UV Arts C.I.C and Raymond Boner and Aches, Derry Girls (2019) Orchard Street, Derry, County Londonderry ArtUK has announced the launch of a new project aimed at raising awareness of murals and street art across communities in the UK. Scheduled to commence in January 2024 and run until December 2026, the three-year program will focus on documenting and photographing approximately 5,000 murals throughout the country. These murals, encompassing various mediums such as paint, concrete, brick, wood, stone, and tile, will be freely accessible on the ArtUK website. Murals, found both outdoors and indoors in public spaces like shopping centers, railway stations, churches, and museums, often face the threat of removal, defacement, or environmental damage. The project aims to capture these artworks as they currently exist, serving as a record for future reference. In addition to digitisation efforts, the project will feature community and school activities, including workshops, films, and learning resources. Audio descriptions for blind and partially sighted individuals will enhance accessibility, while mural trails and curated collections on the ArtUK website. Two key partners, CultureStreet and VocalEyes, will contribute to the project's success. CultureStreet will produce films exploring the art form with young people and artists, while VocalEyes will conduct a training program to create audio descriptions of murals for the visually impaired. Marina Capdevila, Community Mural (2021) Church Walk, Basildon, Essex

What do we think of when we read the word ‘nature’? Something green, maybe forests and mountains? For the artist Yu Ji, nature takes a broader meaning. In a thought-provoking, juxtaposed interplay between nature, the human body, and the surrounding environment, Yu Ji creates sculptures and other paper works that capture this vivid meaning in her second solo exhibition Protrude at Sadie Coles HQ. Yu Ji, Jadeite Joint No.1, (2021) Through her art, Yu Ji captures both the stability and movement of this interplay, highlighting how we exist within and are influenced by our surroundings. This theme is a constant nucleus of the exhibition, offering a unique perspective on the fragility of our connection with nature. The works are characterized by their materials, each chosen for its unique properties and purpose. Ji explores the tension that exists between matter and energy, creating a dialogue between the different elements that make up her pieces. In an interview with Ellen Greig, she emphasized that the materials she uses have “their own charge or energy,” and she learns from them in the process of creation. Her fascination with ruins, abandoned areas, and discarded objects is reflected unconventionally in this exhibition, where she continues to explore these themes. Yu Ji, Protude at Sadie Coles, Installation View, 2024. Image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ. Upon entering the gallery, the viewer is greeted with two tall, abstract-shaped sculptures. These sculptures are striking in their appearance, resembling distorted pillars that seem to bend and twist in unexpected ways. The sculptures and other paper works displayed are majorly monochromatic. Column-Untitled No.3 – 2 (2023) resembles the ancient columns of Greece or Rome, with a worn appearance that suggests the passage of time. Ji drew inspiration from the magnolia flower to create this piece, and the resulting sculpture is both delicate and powerful. Over two meters tall, they're made from soap and concrete, giving them a unique texture and fragility. Despite their size, they seem almost weightless, as if they might topple over at any moment. The artwork captures the essence of stability - something firm, secure, and unchanging - while at the same time showcasing movement, which is fluid, dynamic and ever-changing. The seamless combination of these two contrasting concepts is what makes this artwork captivating. The sculptures are the result of extensive research, collaboration, and processional fabrication. The work explores the relationship between architecture and nature, pointing out that the built environment is influenced by the physics of the natural world. The building and the body share similarities, with both having skin, a structural core, and a network of interior operations that keep them working together harmoniously. Over time, they change and transform, revealing their losses and gains. Yu Ji, Study on Gestures, series (2024) A second series of intricate works on paper, the Study on Gestures series, have been created using a complex layering of original drawings, hand printing, silk screening, and screen-printing techniques, collecting the preparatory materials for the sculptures. These ‘draft’ sketches are now a part of the exhibition and have become actual artworks for the first time. These sketches helped her keep track of her creative process and while she traveled more than she was used to. In the beginning, the artworks and the sculptures do not seem related, being of different themes. However, as Yu Ji’s works are usually an interplay between nature and environmentalism, she delicately establishes a connection between everything that is on display. There is a lot of reciprocity in what she sees in nature and she aims at incorporating nature and the surrounding environment in her works.  Rather than dominating nature and attempting to keep it at bay, the works in this exhibition contend that we could learn from nature and attune to its disposition. Protrude captures the essence of the human experience and encourages us to contemplate the power and fragility of our own bodies. Avantika Pathania is a writer based in London with an interest in fashion, and modern and contemporary art.

Penny Goring’s expansive practice is underscored by an uncompromising candour. The London-based artist and subject of a major retrospective at the ICA in 2022 makes work compulsively, instinctively and freely across mediums and in response to the contemporary state of emergency. Searingly honest poetry and references to history and culture are weaved throughout her semi-autobiographical paintings, drawings, sculptures and digital collages as a means to process personal experiences with trauma and depression, poverty and austerity. In a dark visual language that Penny has been developing since the 1980s she continually returns to the female form with violently charged, child-like scribbles and headless velveteen-pincushion dolls. During the 2010s, Penny garnered a cult-status in the online alt-lit scene for her image macros (a type of meme format) which she uploaded to her Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. Concerned with challenging the conditions of making and exhibiting, Penny works with materials cheaply available to her such as ball point pens, fabric and food dye – and free computer programmes such as Microsoft Paint. She is part of a formidable legacy of feminist artists doing so and her work is displayed in the current, first of its kind, landmark Women in Revolt exhibition at Tate. Installation view, PENNY WORLD, ICA, London, UK (2022) Image courtesy of Arcadia Missa. You trained in Fine Art and Painting and went on to study critical fashion writing. Can you tell me about how your practice has developed? Writing and art were always presented to me as two distinctly separate options but I wanted to do both. I struggled with this stupid binary for years. It wasn't until I merged them that I really got in my stride. On leaving school, I chose Fashion Writing, imagining it could incorporate both – but it absolutely could not. Then I did an art foundation course where it was recommended that I choose BA Illustration as a way to combine the two – which also proved totally inappropriate. Later, when doing BA Fine Art, it was at last the right area for me, but my writing was still a sideline. I was hindered by the strict divides imposed on my art practice and my writing practice – are you an artist or a writer? And even, are you a painter, or a sculptor, or a writer? – until I saw for myself that any and all disciplines can become one practice, and I began to explore the ways I wanted to combine everything. I didn't fully grasp this freedom until 2012. Penny Goring, macro (you're desperate monster) (2017) via pgorig.tumblr.com When did you decide to start making work for the internet and what was the reception of it? In 2009 I began tweeting lines from my writing, and was invited to join an online writer's collective with its website where we posted our latest efforts. It was fab to give and receive constant feedback after working in solitude since graduating in 1994. People told me I was writing poetry, that I used words fearlessly, like paint, and for a few years I felt invigorated. By 2011 it bored me to be focused only on writing. Luckily I found Alt Lit, an online poetry community that seemed like a cool and mysterious secret gang – and it was humbling, because they were gleefully ignoring the binaries I'd struggled with – their approach was new, succinct, rebellious – suddenly my words seemed too wordy. I began honing my poetry, and making image macros, which are a way of making poetry visual that I first saw being done in Alt Lit, and I became obsessed with making them, it was a magic way to manipulate words and images into one work. This led me to non-stop making and posting online – the internet gave me the tools to make everything I'd ever tried to imagine: poetry was in everything, anything was art, nothing was art, who cares, not me: liberated from the constraints of academia and the art world, I made countless image macros, gifs, video- poems, began using my voice, my face, and then I began to incorporate drawing, painting, sculpture too – it all came together seamlessly. Your drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and poetry are about things that you have dealt with in your life. They are about personal experiences of pain, violence, addiction, poverty and loss, and respond to a deep sense of injustice. How do you channel uncomfortable feelings, the distress, rage and pain, into your making process? There is barely a divide between my inner and outer world, this makes it easy for me to confront my feelings and use them. It starts in my sketchbooks/diaries, where I write and draw everything I'm thinking or feel like saying or making, or simply rant and doodle, even stuff I'd never say or do, whatever. If I'm alone at my work table with hand, eye, brain engaged, the emotions that I need to communicate lead to the decisions involved in making the work, and this process causes the momentum, it's like rolling a ball. Sitting with the feeling will conceive the idea, deciding how to do it gets it done. When did you develop Amelia as your alter-ego? Amelia is a dead junky, a gifted photographer, useless at life, friends used to say, 'she's away with the fairies', I identified with that – we were together until I got sober and she didn't. She got into heroin and overdosed several years later. It shook me. She first appeared in my work as subject matter in 2016 – I made a sculpture for her called Pyre (2016), which has recently been acquired for Tate Britain's permanent collection, it's a pile of logs- limbs made from a variety of black fabric, including velveteen, fake fur and PVC, some embroidered with words, such as: 'IF U WAS EVER ALIVE - IF I WAS EVER DIRT'. Penny Goring, Emotive title (Super virilent hyperdeath virus targeted at you know whose) (2017), Amelia Makes The Rain (2017), Pyre (2016) Image courtesy Arcadia Missa/Tim Bowditch In 2017 I started making the Amelia drawings because she was still on my mind. Rather than exorcising her, Pyre (2016) had brought her closer. I drew us as twins, a double-sided coin, turned us into iconic mythical characters. I didn't dramatise, no need, I freeze-framed and glamorised certain moments, same as memory does, and put us in landscapes that reflect how it felt, not the suburbs we roamed but the hostile broken beauty of these never ending end times. The two figures are interchangeable, dead and alive, good and evil, stupid and wise, both equally capable of anything, self-destruction, violence, loving – the Amelia drawings and paintings tie us into archetypal tales, and exploit our doomed attempts to get lost in a world of our own making whilst actually being lost inside alcoholism inside this neo-liberal capitalist hellscape. Penny Goring, Pyre (2016) Your work arises out of a tradition of radical, punk and female art making. To look at your work is to see Hesse and Bourgeois in your sculpture and Acker in your splittingly direct writing. Were these women your influences? I didn't study Art History until 1991, when I eagerly dived right in. My main influences are the books I read, films and TV shows, fashion and music. And always: my disgust with the world at large. Hesse and Bourgeois were two of the first artists I felt an affinity with, Bourgeois for her use of words, fabrics, (I'd been making fabric 'things' since childhood, never knew what they were, they had no use – oh wow, they're sculpture) and her unashamed use of autobiography, Hesse for her ability to suffuse abstract, minimal shapes with intense emotion, studying their work was helpful. But as for Acker, to this day, I have never read a word she wrote. I do know that she had many similar attitudes towards writing as I do and she often employed similar strategies. I also get compared to Sarah Kane, but I've never read any of her work either. Talk to me about the bodies in your work: your ball point drawings of women, sisters, wives, friends, lovers, enemies, these spindly figures that envelop each other and do violence to one another. Your headless, fabric doll sculptures evoke plush voo-doo doll pin cushions. Why do you use the repeated image of the body? When did you start developing these figures? I've been drawing self-portraits and imaginary people since I was a kid. I spent 4 years in life drawing classes. I've spent weeks drawing only hands. The body is all we've got, it's where we live and die, it houses us, it's our vehicle, it feels pain and pleasure, and it makes a multitude of great shapes that I can distort at will to convey feelings, yet still it will be recognised as a human body. Even an expressionless face is unique, but a headless doll is often more evocative, could convey distress, violence, grief or illness – so much stuff in this life can cause you to 'lose your head' – how about love? drugs? poverty? war? I prefer to leave the doors open for the viewer's individual interpretation, often reducing the body to its essential shapes until it becomes a signifier, ascends itself, says more. Tell me more about repetition. What are you hoping to do with your doll series in which you remake the same figure over and again stitching in different, wryly anarchic word formations? You're referring to the velvet Forever Dolls I made in 2023 for my Chronic Forevers show at Galerie Molitor, Berlin. Repetition allows for contradiction and variation within the same theme. I adore contradiction. I chose to make and install them in strict formation to form an army, a family, an infestation, together they are a cacophony, a chorus, apart each has its own particular message and mood. Twelve of the dolls are the exact same shape and size but the 13th is double size and has very long legs, placed centrally she seems like an avenging angel leading her host of love/death bringers, desperate lil' demons, forever in pain, flying towards futility. From left to right: Penny Goring, Forgotten Doll (2019), Plague Doll (2019), Grief Doll (2019), Ghost Doll (2019), Black Forever Doll (2019), No Escape from Blood Castle, Installation view, (2021) Can you tell me about symbols in your drawings? It reminds me of Acker and seems to perpetuate her tradition of mythmaking by weaving fable into personal history, imagination into history, humour into pain. Creating a strange terrifying alchemy. The symbols come about naturally, develop, and continue to be meaningful to me over time, I don't question them. You could say they're like my own personal emoji. I prefer everything I've ever made, ever make, to be in dialogue, within the varying mediums I use it's always my take on the world, my symbols, my own invented language. Tell me about the choice to use humour in your work. It's not actually a conscious choice. It's just me being me. I don't flinch from hardly any subject or taboo and I hold nothing in reverence, I'm not polite, nothing is sacred, unless I say it is. Also, I'm being dead serious. I never intend to be humorous. I deliberately take honesty to extremes, until it becomes something else, expands and shatters, into fabrication, fear-fuelled fantasia, that's where the action is. Amongst other things, this process seems to generate something people apprehend as humour. Penny World exhibition booklet, courtesy of ICA London The Penny World show at the ICA was a major retrospective of your career over the past 30 years. What was your intention for the show? I was lucky to work with an incredible curator, Rosalie Doubal, who has been familiar with my work for years. Our intention was to make the ICA galleries feel like they belonged to me. Also, I wanted to use every inch of the space by showing works at varying heights, and playing with scale, size, width, and texture – showing the Anxiety Objects by tying them to gym ropes hung from the lower gallery's central rafters was perfect as it meant we were also bisecting the space! We didn't show the work chronologically because I wanted to evoke crip time [a concept arising from disabled experience that addresses the ways that disabled/chronically ill and neurodivergent people experience time (and space) differently]. To create an unexpected moment of pause, we hung one small painting on velvet (from a series of 10 called Those Who Live Without Torment), all on its own in a hallway between the two upper galleries, with a bench in front of it, for people to sit down and breathe. I'm currently reading Susan Sontag's diaries where she quotes someone as saying something like: a retrospective is a disaster for a living artist because everything they make afterwards is posthumous. Penny World deliberately wasn't a retrospective, though it was widely received as such and that's fine - it wasn't exhaustive, we only showed selected aspects of my work, and only from a 30 year period, much of it was previously unseen, or only on the internet, or made in my treasured obscurity era only to be buried in my home studio. Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.

Rob Lyons, Temenos, installation view (image courtesy of Hales Gallery) Temenos, the title of Rob Lyon’s debut solo show at Hales Gallery, is a Greek term used to describe land enclosed and consecrated to deity. Lyon’s manipulation of form is itself a type of temenos. He colours, patterns and arranges disparate shapes, painting vistas inspired by the South Downs of England. He grew up there and has in recent years returned to raise his own family. His work wrestles with the spirit of the place, its genius loci. The concept was first worked on by Paul Nash, who endeavoured to invoke in his paintings the irreducible, noemic significance of situation and dwelling. In much the same way, Lyon’s paintings comprise a lexicon of motifs which help to demarcate his memorised landscapes and, in Lyon’s words, ‘activate’ in the viewer a veritable sense of place. Lyon’s application of form is a precise science, rather than a calculation of pliancy. Form is employed to tell stories. Spring, the show’s sextych, chronicles cyclical life, from its Genesis to its Iteration. Lyon’s signature salmon pinks and paling greens factor into vast wafers, pinstriped skies, broad, roving plains and elasticated arrowheads; that is, until the transgression of Spring, Exit, Tumuli (2023), the penultimate artwork of the series. Just as death is the aberrant of life, Lyon’s work of quietus is at stark odds with its livelier neighbours. Deep red undulating tumuli of varying indent are stacked atop one another with little indication of scenery beyond a unanimous pink background - yet, even in Lyon’s vision of death, a sense of place remains. We know those mounds and we know that sky. Throughout his oeuvre, Lyon has constructed a mythology of signification by exercising motifs. Painting in fluent, sparing shorthand permits us to read between the lines and ascertain what is and is not there. Of Spring, Exit, Tumuli, we perceive a landscape triumphing in its barest elements over a complete loss of life. Many of the paintings in Temenos can be interpreted as hopeful consolations of death. Titles such as Resurgence (2023), Blue Ascension (2023) and Attenuate (Both Sides of the Mirror) (2023) are complemented by Till God Calls You Away (2023) and Lavant (2023). The former few call upon speculation of the Afterlife. The latter couple derive from Christendom (Lavant is a Sussex parish and river). Till God Calls You Away frames an orange cross breaching the plains of a hilly landscape, perturbing its winding, striped, and boldly demarcated topography. The cross is, ostensibly, the shadow of an aeroplane. The verticality of the composition, however, invites a Christlike ascension. A single bulbous cloud looms high above as Godhead. In Lavant, as in most of Lyon’s paintings, all forms - triangles, hills and stripes - surge and point towards the skies, or rather, the Heavens. It is hard to perceive the moving nature of these works as effected by anything other than some profound search for meaning both in and beyond death. Rob Lyons, Temenos (2023). Installation images courtesy of Hales Gallery. The show’s titular landscape is the sole occupant the gallery’s far wall. In Temenos (2023), Lyon paints an orbital, irislike shape - the psyche, perhaps - bound by a broad diamond. The cyan majority of the shape is of worn and worked texture. The upper part arches a fine, polychromatic pattern against grey. Its vivid environs are arranged in Lyon’s distinct winding, patchwork formation. The artwork conceives of the word temenos in its Jungian sense. That is, as an unpolluted, private space of cogitation and reflection, guarded from exterior influence. It is an idea of self-contained inner sanctuary. This, too, is the consummation of Lyon’s project, as, in this show he depicts the individual being in sharply demarcated symbiosis with the South Downs landscape. He generates a centre of solace within the spirit of the place: the quintessence of temenos. Luke Ray is a writer based in London.

