Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti]

Tarek Lakhrissi: My Immortal

3 July – 19 September 2021

MOSTYN is thrilled to present the first UK institutional solo exhibition by Tarek Lakhrissi. This new commission consists of existing and new work, and comprises film, sculpture, text and performance – creating a multi-dimensional installation across the gallery spaces. Rooted in poetry, Lakhrissi’s practice seeks to challenge contemporary constructs of language and narratives around minoritised communities.  The exhibition takes the poem ‘Paradise Lost’, by 17th-century English poet John Milton, as a starting point to reflect upon the notion of ‘community’. In light of the disintegration of social cohesion brought on by current crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the growth of far-right populism, this new body of work reflects on what constitutes a community, particularly a queer community. It considers the notion of community as a complex entity: one that offers both the possibilities of love, empowerment and protection but also nightmares, traumas and fears. Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is the anchor around which such tensions are played out – the possibility of a community that offers paradisiacal solace and yet, through its fragilities, can be easily lost. The central installation becomes a battleground, a metaphor for notions of defence and of self-defence to help queer communities of colour fight back against today’s societal violence and, in so doing, becomes a symbol of love and transformative narratives. So in the midst of despair, I have come to believe that love – the feeling of love, the politics of love, the ethics and ideology and embodiment of love – is the only good option in this time of the apocalypse.  Kai Cheng Thom – I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World  

About the artist

Tarek Lakhrissi (b. 1992, Châtellerault) is a visual artist and a poet based between Paris and Brussels. He currently teaches on the CCC Research Master Program in the Visual Arts Department at HEAD (Geneva School of Art and Design). Lakhrissi has exhibited internationally at galleries and institutions including: Museum of Contemporary Art,Biennale of Sydney (2020); Wiels, Bruxelles (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Palazzo Re Rebaudengo/Sandretto, Guarene/Torino (2020); Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (2020); High Art, Paris (2020); Hayward Gallery, London (2019); Auto Italia South East, London (2019); Grand Palais, FIAC, Paris (2019); Fondation Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2019); L’Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2019; Zabriskie, Geneva (2019); Fondation Gulbenkian, Paris (2018); CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France (2019); Kim?, Riga (2018); Artexte, Montreal (2017); Gaité Lyrique, Paris (2017); SMC/CAC, Vilnius (2017). He is nominated for the 22nd Fondation Pernod Ricard Prize (2020-2021).

Supported by: Fluxus Art Projects.

The Mobile Feminist Library: In Words, In Action, In Connection

3 July – 19 September 2021

In Words, In Action, In Connection is a display of publications and printed materials that explores historical and contemporary intersectional feminist activism in Wales. Brought together by artists Minna Haukka and Kristin Luke, whose collaborative practice stems from their ongoing project, the Mobile Feminist Library, a travelling collection of printed materials that responds to its locality, this display takes the form of an experimental reading room. Haukka and Luke have collaborated with artists, activists, collectives and publishers to develop a collection which is relevant to Wales and contains both historical and contemporary publications and printed materials sourced from Wales-based archives as well as the London-based Feminist Library. In Words, In Action, In Connection considers different activist movements at the intersection of class, disability, ecology, gender, language, neurodivergence, race and sexuality, taking these as inherent considerations of any feminism. The materials are locally relevant to Wales, whilst acknowledging that these movements extend beyond geographical borders. The display examines ways in which publishing and printed materials intersect with and strengthen activist movements, and uses counter-patriarchal methods of archiving and knowledge sharing. The space acts not only as a library, but as a place for gathering and communal learning.  Collaborators include: Beau Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed, Butetown History and Arts Centre, Casey Duijndam and Robyn Dewhurst, Elwy Working Woods, the Feminist Library, Rebecca Jagoe, mwnwgl, Patriarchaeth.Movements and historical figures include: Black Lives Matter, Emma Goldman, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, The Commune Movement, Monica Sjöö, women’s publishing collectives and cooperatives.

Beau W Beakhouse and Sadia Pineda Hameed (LUMIN) Beau W Beakhouse is an artist, filmmaker and curator based in Cardiff. His artistic practice often returns to themes of language, land, the post-colonial, alternate histories and dreams via intersections and convergences. He has upcoming residencies with Tangent Projects and Jerwood UNITe (g39) and a forthcoming solo exhibition with Arcade/Campfa.  Sadia Pineda Hameed is an artist based in Cardiff, Wales. She works in film, installation, text and performance to explore collective and inherited trauma; in particular, the latent ways we speak about this through dreaming, telepathic communion and secrets as an anti-colonial strategy inherent to us. She has shown work with The Bluecoat, MOSTYN, HOAX, Peak and others. They also run the small press, radio show and curatorial project LUMIN.

