art. In 1995 her work was selected for the British Art Show 4. Over the following decade her sculpture was shown internationally, including solo exhibitions in Spain and Canada as well as the UK. More recently, her work has been featured in the 2021 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and the Arts Council Collection Touring exhibition, Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945. Permindar Kaur: Outgrown The Art House, Wakefield 3 September – 13 November 2022 Permindar Kaur, Ranya Abdulateef and Ifa Mesfin Abebe: Dream Runner Wakefield Cathedral 28 September – 13 November 2022 Interview by HETTIE JUDAH Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

With swooping forms and blazing colour, Chowdhary explores the grey areas between east and west, sculpture and architecture, and the functional and the decorative. She talks here about the themes that underpin her work You can spot the artist’s house on Lubna Chowdhary’s quiet street in south London: the painting, planting and view through the windows all broadcast her mastery of subtle colour and form. At the back of a lively garden is her ceramics studio, lined with maquettes and works in progress. Back in the house, she has arranged an exhibition in miniature for us: examples of her recent series. They become essential props in a conversation that roves around the interplay of different cultures: the art world and the craft world; northern Europe and South Asia. Chowdhary uses the vernacular of functional design – wooden furniture, ceramic vessels and tiles – to explore cultural hybridity, the object and the body, and the relationship between hand making and industrial manufacture. In her exhibition Erratics at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, the artist elaborates these key concerns, while celebrating, too, the seductive lushness of coloured glazes and geometric ornamentation. In geology, the term “erratic” denotes a stone inconsistent with the surrounding rock. Picked up and transported across long distances by a glacier, an erratic is deposited by melting ice: a stranger on foreign terrain, it is nevertheless, literally, part of the landscape. Chowdhary uses the term both for its sense of dislocation, and of blending: it is, she says, a useful analogy for a diaspora artist. The titular Erratics are wooden sculptures inspired by furniture from India’s colonial period, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London. Chowdhary encountered these hybrid objects during a ceramics residency at the museum in 2017. In Erratics I, II & III, she pushes the “lost in translation” oddness of 19th-century British designs reinterpreted by Indian artisans still further, beyond the limits of usefulness. The small ceramic sculptures Disobedient Typologies (2021) continue Chowdhary’s investigation of grey areas: between east and west, sculpture and architecture, and the functional and the decorative. Formally, the arrangements of shaped tiles that make up tableaux such as Certain Times 51 (2021) recall Giorgio Morandi’s still-life paintings of clustered vessels, while their bright glazes serve as a vivid counter to his cool tonality. Here, as in wall-based tile works such as the Sign series, Chowdhary confronts the legacy of the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, whose 1910 essay Ornament & Crime announced: “Cultural evolution is equivalent to the removal of ornament from articles in daily use.” The legacy of Loos’s campaign against ornament endures in “sophisticated” minimalist design of the present day. Underlying Loos’s objections to the exploitation of labourers and the obsolescence of fashionable designs, was an explicit connection between ornament and “primitive” cultures: “the natives, the Persians, the Slovak peasant”. Chowdhary’s riposte comes in swooping forms and blazing colour. Born in Tanzania in 1964, Chowdhary grew up in Rochdale in the north of England and is now based in south London. Since studying ceramics at London’s Royal College of Art, she has collaborated with architects on commissions in the public and private sphere, among them the installation of glazed pictorial tiles, Interstice (2021), in the entrance lobby at the recently redeveloped 100 Liverpool Street building in London and a rhythmic ceramic design for the foyer of the Standard Hotel, also in London. About 20 years in the making, Metropolis – her 1,000-piece exploration of architectural forms real and imagined – was shortlisted at an early stage for the Jerwood Ceramics Prize in 2001. The finished version was installed in the Asian and European Ceramics Gallery of the V&A in 2017 and is now in the permanent collection of the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the annual Freelands Foundation Award. A version of Erratics was shown at Peer Gallery in London in 2021. Lubna Chowdhary: Erratics Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art 25 June – 9 October 2022 Chowdhary also has work included in Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, Hayward Gallery, London, 26 October 2022 –⁠ 8 January 2023 Interview by HETTIE JUDAH Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

