MOSTYN new exhibition season, opening Sat 9 October 2021 – “Jacqueline de Jong: The Ultimate Kiss” and “Anathemata” feat. Antonin Artaud, Martin Bladh, Pierre Guyotat, Paul-Alexandre Islas, David Jones, Sarah Kane, James Richards, Karolina Urbaniak
Jacqueline de Jong: The Ultimate Kiss
Opens 9 October 2021 9 October – 6 February 2022
Jacqueline de Jong is considered one of the crucial artistic figures of the post-war avant-garde. This exhibition is the first institutional solo presentation of her work in the UK. Throughout her career spanning half a century, de Jong has developed a unique painterly practice. Expressive in style, her work exhibits uninhibited eroticism, violence and humour. In parallel to her work as a painter, she was editor of The Situationist Times (1962-1967) and a member of the Situationist International during her early years in Paris in the 1960s.
Jacqueline de Jong was born in 1939 in Hengelo, The Netherlands. She lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The Ultimate Kiss is curated by Juliette Desorgues (Curator of Visual Arts, MOSTYN) and organised in collaboration with WIELS, Brussels where the exhibition was presented by Devrim Bayar (Curator, WIELS) and Xander Karskens (Director, De Ateliers) (May 1 – August 15, 2021). The exhibition will travel to the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany in 2022.
The exhibition is kindly supported by: The Mondriaan Fund, The Dutch Embassy, London, The Tyrer Charitable Trust, Dürst Britt & Mayhew, Gallery, The Hague and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.
An exhibition catalogue Jacqueline de Jong: The Ultimate Kiss, featuring texts by Devrim Bayar, Juliette Desorgues, Alison Gingeras, Xander Karskens and Niña Weijers, and published by Fonds Mercator, is available to purchase from the MOSTYN Shop or is available to order online.
Anathemata
Opens 9 October 2021 9 October – 6 February 2022
Antonin Artaud, Martin Bladh, Pierre Guyotat, Paul-Alexandre Islas, David Jones, Sarah Kane, James Richards, Karolina Urbaniak
Curated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou
Anathemata is a display that interrogates the tradition of epic poetry within a tetrad of 20th century avant-garde artists; David Jones, Antonin Artaud, Sarah Kane and Pierre Guyotat. These four artists are presented alongside contemporary artists Martin Bladh, Paul-Alexandre Islas, James Richards and Karolina Urbaniak through a display of manuscripts, drawings and videos.
The exhibition title is borrowed from David Jones’s eponymous poem published in 1952. A British poet and artist of Welsh descent, Jones is considered a leading figure within modernist poetry along with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. His poem, The Anathemata, investigates the importance of mythology within the history of humanity from a modernist perspective. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War and interweaving Welsh and English late medieval sources, it defends the importance of epic narratives, fables and myths against the desacralising effect of modernism. Considered Jones’ seminal work, The Anathemata narrates the thought processes of a cambrophile over the span of roughly seven seconds at an English Catholic Mass. Using Old, Middle and Early-Modern English, Welsh, and Latin, The Anathemata questions the importance of past mythology within human history – from the Iron Age in Cornwall and Tudor London to Penda’s Mercia and the Welsh “Otherworld” – in a highly allusive and nonlinear fashion. In this text, Jones also stresses the importance of the artist as an inventor and bearer of myths.
Antonin Artaud is a French artist considered one of the major figures of early 20th century avant-garde. His texts revolve around transcendence, mysticism, drugs, and extreme corporeal experiment. Like Jones, a large part of Artaud’s writing practice challenged and gathered different languages (French, Latin, Arabic), myths and temporalities (from Ancient Greek to Aztec and Early Christian civilisations). Both were concerned with the idea of the impending apocalypse. In his Letters from Ireland which he wrote while in exile in Dublin, he details an imagined forthcoming apocalypse, and plans his own role within it as « the revealed one ». Also on display are several of his magic spells, intended to curse his enemies and to protect his friends from Paris’ forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance at the Deux Magots café, an important meeting point for artists and writers in Paris in the post-war era. Artaud’s depictions of the human body as dismembered, surrounded by flying nails, translated the agonies of his physical as well as psychical life. Indeed, between June 1943 and 1944, Artaud was subjected several times to electroshock therapy in Rodez (France). Cast aside from his community and finishing his life in an asylum, Artaud was in a sense the subject of an anathemata. In Artaud’s work, the body experiences a form of disfiguration, it is “outside the figure of being”. Caught between life and death, the visible and the invisible, it is ultimately traced by the lines of forces drawn from the electromagnetic spectrum.
