Rebecoming
The Other European Travellers
Flowers Gallery, London. 10 September-11 October 2014
Virgílio Ferreira,
Henrik Malmström, Tereza
Zelenkova and Lucy Levene
Curated by Tim Clark, 1000 Words
Virgílio Ferreira, Being and Becoming, 2013. Injet print on cotton fine art paper, 70 x 47 cm.
1000 Words is delighted to announce a group exhibition featuring the four winners of the inaugural 1000 Words Award at Flowers Gallery, London this September.
1000 Words is delighted to announce a group exhibition featuring the four winners of the inaugural 1000 Words Award at Flowers Gallery, London this September.
Rebecoming brings
together newly commissioned works from four artists Virgílio Ferreira, Henrik
Malmström, Tereza Zelenkova and Lucy Levene. Focusing on migration patterns
between 1950 and 1980 from southern to central and northern Europe, it depicts
fragments of the lives, stories and environments of individuals who left their
countries of birth to start a new life in new lands, principally due to
economic reasons.
The works explore issues related to family, labour, mobility, boundary,
cultural heritage and social expectation. They also connect to instances of courage,
upheaval, opportunity, unfreedom, self-respect, heroism and the dream of
returning ‘home’, not withdrawing exploitation and poverty; the ultimate
capitalistic ethic. By offering personal visions of lived experience, Rebecoming examines the contradictory
nature of how the stage for temporary migration in many cases became permanent.
An installation by Tereza Zelenkova (b.1985, Czech
Republic) comprises black and white photographs from two series’, Girls & Gloves and Stewartby inspired by John Berger’s 1975
seminal text The Seventh Man. Shot in
the former London Brick factory in Bedford, England - a company that once recruited
more than 7,500 men from villages in southern Italy to fill the least desirable
and repetitive jobs during the post-war reconstruction boom - the images make visible bits of detritus strewn across the building’s crumbling
interior.
Workers’ gloves and posters of women form Zelenkova’s
topology, offering monuments to desperate optimism. Drawing on her signature surrealist
impulse, these objects undergo metamorphosis and alongside portraits and images
of a housing estate in the adjacent town Stewartby, become imbued with
emotional encryptions that speak to isolation, powerlessness, homesickness,
sexual frustration and desire. Central to her project lies an exploration of how,
or whether, the dream of a suburban life abroad was ever realised.
In The Spaghetti Tree, Lucy Levene (b.1978, UK) also responds
to Bedford’s Italian community, the largest concentration in the UK at more
than 14,000 people. The artist pulls together strands from her previous work, deftly
fusing documentary photography with performance and construction, experimenting
with varying levels of control and direction.
Attending events and accepting invitations to people’s homes, she
developed attachments and became involved in the families’ intimate narratives.
Her often witty photographs call
into question mythologies of what it means to be ‘Italian’ and the nostalgic ideal
of La Bella Figura felt by many
as they try to forge an independent identity in their new home, simultaneously revealing
the tensions in conventional modes of portraiture; the perfect and
imperfect image.
Virgílio Ferreira (b.1970,
Portugal) has created the series Being
and Becoming in an attempt to evoke the inner feelings of his Portuguese subjects
and open up a space for reflecting on hybrid-identities and polarity of living
in-between cultures, languages, landscapes and borders. Using multiple
exposures and diptychs, and by loading his imagery with metaphor, Ferreira’s
images not only evoke a sense of duality but also lend tangible form to the
condition of remembering.
The diffuse traces, obstructions and dappled light that routinely appear
in his imagery lock the viewer into moments where elements of the past coalesce
with the present to create a notion of continuity between ‘there’ and ‘here’. Ultimately,
Ferreira’s images tap into feelings of being uprooted or of seeing oneself
through the filter of difference in an adopted country.
Through a short film entitled Life’s
Work Henrik Malmström (b.1983,
Finland) offers an unpredictable twist on the distance between objectivity and
subjectivity by reflecting on the mundane situations of various Portuguese inhabitants
from his local neighbourhood in Hamburg, Germany.
Getting as close as possible yet aspiring to a neutral position, Malmström conjures up the
vivid presence of cleaners, sex workers, laundrette staff, religious
worshippers and commuters. With deadpan humour and an unremitting gaze, the
artist seeks to open up ‘the universe next door’ whilst also engaging more
broadly in the multitude of
individual dreams that form one universal wish - to find happiness in life
through comfort and material security.
Collectively the artists in Rebecoming
offer insight into the complexities of the migrant experience at a charged and
contentious moment in the evolution of modern Europe. It is an ode to those travellers
who dared to make the journey, for better or worse.
Rebecoming is part of The
Other European Travellers project, a co-production by 1000 Words, Cobertura Photo and Atelier de Visu with the
support of EACEA programme of the European
Union.
For further
information or images contact Alex Peake on 020 7920 7777 or email alex@flowersgallery.com
*Tim Clark will give a free, informal curator's tour discussing the exhibiting artists and themes of the shown Saturday 11 October at 3pm. Please RSVP to jessica@flowersgallery.com to attend.*
*Tim Clark will give a free, informal curator's tour discussing the exhibiting artists and themes of the shown Saturday 11 October at 3pm. Please RSVP to jessica@flowersgallery.com to attend.*
