For the first time at London Art Fair 2018 there will be an all-female line-up announced for Dialogues, part of London Art Fair’s platform for international contemporary work Art Projects
Art Projects returns to London Art Fair 2018 (17 – 21 January), offering a platform for emerging galleries presenting innovative contemporary art from around the world. Now in its 14th year, the section will bring together 33 international projects, including curated solo shows and group exhibitions. Included in Art Projects are five unique collaborations, known as Dialogues, with pairs of galleries invited to display their artists in conversation and contrast. In a first for London Art Fair, Dialogues will feature exclusively female or female-identifying artists whose work addresses gender and cultural identity.
This year’s edition of Dialogues, curated by Misal Adnan Yildiz, features 24 women artists whose work focuses on the representation and recontextualisation of the female. Featuring artists of Maori, Kurdish, Asian and African origins, Dialogues offers a platform to explore the complexity and diversity of the female perspective, and how this is mediated by cultural identity.
Gil Hanly, untitled (from the unemployment series)
Galeri Nev (Turkey) are bringing together a selection of works by Berlin-based Mehtap Baydu which explore the artist’s body through her relationship with her mother, including a bust created using her mother’s favourite dress as “skin”. Also playing with the idea of memory as ‘female’ is Bowerback Ninow (New Zealand) who will be re-staging the exhibition Blue Book for London Art Fair. Blue Book attempts to understand Gil Hanly’s process as a documentarian of Auckland’s social, political and artistic landscape throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Yingmei Duan, To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain, (Photograph of live performance with East Village artists, 1995, Beijing, China), 2014, pigment on archival paper, 74 x 109 cm
Tanja Wagner Gallery (Germany) will be presenting Nilbar Güre?’ mixed-media work which explores the cultural codes of female and queer experience. Her performative approach is shared by artist Yingmei Duan, who trained with Marina Abramovi? and uses her body as an expressive medium. Duan’s project Talk Together with Pakistani artist Aisha Abid Hussain is showcased by Hanmi Gallery (UK).
The artist-run initiative ALASKA Projects (Australia) will present four antipodean artists originating from Australia, Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand alongside a quartet of European artists represented by IMT Gallery (UK). Together they investigate the notion of the ‘female portrait’, through traditional portraiture, performance and fictional writing. Highlights include Paola Ciarska’s humorous but unsettling paintings which present women in domestic environments filled with technology, and Angela Tiatia’s video installation Walking the Wall, which explores the conflicting rules of femininity imposed by mass global culture and her Samoan heritage.
Joanna Bryant & Julian Page (UK) will show four contemporary artists challenging the notions of shape and space through abstract forms. they will sit alongside Starkwhite (New Zealand) who will be showcasing Maori photographer Fiona Pardington’s ongoing project Nabokov’s Blues: the Charmed Circle. Revisiting the public archives of author and lepidopterist (a person who studies or collects butterflies and moths) Vladimir Nabokov, her abstract photographs draw parallels between Nabokov’s collecting and Maori culture’s relationship to the natural world.
Rita GT, Fall. Action no1. Luanda, 2013, inkjet print on photo paper. Courtesy of MOV’ART
Perve Galeria (Portugal) will be bringing Feminine Art Speech to London Art Fair, a site-specific project featuring works by three women artists, who by using or imitating mediums such as textiles and embroidery comment upon the persisting view of women as artisans rather than artists. Perve Galeria is joining forces with MOV’ART (Angola) who endeavour to facilitate EuroAfrican collaborations. RitaGT and Keyezua, from Portugal and Angola respectively, will present L’École Des Femmes reacting to Molière’s theatrical comedy in order to tackle current issues such as the colonialism of gender.
London Art Fair 16th- 21st January 2018 Business Design Centre 52 Upper Street London N1 0QH
www.londonartfair.co.uk/dialogues
