Author: bdht

The Poetry of Place

The Poetry of Place

An exhibition in Studio 3 Gallery, Jarman Building, School of Arts, University of Kent, 19 February – 5 April 2024, Monday-Friday 10.00-16.00. FREE ENTRY.

Aran Diary

Film by MAURIZIO CINQUEGRANI

The Sacrilege of Bridges

Photographs by JUNKO THERESA MIKURIYA

Texts by BEN THOMAS

Studio 3 Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to the poetic associations linked to specific places. Maurizio Cinquegrani’s film Aran Diary explores the Aran Islands of Inishmore (Inis Mór) and Inishmaan (Inis Meáin), while The Sacrilege of Bridges, a text and image piece by Junko Theresa Mikuriya and Ben Thomas, investigates locations in London linked to the life of the poet and artist William Blake.

The Sacrilege of Bridges was previously exhibited at the Italian Cultural Institute in London during November 2023 as part of the exhibition Poetry & Magic. Further information and an interview with artist Junko Theresa Mikuriya can be found here.

Maurizio Cinquegrani writes of his film:

I filmed Aran Diary in the spring of 2023 while exploring the Aran Islands of Inishmore (Inis Mór) and Inishmaan (Inis Meáin). During a previous stay in Inishmore in the summer of 2022 I began writing a script combining my own experience of the islands (which started in 1998 during an Interrail trip across Europe), the stories from the Arans I have read or seen in film, and a fictional framework based on a character who would have eventually been named Aloysius (from one of James Joyce’s middle names). Aran Diary is the result of this process and is inspired by the essayistic practices of filmmakers like Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, and Patrick Keiller.

The script is reflection on my time in the Aran Islands and the words of various writers who have visited the islands. The list includes James Joyce (The Dead), John Millington Synge (Riders to the Sea and The Aran Islands), Martin McDonagh (The Cripple of Inishmaan), Tim Robinson (Stones of Aran), Seamus Heaney (Lovers on Aran), Liam O’Flaherty, Arthur Symon, and Máirtín Ó Direáin. My film also looks back at Robert Flaherty’s docudramas Man of Aran and A Night of Storytelling, and it uses these films to reflect on the relationship between fiction, myth and reality in the extraordinary landscape of the Aran Islands.

Aran Diary was filmed at multiple locations in Inishmore and Inishmaan, including Dun Aengus, the Wormhole, Dun Conor, the Seven Churches, Dun Doocaher, and Kilmurvey Beach. I have used a hand-held camera and avoided any kind of camera movement. These choices are dictated by the fictional framework of the film, a story which sees Aloysius visiting the islands in the process of scouting for locations in view of a fictitious film which will never be completed. My footage is juxtaposed to a voice-over narration read by actor and former Film student at Kent, Felix A. Morgan; I have also created a soundscape based on waves, wind, birds, dolphins, steps, and other sounds I associate with my experience of the islands. The seven segments of the film are introduced by the sound of knitting combined with individual images of the seven knots associated with the Aran textile tradition. The result is a film ultimately concerned with the meaning of place and space, with memory and with the passing of time; these themes emerge from an essayistic engagement with landscape and with the ruins, the stones, and the cliffs of the Aran Islands.

Remember by Ana Maria Pacheco

Ana Maria Pacheco, Remember

Studio 3 Gallery is delighted to host Ana Maria Pacheco’s Remember (2022) during Autumn Term 2023. The exhibition is open to the public Monday – Friday, 10am – 4pm, in the Jarman Building, until 15 December. The private view, to which all are welcome, will be on Thursday 19 October at 6pm.

According to the art critic David Elliot:

Remember, Pacheco’s largest, most colourful, and most complicated installation to date, radiates a previously understated sensuality. Each of its strongly variegated groups of figures seems connected yet, confined in their own worlds, they also appear to exist outside them, on another plane. Although the title reflects the artist’s own remembrance, its central focus is a wider celebration of the energy, vitality, and cyclical nature of life against a continuing hubbub of violence, discord, and kindness. No old people are figured here and out if its twenty characters, three of them are young children.

As if in a film set, different scenes overlap and flash before the eye: young families huddle together, a group of gigantic young thugs are locked in a battle and, as if they hail from another world or time, a “chorus” of young women in white robes, with another veiled in blue, stand to one side, while yet another engages with a focal scene that is either just beginning to unfold or about to reach its climax: steadied by two “sympathisers”, a deathly-pale young man is either being helped down from, or being hoisted up onto a scaffold. This thinly-stretched matrix of a possible crucifixion provokes for the viewer an inevitable dilemma: should one grieve, rejoice – or do nothing? The observer is offered a vital choice: a red pill that could lead to life, it seems, or the blue one, a fast track to oblivion.

If only we could remember![1]

An interview with the artist talking at the Galway International Arts Festival is available here.

[1] This refers to a scene from the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which rebel leader Morpheus offers Neo, the protagonist, a choice between an uncertain future, living the often harsh truth of reality [the red pill] or the possibility of continuing to live in a beautiful, simulated prison, confined by ignorance.

