Two exhibitions at Mostyn create beauty from trauma. Firstly we have Paul Maheke’s most extensive solo exhibition in the UK to date, titled “To Be Blindly Hopeful.” This showcase comprises drawings, paintings, and a video performance located upstairs. Maheke’s distinctive use of vibrant stripes, reminiscent of his signature style, almost serves as a reflection of himself, with the measurements of these stripes derived from the artist’s own body measurements.
To Be Blindly Hopeful emerged from the very last sentence of a journal that Maheke wrote between August 2020 and June 2021 which encapsulated turbulent months for him while he learnt to deal with the trauma of an abusive relationship. The exhibition revisits fragments of this journal, a personal odyssey that became the genesis of a body of work, as intricate as it is expansive. The exhibition title references the artist’s mindset during a period marked by uncertainty and upheaval. It beckons us to consider the potency of hope, not as a calculated response to circumstance, but as a courageous act of faith in the face of adversity.
As we enter Maheke’s immersive world, we are confronted with the artist’s profound engagement with the notion that hope can be a transformative force. It is not a passive waiting, but an active meeting with the possibilities that arise in the void left by uncertainty. The interplay of light and shadow in Maheke’s visual language serves as a metaphor for this constant back-and-forth, mirroring the intricate dance of hope and despair that can define the human experience.
The second exhibition Daughter of Dog is an exhibition of newly commissioned works by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen. Moving across film, sculpture and sound, the show is occupied with forms of aggression, love and death. Starting from an exploration of grief, the exhibition engages with complex emotions and their non-binary nature, and in a broader sense with reality as a composition of contradictions. The works are displayed as a constellation that looks at the void and the entanglements it holds; hyper-alert, capricious, blooming, fragmented and messy.
The film of the same name is made following non-traditional methods of music composition and songwriting; bringing together (camera and body) movement, text and images to construct a score helped by AI using sounds produced by carnivorous plants, a robot dog, atlas moths, german shepherds and dancers rehearsing the choreography of a pogo mosh pit.
In the same space ‘paintings’ are created on Aluminium canvases from the ashes of dead racehorses using a kiln –
We use powder coating on either aluminium or steel panels. Powder coating is an industrial process that uses an electric charge to fuse the powder to a metallic surface and heat (kiln) to cure. We make these works with bespoke powders that we have made for us in a factory, using the ashes of thoroughbred racehorses. We mix the colours to match a rare horse colour pattern called roan and specify the powder particles to match the thickness of horse hair. We then apply this powder unevenly by hand in a powder coating facility.
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (UK/BE, b.1981, based in London) work across objects, installation and film. Their collaborative work explores processes of production and the tensions between the organic and artificial.
Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen: Daughter of Dog 23rd March 2024 – 29th June 2024
Paul Maheke: To Be Blindly Hopeful 23rd March 2024 – 29th June 2024 MOSTYN