Sámi artists Anders Sunna, Máret Ánne Sara and Pauliina Feodoroff have transformed the Nordic Pavilion to highlight the continuing struggle against colonialism, discrimination and land possession faced by Europe’s only Indigenous people Pauliina Feodoroff’s multipronged work at Venice has a tangible goal: to raise awareness and money to protect as much old-growth forest as she can. For the past five years, Feodoroff has collaborated with land guardians to create a “forest peace plan” for lands decimated by commercial logging. With the aim of eventually buying back privatised land for the Sámi to manage and renew, the artist has created a series of images of these landscapes to be auctioned off, along with the rights to visit the land every five years. She calls these “landpersonscapes” in recognition of the Sámis’ inseparability from land that European colonisers long characterised as empty wilderness. “Buy our art, not our land,” is the message. In addition to this fundraising element of the project, Feodoroff has choreographed a three-part performance titled Matriarchyaddressing issues around colonisation, Sámi notions of kinship with nature and matriarchal values of care and collectivity. The first part, titled Contact, enacts “the first proper greeting” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, demonstrating the Sámi tradition of gift-giving, which settlers misread for submission to domination. The second part, Auction, performs a sale of the landpersonscapes, and the final, jubilant segment, Matriarchy, celebrates the decolonisation of the female body and its communion with the land. “In our society everybody leads and nobody leads,” she said during a press trip to visit majestic old-growth forests flanking Lake Inari in northern Finland. “We don’t want to be governed and nature doesn’t want to be governed, it wants to be collaborated with.” Giardini 27 September – 27 November 2022 Review and interviews by ELIZABETH FULLERTON Filmed by ELIZABETH FULLERTON and MARTIN KENNEDY

Artist Yuki Kihara, who is of mixed Japanese and Samoan heritage, talks about showcasing queer rights and revealing the toxic influence of colonialism in her works The artist Yuki Kihara (b1975), who is of Japanese and Samoan descent, brought some tropical sunshine and more than a flash of gender political heat into the gloomy depths of Venice’s Arsenale, with a presentation that foregrounds queer rights, small island ecologies and decolonisation, among other hot topics. As the first artist to represent New Zealand in Venice who identifies as Pasifika, Asian and fa’afafine (Samoan for someone who is born male but presents “in the manner of a woman”), Kihara is pulling no punches. Her installation, Paradise Camp, was inspired by an essay by Ngahuia Te Awekotuku that was presented at a Paul Gauguin Symposium in 1992, at the Auckland Art Gallery, drawing attention to the sexual ambiguity of some of the characters so vividly evoked by Gauguin. Kihara has repaid the compliment by staging photos inspired by Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, using sites and people of Samoan origin, to reflect those similarities and celebrate Gauguin’s recognition of non-western and non-binary beauty. These are on show in Venice, as is a new film, also called Paradise Camp. Shot on location in Upolu Island, Samoa, it features a local cast and crew, mostly drawn from the the fa’afafine community, and its various chapters include one segment that playfully interrogates indigenous v colonial attitudes to art and culture, featuring a group of “ordinary Samoans” who end up mocking and deconstructing the kind of white cultural tropes that are taken for granted in Europe, but are unfamiliar in Samoan art education. Kihara, who works across photography, film, performance, curation and installations, studied fashion design at Wellington Polytechnic (now Massey University). While she was still a student, the national museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased a work of hers, a rare accolade. The work was Graffiti Dress – Bombacific, which blended 26 T-shirts featuring corporate logos into one fabulous creation. In 2008, she had a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Entitled Living Photographs, it explored the exotic poses and tableaus captured by 19th-century colonial and non-indigenous photographers, such as Thomas Andrew and Alfred John Tattersall, which had helped to spread inaccurate stereotypes about Pacific islanders and their culture, many of which still prevail. Kihara’s work is now in the MoMA collection, the Te Papa Tongarewa Museum, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum and Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan. Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp New Zealand Pavilion, Arsenale, Venice 23 April – 27 November 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Sámi artists Anders Sunna, Máret Ánne Sara and Pauliina Feodoroff have transformed the Nordic Pavilion to highlight the continuing struggle against colonialism, discrimination and land possession faced by Europe’s only Indigenous people Máret Ánne Sara’s visceral presentation grew out of her four-year artistic campaign Pile O ’Sápmi, alongside her brother ’s unsuccessful legal challenge to Norway ’s forced reindeer culls. That project’s most famous iteration was a vast curtain of reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at Documenta 14 in 2017 and now hangs at the National Museum of Oslo. In her studio in Guovdageaidnu in Norwegian Sápmi, Sara described how a chance conversation with a reindeer herder helped her overcome her despair over her brother’s defeat and the Sámis’ plight, and inspired her Venice works. He told her: “Seeing the first red calves when they’re newborn makes all the struggles vanish. It strengthens your body, your spirit and your visions for the future.” For this show, Sara collected the corpses of reindeer calves and incorporated them in a dramatic spiral mobile. Half hidden among hanging birch branches and grasses, the baby corpses appear to be in motion, caught in a liminal state between life and death. Surrounding the mobile, amorphous sculptural forms composed of hand-stitched reindeer intestines reference the stomach’s function as a container of emotional knowledge and the Sámi idea of “duodji”, narrowly connoting the tradition of “craft” as well as a philosophy of life based on the absolute interconnectedness of humans, animals and nature. Giardini 27 September – 27 November 2022 Review and interviews by ELIZABETH FULLERTON Filmed by ELIZABETH FULLERTON and MARTIN KENNEDY

Sámi artists Anders Sunna, Máret Ánne Sara and Pauliina Feodoroff have transformed the Nordic Pavilion to highlight the continuing struggle against colonialism, discrimination and land possession faced by Europe’s only Indigenous people Anders Sunna, who is from Swedish Sápmi, created an installation of five large-scale “history” paintings, each depicting a decade in the 50-year battle between his family and the Swedish authorities, mainly over reindeer-herding practices. “When the government had made you illegal, then everything is legal to do to you. So, you have no rights at all,” Sunna said, speaking at his studio in the Swedish town of Jokkmokk ahead of the biennale. The paintings, which incorporate collage and draw on Sámi symbology, are enclosed within wooden casings carved by members of Sunna’s family, with shelves holding folders of thousands of documents from all the court cases, and each work immerses the viewer in a sonic landscape composed of field recordings from the court and interviews. The charred remains of a sixth painting in the series lie strewn on the ground, representing an equivocal future. Giardini 27 September – 27 November 2022 Review and interviews by ELIZABETH FULLERTON Filmed by ELIZABETH FULLERTON and MARTIN KENNEDY

The Barbadian-Scottish artist has used sculpture, film and tapestry for her Scotland in Venice presentation. Her aim, she says, is to show that, through self-compassion and collective care, we can battle racism and colonialism. Set apart from the crush and crowds of the nearby biennale venues, in a former boatyard, on a tranquil, waterfront site, the work by Alberta Whittle (b1980 Bridgetown, Barbados), for Scotland in Venice, invites you to do as its title says: pause. Her installation, Deep Dive (Pause) Uncoiling Memory, comprises tapestry, film and sculpture, and revisits and enriches themes Whittle has explored before: colonialism, oppression, forgotten (or suppressed) histories, the many legacies of slavery, and the experience of racism. For Venice, it is the core part of her practice, the idea of collective care as an antidote to “anti-blackness”, that comes across most powerfully – in the seating and blankets she places around the two-room space to allow for rumination and discussion, as much as in the evident time, energy and love she has expended in making these works, alongside a variety of collaborators. And despite the work’s unflinching exposure of issues that damage us all, this enveloping sense of compassion, clarity and affection emanates from the work and gives one the feeling that her mission, as explained in the introductory panel to her Venice installation, could be