Le Piazze [In]visibili – Invisible Squares

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Le Piazze [In]visibili – Invisible Squares

 

Curated by Marco Delogu

 

Studio 3 Gallery, Jarman Building, University of Kent

 

6 – 17 December 2021 and 17 January – 18 February, 10am – 5pm. Free entrance.

 

Private View: Friday 10th December 5-7pm.

 

When the first lockdown hit Italy in the Spring of 2020 the country’s famous piazze, the bustling squares at the heart of its civilisation, fell eerily silent. Empty of the usual crowds, the piazzas became – ‘perhaps for the first time in our lives’, writes curator Marco Delogu in the exhibition catalogue – ‘imaginary places “seen” like this previously only by the great artists and the minds who designed, planned, built and adorned them’. Delogu reacted to this extraordinary situation by coordinating a team of forty photographers and writers to document and respond to the nation’s temporarily unreal squares. The project involved a complex challenge as during lockdown the photographers could only go outside alone and ‘subject to explaining the reason to the relevant authorities’ while ‘for many writers it was difficult to achieve the necessary concentration’. The writers and photographers – ‘piazza partners’ – worked both in dialogue and independently of each other yet for each piazza ‘the results coincided surprisingly’.

 

The title of the exhibition Le Piazze [In]visibili (Invisible Squares) alludes to Italo Calvino’s famous novel Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities). While he was Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London, Delogu had met the architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, visiting him in his house in Hampstead where he was shown a first edition of Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) with a dedication acknowledging the inspiration of Rykwert’s The Idea of a Town(1963). Rykwert has contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue pointing out that while lockdown impoverished Italy’s piazzas it also provided a rare opportunity to ‘see their complex geometries, their bare bones, and therefore their very structure’.

 

The exhibition is an initiative of Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and is shown at the University of Kent thanks to the generosity of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s Minster of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, writes of the subject of the exhibition that ‘we are aware that we are facing great challenges, but nonetheless believe that we have the ability to rise to them and draw the impetus needed to overcome them from our sights firmly set on the future’.

 

Students taking Kent’s MA Curating have worked to adapt the exhibition for installation in Studio 3 Gallery.

Fascinating Fears – virtual exhibition until 10 August 2021

 

An online exhibition of art prints curated by undergraduate art history students at the University of Kent’s School of Arts will take place from 10 May to 10 August 2021.

Entitled Fascinating Fears (trigger warning: some artworks display scenes of violence and sexual violence; we do not recommend the exhibition to children), the virtual exhibition will feature works by artists such as the Old Masters Albrecht Dürer, Salvator Rosa, and Francisco Goya; modern artists like Salvador Dali and Michael Ayrton; great Japanese masters like Katsushika Hokusai;
and the contemporary artists Ana Maria Pacheco, Marcelle Hanselaar, Marcus Rees Roberts, and Jake and Dinos Chapman.

The exhibition addresses four sub-themes:

‘Nightmares Creatures’, which explores how monsters have personified various fears, and induce the uncanny feeling of horror

‘Face of Fears’, which displays the facial and bodily expression of human fears and explores the various shades of this feeling, allowing for an audience to see fear expressed in others

‘Japanese horrors’, exhibiting the ghosts and natural forces that have haunted Japan for centuries, becoming an essential part of its cultural folklore.

‘Female Fears’, which explores violence against women and the fear of their sexuality in both historical and contemporary prints, allowing the viewer to reflect upon the differences provoked by gender and social inequalities and of who is afraid, and of what.

Fascinating Fears is the result of the ‘Print Collecting and Curating’ module in Art History. Introduced in 2006, this module gives students the opportunity both to curate a museum-quality exhibition of their design and to acquire prints for the Kent Print Exhibition. This is the 9th exhibition resulting from this course.

For the exhibition students interviewed leading contemporary artists Marcelle Hanselaar and Marcus Rees Roberts, whose works are included, and the expert on Japanese prints Ellis Tinios, who taught a class for the module.

Dr Ben Thomas, convenor of the module, said: ‘Fear is a feeling we all share and understand, perhaps particularly during the current pandemic. The students have curated an exhibition that explores this fundamental human emotion, and how it has been expressed through art in different times and cultures. They have adapted brilliantly to the constraints of lockdown in devising this online exhibition.’

You can follow Fascinating Fears on Instagram.

Are You Local? opening times

 

Are You Local? is now open to the public (under Covid restrictions). The opening times are:

 

Wednesday 16 June, 11am – 2pm

Friday 18 June, 11am – 2pm

Monday 21 June, 11am – 2pm

Wednesday 23 June, 11am – 2pm

Friday 25 June, 11am – 2pm

Monday 28 June, 11am – 2pm

Wednesday 30 June, 11am – 2pm

Friday 2 July, 11am – 2pm

 

Please pre-book your visit by emailing: ac2030@kent.ac.uk or mib23@kent.ac.uk

 

Access to the exhibition is via the double doors at the rear of Studio 3 Gallery. You must wear a mask, sanitise your hands, and scan the QR code on entry into the NHS track and trace app.