Butetown History and Arts Centre The Heritage and Cultural Exchange (HCE) is a community based organisation which aims to chronicle the cultural diversity of south Cardiff, a legacy of the city’s industrial and maritime past, when it was a global hub of the coal trade, attracting workers from around the world to its docklands. The collection of photographs, archives, and oral histories, originally compiled by the Butetown History and Arts Centre (BHAC), is being catalogued, digitised, and made more widely available by a team of volunteers, helped along with grant funding. BHAC was founded in the late 1980s, based in Cardiff Docklands, and worked to record the history of the local community. It was led by Glen Jordan, an American academic who moved to Wales to complete the theses of his mentor Sinclair Drake. Butetown History & Arts Centre survived until 2016 when its assets passed to HCE. 

Casey Duijndam and Robyn Dewhurst  contributed to organising and documenting the Black Lives Matter protests across North Wales in 2020. Casey Duijndam is an activist who is half Ugandan, half Dutch and 22 years old. In 2020, during the pandemic, she made history by joining forces with a group of strong women to set up three of the Black Lives Matter protests in North Wales, an experience that was both heartbreaking and empowering. After years of gathering strength, the BLM protests were a pivotal moment in her political life, creating a catalyst for her to start speaking publicly and organising people to stand together and fight against racism in the UK and across the world. Since then she has given numerous interviews about how we can educate ourselves and the people around us, has been the subject of secondary school student essays, and has extended an invitation to North Wales Police to engage in dialogue about their future role in protests.  Robyn Dewhurst is a British artist currently based in North Wales. She works with digital photography and exhibition curation to highlight lesser represented subcultures and socio-cultural groups. Her bold and abrasive images focus on people, practices and events that exist beyond the mainstream. She has collaborated in the past with local LGBTQ+ communities to curate the exhibition ‘QUEER IDENTITY’ in the Leeds Corn Exchange – an event showcasing the personal experiences of LGBTQ+ youths through illustration, film, photography, fine art and performance. She also photographs DIY Drag and Burlesque performers, leading her to larger projects, for example working with the Henry Moore Institute for ‘Age of THE : Athenian’. She graduated from BA (Hons) Photography at Leeds Arts University in 2020.

The Commune Movement Wales, particularly Mid Wales, was a major destination in the 60s-80s for people choosing to leave urban centres and establish intentional communities as part of the Commune Movement. These communes engendered a crossover between different forms of activism, including the women’s liberation movement, environmentalism, anarchism, anti-racism and nuclear disarmament . The movement can be traced through varied forms of publications and printed ephemera, from advertisements in Spare Rib for women’s cooperatives, to flyers hand-printed on gestetner duplicators, circulated amongst communes, then used for fuel in wood burning stoves, to manuals on self-sustainability such as The Whole Earth Catalog, a tome printed in California which was widely used on Welsh communes.

Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was an anarchist feminist activist. Deported from the US to the Soviet Union in 1919, in the 1920s she sought refuge in Ammanford, a coal mining community in South Wales, which was her base for lecturing on socialism, communism, and feminism across the South Wales valleys. She also had ties to the ‘White House’, a centre in Ammanford for collective radical political study and a meeting place for young socialists. Her publications and writing centred around anarchist philosophy and women’s rights, particularly suffrage, free love, birth control, homosexuality, and marriage. She founded the radical monthly journal Mother Earth and her role in the history of feminism is encapsulated in a collection of her works titled Anarchy and the Sex Question. Feminist Library The Feminist Library, open since 1975, is a large archive collection of feminist literature, particularly Women’s Liberation Movement materials dating from the late 1960s to the 1990s. They support research, activist and community projects in this field. The Library is also an autonomous feminist community space. The Library is trans-inclusive, welcomes visitors of any gender, does not require registration or membership, and provides an intersectional, non-sectarian space for the exploration of feminism.

Greenham Common Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp lasted from 1981-2000. It began when Women for Life on Earth, a Welsh campaigning group, decided to march from Cardiff to RAF Greenham Common, and set up a camp protesting the British government’s decision to store nuclear weapons on the airforce station. Women stayed at the camp for nearly 20 years, staging blockades, actions, and interventions to protest the nuclear threat overshadowing their lives. 

Minna Haukka is a Finnish artist, based in London since 1999. She works with mixed media, installation, sculpture, textiles, video and drawing. Her practice is socially engaged with an interest in deconstructing and repurposing the everyday. She was artist in residence at the Feminist Library in London from 2018–2020, where she has been volunteering since 2015. She is currently lead co-ordinator of the Library’s Curatorial Group. Since 2018, she has collaborated with Kristin Luke on the Mobile Feminist Library project – a white van converted into a library which was part of the Still I Rise exhibition series at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea and Arnolfini, Bristol in 2019. Minna Haukka has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since 1993 and she has co-curated projects in London at the Showroom, Space Station 65 and The Feminist Library, and at HilbertRaum Gallery in Berlin.