accomplished: “To collectively consider the historic legacies and contemporary expressions of racism, colonialism and migration, and begin to think outside these damaging frameworks.” There are big green gates – vivid against the bright-purple-painted walls of the first gallery - placed at the waterfront, and around the two rooms within this former boat shed, which bear key words, including Remember, Pause, Breathe. One has pale lilac and maroon glass – made here in Venice – inserted into its frame. Another is draped with a tapestry, of writhing limbs, splayed hands and snakes, which Whittle made at Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, with the words “what lies below” inserted into the metal frame. These snakes and tangled hands, says Whittle: “Are a way of thinking about the acquisitiveness of empire. The hands are made from a donation of whale ropes.” Caribbean cowrie shells are arranged around the foot of a gate, to evoke the ancient forms of trading that presaged colonial expansion, slavery and oppression. The commission expands her opportunities to explore her core theme, which she states as: “How do we look at history and its impact on the everyday? I was thinking about this work as an excavation … into histories. But also … a way of thinking about what does it mean to build community and think of new strategies of being together. A call to change: that’s really my hope for the exhibition.” In 2021, Whittle was in solo presentations at Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh, the Liverpool Biennial, Art Night London and Glasgow International and she was in the group show Life Between Islands: Caribbean British Art 1950s to Now, at Tate Britain. In 2020, she was awarded a Turner Bursary, a Frieze Artist Award and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award. She had a solo exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts in 2019. Forthcoming exhibitions include a group show at Fotografiska, New York and a solo show as part of the British Art Show 9 in Plymouth. The Venice work will appear as part of a larger show of her work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Alberta Whittle: Deep Dive (Pause) Uncoiling Memory Scotland in Venice, Docks Cantieri Cucchini, S Pietro di Castello 40, Venice 23 April – 27 November 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Close Watch, Takala’s multi-channel video at the Finnish Pavilion, is based on her time working undercover as a security guard in a large shopping centre. As she explains, it explores the concept of how private companies exert control over the behaviour of the public The Berlin- and Helsinki-based artist Pilvi Takala (b1981, Helsinki) has an established practice of filming performative interventions, often going undercover to reveal the hidden workings of systems that constrain or control our behaviours. For the 59th Venice Biennale in the Pavilion of Finland, her presentation Close Watch (2021) reveals the research she undertook into the private security industry, spending six months undercover as a Securitas guard in one of Finland’s biggest shopping centres. The work painstakingly exposes the multitude of subtle and overt strategies for controlling behaviour between guards and members of the public, but also between the guards themselves, and reveals the invisible boundaries of what we consider acceptable behaviour in what is supposed to be a public space but is, in fact, part of the privatised public realm. For ethical reasons, Takala could not film the day-to-day experience of guards and members of the public, but she used the six months’ immersion to observe and record in her notebook issues of concern and interest, stepping over the line from being a performer to becoming a participant. As she says here: “I was actually doing the work, so there wasn’t any pretending in it. And it was … quite challenging. For me, the research was also about: What problems will I have doing that work? What are the ethical considerations? I was, of course, interested in my colleagues but also in myself, how to do this work well.” Takala worked with the architects Studio LA to adapt the original Alvar Aalto-designed Finnish pavilion to turn it into a space that articulates the dual nature of watching and being watched. The front half of the pavilion, where Takala reveals the methods by which, after her six-month work stint, she invited her fellow guards to participate (some were happy to get involved, others not) is screened off from the rear part by a one-way mirror, which obscures what is going on behind. The rear two-screen space shares the post-surveillance performances and workshops, but here the dividing mirror is clear so you can witness these communications, while knowing people are unaware that you are watching them. In these workshops, Takala, along