Winter/Spring programmes 2019

This year Gasworks celebrates 25 years. The organisation has worked with over 500 artists from 80 countries around the world through residencies, exhibitions, public events and studio provision.

Follow us on Instagram for a look through our archives, highlighting our unique, long-standing relationship with artists: @GasworksLondon #gasworks25

Exhibition programme 2019

Libita Clayton: Quantum Ghost
January 24–March 24, 2019

Quantum Ghost is the first UK solo exhibition by Bristol-based artist Libita Clayton, mapping a journey through archives and territories related to her family history.

The exhibition presents an immersive sound installation, large-scale photograms and a programme of live performances that unearth the subterranean histories and political undercurrents connecting the mining regions of Namibia and Cornwall. From mined ores and sedimentary rocks to precious metals and rare earths, Clayton’s work examines the raw materials at the core of capitalist extraction, revealing how the echoes of colonialism reverberate through the deep time of geology.

Conceived as an exercise in sound archaeology, the show summons a polyphony of ancestral voices in the form of a lament, while exploring the unheard sounds of a mineral landscape that is haunted by the ghosts of colonialism and extraction. The often inaudible rhythms of geological phenomena (from slow-moving magma to the radioactive decay of uranium into lead) resonate with the violent flows of natural resources and human bodies across history.

Quantum Ghost is commissioned and produced by Gasworks. In late 2019 the work will travel to Spike Island, Bristol. This exhibition is part of the Freelands Artist Programme, which offers artists based outside London a three-month residency and a solo exhibition at Gasworks. Quantum Ghost is also supported by Arts Council England.

This exhibition is accompanied by an extensive events programme. Please see Gasworks’ website for more information.

Pedro Neves Marques (April 11–June 16, 2019)

Pedro Neves Marques is a New York-based artist, filmmaker and writer working across theory and speculative fiction. His work traces the histories of colonialism past and present, weaving a constant dialogue between contemporary issues of science, ecology and indigenous cosmologies in Brazil, where most of his films are produced.

For his first UK solo exhibition, Neves Marques presents a body of works based on his research in a laboratory in São Paulo that breeds genetically-engineered mosquitos. Ranging from analogue film and digital animation to poetry, the exhibition features new and existing works that interrogate the laboratory as a place that defines the biopolitics of the 21st Century.

The exhibition examines the trauma of biological warfare against the backdrop of the Zika virus epidemic. Blood and sex hormones are revealed as agents of power that operate with extraordinary force in our daily lives at the molecular level. Drawing on the literary traditions of horror and feminist science fiction, Neves Marques invites the viewer to speculate on the future of love, care and intimacy in the midst of Brazil’s rise of authoritarian politics.

Pedro Neves Marques’ exhibition follows on from his residency at Gasworks in early 2018.

Residencies programme 2019
Gasworks offers studios to international artists for a three-month residency to develop new work and research on site. Upcoming residents are:

January 7–March 25, 2019: Pablo Accinelli (Argentina), Cian Dayrit (Philippines), Miriam Laura Leonardi (Switzerland) and Tiago Mestre (Portugal).

April 1–June 17, 2019: Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola (Nigeria), Lorena Ancona (Mexico), Lauren Gault (UK), Ariadna Guiteras (Spain) and José Rosales (Costa Rica).

For Open Studios and other opportunities to meet the artists, please visit Gasworks’ website.

Participation residencies programme 2019
London-based artist Jacob V Joyce will be taking part in Gasworks’ Participatory Residency Programme: Connecting Communities, a programme that provides opportunities for artists and migrant communities in the local area to work together. FOTL (Future of the Left), the collaborative artistic and research practice of Andrea Francke and Ross Jardine, will develop an ad-hoc evaluation framework for the project. Connecting Communities is supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.