Highlights: 8 - 14 July, 2024

New Art Highlights of the week includes: Uma Breakdown, Joanne Masding, Janet Currier and Ngo Chun Tse

Earth AD 2, 2023

Uma Breakdown

Earth A.D. 2 is an expansive body of work by artist Uma Breakdown, spanning immersive installation, writing and video games, and draws on their research into ongoing collective repair. The work explores the structures and history of Gothic narratives, and their creative relationships to time, space, identity and social relations. At the same time it’s a science fiction story about trans solidarity and care across time and space, which is repeatedly told, distorted, translated, lost, and reinvented.

A video game which forms part of the project is playable here. 

Body of Pieces, 2024

Joanne Masding

Body of Pieces is an abstract fiction by Joanne Masding, presented as an artwork, a set of sculptures, a book.

It follows two female characters, The Surgeon and The Dancer, as they attempt to interact with a series of hard to grasp and vaguely defined objects, and one another, within the bowels of a fictional archive.

From behind screens, inside bellies and out of mouths, the text follows the exploratory limbs of its characters as they sense their way through the landscape of things. From up close with fingers and at a remove stuck behind a laptop, The Surgeon and The Dancer test out ways of interacting with the physical world in front of them, and of dealing with their own shifting and malleable bodies. Meeting objects staged across a series of murky rooms, they make attempts to know the physical realm, and to find alternative ways of articulating their experiences.

Continuing explorations from the studio that are central to Joanne’s sculptural practice, Body of Pieces thinks through ideas of embodied knowledge and how the material world can be understood and translated. Begun while caring for her first child and working at home, and spanning the pregnancy and birth of her second, the text was made over multiple years to consider what it is to create and add to the world; both as a maker and as a mother. In the lawless space of a museum built out of written fiction, precious artefacts are eaten and melded with, body parts are carved up and ballooned outwards, and objects, artworks and children, are birthed, created and made real.

‘Body of Pieces’ is published by Bobo Books and distributed by Antenne.

Supported by Arts Council England, An Endless Supply and backers on Kickstarter.

Night Creeper 2 (drawings from a sickbed), 2021

Janet Currier

Coloured pencil on drawing paper

21 x 30 cm

Séance, 2023

Ngo Chun Tse

Through the process of re-reading the very beginning of Asia’s film history, we discover that the ghost has disappeared. Meanwhile, obsolete technologies have become dead media, and artists are tracing the ghostly illusion of the image from these obsolete technologies. By combining archives, video, and 3D rendering, artists attempt to explore the ambiguity of historical and material memories.