with several of her ex-colleagues and three actors, re-enact and dissect incidents from her field research, sometimes replicating incidents verbatim, sometimes improvising. Borrowing the participatory technique of forum theatre, she and the participants explore power dynamics, ideas of social justice, and alternative strategies for situations that can trigger or be triggered by use of excessive force, racist language and toxic behaviour. With insight and intelligence, for the most part, her ex-colleagues reflect on their behaviour, their roles and responsibilities. As the communications unfold in the front room between Takala and her former workmates, one is struck by the openness and clarity of Takala’s approach – even in text or WhatsApp form - and her colleagues’ generally enthusiastic responses speak of the trust and respect that clearly built up between them. Takala has made previous works looking into the security industry, but her field of investigation has also included the realms of Hackney hipster co-working hubs and the tightly controlled environment of Disneyland. For The Stroker (2018), she posed as a wellness consultant in the east London co-working office Second Home, observing people’s responses to her overtly tactile overtures. For Real Snow White (2009), in a work both sinister and playful, she dressed up as Snow White and filmed the disturbance that created at the Disneyland entrance when the guards refuse her entry, using a variety of excuses, but ultimately exposing the Disney brand’s tight control of their image and that of its characters, which must be protected at all costs. Takala studied for her BFA/MFA (2001-6) at Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, including a year (2004) studying Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art. She has previously exhibited at Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2021), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki (2018), CCA Glasgow (2016), Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015), MoMA PS1, New Museum, New York (2013) and Künstlerhaus Bremen (2012). Takala won the Dutch Prix de Rome in 2011 and the Emdash Award and Finnish State Prize for Visual Arts in 2013. Pilvi Takala: Close Watch Finnish Pavilion, Giardini, Sestiere Castello, 30122 Venice 23 April – 27 November 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Angela Su talks about the new age group that tried to levitate the Pentagon, a story that informed her show at Venice, and says a lot of her work is about the interior of the body and physical transformation. Angela Su (b1958, Hong Kong) studied biochemistry in Canada before turning to the world of art. And it is an alchemical mixture that she has conjured for her Arise: Hong Kong in Venice presentation. Her practice is centred around deep research into contemporary science as well as science fiction, and she has said: “Science, the history of science, the impact of technology and the transformative body are the recurring themes in my work.” Her practice is broad-ranging, including video, performance, drawings, hair-embroidery and installations. For Venice, she has used almost all these media, in a layered, multi-room presentation, the centrepiece of which is her pseudo-documentary titled The Magnificent Levitation Act of Lauren O. In this interview for Studio International, she explains that it was inspired by her reading about the history of protests, and the discovery of an unlikely but true story. In the 1970s, members of a charismatic new-age movement, based at Esalen in California, tried to use the power of their minds to levitate the Pentagon as a form of anti-war protest (in Su’s film, it seems the US military get their soldiers to train with this community, to gain greater mental powers). The central, fictional character in the film, Lauren O, was inspired by Lauren Olamina, the main character in Octavia Butler’s book Parable of the Sower, who learns to fly in her dreams. All the other elements in the show are, in some form or other, exploring the “psychological preparation for levitation”. In the introductory room, 15 small video screens suspended from the ceiling show us a multitude of dancers, gymnasts and circus acts performing. Su says: “For a tightrope walker, it’s a constant balancing act to guess what’s safe and what’s dangerous.” She calls this video collage Tiptoeing the Kármán Line – after the line that notionally separates the Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. In the second room, she offers us some of her trademark hair embroidery, and some finely wrought drawings of fantastical anatomical interior landscapes, as well as a video where Su herself plays a “risk” game, wielding a pair of sharp scissors with one hand as they dance around the other hand, dangerously close – and sometimes too close. “A lot of the work is about the interior of the body, physical transformation. Pain is also about risk-taking and you have to prepare your body mentally for that kind of process of transformation,” she tells us. Beyond that room is her Lauren O “documentary”, which she describes as 90% fact and 10% fiction. It clearly speaks to the multiple oppressive regimes and invasions around the world today, and the various forms of resistance they have triggered. She says: “History repeats itself and I see a lot of similarities. I like to dig up forgotten histories like Esalen, and I learned a lot from the process.” The presentation concludes inside with a large glitterball and then culminates, outside, with some concrete structures for gathering or performing, based on circus arts. This Venice Biennale presentation was curated by guest curator Freya Chou in collaboration with the consulting curator Ying Kwok, and co-presented by the publicly funded M+ Museum and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. As referenced in this interview, Su has close connections with Finland, and has brought to Venice some of the artist friends and collaborators from her 2021 participation in So Long, Thanks Again for the Fish, at Levyhalli, Suomenlinna, Helsinki. In 2020, her work featured in 100 Drawings from Now, at the Drawing Center, New York, and Meditations in an Emergency at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. In 2019, Su presented Contagious Cities: Far Away, Too Close at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, a piece commissioned by Wellcome Trust; showed Woven at Focus at Frieze London; and The Afterlife of Rosy Leavers at the Artists’ Film International at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. In 2017, she participated in Pro(s)thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Angel Su: Arise: Hong Kong in Venice Arsenale, Campo della Tanna, Castello 2126, Venice 23 April – 27 November 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Niamh O’Malley says she wants her Irish Pavilion installation to be a welcoming space, for visitors to ‘feel the power and the height and weight of things’ Niamh O’Malley’s elegant sculptures sit quietly in the concrete-floored, timber-roofed, high-windowed space that the Irish Pavilion occupies in the Arsenale, at a turning point in this huge medieval-shed complex where the lapping waters of Venice are finally visible through the doors. It is a visually and sensorily rich setting for an artist so intent on revealing the poetry within ordinary, domestic and urban materials, especially glass. And here they are, one glass work layered against a wall, another delicately carved into drooping, lacy, weed-like fronds each edged in metal. Yet another hovers vertically above us, a delicate, art-deco semi-circle awning of leaf-embossed glass inviting us to enjoy its shade and the fragile patterning it casts on the wall below, while at the same time disrupting that sense of shelter or safety with the slices of glass that are scattered, seemingly loose, on its upper surface. O’Malley uses steel, limestone, wood and glass in ways that disrupt expectation, but the manner in which she does so makes you acutely aware of the material, its properties and typical contexts. One work that resembles an everyday, urban drain – albeit one smoothly curved and neatly edged, as if designed to cover a small stream - is made of limestone, expertly carved, its cold, contoured and fossil-flecked planes inviting touch and appreciation. A freestanding metal structure fans out overhead, its slender stems morphing into flat, cold, palm leaves. Another tall metal stand is hung with pendulous wooden shapes that drape down to the floor, but whose upward and outward curves invite the eye towards the roof, all the better to appreciate these playful timber gestures against that grid of rigid, rugged, structurally crucial beams. A smooth oblong of carved and polished wood lies on the floor, supporting several large discs made of what looks like rough concrete but could be limestone: slightly curved in their wooden frame, they evoke pools of water. Nearby is a short film that O’Malley made during lockdown, of a crow dipping its head down to gather water from a small pond she made with her young son and husband in her Dublin back garden. The bird is at its most fascinating as it tips up its beak to let the water roll down its throat, and as the action of dipping and drinking is repeated, something mechanical in its manner jars with the naturalistic setting, revealing the slippages between nature and our constructions and expectations of it. Beside this film is another, larger screen, displaying the flickering, fluttering louvres of a metal fan, whose rhythmic, nervous movements suggest a