"Jez Butterworth and Sam Mendes’ new play peels back the layers of a family and a town that keep dreaming in the face of their own decrepitude." writes FETCH critic Paige Bruton. Blackpool, 1976. The Webb sisters have returned to Seaview, their family home and guesthouse that overlooks a parking lot. Victoria (Laura Donnelly), their mother, lies dying in a room hidden in the eaves of the theatre. She’s in pain, but waits for the arrival of her eldest and favourite daughter, Joan (also played by Laura Donnelly), the only child who lived out Victoria’s dream of finding fame and fortune in the hills of California. The play is structured according to a series of dualities: the set is split between a public drawing room in Seaview as well as the private living quarters of the family; time is fractured between the present – the final days of Victoria’s life, and flashback – the Webb girls’ childhood, largely defined by their involvement in a singing and dancing troupe arranged by their mother. The play is also split metaphysically between reality and a dreamland – referenced by the title and a recurring song, “The Hills of California” (“a song is a place to be” instructs Victoria), that represents fame and success only found outside of Blackpool. The effect is a captivating storyline that gradually erodes these binaries: the trauma of the past catches up with the present and viewers witness how dreams and lies have devastating effects on the realities of the sisters. Over the course of the play the drama builds in intensity, with the first act appearing to follow a well-trodden narrative of a family reunion that exposes grievances between a supposed “golden child” and those that feel they have been passed along. However, in the second act, a suspected secret about Joan is revealed unceremoniously by the husband (Shaun Dooley) of Joan’s sister, Gloria (Leanne Best). From there, the action follows countless twists and turns, each revelation more surprising than the next, without the play ever falling into genuine contrivance. Despite touching on themes such as dreams as well as lies, motherhood as well as sisterhood and sacrifice, trauma and forgiveness, The Hills of California refuses to pigeonhole itself into one narrative or arrive at a concrete conclusion. Audience members were captivated by the final act, held on the edge of their seats for a finale that ultimately seemed to encapsulate the melancholic but hopeful state of Blackpool itself: a town whose future might best “be served – and saved – by looking back,” according to the play’s program. Donnelly, who inhabits two all-star roles, is the play’s stand out performance, remarkably capturing a severe but well-intentioned Victoria in the late 1950s, as well as a cool but damaged Joan in the 1976. The music of the play was also particularly spectacular, offering glimpses of beauty and harmony between the Webb sisters, whose relationship is otherwise tumultuous, and is portrayed on a set that can only be described as gaudy. For those looking for a truly quality night at the theatre, with a play that avoids becoming overly sentimental or sensationalist in order to evoke emotion in its audience, The Hills of California may be among Butterworth’s best and most mature works to date. Cover image credit: Oliver Rosser

Photograph courtesy of Martin Pope/Getty Images Can you name the largest protest in history? Neither could I. It turns out to be the anti-war protests of February 15 2003, in which between six and ten million people took part in various marches across sixty (mostly European) countries over a single weekend. The one in Rome involved around three million people and the BBC estimates that up to a million people marched in London to protest the American invasion of Iraq. The USA, of course, would only pull out of the country a decade and a half later, when all the oil ran out. Only yesterday London witnessed its as-of-yet largest-scale protest in support of Palestine, with just over 20,000 people marching through the West End demanding a ceasefire. As of time of writing, you will note that Israel is still very much firing. Similarly, young black men in America are being shot by police at much the same rate as they were before the Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests of 2020, and to everyone’s shock the bright pink ‘pussy hats’ of the 2017 Women’s March did little to dissuade the American government from eventually repealing Roe-v-Wade. All of this is to say that the West’s protests haven’t really done much to change its societies since the storming of the Bastille. You can generously attribute some minor legislative changes during the Vietnam War to the 1963 March on Washington, and the French have gotten some good gaffs in over the last few decades, including their own student riots of the 60s – although, again, to minor effect: in state terms very little came of the infamous Mai ‘68 protests (the proposed Grenelle Agreement reforms were never fully implemented by De Gaul) and the pension-related changes brought about from the gilet jaunes movement in 2018 were effectively repealed in July of last year (never a nation to be disheartened by such technicalities, they have now taken to spraying politicians homes with agricultural manure). One might cautiously suggest that the closest the West has come to a genuinely impactful protest in recent years is the working-class Capitol insurrection of January 6th 2021, but that's a frightening proposition in its own right and even then, the ripples were more cultural than political. It is tempting to say the same of the recent slew of art-focused protests that have been cropping up around Europe: starting in October 2022 with activist group Just Stop Oil hurling soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National in response to a perceived growing climate crisis, with the most recent soup-based antic coming from French environmental group Riposte Alimentaire doing the same to the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Typical pearl-clutch responses have varied from "how could you do this to capital-A Art?" (all of the works targeted so far have been protected from damage by glass and frankly the museums can afford the restoration costs) to “this makes me reluctant to support climate change activism at all” (one wonders how weak-willed your support was if all it took to shake it was a few soup stains). Like all modern Western protest, these acts are well-meaning, allegorical and utterly harmless. What is often left out of the conversation is the following: a harmless protest is a useless one. Let’s start with the obvious: genuinely effective protest involving public art is usually the consequence, not the cause, of social and political change. Think the toppling of Soviet statues after the dissolution of the Union, or the fall of the Berlin Wall after miscommunications of new travel regulations. In comparison, these modern stunts - aimed to create rather than reflect reform - are very sweet; but they mean little and do even less. It would be cruel and lazy to suggest that this is the fault of protesters themselves; and I do believe that many of the organisers of these exploits have genuine faith that their efforts will somehow affect how governments approach various issues. The vast majority of us, however, know this to be untrue - but the sentiment is noble and the actions it spawns should not be dismissed merely because of their proponents naivety. There is perhaps something to be said for the overt visuality of these acts in the age of social media, but even the Edwardians understood the impact of a good stunt: the Rokeby Venus was slashed by meat cleavers by feminists in 1914, and targeted in a similar fashion by Just Stop Oil in November 2023. From left to right: Just Stop Oil Protesters, Kristian Buus/Getty Images, Achille Beltrame, The aberrations of Womens Suffragism (1914) That being said, the most common defence of these acts (often coming from their proponents) is that they at the very least provoke “discussion and debate”. This argument is infantile and irrelevant. It is a neoliberal myth that debate solves anything and Big Oil is not checking Instagram comments for insight into their next move. It is perhaps true that it brings public “attention” to the cause - but, as has been proved countless times, raising the average persons awareness of issues like climate change or food scarcity does remarkably little in both the long and the short run. The only attention that should be sought in situations like this is that of the state, and it would be laughable to suggest that the only reason there isn't enough climate regulation is because governments simply missed the memo. The Royal Dutch Petroleum Company is not sucking oil out of the earth because someone forgot to tell them it wasn't great for the planet, and conservatives like Therese Coffey are not suggesting British citizens cut back on food because she doesn't understand there isn't an alternative. I will not linger on the asinine idea that some of these protesters are actually paid actors by Big Oil whose efforts are "funded by big oil to make climate activists look terrible in the public’s eyes". It’s unclear where the conspiracy originated from, but one of the earliest suggestions that Just Stop Oil is in fact a psy-op by Shell designed to reduce popular support for climate movements justifies by pointing out that... one of the protesters has dyed hair, as apparent evidence of the organization's status as a mercenary operation for the petrol company. I am the last person to turn my nose up at a good art-world psy-op theory (Brad Troemel’s “the FBI is responsible for artspeak” being one of my favourite) but if we start accusing left-wingers of being in cahoots with Big Oil for dying their hair we may as well give up believing anything in earnest at all. A heavy dose of skepticism is always healthy; blind paranoia is not. Personally, I’m looking forward to seeing some actual carnage. Governments do not respond to a few soup splatters - but they do respond to the threat of damaged tourism. How much money would the French government stand to lose if even a quarter of their tourists decided the Louvre wasn’t worth the visit? How many Euro-tourists would stay home if Guernica or The Kiss were damaged beyond recognition? How quickly would climate legislation (indeed, any legislation at all) change if Western politicians felt it would be more beneficial to do so than to risk losing cultural standing? Call me when they start firing caustic acid at the Sistine ceiling. If we claim to care about things like the climate, or food scarcity, or any other social issue that would be resolved via legislative change, we must also support those willing to actually disrupt the powers that be. This doesn't necessarily include the limp-wristed efforts of groups like Just Stop Oil, but it's a good place to start. Should historical art have to suffer in order to get governments to listen to their people? I believe I am legally required to say no, and that you really shouldn’t consider throwing bleach-tipped darts at The Last Supper — but then again, Louis XVI probably didn’t want people throwing stones at the Bastille.