Rebecca Jagoe is an Irish artist based in Wales, whose practice encompasses performance, sculpture, textiles, writing, and drawing. Their work is a material memoir which examines how their own experiences of illness and gender, have been informed by specific Western cultural narratives. In particular, their work explores how within European culture, the Feminine is constructed at the meeting point of medical rhetoric and the aesthetics of mainstream fashion. In 2020, their work has been shown online by Wysing (Cambridge, UK) and La Casa Encendida (Madrid, Spain), and they performed at CCA Goldsmiths (London, UK) before lockdown. They have recently shown work at Jupiter Woods (London, 2019)), South London Gallery (2019), and the Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2018). Their writing has been published by Hotel magazine (forthcoming), the Happy Hypocrite (Issue 11, The Silver Bandage), and Frieze magazine, among others. In 2021 they will produce an online broadcast performance with Site Gallery.

Kristin Luke (born in 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA and based in Penmachno, Snowdonia, Wales) is an artist who works across film, sculpture and live events. From 2019–2020, Luke was the artist-in-residence for The Wall Is _____, a collaborative project with a North Wales housing estate, addressing regeneration and community self-perception and supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. She has been collaborating with Minna Haukka since 2018 on the Mobile Feminist Library. From 2017–18 she was an editorial group member and contributor to Schooling & Culture, a journal on radical education produced in collaboration with MayDay Rooms and The Showroom Gallery. In 2018, she co-programmed a workshop series and built an installation for D.O.P.E., a youth-led alternative education space, supported by the Showroom Gallery and Westminster Council’s Create Fund. In 2018–19 she was a Creative Practitioner for the Lead Creative Schools programme in Wales. In 2015–16 she was an Open School East Associate. She is a member of the artist group MoreUtopia! Her work and projects have been exhibited at galleries including South London Gallery; Arnolfini, Bristol; Somerset House; Enclave; AND/OR; Bas Fischer Invitational, Miami; Jerwood Arts; and The Agency. 

mwnwgl Mae mwnwgl yn gasgleb cyhoeddi a churadu sy’n cynhyrchu sgwennu/celf newydd mewn ieithoedd Cymrae/ig. Cafodd ei rifyn print cyntaf, Anghyfiaith, ei gomisiynu gan oriel g39 a’i ryddhau yng ngwanwyn 2021 gyda gwaith newydd gan Umulkhayr Mohamed, Catrin Menai, Bob Gelsthorpe, Radha Patel, Joanna Wright a Sarah Roberts ar themau o (gam)gyfieithu, tafodau estron a chyfathrebu rhwng a thu hwnt i iaith, ynghyd â gwaith gan Esyllt Lewis, Elin Meredydd a Dylan Huw, sy’n llywio’r prosiect. //  mwnwgl is a publishing and curatorial collective committed to producing and circulating new art/writing in and around Welsh languages. Its first print issue, Anghyfiaith, was commissioned by g39 and released in Spring 2021, featuring new work by Umulkhayr Mohamed, Catrin Menai, Bob Gelsthorpe, Radha Patel, Joanna Wright and Sarah Roberts on themes of (mis)translation, alien tongues and language’s in-betweens, as well as by founding members Esyllt Lewis, Elin Meredydd and Dylan Huw. 

Patriarchaeth is a small independent feminist collective, run by student artists, activists and writers from Wales. Their work focuses on ensuring that the world of Welsh language literature and publishing is limitless, and that there are spaces upheld for new voices and challenging conversations. This is a radical and collaborative publication, taking on the form of a series of bilingual zines each with its own theme. Practising collective creativity as a mode to re-examine their relationship as young people to print, publishing and the arts is at the heart of the project. Patriarchaeth is interested in exploring themes of gender, sexuality and language from a feminist perspective. The group aims to discuss the role of the Welsh language within meaningful and current political discourse. Their feminist work is in solidarity with and committed to intersectionality, trans-inclusivity, abolitionism and anti-racism through prioritising mutual care and solidarity. Dedicated to liberatory pedagogy, Patriarchaeth’s ethos consists of community, justice and joy. 

Monica Sjöö was a visionary artist, eco feminist, writer, grass roots activist and an early pioneer of the Goddess movement. She was a tireless researcher of ancient matriarchal cultures, passionate about recovering what she saw as the suppressed history of women. In addition to her drawings, paintings, and prints, Sjöö was the author and illustrator of three books, a contributor to numerous journals and magazines and was also a prolific letter writer and networker. Images of her work have featured on various book covers, used to illustrate posters and audio tape covers and been included in diaries, magazines, journals and articles all over the world.

With support from Arts Council of Wales National Lottery Fund & Artist Stabilisation Fund, and the Kone Foundation.