breathing, pulsing, living entity at play. O’Malley and the curatorial team from Temple Bar Studios + Gallery had this room stripped back to its antique essentials, revealing windows and the crumbling brickwork around their frames, all the better for these objects and their explorations of that continuum between construction and deconstruction to become part of the room’s physical choreography. O’Malley calls the installation Gather, she says, because it felt like a gathering. “I wanted it to be a welcome and an invitation to stand together in the space, with things, with objects to touch, as opposed to a virtual relationship to forms and artworks.” She tells us she has not only been enjoying the natural responses of visitors, but also a performance from the Croatian Pavilion, which for this biennale takes the form of six dancers, responding to other biennale spaces and structures, as well as a complex system of algorithms devised from the day’s news headlines. O’Malley, who was born in County Mayo in 1975 and studied at the University of Ulster, Belfast, gaining a PhD in 2003, is based in Dublin’s Temple Bar Studios. She participated in Dublin Contemporary, 2011, with her film Quarry (2011) capturing the barren landscape of a stone quarry. Her solo installation at The Douglas Hyde in 2015 brought further critical acclaim. Her work is held in the collections of The Hugh Lane, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Arts Council of Ireland. Niamh O’Malley: Gather Irish Pavilion, Arsenale, Venice 23 April – 27 November 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Jonathas de Andrade: With the Heart Coming Out of the Mouth – Venice Biennale 2022 Giant ears, a massive inflatable heart and a disembodied head – Andrade explains why he has filled the Brazilian Pavilion with an odd assortment of body parts. In one ear and out the other – this is the literal journey you must go on to experience Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade’s pavilion for the Venice Biennale. Two outsized ears frame the entrance and exit, guiding your passage through Brazil’s sleek, modernist pavilion in the Giardini, and announcing the inspiration that partly fuelled this exploration of tension, disembodiment and anxiety - that of his childhood visits to science fairs. Along with the oversized ears, there is a disembodied Styrofoam head floating slowly up and down in one room, a giant tongue lying dismembered on the floor in a pool of blood. But the tone is in part playful as well as grotesque, reinforced by the main event, occurring at regular intervals: a crimson, fabric, inflatable heart drops out of a pink mouth positioned in the ceiling and slowly descends to the floor. Then, over several minutes, to the general surprise of the assembled viewers, it unfolds and expands sideways to fill almost the whole of the second room in this two-room space. The artist’s intention here is to demonstrate the feeling of “the heart coming out of the mouth”, the English translation of this installation’s title, Com o Coração Saindo Pela Boca. This popular phrase illustrates a state of high tension, and echoes the English phrase “with your heart in your mouth”. It sparked the inspiration for the installation early on in his research explorations when De Andrade (b1982, Maceió, Brazil) started gathering regularly used local idiomatic phrases that figure body parts. He tells us: “I collected 250 statements and to my surprise most of them would resonate with the political atmosphere in Brazil at the moment.” He has placed these phrases in captions, in Portuguese, English and Italian, quite low around the room, alongside vivid, cartoonish representations of the sometimes surreal, occasionally grotesque metaphors they conjure. As for the ears at the entrance, he says they are “a great metaphor for how things happen politically. We have huge disasters going on and the ones who should react … are not hearing.” Ambiguity, ambivalence and a feeling of physical detachment, not quite being fully present in your body, are very typical of states of high anxiety – and we have all experienced those of late. But De Andrade wants this installation to make us think about where the danger, the menace that creates that anxiety comes from. Behind the inflating and deflating heart/mouth sculpture, there is a large screen playing another work, which he translates as “The Knot in the Throat”. Here, creatures from which one would normally run screaming – pythons, boa constrictors, assorted slim and very poisonous-looking snakes – interact with young people who clearly have complete faith in their connection with these dangerous species. He tells us these are all volunteers and handlers at a refuge for wild animals near where he lives. His film is a clear signal that it is not these animals we necessarily