On the 22nd of November, the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the first fifteen minutes of Burt Topper's War is Hell (1961) screened at the ICA. This was the film that Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s alleged assassin, was watching when he was arrested for the President’s murder. Fifteen minutes into the movie, two police men burst through the doors of the cinema, attempting to grab a man sitting in the front row. There is a struggle, the man runs and the police shout to the audience to grab him. Eventually, they get on top of him by the exit. Perhaps because this kind of immersive programming is not happening outside of Stanley Schtinter's events, the audience, despite being aware of the premise of the screening and the significance of the date, are momentarily, earnestly scandalised. As they murmur excitedly, music commences and one of the police men makes his way up to the stage, singing From Russia with Love (partially in Russian). He dedicates the rendition to scholar and critic Erika Balsom, who then introduces the 1963 Bond film of the same name - a movie United Artists produced to honor Kennedy’s own high regard for the book the same year the president, who so closely aligned his image to that of James Bond’s, was to be assassinated. Schtinter, whose previous projects involve accurately restaging the funeral of Princess Diana on the streets of Manchester in 2018, as well as screening over 100 hours of scenes from the Queen Vic in EastEnders at proper London pubs, including ones priced out and shutting down in a piece titled The Lock-In, and a comprehensive sonic history of the manifesto in art and politics read by children, is a rare thing. His work is driven by a transgressive desire to process unprecedented times, and not only to analyse but also embody a cultural history. His latest project, the book Last Movies (Tenement Press, 2023) a major retrospective spanning five months at the ICA and a slew of international events, reveals a century of cinema via the last films that famous cultural figures watched before their deaths. I had a chance to speak to Stanley about his work in some more detail. Schtinter at PAF Olomouc (courtesy: PAF Olomouc, 2023)* AG: Can you tell me about your ideas for Last Movies? This style of programming feels very American. SS: South American, right? Mexican? Laughs. I hope this kind of programming is happening there, and in North America too. It feels necessary for alternative organisational principles to become more widely employed, considering how many institutions and streaming platforms curate or categorise in line with the algorithm’s capitalist logic of “if you bought that, you’ll like this.” It does the opposite of what it’s meant to, undermining an audience’s sense of adventure to say nothing of intellect, and degrading the work on show by reducing it to a mush of dreary and superficial signifiers. It is against art. It is even against life. Last Movies, by its nature — that is an alternative read of the first century of cinema according to the films last watched by some of its key cultural players — removes my value judgement as the ‘programmer’ before anything else. I don’t have any control over who’s ‘in’ it - the cast, if you like. The project relies on sufficient scrutiny being afforded public figures in their last days and hours, or a public figure having watched a film with very close proximity to death, so that it becomes a part of their life story. In both cases this usually stems from a strange and predatory relationship the culture encourages with celebrity. This means any bias is located elsewhere. The assumed authority of the organiser collapses. The case is open to the audience and pivots on their perception. Do you think that it’s harder to show a programme like this in the UK, than the States? I experienced more enthusiasm for showing the programme in the US, but I think it’s hard to do anything anywhere. There is in the UK, as there is in the US, a scarcity of opportunities, and of space; an inevitable precarity with that, and relentless propagandising to frighten and confuse and misdirect any dialogue and action about what might be done. (An example could be that while people busy themselves obsessing over the evil of an author of a fictional magical orphan because of her attitude to gym changing rooms, the British government remove every person’s right to protest.) It is amazing that anything of any worth actually gets done in these conditions. And by “worth” I mean that which functions in spite of the conditions, outside of the regime of market logic and personal branding; that which does the art and the programming for the sake of the art and for the sake of the programming, rather than the individual simulating what already exists and they see to be successful because they believe this will deliver them subsistence, glory, power. This describes a lot of what’s out there. But any artwork, film, program, writing, whatever it is, if it considers as part of its conception how it’s going to be advantageous to the artist or the author or the programmer socially or economically… it is shit. It stinks. It is always transparent and there is nothing that you can do to fill that stinking void. Enemy of art, enemy of life. The UK sets the bar very low, so don’t misinterpret this as a glorification of American culture, but there does seem to be a longer leash granted the audience. And being there in the US – though I can only speak to an experience of the big cities – as an English-French friend of mine recently pointed out, serves to show how total the decline in Britain really is. A simple comparison: London’s drive-in movie theatre during COVID was a limp, mafiosa enterprise in Tottenham, which got about as innovative as Notting Hill (1999). And £35 for the insult. Meanwhile, at New York Film Festival they had a drive-in theatre in The Bronx, and invited John Waters to show a film. He picked Salò by Pasolini. Historically at American drive-in theatres people would honk their horns if there was nudity or gore in a film. Waters asked people to honk their horns whenever they saw art. Beyond a few key players Britain doesn’t have a great cinematic tradition, never mind a drive-in one. Most of what you’d point to as “British cinema” is really just the theatre with a camera plonked in front of it. America is the movies. And the movies are death. The advent of the state, and how it communicates and dominates today is inextricably linked with and reliant on the movies. And murder. Film is living matter; a kind of seering. When I’m at my most despairing I think we get the films we deserve, but then I see Saltburn (2023) and fuck me if I’m that much of a misanthrope. But the way people broadly consume media, and the bad theatre we conceive and give freely and painstakingly through and because of our screens... we do probably get the “leaders” we deserve, if we aren’t constantly demanding they justify the power they wield over us. Surprise at the election and re-election of Donald Trump is only equivalent in stupidity to the relentless disprovability of his claims. And never mind B-movie player predecessor, Ronald Reagan: John F. Kennedy’s dad Joseph was a movie producer, and it was using the sordid techniques he learned in that industry, along with all the cash he earned there, rather than his experience as a politician, that put JFK in the White House. In your chapter on Dillinger, ‘Hoover’s leading man,’  you describe his death as a scene from the movies: ‘The bank-robbing, movie-loving people’s hero, John, had been shot from behind with four bullets; one at point blank range in the back of the neck. Betrayed by a woman in an orange dress that looked red beneath the neon lights of the Biograph theatre, Chicago, Dillinger was killed leaving the cinema.’ It’s incredible how many of the famous and infamous individuals you write about met their end at the cinema. When did you start researching the last movies these figures watched? I was in Vienna researching for another project when I met the artist CM von Hausswolff. He told me that in 1986 he had falsified papers and got himself and a friend, Erik Pauser, over to cover culture in post-revolutionary Iran. Near impossible to visit at that time. They wanted to go to Alamut, the ruined mountain fortress of the emperor of lore, Hassan i-Sabbah. (I heard there was a film documenting this, which has a kind of mythical status in some circles.) Sabbah ruled great swathes of Persia without an army. From his hashashin we get the word “assassin”: he’d select the smartest, fittest boys from the local area and drug them with hash and whatever else, before waking them in his garden of earthly delights. They thought they’d experienced God, thanks to Sabbah, and so would do whatever he asked of them. Rather than send an army to wage his war, Sabbah would send a single man. An assassin. Hausswolff described to me how upon returning from Alamut to Tehran, he and Pauser discovered that Olof Palme, prime minister of their native Sweden, had been assassinated. Shot in the back of the head leaving the cinema. My immediate question was: what did he see?! The Mozart Brothers (1986) by Suzanne Osten. The assassin is still at large, of course. This discovery is probably what set the project up. Wow. And is that showing at the ICA? Yes, it’s the last screening in the series, along with the never-before-shown Alamut short. I did contact Suzanne Osten to come and speak in conversation with Hausswolff. She said no. Did she say why? She said that she has always resisted ‘exploiting’ Olof Palme’s death in relation to her work. I’d already finished and filed the book when she told me that she had actually sought Palme for the leading role of the theatre director in The Mozart Brothers (1986). There is a good chance that he was at the cinema that night because she had asked him to be in the film. To go was a last minute decision for Palme, unplanned. Extensive investigations were undertaken to look for wiretaps or anything that showed someone knew he would be there that night, at his office and in his home, but nothing was found. How did you conduct your research? Books, films, newspapers, TV and movie schedules. And I moved to the literal Fen of Penda, those old, ‘bare hills’, for almost total isolation and proximity to the, uh, other world. In some instances I actually spoke to people. Filmmaker and producer James Norton helped me research. He told me that Bob Rafelson, the last and the best of the “new” American cinema, had watched Joker (2019) (we may deserve Joker, but Bob certainly didn't). Norton put this information in an email, just a sentence and then a link to the Guardian obituary for Rafelson. His sentence said, ‘Bob Rafelson died at home after watching Joker on DVD, surrounded by his family.’ I didn’t bother to click on the link. He’s my trusted researcher, after all. This was many many months ago, so Joker became a central part of the project. But as I was finishing the book I went back fact-checking. No line about Joker in the Guardian obituary. Thick twat that I am, I figured the Guardian had removed this fact for some reason, so I wrote to the Rafelson family to ask rather than Norton. Peter, one of Bob’s children, came back to me and said, ‘I can neither confirm nor deny this, but I can tell you, that just before he died, I climbed into bed with him and watched his favourite actor, Jeff Bridges, in The Old Man,’ (the 2022 TV series). Not long afterwards the penny dropped. I went back to Norton and asked, finally: ‘...were you joking?’