RECKONING: Walking Tour & Artists' Talk - Exodus Crooks & Titaness
Sunday 17 September, 2-5pm
With ICF @ Block 336 and San Mei Gallery
International Curators Forum (ICF) and San Mei Gallery are excited to announce a collaborative event bringing together our September exhibitions. The event will be a Sunday afternoon gathering, featuring a walking tour between both exhibitions in Brixton and an artists' talk, accompanied by food, drinks and music.
Event Schedule:
Meet at 2pm at San Mei Gallery and end at Block336 ; see Eventbrite Agenda for full details
For this conversation, Exodus, Maria and Tiffany will reflect on their respective exhibitions and practices, and explore threads of connection and shared themes between their projects, such as collaboration, vulnerability, symbolism and plant life.
About the Exhibitions:
Epiphany (Temporaire)
An exhibition by Exodus Crooks curated by Orphée Kashala at ICF @ Block 336 presented by ICF and Ort Gallery (26 August - 17 September)
Exodus Crooks is a British-Jamaican multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer whose practice centres the relationship with self. Observing the results of fractious domesticity, despair and passion, their art tends to appear as questions of self-actualisation and the role that religion & spirituality play in that journey to enlightenment. Based between the Midlands and North Jamaica, their art exists alongside their educational role.
Crooks’ work for this exhibition includes sculpture, film, text, and sculptural installation. They are invested in a process of carving out (sometimes literally) dialogues and bringing thoughts to the surface, from the layers of history, heritage and culture around them. In this interrogation of domestic and familiar surfaces, Exodus is investigating the embodiment and repository of memories, histories and traditions, inherited, stored and transferred through time and shared space. A succession of profound experiences converge within the exhibition to form an allegory of personal stories of love, loss and pain.
The exhibition is curated by Orphée Kashala. In developing this exhibition together, Orphée and Exodus have been in regular conversation for 12 months. The show stems from Ort Gallery and ICF’s Emergence(y) project for emerging curators, which Orphée was selected to participate in in 2021. As part of the project, Orphée undertook a residency at Ort Gallery in Birmingham to focus on his curatorial research and development. This residency coincided with Exodus’ DYCP (Develop Your Creative Practice awarded by Arts Council England) research in Jamaica. Together, they explored the themes of epiphany, temporariness, displacement, home, heritage, tradition, imagination, diaspora, creativity, honesty, spirituality, and self-determination.
Love is a state of mind
An exhibition by Titaness aka Maria Joranko & Tiffany Wellington at San Mei Gallery (8 September - 4 November 2023)
Titaness is an artist duo comprised of Maria Joranko and Tiffany Wellington. Their collective interdisciplinary practice is shaped by their dual interests in memory, opacity, and love, explored through storytelling, sculpture, sound, and performance. Infusing their personal experiences and lineages with localised and diasporic viewpoints, they explore the potentialities of storytelling to weave alternate worlds.
At San Mei Gallery, Titaness presents a new sound and sculptural installation based on the legendary ballad of Tam Lin from the Scottish Borders, where the character of Tam Lin is rescued by their true love from the Queen of the Faeries. Drawing on traditions of folklore, oral history and nightclub performance, Titaness offer a queering on this tale in a mythic reimagining of the story of Tam Lin through a diasporic lens.
At the centre of the exhibition, a co-authored story emanates, in a five-channel sound installation, from a series of five sword-like sculptures, with each sword representing a character within Titaness’ narrative. The artists turn to the sword as symbolic objects of protection, which in the heraldic world of the mediaeval period were often treated as iconographic extensions of their bearer. Exploring the possibilities of queer collaboration, the installation imagines the means of protection and gathering through which queer lives might be spoken.