Pierre Guyotat was a preeminent French artist who died in 2020. Like David Jones, he was a poet interested in the epic format, the fragmentation of words, and the use of heterogeneous languages from various historical periods and geographies. Similarly to Jones, he was a soldier. He was enlisted in the Algerian war, an experience that inspired him to write Tomb for 500,000 Soldiers. Written in 1967, this book was censored and, in a way, anathematised. Composed of seven songs, it can be perceived as a cataclysmic incantation. Moreover, he is maybe one of the last mythical figures of the French literary scene that could be affiliated with poets such as the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud or Artaud. Guyotat works with a mutant language, inhabited by bodies, animals and ghosts. He incorporates and carries in each of his works the cursed part of humanity. His visions are dazzling, the body triturated, wounded, exalted, entangled, seen in its convulsive materiality. Words and bodies function as apparitions in constant metamorphosis.
Sarah Kane is a renowned British dramaturge whose radical conception of theater has been compared to Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. While her plays examine human atrocities such as cannibalism, sexual violence and war abjections, her mise en scène is devoid of any affectation. Her subjects are stripped to the bone, laid bare like a cadaver. Her first play, Blasted, which opened at the Royal Court Theater Upstairs on 12th January 1995, presents a brutal vision of war-torn society through a series of violent acts. The title could also echo the avant-garde poetry magazine founded by Wyndham Lewis, Blast, which presented ideas about art that are close to those of Sarah Kane: injecting reality directly into people’s heart. Like David Jones, she considered history as a palimpsest of myths and rituals that could be found in one of the most popular epic spectacles of her time, football. She saw in the matches played by Manchester United the representation of a myth in which the Gods fought for possession of the sun.
Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak are artists, photographers, multimedia players and founders of the publishing house Infinity Land Press. Along with Stephen Barber, they have participated in the dissemination of authors such as Antonin Artaud within the British cultural scene through their work as publishers. Established in 2013, Infinity Land Press is self-described as a “realm deeply steeped in pathological obsessions, extreme desires, and private aesthetic visions”. For the exhibition, they will notably present On The New Revelations of Being, a video based on Antonin Artaud’s apocalyptic manifesto from 1937. It envisions the end of the world and the death of God through a series of cataclysmic occurrences of Artaudian cruelty.
Artist James Richards is known for working across moving image, sound and installation. A newly commissioned work, Phrasing, based on precedent research and developed through 80 slides, is exhibited for the first time as part of the display. Cutting and recombining images from various sources such as radiographies, comics, and medieval engraving, he digs into what could be called a modern epic. His use of X-Rays acts as an inner search, an opening of bodies and objects, an effraction of envelopes that deals with the secret of interiority. In that sense, his quest finds echoes in the introspective voices of Jones, Artaud, Guyotat and Kane and becomes a receptacle for the tumults and hubbubs of the world.
Finally, Paul-Alexandre Islas, is an artist, musician and Artaud’s reader who notably questions the violent dimension of art, its personal cost and the legitimacy of the people who allow themselves to practice it. Similarly to Artaud, Islas doesn’t have superstition about the already written poetry. If poetry is already written, let it be destroyed.
From Jones’ lecture of Arthurian legends to Islas’ contemporary incantations, the exhibition Anathemata tries through myths, violence, desire, war, and the superhuman devotions that are found in the works presented, to bring forth a spectacle capable of stirring up the forces that are boiling within them.
Photo: Martin Bladh, After Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson, 1636, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.
MOSTYN new exhibition season: Tarek Lakhrissi and Mobile Feminist Library
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.
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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