Summer/Autumn Programmes 2019

Gasworks is celebrating 25 years by looking through our archives and highlighting our unique, long-standing relationship with artists. Follow @GasworksLondon or search #gasworks25 on Instagram to see images of work by alumni including Ibrahim Mahama, Lynette Yiadom Boyake, Goshka Macuga and Pio Abad.

Exhibitions

Patricia Domínguez: Green Irises
July 4–September 8, 2019. Preview: July 3, 6:30-8:30pm

Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez explores mestizo rituals and healing practices emerging in the contact zones between the coloniser and the colonised. Informed by the study of ethnobotany in South America, her first UK solo exhibition invites the viewer to envision possible futures for humans, plants and animals thriving in the cracks of modernity. 

The exhibition features a series of cybernetic altars and totem figures that combine talismanic objects with corporate shirts, consumer electronics and healing plants as a way to confront the effects of neoliberalism on the body. Ceramics, watercolours and assemblages of found objects are gathered around a multi-screen video installation entitled Eyes of Plants. In the video, a 3D model of a pre-Columbian vase embodying a crying duck serves as an avatar to mourn the many indigenous worlds suppressed by colonial power.

Halfway between science fiction and ethnographic surrealism, the exhibition embraces a range of hybrid histories, from the syncretic worship of Our Lady of Cerro Rico, an infamous silver mine in Bolivia where eight million natives died, to the archaeological museum inside Scotiabank’s head office in Cusco, built on top of the ruins of an Incan palace.

Patricia Domínguez’ exhibition is commissioned and produced by Gasworks, with generous support from Lazo Cordillera, Fundación Engel, Fundación AMA and SCAN. Gasworks exhibition programme is supported by Catherine Petitgas and Gasworks Exhibitions Supporters.

 

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami: (15,952km) via Trans-Sahara Hwy N1
September 19–December 15, 2019. Preview: September 18, 6:30-8:30pm

Gasworks presents the first institutional solo exhibition by London-based artist Kudzanai-Violet Hwami. Born in Zimbabwe, Hwami left her homeland at the age of nine amidst political turmoil. Drawing on personal experiences of geographical dislocation and displacement, her intensely pigmented paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources, including images found online and haunting family photographs, as a way to collapse past and present into bold afro-futuristic visions.

Hwami’s work bears testimony to diasporic life, migration and resilience. Her portraits are a celebration of black bodies and a powerful manifestation of queer joy, while also raising questions about gender, spirituality and the conditions of representation for marginalised communities. Often taking intricate and layered digital collages produced on a tablet as a point of departure for large-scale canvases, Hwami reflects on the role that online communication and different forms of technological mediation have in the everyday life of diasporic subjects.

After representing Zimbabwe at the 58th Venice Biennale, the artist has developed her most ambitious body of work to date, a newly-commissioned series of paintings that explore black self-fashioning as well as deeply personal experiences of uprooting and regrounding. Bold and tender, Hwami’s portraits interweave memory, testimony, imagination and the political longing for a truer world.

Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Gasworks, where she has been a studio holder since August 2018, and generously supported by Tyburn Gallery. Gasworks exhibition programme is supported by Catherine Petitgas and Gasworks Exhibitions Supporters.

 

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

July 1–September 16, 2019: Andres Bedoya (Bolivia), Niyeti Chadha (India), Ana Mazzei (Brazil), and Mulenga Jestina Mulenga (Zambia).

September 30–December 15, 2019: Alana Iturralde (Puerto Rico), Deborah Joyce Holman (Switzerland), Christina Pataialii (New Zealand). An open call is currently live for artists based in Pakistan.

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

 

Participation Residencies 
London-based artist Jacob V Joyce has been running workshops for 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, have developed an evaluation framework for the project. In September 2019, Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale (The Alternative School of Economics) will be joining Gasworks as the next Participation Artists in Residence. Connecting Communities is supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation.