Exhibition
13.11 – 19.12.21
Preview
13th November | 4 – 8pm
Performance
19th December (postponed)
Open
Thursday – Sunday, 1 – 5pm
P/////AKT
Zeeburgerpad 53, 1019 AB Amsterdam
David Dale Gallery are excited to present I didn’t think it would turn out this way, an exhibition of artists’ moving image by Glasgow-based artists at P/////AKT, Amsterdam. The exhibition includes six short films by Aman Sandhu, Anne-Marie Copestake, Clarinda Tse, Margaret Salmon, Mathew Wayne Parkin and Renèe Helèna Browne.
I didn’t think it would turn out this way takes its title from an essay on intimacy by affect theorist Lauren Berlant, and presents narratives which orbit the tacit complications of intimacy, shared experience, and the body in absence and presence.
In I you me we us (2018) Margaret Salmon centres moments of longing and physical togetherness; personal accounts of the influence of inheritance and monstrosity are exposed in Daddy’s Boy (2020) by Renèe Helèna Browne; and local histories considering the necessity for communal recognition are recorded in A love (2019) by Anne-Marie Copestake. In Textures Gestures Meshes Measures (2021), Clarinda Tse considers desires for and experiments with occupation as a form of resistance; Aman Sandhu presents efforts towards a proximity and reshaping of personal-historical narratives in The Magic Roundabout (2021); and Mathew Parkin defines moments of lack, grief and detachment (of the self or another) in Vaseline (2018).
The films will be screened within an environment built by Netherlands-based artist collaborators Harriet Rose Morley and Bo Wielders. There will also be a publication available at P/////AKT and online featuring writing by Aman Sandhu and Mathew Wayne Parkin, designed by Phoebe Kerr, as well as a limited edition riso poster by Margaret Salmon.
I didn’t think it would turn out this way has been programmed by Caitlin Merrett King, Programme Coordinator at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, as the first part in an organisational exchange with P/////AKT, Amsterdam who will present an exhibition at David Dale Gallery in early 2022.
David Dale Gallery have contributed to Postcards from the Edge, a series of online artist contributions around current and upcoming projects at P/////AKT. Click here to see our postcard!
ARTIST BIOS
Aman Sandhu
The Magic Roundabout, 2021, digital video, 11 mins 45 secs
The Magic Roundabout uses a notorious traffic intersection in Swindon as a stage for the retelling of male indiscretions in a local Punjabi family. Shot entirely inside a car driven continuously around the roundabout, the film creates a state of suspension and disorientation while critiquing heteronormative colonial framings of South Asian migrants.
Aman Sandhu is based between Glasgow and Montréal. Through a study of improvisation, he aims to rethink the place of refusal in critique to produce other ways of coming to knowledge. Sandhu studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2013-15 (Klasse Rita McBride) and graduated from The Glasgow School of Art’s Master of Fine Art programme in 2017. Sandhu was awarded the 2020 Emerging Visual Artist Residency at Cove Park, Helensburgh. He was included in Glasgow International 2020/21 and has been engaged in a long-term pedagogical research project with SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre), Toronto since 2020. Recent solo exhibitions include So Glad (Market Gallery, Glasgow, 2020), NO MORE ARTISTS (CCA/Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow, 2019). He has exhibited at Celine Gallery, Glasgow; Gardiner Museum, Toronto; Younger than Beyoncé Gallery, Toronto; FOCUS Photography Festival, Mumbai; and presentations of his pedagogical project, ELEFANT at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach. His writing has been included in Nothing Personal magazine, Glasgow; rage and desire, CCA Annex; and Guitar! online programme by Sarah Tripp, Book Works.
Anne-Marie Copestake
A love, 2019, digital video, 16 mins 30 secs
A love forms an approach to local history unfolding in Copestake’s home neighbourhood and within a temporary community. The film foregrounds quiet, tender engagement, respect, forms of love, presence, absence, and ritual. There is a deliberate lack of language in the film, underlining the unuttered and recurring inadequacy of language, especially in expressions of uproot and the depth of emotions engendered. A love considers individual and collective values, desire for recognition of lives, and the necessity for communal recognition.
Anne-Marie Copestake lives in Glasgow. Working with moving images, audio, text, print, performance and sculpture, recent works foregrounding unsung legacies have focused on vivid portraits of a kind. With an emphasis on considering conditions that have surrounded choices or a lack of choices, a tangible passion of collectivity in the everyday, these works explore environments and landscapes that may have contributed essentially to these conditions. Copestake often works collaboratively, most recently with musician Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh.
Clarinda Tse
Textures Gestures Meshes Measures, 2021, digital performance, video collage, 14 mins 33 secs
Navigating the space of digital live art, this research stems from an incorporeal position of occupation, manifested as participation of a glitchy ghost from the location of Scotland (where I am living), superimposed on street-nature scape of Hong Kong (where my sister is living). With slices of her life transmitted as digital footage, I receive, shuffle, pass, walk across, jump and wiggle, seeing familiarity re-enacted in a woven architecture of gesture and movement. (Who are the occupants?) Pondering and finding hope in resistance within ‘The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement’ by Pang Laikwan, published in 2020, I am reminded to see occupation as process rather than sign. Through an intersubjective perspective that sustains plurality, liveability is reassured.
Clarinda Tse is an interdisciplinary artist, listener, facilitator, movement practitioner, Hong Kong-born and Glasgow-based. She works across being a sofa barnacle and a mutating muscle and is currently a committee member of Market Gallery, Glasgow. Tactility being the inspiration for exploration, she connects with more-than-human lifeforms and objects, finding creativity in shifting materiality and textures, especially with potentially edible materials. She uses material language to create alternative ecosystems, expanding conceptions of time and being. Refractive bodies, opacity, mesh, flexibility, orientation, mass, moulding, fractals, stillness, waves and weave form some of her sensual language. Honouring intuition, play and intimacy, the making and the viewing are multi-layered and open-ended, involving intergenerational cellular memories and connection to land/water. She interacts with slipperiness, navigates discomfort in leakiness, explores tension in relation to appearance and actualisation which marks diasporic conditions in scattered times. Through these processes, finding intrinsic joy in entangled symbiotic existence. Her work has been supported by: Unfix Festival (2021), Present Futures (2021); The Work Room Artist Research Bursary, Glasgow, UK (2020-21); Create: Inclusion Residency, Bothy Project and Transmission, Glasgow, UK (2020-21); Studio Projects, Market Gallery, Glasgow, UK (2019).
Margaret Salmon
I you me we us, 2018, two channel video, 6 mins
I you me we is a double monitor work which portrays particular visual representations of warmth, care, kinship and growth. It features the hands of lovers and family members, interspersed with texts, words, language and questions posed by the artist.
Margaret Salmon (b. 1975, New York) lives and works in Glasgow. Concerned with a shifting constellation of relations, such as those between camera and subject, human and animal, or autobiography and ethnography, Margaret Salmon’s films often examine the gendered, emotive dynamics of social interactions and representational forms. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at institutions including DCA (2018/19), Tramway (2018) Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2015); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2011); Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2007); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007) and Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2006). Her work has been featured in film festivals and major international survey exhibitions, including the British Art Show 9 (2021), Glasgow International (2021), Berlin Biennale (2010) and Venice Biennale (2007) London Film Festival (2018, 2016, 2014). Salmon won the inaugural MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2006, was shortlisted for the Jarman Award 2018 and the 2019 Margaret Tait Award.
Mathew Wayne Parkin
Vaseline, 2018, digital video, 43 mins
In Vaseline Mathew Wayne Parkin visits their Grandmother’s house shortly after her death. Mourning and desire intertwine in this intimate portrait, as they consider her life through objects, photographs and interviews with their family members. The film seeks to destabilize northern identity using formal and informal archives of local history, labour and accent, building to explore sexuality, witchcraft, and cats.
Mathew Wayne Parkin is an artist, writer and home cook mainly working in moving image with family and friends. They are particularly interested in autobiography, accent, intimacy, and speech acts in public. Their work is like an armpit, personal and intimate, of the body and relationships – smelling earthy. Mathew tries to resist dominant forms of media and sit against professionalised forms of moving image production through DIY and home video techniques, as well as queer crip analysis. Mathew has shown work with LUX, Videoclub, V22 Foundation, IMT Gallery, Grand Union, Workplace Gallery, Embassy Gallery, Spike Island, Eastside Projects, Tramway, S1 Artspace, the ICA, and the CCA Glasgow. Mathew has undertaken residencies at Triangle France – Astérides, Hopitalfield Arts and Cove Park.
Renèe Helèna Browne
Daddy’s Boy, 2020, digital video, 22 mins
Daddy’s Boy is a personal exploration of the influence of paternal lines on bodily experiences of gender. The film combines reflections on the contemporary legacy of the Tyrannosaurus Rex and a visual portrait of Browne’s father in an entangled, fragmentary account of inheritance and intimacy, monstrosity, and family. Daddy’s Boy was commissioned by the 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2020 and supported by the Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Daddy’s Boy was written and edited by Renèe Helèna Browne, filmed by Renèe Helèna Browne and Letitia Browne, with colour grading and sound mixing by Natalie McGowan and SDH captioning by Matchbox Cine. Daddy’s Boy was commissioned by the 16th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival 2020 and supported by the Visual Art Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland.
Renèe Helèna Browne is an Irish artist based between Scotland and Ireland. Browne makes vocal soundscapes, essay films and angsty drawings. They are currently developing Rebuilding Urania, an oral archiving programme commissioned by Project Arts Centre (PAC) Dublin. Rebuilding Urania will be made public as a series of episodes with Book Works UK, Lux Scotland, TULCA festival curated by Eoin Dara, and Dublin Digital Radio in 2021. Browne is 2021-2023 Talbot Rice Resident Artist with ECA at the University of Edinburgh and 2021 Sunset Kino Award winner for their film Daddy’s Boy with the Salzburger Kunstverein for excellence in contemporary film. Browne is working toward solo presentations with Project Arts Centre and CCA Glasgow. They are supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary 2021, have recently completed the Experimental Film and Moving Image Residency in partnership with Cove Park and Alchemy Film, were Shortlisted for the Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize 2021 and screened films with the European Media Art Festival No. 34 and AEMI, Dublin.
Harriet Rose Morley is a multi-disciplinary artist, maker, and educator currently based between The Netherlands and the UK. The projects and works she produces aim to challenge the conceptions, potentiality and the function of (public) art through engagement, collaboration and conversation. The development of her work is often reliant on public interaction and collaboration through workshops, conversations and educational events that provide an accessible and inclusive insight into topics of urgency within art in public space such as the relationship between care and therapy, labour, self-organisation, alternative education, and self-build ideals.
Bo Wielders is continuously researching urban and architectural structures, institutional walls and language. She builds, often in collaboration with others, new environments reacting on those existing structures. During the rest of the days you will find her cooking, touching wood or using a chair as table to eat her dinner as breakfast.