. He was. There are invariably holes in research, limits to how much you can find out, which you might plug with speculation. In the same way experiences become stories and are fabricated between retellings. There must be a kind of temptation to go with the best version, perhaps a more superfluous one of these stories in a project like this? It is rubbish to say that any historical write-up doesn’t carry a dose of speculation (even if the writer was there). Shedding a ‘satanic light’ is essential. The whole of history could be re-written from below. Look at Peter Linebaugh’s revelatory work. In my work, or “unwork” as I might have it, I mean to be clear about how bias factors in any kind of story-telling. The book and the programme coexist but do different jobs, and are not mutually reliant: the book is intensely researched, but it’s also my very open speculation, opinion, experience. It has been described as conspiratorial but this is a misunderstanding. That we might not be able to make sense of connections and collisions doesn’t make them any less real. I remember you talking about this project at Close-Up Film Centre at least a year ago, how long did it take you to compile this research and when did you know it was finished? I had the idea a long time ago, but the writing took a year with a diligent daily practice. It was finished at the point the editor / publisher said: you must stop. I’d probably still be at it now if they hadn’t. There is a larger cast I could’ve written about and might in the future. The book was, in the first, about trying to understand my motivations for the programme, and attempting to find a control centre for the navigation of that. Was there anything that you discovered which particularly shocked you? The extent of historical inaccuracies and outright fabrications that I encountered were most surprising; how the official narrative around certain people, certain films, has been unquestioningly picked up on by one writer to another, and formed as gospel. The work isn’t ‘shocking’ in the sense that it’s concerned about the ways we die, or the vessel of the body emptied by death. I’m not interested in that. It’s a celebration of life via the medium that imitates it. Did you ever attempt to connect with the figures in your project, with their spirits, through a medium or any sort of ritual? The connection is there through the ghosts we’re sharing onscreen. The films become somehow talismanic to the character, equivalent to amulets or shabtis, but ethereal funerary monuments to a life’s passing of time. In-flight entertainment for Hades’ crossing. Living in isolation and immersed in a project dealing with the other world, it’s probably inevitable — if you’re doing your job properly — that there’s an intimacy or ultra-sensitivity and connection you feel, re-humanising the myth-made character? Maybe that’s bollocks, but who can say. Death seems cruel, but it’s also the big sleep. And we do not know. The first century of cinema’s revelling in a depiction of death is abandoned here. In Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (Straight Arrow Press; 1959), that magnificent tome of occult gossip, there is a cruelty. It isn’t particularly his cruelty, but rather holding a black mirror up to the culture. Last Movies isn’t dealing with that mirror, concerned instead with a more literal kind of stargazing. Did you meet with any resistance when trying to find answers? No resistance. I only sought “consent” if I was directly in touch with the recently bereaved, as in the Rafelsons. If anyone isn’t exactly onboard, they just think the project extremely weird. I haven’t knowingly undermined anyone’s privacy. The bare bones are often already public, so it’s a process of reorganisation and re-imagination, or ’archeology’ as the tomb raiders might have it. Can you tell me a little bit about your work with the Liberated Film Club? The Liberated Film Club was an event series: I would invite an artist, writer, filmmaker to introduce a film, but neither they nor the audience would know in advance the film screening. Great collisions happened. And it was as much about what happened in the auditorium, as it was about afterwards, into the night, as it was about the journey there too. An organising principle like this one attracts a certain kind of person, or a person with a particular attitude in that moment. The tagline was: ‘because you’re sick of knowing exactly what you’re going to get, and you’re sick when you get it,’ and its conception drew on the line in Stavros Tornes’ manifesto: ‘cinema is the liberating application in the margins in search of a proper world (cosmos).’ Schtinter presenting Laura Mulvey’s Liberated Film Club from Wadi Rum, Jordan The idea, but also the films that you screened, were pretty radical. How were the events received by audiences? I would invite someone to be the face for the evening, so, for example, an audience would come for Dennis Cooper. But of course I would try to put on a film that a Dennis Cooper fan might not usually watch, or at least my judgement of what they might not watch. The programmes were shaped in that way and responses varied. How long did that run for? In fact it was initially a pirate DVD label, touring London’s chicken shops, I think from 2014–2015. Then in 2016 it became institutionalised: one year into Close-Up’s existence at the Sclater Street site, they wanted to do something special for the anniversary. This meant a month of “blindfolded” screenings. Three times each week I’d have a different guest introducing a different film or films. It ran sporadically thereafter, including the famous Bad Sex Double Bill and sneaking Pere Portabella’s portrait of political dissidents, The Supper (1974), in to Brixton Prison. And then, in 2019, it started happening monthly at Close-Up. Covid effectively killed it, but already the specific approach had begun to run its course. Queues around the block, waiting list for tickets. No thanks. Was this when you wrote the book? I edited the Liberated Film Club book between 2020 and 2021. It’s not really my authored work, rather collecting together transcripts of what people presented at Close-Up. It was collated and completed in that first run of COVID lockdowns, and my opening Last Movies with Agamben’s quote - 'And what is a society that values nothing more than survival?' - is a filthy, loving hand outstretched to my own tragic, optimistic closing passage in the Liberated Film Club book. How do you define your practice? When a prospective employer asks sex worker Barbara Graham, played by Susan Hayward in Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! (1958) what she does, she answers: ‘…the best I can.’ You trained in Fine Art? ‘Training’ is a stretch. I made great friendships and had the liberty of time; the opportunity to leave where I came from. There was a good library of films, and a loan store for hiring projectors. All of this made it worthwhile. I went to Camberwell and then LCC, both in London. I went to Camberwell because Syd Barrett had been there and William Blake saw his angels in nearby Peckham Rye. I quickly realised that I’d been duped; a Goddessless place deprived of music and magic. I was at the very end of the New Labour wave, where it was possible to get a non-repayable grant on the basis of your parents’ income, and a great whopping loan (with tuition fees then about a quarter of what they are today, and the likelihood of ever making enough money to pay it back, if you studied art, hella unlikely). The principle that everyone should go to university was good, I think, but it also meant that loads of courses were vomited into existence, and an existential threat was perceived by the older, more established courses like I was on. A gold rush. Fool’s gold. People didn’t really seem to want to be there, the tutors especially. It was a job. Going straight from school to university I wasn’t equipped to articulate exactly what the problem was, and address it proactively, but I knew already that teaching was and is the ultimate privilege and vocation, and... well, as it was I was asked to leave. It feels like you must have it figured out before you even go to university, or that it’s not really acceptable to be just emerging in a creative field if you’re not backed by money. It is useful to be able to have a legible conversation about your creative work, but beware the poet who can speak as academician about the nature and the machinations of their practice. It is anathema to expect the artist to talk, when the language they’re equipped with at its most fluent speaks the unspeakable. I’m talking Mozart's Requiem in D Minor. The culture’s disregard of the divine potential of the human-being as a driving force is a disaster. There are legion hacks out there who are successful not because of their art or film or programming, but in spite of it. Talkers. Propagandists. Advertisers. I think this is the kind of grotesque professionalism you’re touching on? The specific confidence that the privately schooled, elite university educated person is more likely to have than someone who hasn’t had that experience. But there's no rule. Dicks everywhere. “Emerging” is a dirty word. Emerging from and into what exactly? We live in hyper-religious times and yet believe in nothing. Professionalism has replaced dialectic in the university — and without the dialectic what even is the university? Kids are nudged along the conveyor belt from high school to university: told to market themselves to be successful, and a brand needs to be consistent to perform well. But the idea that we are ever any one thing, and to insist as such is a kind of mental illness, at any age. And to be 'successful'? The examples in the broader culture are invariably shaped by superficiality and narcissism on an individual level, and barbarism on a political one. Mercenary, closed attitudes are celebrated. The right to be wrong is forbidden. This might ‘win’ in the short-term, but the eternal truths always out: courage, loyalty, understanding. Bodies are brief, they fade and fail. The face? The identity? Ha! You’re as good as the substance of your ideas; as what you put out into the world. And you are what you do every day. Make coffee? You’re a barista. Sit glued to your laptop? I don’t know what you are but it isn’t good. If you’re really fortunate then ‘putting out’ creatively means some kind of humble contribution is made to a greater narrative, to the great narrative, that has been going on forever and will go ever onwards still. The road is long, blah-blah. How did your name come about? In Basque culture a child would be born with a set of names based on the expectations of who they might become, where they are, the time. By the end of a person's life it was common for a name to have changed entirely because those things rarely stick. There’s a lot in a name — the way we manage them a relatively new phenomenon. To be able to shake off a self (as the snake does) is a right to be fiercely defended. To be any one thing is the way of madness; it is how control controls. Who else is making interesting work? Everyone releasing on purge.xxx. For programming Light Industry in New York City, and the itinerant Danish collective Terrassen. I like the big guns: Cómo Te Voy A Olvidar by Los Ángeles Azules; Puccini’s Tosca; Francis Alys’ Tornado, and Sophie Calle’s Guernica. Stanley Schtinter is the author of Last Movies (Tenement Press, 2023), and custodian of its parallel film programme (continuing at the ICA in London on January 30; February 14; and every Sunday throughout March at the Watershed in Bristol). He is also the director of Snow White (premiering at IFFR in 2024), and publishes as purge.xxx. For more information visit his website here. Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.

The UK's first and only LGBTQ+ museum, Queer Britain, has announced its first Community Residency Programme in collaboration with Traveller Pride and doctoral researcher Shaan Knan. From February to April 2024, members of the Traveller+ community will participate in six hybrid sessions at Queer Britain, marking the beginning of an initiative aimed at addressing the erasure of underrepresented histories within the LGBTQ+ community. The residency series is in collaboration with LGBT Traveller Pride, a network dedicated to supporting and informing LGBT+ Travellers. Tyler Hatwell, Executive Director & Founder, reflecting on the significance of the program, states, "Travellers in the UK are very rarely in control of our representation. Stories are told on our behalf, we are spoken about but it is rare for us to be the ones driving the narratives. The chance for us to be here and challenge this, look at what stories we want told and how we want to belong in wider society, is a very exciting one." Over the upcoming year, Queer Britain plans on hosting three community groups for residencies at the museum. This initiative provides historically marginalized groups with access to the studio space, galleries, and the museum's collection for a comprehensive three-month research period. Participants will utilize this opportunity to develop research and creative skills, ultimately producing works in various forms, such as a zine, installation, or performance piece. The resulting creations will be archived in Queer Britain's collection. By archiving the works created by underrepresented communities into the museum's collection, the initiative seeks to prevent further historical erasure of LGBTQIA+ histories and experiences. Nan Dorrego Carreira, Queer Britain's Programming and Community Events Manager, emphasises the program's significance, stating, "This project will start our first Community Residency Programme, meant to address the erasure of underrepresented histories within our LGBTQ+ community, amplifying their voices and experiences for a more inclusive future." The call is open to individuals aged 18 and above who identify as both queer and Traveller+. Romani artists Váradi Béla and Gemma Lees will also deliver two of the sessions. Cover image: Joseph Mitchell via Cambridshire Live Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a contemporary arts writer and art critic based in London.

Imagine an artist studio. What comes to mind? Perhaps a solitary artist, rummaging through tins of paint and brushes, their endless canvases and easels lined up on the floor like soldiers ready for battle? Or a group of artists exchanging ideas and feedback with a cup of coffee before returning to their own worlds – desks with different sketches, books and materials? One of the key findings in Understanding the Value of Artists Studios, published in April 2022 by Acme, the largest provider of permanent affordable artist studios in England, emphasises that studio space is central to the artist's sense of identity and well-being. The report underscores the often-underappreciated importance of affordable artist studio spaces. After all, it’s a dedicated space for work where magic happens – almost a sacred space. In addition to other crucial factors, such as having a room – literally and figuratively – for growth and improvement, a significant part of this self-actualisation in a studio stems from being close to fellow artists. Ahead of their upcoming exhibition, Nectere, at Kupfer – which concludes their year-long residency – I caught up with the Acme Early Career Awards recipients, MARIA, Hannah Morgan, Ding Ruyi and Sabīne Šnē, to chat about their experience sharing a studio and the importance of such spaces. Nastia Svarevska: Hannah, Sabīne, Ruyi, and MARIA, congratulations on your upcoming exhibition at Kupfer. I’m interested in the title, Nectere, which means 'to attach, bind, connect' in Latin. Can you tell me about the inspiration behind it? And how does it relate to the themes explored in your individual practices? Hannah: Fundamentally, we seek links and uncover unseen spaces within our research and work. Finding ourselves in a shared studio that became such an easy and open space, we developed common ground – from daily routines to shared knowledge: books, articles, exhibitions, etc. This sharing and open mentality continued throughout the year, and we noticed many crossovers in our works. It was an interconnected worlding of sorts – thinking about virtual, speculative, and actual networks grounded with experience of human, non-human, and material expression. The works originated from seeking connections inside and outside our bubbles while maintaining the identity of our individual practices. In particular, we were looking at soil, under earth, financial, extractive, and political. The idea of ‘nectere’ embodies our practices and, at the same time, reveals the importance of shared space and connections as well as new knowledge and links that arise from that. Sabīne: Yes. The meaning of ‘nectere’ describes what we've experienced while sharing the space and developing various new works next to each other. So it’s a double signifier, representing your process of working together as well as your individual works and the crossovers between them. How do they coexist in the exhibition space? Sabīne: The exhibition is the final point of a twelve-month residency. Essentially, it's about four artists with very distinct points of view engaging with each other and the different systems we inhabit. The works look into the natural world that shapes all of us and the capitalistic systems that impact it. We're investigating current global issues through personal experiences influenced by our upbringing, immediate and chosen families, and other aspects. It starts on the ground floor with the tech gadget installation by Ruyi, who questions the understanding of value and aesthetics by looking at art and work as historically opposing conceptions. Maria’s sculpture and multi-channel video essay explore the intersections between pain, chronic illness, rage, and love. On the upper floor, we explore the world beneath our feet. Hannah created carvings in English Alabaster as well as metal and wood sculptures with a video piece that investigates mines and underground ecologies. Finally, my videos and 3D animations, digital drawings, and sculptures look into the soil and the diversity of organisms that sustain all life on the earth. Sabīne Šnē, Subsurface Kin, video still, part of mixed-media installation Terrain We Traverse, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist MARIA, YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE, video still, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist Hannah Morgan, Animula: mud time fissures (detail), Mixed media installation, shown at Xxijra Hii Gallery, 2023 The diversity of the research is very intriguing. As artists from different backgrounds – artistic and cultural – have your ideas and practices evolved or been influenced by the proximity to each other's work? Ruyi: Yes, definitely. As an artist from East Asia with professional experience in the financial sector, my artistic practices, interests, and materials I use are very different. However, these differences allow us to absorb, integrate, and learn from each other, like our title, Nectere. For example, my working space was next to Sabīne, and I've learnt a lot from her about the spirit and attitude that a professional artist should possess. I've also received a lot of advice on materials and methods from Maria and Hannah, which has allowed me to think more critically about my work and helped me grow a lot. Maria: Absolutely. There are many material choices I wouldn't have made otherwise, and thanks to them, I've become aware of new artists and ways to pursue research. I do believe that we grow and learn the most in collaborative environments that encourage mutual support. How does the experience of sharing a studio space differ from having one of your own? Maria: Developing a sense of mutual trust, openness, and honesty with feedback is really important. It's been a significant part of us supporting and getting to know each other over the past year and having a good home base to work from. We know how to have fun together but also when to be serious and get our asses in gear while staying focused and honest with each other. We've been so supportive of each other and workshopped so many solutions; being yourself in the company of others while also creating work makes a difference. In an individual space, I know that I would've felt lost without this support system. I work much better in a communal environment where we all bounce ideas off each other, exchanging, talking, laughing, and commiserating. Being an artist is hard work, and knowing I was coming to work in a space where we could joke, play around and hone our strengths together made the experience completely worth it. Without this, I think it would've felt lonely, especially post-grad. Knowing that we have each other's back is powerful. Ruyi Ding and MARIA working in the ACME Warton House studio, 2023 Sabīne: The four of us successfully fostered a healthy and pleasant working environment; unfortunately, this is not always the case in the art world. Can you elaborate on that? Sabīne: It's the elitism and toxicity of some of the art circles with too much focus on privilege, class, and race, to name a few. Surrounding yourself with empathetic people who care about you is essential. Competitiveness is crucial, but so is a supportive community capable of providing subjective opinions and valuable insights. More and more initiatives and people advocate for inclusivity and care and show others how to set boundaries when necessary, which is helpful. Community support seems to be the only way to navigate these precarious times characterised by inadequate support for the arts. As an organisation, Acme has been leading by example by providing affordable studio spaces and creative development opportunities for fine artists since 1972. How has being part of it impacted your artistic journey and practice? Maria: Without residency, I wouldn't have been able to make so much of the work I've created in the past year, focus on research, or push myself into a new phase of work, programming, and fun! Sabīne: I moved to London after receiving the residency award, which has impacted me and my practice on many different levels. However, Acme provided time for research and experiments and a safe space for mistakes, which has resulted in a much clearer vision of what I want to do and how I want to do it. It's crucial that there are organisations that support artists at different stages of their careers, and there should be more of them. Ruyi: I'd say that without this support, I couldn't persist on this path until today. Especially under the current economic decline and the depressed art industry, this means a lot to all of us. Hannah: With the underfunding of the arts by the central government over the last 15 years, practical and community support post-grad is a rarity in this country. Acme helps to fill this gap. On a personal level, I'm beyond grateful that I've been able to explore and experiment with my work in a way I wouldn't have been able to without the support and space. Mostly, I feel so lucky to have been pulled together with these amazing humans. Maria, Ruyi Ding, Sabīne Šnē, and Hannah Morgan in the ACME Warton House studio, 2023 Nectere is on view at Kupfer from 26th January to 10th February 2024. Opening: 25 January 2024, 6 – 9 pm Nastia Svarevska is a London-based curator, editor and writer from Latvia. She holds an MA in Curating Art and Public Programmes from Whitechapel Gallery and London South Bank University and writes for an artist-run magazine, Doris Press. Her poetry has been featured in Ink Sweat & Tears, the Crank and MONO Fiction. You can find her on Instagram @ana11sva and her website anasva.com.

© Oliver Look Nelken (Carnations), a defining piece by Pina Bausch, is scheduled to make its appearance at Sadler’s Wells Theatre for Valentine's Day, marking its comeback after an absence of nearly two decades. Nelken (Carnations) first premiered in 1982. Within a vast field of 8000 carnations, the ensemble navigates through seasons, transitions between chairs, and showcases virtuosity with a nod to classical forms. The performance conveys a worldview that is both tragic and cruel, yet tender and brimming with a humanity that resonates with audiences worldwide. Representing an almost 30-year collaboration between Pina Bausch and set designer Peter Pabst, Nelken seeks to establish an otherworldly atmosphere by covering the stage with carnations. Pina Bausch's transformative influence revolutionized the fusion of dance and theatre, giving rise to Tanztheater Wuppertal. Having presented Bausch's works multiple times over the years, Sadler’s Wells has a longstanding connection with this production. Directed by Boris Charmatz, this revival promises to be a beautiful challenge and an ideal way to spend Valentine’s Day this year. Taylor Jha is a writer and curator based in Brixton.

There's a lot to be said for post-internet contemporary art, but there's one thing that its proponents often lack: humor. There's a sort of sterile seriousness to a lot of meme-based art that can sometimes overshadow the inherent playfulness of the form: Mauro C. Martinez, however, has mastered the line between the meme and the meditative, a fact on full-force display at his latest solo show at UNIT London. Practice Makes Purrfect is a delightful and vivacious show filled with the ironic jocularity and acerbic zest that all post-internet art should aspire to. Mauro C Martinez, Practice Makes Purrfect 11, 2023 Practice Makes Purrfect is a slight departure from the Mexican-American artists' previous show in the gallery, which examined the liminality of virtual gaming and its practitioners' desktop spaces. This is Martinez's first series that is not directly inspired by internet culture, but no less carries the same sort of toungue-in-cheek humour that prevades in previous series like Cursed Emojis (comprised of oil paintings copies of distorted emoji faces) or Sensitive Content (depicting blurred images overlayed with Instagram's content warning screen). Practice Makes Purrfect sees 15 paintings from a birds-eye perspective of tennis players in mid-swing in which the shadow of the ball in replaced by the outline of a housecat. Mauro C Martinez, Practice Makes Purrfect 11, 2023 The vivid primaries of the courts and the players clothing dominate the canvas, but it's the movement - or the locus of movement - that really carry the scenes. Martinez uses the narrative of motion to simultaneously satirize and celebrate the darker side of competition, highlighting the paradoxical intricacies inherent to corivalry. Inspired by Hannah Wohl’s book Bound By Creativity (2021), Martinez seeks to explores how artists develop their own work by building upon others through experimentation and social interactions, unwittingly entering into unspoken competition themselves. Martinez's technical grasp of light and shadow is also made manifest throughout the exhibition. The strong daylight illumination of sport photography is not an easy one of translate into a medium like painting, especially when communicating the distance between the shadow of the players and of their airborne marks, but the deep umbras cast by the subjects against the vast, arresting landscapes of their courts are remarkably convincing. His shapes are sharp and simple, the shadows starting strong before blurring expertly as they travel away from their progenitors, naturally leading the eye towards the blurred contour of the floating feline and its unfortunate fate. The cats are often out of sight, existing only as shadows or vague blurs in the foreground, leaving the audience to put together the pieces of whats going on. In this contextual realm, the works capture a profoundly significant facet of post-internet art: the celebration of the viewer's intrinsic capacity to insinuate and weave their own narratives. Martinez has, as it were, laid the dominoes, but relies on us to knock them over: The cat is not hit across the court until we lay eyes of it, the racquet won't swing through the air until we allow it to in our minds. From left to right: Practice Makes Purrfect 8, Practice Makes Purrfect 3, Practice Makes Purrfect 7, Practice Makes Purrfect 10 (2023) It's an excellent choice for Unit, who themselves have has become synonymous with a pioneering use of social media and digital content amongst the London artworld. Martinez's Sensitive Content series prompted the public to send the gallery emails asking them to 'fix' their social media posts, a testament to how successfully the gallery bridges the gap between the physical and virtual spheres of modern art. Martinez's solo show is shown alongside the group exhibit Worlds Beyond featuring Monica Kim Garza, Alvin Armstrong, and Pelle Cass. Installation view, courtesy of UNIT London. Practice Makes Purrfect is on view from January 3 - February 4, 2024 at UNIT London, 3 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HD. Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based arts writer and contemporary art critic.

Brixton-based artist Olly Fathers’ work arises out of formalist and minimalist traditions and is guided by a curiosity to explore relations between abstract shapes, different materials, and forms. Particularly interested in the use of organic materials, and taking inspiration from architecture, design, culture and computer technology Ollie began integrating woodwork into his practice in 2019. Using self-taught marquetry techniques, Ollie uses incredible accuracy to design, cut and assemble wood veneers pieces. The process is one of both experimentation and precision and the result generates a playful balance between harmony and chaos, stillness and movement. To look at Olly’s two-tone, organic wood compositions is to feel a sense of clarity in the simplicity of primary shapes, repeated and refashioned into different geometric iterations, as though the artist is going through the motions of solving a puzzle. The title of Olly’s most recent show at JGM gallery, Tangram, is perfectly suited then. Within this theme of creative production, the exhibition title, Tangram, takes its name from two-dimensional dissection puzzles, originating in China during the 18th century. In combination with the artist Dominic Beatty, whose similarly conceptual, but inverted approach, uses the artificial material, acrylic paint to create patterns that look like textiles, arising out of a deep interest in folk culture. Ollie’s carefully cut 2D wood veneers and 3D sculptures are hung alongside Beatty’s paintings in a show which uses pattern as a vehicle to question definitions of chaos and order. Agnes Houghton-Boyle: Your work evokes such a sense of clarity. The repeated use of primary shapes is balanced with the natural tones of the wood. I imagine that both the process of arranging combinations of shapes until you find a design you like and the practice of cutting and joining the wood would be quite meditative. Did you find the process to be so? Olly Fathers: Yes, when I'm making the compositions I'm sort of trying to get a constant feeling of balance, and also the potential suggestions of movement, but trying to get a sense of tranquility within the composition. To get that, I'm working until I get a feeling that something is balanced visually and evokes that the feeling inside. The whole process of making the pieces, for me, is quite relaxing and that's what makes me enjoy it so much. From the design through to making it is quite a sort of meditative process. I'll have been full time in the studio for two years at Christmas and while I've been doing it for much longer than that, it's the only time I've been in the studio full time, so I’ve more and more time to think about it. While I've been locked in here, which is something I feel quite fortunate to be able to do, especially in this day and age, and one of the things I’ve begun to realise is that when I'm actually in the process of making, going from design to cutting the veneers out and cutting the shapes, is that there will come a moment where I'm actually not really thinking about anything. Sometimes there will be a moment where I've started somewhere with the knife and get to another point, and it might only be a short amount of time, it could be ten or fifteen seconds, and I'll just end up being somewhere and after, sort of remember that I started off somewhere else. So I think the actual process of making the works is actually almost like meditation. That ability switch off is something I've began to think about and realise it's happening, because it's something that you just do subconsciously, without thinking about it. I'm sure other artists get it as well, but that's something I really become aware of. One of the beautiful things about being an artist, is having that ability to let your mind be free from all the stresses and things in the world. Have you always been doing this particular practice? How has your work changed since you've been in the studio full time? When I graduated in 2010, a friend of mine, his uncle had this strange, end of terrace space, that we renovated and turned into a studio. But it was quite far away, so I couldn't go that often and I was also working as well. I've now been in my current studio for twelve years. It became available and I just jumped in here with two other people at the time. I'm here on my own now. So I've been here since uni, trying to make work alongside other work, and the works changed quite a lot. I used to make paintings, not so traditional paintings, there was built up surfaces and drip paint around the surface. I did that for a long time. I got to a point I was really happy with them, but I think because I got them to the place where I always wanted them to be, I didn't have the drive to try and progress them anymore, because I'd achieved it. Then about four years ago I started working with woods veneers. Covid actually really helped me to focus with no distractions. I spent a lot of time learning about the techniques, reading books, watching YouTube videos, contacting people, but mainly it was just trial and error. I did the balance between work and studio, which has been tilting in the right direction for about four or five years. It got to a point where I had enough not to have to do the other work for a few months. With the extra bit of time, I could make more pieces, and it's just been an ongoing thing from then. With that happening, it's opened more opportunities which has meant the work has done better. It's been a natural progression, but it has increased massively in the last couple of years because I've had more time to make the work. There's always the tension between wanting to make work and being able to physically make it happen. It's taken me over ten years to get this to this point and I never expected it to be a quick thing. I've always wanted it to happen in a sort of slow and steady pace. I've got like a back log of experiences. Besides just work, I think it's important to have experiences in life. That's the thing that influences the work. I didn't realise it at the time, but I was doing a lot of work that involved using tools, or learning about materials, or just learning sort of insider knowledge about the art world and all these things have sort of helps with various different aspects of me understanding parts of things which are beneficial but now, I feel that knowledge, isn't something I'd have been able to learn any other way. I'm like a sponge that soaks everything up. When I spoke to you guys at the preview you said that you'd worked as an art technician and met Dominic working at the Saatchi Gallery, where you both were technically installing exhibitions. That was maybe eight years ago now, maybe even longer. That was how we first met and became real friends through the art technician world. Installing other people's work must give you a sense of how you'd like your work to be shown? It's fascinating because, you get to see the backside of the work the artists and everything about it. So both in literal sense of the physicality of the piece, but you also get to meet people and see behind the scenes. You kind of see the good and bad, all of which is you know is quite reassuring, less intimidating. Do you distinguish the wood veneer work you hang on the walls to your other sculptures? Whilst the wood veneers are like canvases in a way, all of the pieces, the shapes are cut out as individually and are built, rather than being arranged on a flat surface. They are still constructions and in them I am always thinking about the shapes that are on top of others and the chains of depths that can be created. But the compositions, like the ones at JGM are a more literal version of the 2D compositions, like 3D extruded versions of the 2D works. It's nice to be able to see that, to actually see something balancing on top, the accuracy of it. It's more obvious and increases the sort of feeling of balance, or movement. I enjoy thinking about these ideas and I enjoy the process of executing them and seeing the designs come to fruition. For me, I very much want to feel that the work is progressing. Sculptures is just one part of where I want to go, but it's a fun direction. The repetitions of the shapes remind me of water in the way that they never settle, they never make the same formations. There is a deliberate fluidity and movement to the work, which references water, but is also a slight nod to the sixties psychedelic period. Visually I wanted to try and expand on some of the shapes I’d used and so there are various references to sixties architecture and design. It’s trying to find ways to weave in references to other things without being too literal. But it’s always nice for me when people see things and say that it reminds them of something else. For me, it’s really satisfying to hear them trigger those thoughts. I was massively into the big minimalist painters, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella. Some of the compositions are dictated by the material, but there’s certain things I do with the woods, by changing the grain to get subtle changes in tone. So having an increased understanding of material in turn helps dictate some of the compositions and helps me to depict what I actually think. With minimalism it’s really about stripping back the details which cloud the overall picture. What do you feel you are emphasising in your work? Particularly the larger works, the thing that I've realised is that it's much more difficult to do a large piece with less elements, there's actually fewer places to hide. You have to be really confident in what you're doing to have a very minimalist piece and be able to stand next to it and promote it. On a technical level, when I'm scaling the pieces up, because of the nature of the veneer and the way that it reacts to humidity but particularly in the gluing process, it's much more challenging to do, like a really large arc that joins perfectly, and the seams don't split at all, than if you have lots of small pieces, because you can control them, you can bind them together, much easier with less movement. Technically it's actually more challenging in a lot of ways to do the more minimal, larger works. Having a perfectly joined arc or circle, because it is stripped back, lets people realise the material and how it's made. I hope there is a kind of heightened appreciation of what's going on. And it all adds to this simple and bold balance that people get when they stand in front of the pieces. Do you find the process to be somewhat chaotic? If you were to see me in the she day when the actual process is going on, it's relatively organised but particularly when I'm actually gluing the pieces or in the actual process of designing the works it's quite sporadic and the actual file design is an iteration, maybe. It all depends on the work, some designs come really naturally, it's very nice, and other times it can be 20 durations and lots of different drawings before I've reached the point where I decide this is good and I'm going to go with it. I have to be relatively organised but I think the calm comes within that like a sort of meditation in the cutting and joining process, which has to be somewhat serene and calm otherwise that's when mistakes happen, when I'm erratic and rushed and trying to do things too quickly. Even the material can be quite challenging, certain different words are more difficult to work with than others, which almost like forcing me to be more calm and patient when joining them together. For the joining of the wood to be perfect, it has to be controlled. That probably comes across in what people see, because it is this sort of image of perfectly cut and joined elements, almost like taming the wood to get it there. So it’s gone through the chaos of process. There’s never a time where it isn’t stressful, particularly with larger ones, the gluing process is a stressful time. so it's kind of flickering between sort of trying to be chaotic but me constantly trying to calm it down. Does it ever not work? Yes, several times. There's a piece in the JGM show where I had to cut the bottom of three times. As the work develops, I might end up trying to have imperfection show, but at the moment given the nature of what I'm trying to do, it wouldn't work if one little bit split and it wasn't perfect. If that does happen, and it doesn't so much anymore, but it can, then in that case I will either be a case of me effectively remaking it or doing a mini restoration on part of it, or there have been times, where I've cut pieces off, and re-joined pieces. But that has become part of the process now. If it does happen, it's about remaining calm and thinking about how to resolve it. Overcoming that kind of challenge is actually part of the practice now.  If it went perfect every time it would actually be quite boring. I mean don't get me wrong, I do enjoy when it goes perfectly, but I also enjoy the challenge of it going wrong and having to think about how to fix it, or repair or restore, however you want to think about it. It is part of the process really. From left to right: Two Tone No. 9B, Two Tone No. 6B, Two Tone No. 4 It's really interesting to see how far you can take the same formulations, and generate different combinations in different forms each time. Now I'm actually trying to do some works which are slightly different. I will continue to carry on that narrative using similar shapes and different compositions. But there is a point where I don't want it to be too invested, so I think about how it can expand, and it's starting to do that now. There's much more scope for variation in these new pieces. I think it's important that the work isn't repetitive, I don't want it to stay stagnant. The work made for JGM is very much one series, that follows an idea. I wanted them all to use similar shapes, just two tones. A lot of them are actually inverted versions of one another because they were made using the same pieces. The off cuts from one made the other. That was always the idea strictly for that show with JGM. I've got another show next year and there'll be a different starting point, a whole-body work based on that. It's important that they are very much evolving and progressing. Earlier, you talked a little bit about the artists who have influenced you. I also wondered if in in a different kind of way, when you are working before, you're refashioning anything that's not gone on right in your drawing, and you're, and you're having to be in this really calm state to try and manage these materials. Is there anything that you listen to in particular, and I wonder this also because of the wood that you use, which kind of speaks to ideas of acoustics and instruments. I listen to a real mixture of things, but when I'm in the studio, I don't really listen to music very often because it can get very repetitive. In the last few months I've started listening to classical music, particularly Bach. I don't really know a great deal about it at the moment, but I do find it relaxing. But I also listen to LBC and a lot of podcasts - and also talk sport! For me, it depends on which stage of the process I'm at. But it's more just to keep me sane because I'm here all the time. I also think both your work - and also Dom’s but in a different way, because it comes out of folk traditions feel closely related to music, it would be such a nice exhibition to have a language of sound accompanying the pieces. Yes, I think music would go well with the show. It's been really nice working with Dom and I think we’ll look to do something together again in the future. There’s very different skills involved with our pieces but they’re also similar. I’d like to think that someone can image me cutting out all of these pieces and joining them, and the time that goes into it. With Dom’s work, it’s almost like you can see his hand moving and the time that goes into that. I think that’s one of the reasons they work well together. Tangram, Installation view, JGM Gallery Image credits: JGM Gallery/Olly Fathers Agnès Houghton-Boyle is a critic and programmer based in London. Her writing features in Talking Shorts Magazine and Fetch London.