need to fear, so much as other humans. This is a landmark moment for De Andrade, combining all his skills in multimedia installations including film, found and often everyday objects (the sayings, essentially, are found objects) and sculpture along with the new, animatronic element. He previously won acclaim for his film O Peixe (The Fish), which debuted at the 32nd Bienal de São Paolo, in 2016, in which he films a Brazilian fisherman tenderly holding a fish as it dies. It was subsequently shown in a solo show at the New Museum, New York, USA (2017). He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 2019, The Power Plant, Toronto (2017); New Museum, New York (2017); Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2016-17); Museu de Arte do Rio (2014-2015); Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2013); Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal (2013). He is currently showing Staging Resistance at Foam, Amsterdam, until 18 May 2022. His Venice presentation was curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, who was general curator of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021). Jonathas de Andrade: Com o Coração Saindo Pela Boca / With the Heart Coming Out of the Mouth Brazilian Pavilion, Giardini, Venice 23 April – 25 September 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

In the darkness of the Icelandic Pavilion, Sigurður Guðjónsson talks about his monumental video work – a visceral experience, its scale and form resonant with its architectural setting and enhanced by a primal soundtrack. The combination of elemental, bass, rumbling sounds with the scale and bristling texture of the video installation Perpetual Motion, by Sigurður Guðjónsson (b1975, Reykjavík), brings visitors to an abrupt halt partway through the long, processional rollercoaster of art along Venice’s Arsenale. I noticed one visitor sink to the floor to sit in a meditative state of wonder. The monumental, visceral experience (and stunned reaction) is just what this Reykjavík-based artist hoped for as the piece gestated over the last two years. Wanting to break out of the stereotypical presentation of video work – where people sit or stand passively in front of screens of varying sizes – Guðjónsson took advantage of the high ceilings and industrial materiality of this former boat shed to devise the two-screen format here: one long, thin screen extends up six metres, towards the timber roof trusses, while the other protrudes forwards like a catwalk, across the floor. Each screen appears to display the same, or similar, landscape of metal dust, adhering in spiky clusters to a magnet that is rotating slowly on a belt. These magnets, however, are moving in opposite directions, one up to the heavens, the other to meet the visitor. The fact that they move at different speeds helps to create a compelling sense of tension. The combination of this slow-moving, magnified magnetic landscape with the Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson’s soundtrack - as if machinery is melding with geology, rocks grinding against motors - is mesmerising. Two years ago, Guðjónsson took a trip to Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, based near Geneva, which hosts the world’s largest particle physics laboratory as well as the Large Hadron Collider (a machine that can replicate atomic conditions from billions of years ago). It has a programme of artistic residencies and collaborations (Arts at Cern), founded in 2011 and currently curated by Cern’s head of arts, Mónica Bello. Conversations with Bello helped to spark the creative process, though Guðjónsson says: “It’s hard to say how much of Cern is inside the piece.” Sigurðsson is a good friend of Guðjónsson and it seems that the push and pull of ideas between sound and vision had a major impact on sculpting the sonic and visual results – the latter conjuring associations both with vast forest landscapes and magnified detritus from laboratory or workshop desks. Guðjónsson studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2003-04), after gaining a BA at the Iceland Academy of the Arts (2000-03). He was awarded the Icelandic Art Prize for Visual Artist of the Year in 2018 for his exhibition Inlight, featuring filming undertaken in St Joseph’s, a defunct hospital in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. He has featured in numerous group exhibitions including the Liverpool Biennial (2012), and has solo shows coming up in 2022, at the Berg Contemporary in Reykjavík (where his solo show Unseen Fields took place in 2021), and Regelblau 411 in Thyholm, Denmark. Sigurður Guðjónsson: Perpetual Motion Arsenale, Sestiere Castello, Campo della Tanna 2169/F 23 April – 25 September 2022 Interview by VERONICA SIMPSON Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY