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There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body
A two person exhibition by Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz 4-26 February 2022 / Wed to Fri 1-7pm, Sat & Sun 11-5pm WATCH: 'Electronic Tabla' - Live performance by Claire Zakiewicz and Kuljit Bahmra
The performance features Claire Zakiewicz painting on canvas accompanied by composer and musician Kuljit Bhamra, playing the world’s first electronic tabla of his own invention. The music and painting are improvised, with the artists collaborating in real time. The artwork produced during the performance became part of 'There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body' exhibition, a two person show by Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz, and remains on view throughout the run of the show. Family art workshop for Hackney residents / Sunday 20th February 3-4pm RSVP ↓
In this workshop for families, participants will explore relationships between sound, words and drawing. Topics will include:
This is the first workshop connected to the exhibition currently on display at HOXTON 253, titled There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body. It will be led by the artist Claire Zakiewicz. The workshop emphasise a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Participants will be invited to experiment with spontaneous and intuitive ideas, embrace mistakes and imperfection, and focus on habits and repetition, voice, listening, curiosity, and joy. No background knowledge or artistic experience is necessary and all are welcome. Who is this workshop for: This workshop is for children aged 7+ and adults. Under 18's must be accompanied by an adult. Priority access is given to Hackney-based residents. If you are not a Hackney resident and would like to join the waiting list, please let us know via a quick email ([email protected]) with the workshop title in the subject. We will get back to you before the event if there are available spots left. Queer writing and performance workshop for Hackney residents / Thursday 24th February 7-8pm, RSVP ↓
Workshop Rupert Vilnius, 2021, photo by Violetta Pilecka
In this workshop, we will take inspiration from queer, trans, and non-binary thinkers, writers, and artists, in guiding us towards a number of creative experiments, using:
Both workshops foreground a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Participants will be invited to experiment with ideas around spontaneity and intuition, mistakes and imperfection, habits and repetition, voice, listening, curiosity, and joy. No background knowledge or previous experience is necessary and all are welcome. Who is this workshop for: Priority access given to Hackney-based queer residents aged 18-25. If you are not a Hackney resident or aged over 25, and would like to join the waiting list, please let us know via a quick email ([email protected]) with the workshop title in the subject. We will get back to you before the event if there are available spots left. The gallery has step-free access and is wheelchair accessible. Please don’t hesitate to contact us about any access requirements. Artists in conversation & performance / 26th February 5-6.30pm, RSVP ↓
Sophie Seita, photo by Christa Holka
Sophie Seita will present a lecture performance, Reading the Rock, in response to her sound installation My Contact Aureoles (2020/2022), which is included in the show. Following the performance Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz will be in conversation with HOXTON 253 curator Zsuzsa Benke sharing insights into their respective practices and the works in the exhibition. Doors open at 5pm Performance starts at 5.15pm About the performance: Sophie Seita’s lecture performance Reading the Rock bends into and around different body-and rock-formations—quite literally through the metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rock that can be found in the Big Bend State Park that runs along the Rio Grande that divides West Texas and Mexico, which is also the setting for Seita’s installation My Contact Aureoles. Other stepping-stones or touchstones are Valie Export’s Körperkonfigurationen (Body Configurations), John Ruskin’s ‘Of the Material of Mountains’ in Modern Painters; Laura Aguilar’s self-portrait Grounded #114 (2006), Dana Luciano and Mel Chen’s ‘Queer Inhumanisms’; Yoko Ono’s Stone Piece, William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral; and other materials and voices that tease out the complex from the simple and vice versa, all pivoting around some questions that animate her work in the show: How can a work hold a moment, translate it, make it tangible and yet remain ultimately unknowable? Or more simply: How can I experience this enough? |
‘There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body, beyond what’s graspable. I read and write to seek comprehension, to solicit unravelling. Seize what seems pliable to that action, that attention’ -- Sophie Seita, after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles (2020-2021)
This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz explores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?
Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the multi-media exhibition featuring performance, painting, sound and moving image works also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.
Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.
‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
—Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)
Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines.
Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.
FREE WORKSHOPS
The artists will offer two writing and drawing workshops for Hackney residents that explore the themes of the exhibition, one for families, and one centred around LGBTQI+ issues for adults. Participants will be invited to experiment with ideas around spontaneity and intuition, mistakes and imperfection, habits and repetition, listening, curiosity, and joy. Both workshops foreground a spirit of playfulness and exploration. No background knowledge or previous experience is necessary and all are welcome. If you have any access needs please don't hesitate to get in touch with the gallery. Places are limited, please RSVP here.
Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the multi-media exhibition featuring performance, painting, sound and moving image works also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.
Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.
‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
—Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)
Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines.
Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.
FREE WORKSHOPS
The artists will offer two writing and drawing workshops for Hackney residents that explore the themes of the exhibition, one for families, and one centred around LGBTQI+ issues for adults. Participants will be invited to experiment with ideas around spontaneity and intuition, mistakes and imperfection, habits and repetition, listening, curiosity, and joy. Both workshops foreground a spirit of playfulness and exploration. No background knowledge or previous experience is necessary and all are welcome. If you have any access needs please don't hesitate to get in touch with the gallery. Places are limited, please RSVP here.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sophie Seita, Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers,2017. Photo by Natalia Jaeger. Image courtesy of the artist
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Sophie Seita is a London-based artist, writer, and educator whose work explores text in its various translations into book objects, performances, videos, or other languages and embodiments.
She works internationally on several creative and critical projects; most recently and together with Naomi Woo, she’s co-created an operatic talk show and community-oriented public art project, rooted in speculative and collaborative research on queer-feminist gardeners, funded by the British Council, Canada Council, Canada High Commission, and Farnham Maltings. Other work has been shown at [SPACE], La MaMa Galleria (NYC), Printed Matter (NYC), Bold Tendencies, the Royal Academy, the Serpentine, Queer Art Projects, Flat Time House/Up Projects, Raven Row, Parasol Unit, Art Night London, the Arnolfini, Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), JNU (New Delhi), Heong Gallery and Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge) and elsewhere. Seita is the author of, most recently, My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar, 2020) and Provisional Avant-Gardes (Stanford University Press, 2019). Other work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Roberts Institute of Art/The Hunterian; Other Forms; Earthbound Press; Ma Bibliothèque; Bricks from the Kiln; 87Press; Post45; TDR/The Drama Review; Manifold: Experimental Criticism; Chicago Review; Bomb; Ugly Duckling Presse; Belladonna; and Nightboat Books. She is an Assistant Professor at Boston University and a visiting tutor on the Alternative Education Programme at Rupert in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the MSt in Writing for Performance at Cambridge University. More information on her performances, publications, and other collaborative projects can be found here: www.sophieseita.com |
Claire Zakiewicz, Photo by Chris Freeman. Image courtesy of the artist
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Claire Zakiewicz is a painter and interdisciplinary artist living in London. Her primary area of research has been the physical and metaphorical relationship between drawing and sound, which she explores in her visual art practice by incorporating improvised and experimental music.
Zakiewicz curated a series of performance and video screenings titled Some Loose Assemblies at Hundred Years Gallery, London throughout 2021, which she started with Sophie Seita. Also in 2021 she co-produced Writing the Future with Gerald Curtis, which was funded by the Arts Council, England. She has undertaken multiple residencies at Bill Young's Dance Studio in Soho, New York, where she has a painting and video work on display until the end of 2022. Zakiewicz has undertaken other residencies at PointB Worklodge (NYC), The Mothership (NYC), Cill Rialaig (Ireland), and The Aldeburgh Beach Lookout (UK). She had many solo exhibitions and curated performance festivals at ARTI3160, Venice between 2017 - 2019. Her works have been presented at Tate Tanks and Tate Britain, (London) in the exhibitions Tweet Me Up, 2011 and Label, 2012, in the group show Alive In the Universe for the 58th Venice Biennale, 2019 and have been shown at NOoSPHERE Arts (New York), The Last Frontier (NYC), The Mothership (NYC), Plaxall Gallery (NYC), Itinerant Performing Arts Festival, (NYC) and ARTI3160 (Venice). Between 2009 - 2012 Zakiewicz was a member of the ensemble Fig. with composer/performer Alwynne Pritchard and sound designer Thorolf Thuestad with whom she performed at Landmark, USF, and BEK (Bergan Norway), PointB Worklodge, (NYC) and live on Resonance FM (London). Her essay ‘The Aesthetics of Failure’ was published by Bloomsbury in The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts; Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished, 2020. Zakiewicz studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art, London and Anglia Ruskin University, prior to completing a research-based MA at Sir John Cass School of Art, London. She regularly practices a variety of performance techniques including the Meisner Acting technique and contact improvisation as a way of practicing painting and drawing methods. www.clairezakiewicz.com |
For further enquiries, please contact Zsuzsa Benke [email protected]
The exhibition and associated programme are supported by and part of HELLO AGAIN, HACKNEY, the borough's cultural reopening initiative.
The exhibition and associated programme are supported by and part of HELLO AGAIN, HACKNEY, the borough's cultural reopening initiative.
Hello Again, Hackney programme partners, supporters and sponsors:
