Ann Coxon, Curator of International Art at Tate Modern is joined by contemporary visual artists Katarzyna Perlak, Rebecca Bellantoni and Raisa Kabir for a discussion which explores how crafts can be used to revisit and reimagine history from contemporary diasporic, feminist and queer perspectives, acting as a tool for archiving past and present historic moments, intimacy, connection and care.
Jerwood Arts presented this event alongside exhibition Survey II, as part of the Tender Crafts programme to coincide with London Craft Week 2021. Survey II continues at Jerwood Space in London until 11 December, and is a major touring exhibition that presents new commissions by ten of the most outstanding early-career artists in the UK. Find out more…
About the speakers
Ann Coxon is Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. Having always questioned the hierarchy of craft and art, Ann has a specialist interest in textile art. She has curated numerous exhibitions and collection displays at Tate Modern, including galleries of works by Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, Janet Cardiff, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Phyllida Barlow, Mona Hatoum; and thematic displays, including ‘Beyond Craft’ focusing on American Fiber Art from the 1960s and 1970s. Ann has also curated a number of important temporary exhibitions, including most recently the celebrated retrospectives of Dorothea Tanning and Anni Albers.
Katarzyna Perlak works in moving image, performance, sound, textiles and installation. Her work is driven by politics and feelings, examining queer subjectivities, migration and the potentiality of affect as a tool for registering and archiving both present, continuous and past historical moments.
Katarzyna is a Polish born artist, based in London. Her background is in Philosophy, which she studied in Poland, and Fine Art Media which she studied at Camberwell College of Arts (2008) and Slade School of Fine Art (2017). Her films have been shown widely at film festivals across Europe and she was part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2017. She has exhibited internationally, including: Young Curators New Ideas V, Detroit Art Week, Detroit, I was, but just awake, Art Night, London (2019); Tighten Throat and Butterflies, Metal, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018); A Day of Learning, Diaspora Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice (2017) and Remote Intimacies, Leslie – Lohman Museum of Arts, New York & ONE Archives, Los Angeles, (2021). katarzynaperlak.com
Rebecca Bellantoni is an artist based in London. Bellantoni mines everyday occurrences and abstracts them. Investigating, through the lens of metaphysics, spirit/energy, religion and the aesthetics of them. Troubling the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’; how might these removed borders offer portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought/action. Black geographies and their attendant realities are a research element. Her practice is wide ranging and utilises video, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, sculpture, writing and sound-text.
Recent works and projects have been shown with Adelaide Bannerman at PUBLICs, Helsinki, Rowdy SS at Tate, Block Universe and Palais de Tokyo, Nora-Swantje Almes at Ravens Row, Languid Hands at Den Stroon Haag, The Hague and Present Futures at The Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths. rebeccabellantoni.com
Raisa Kabir is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver based in London. Kabir utilises woven text/textiles, sound, video and performance in her work to materialise concepts concerning the cultural politics of cloth, labour and embodied geographies. Her (un)weaving performances comment on power, production, disability and the queer brown body as a living archive of collective trauma.
She has exhibited work internationally at The Whitworth, The Tetley, Raven Row, Textile Arts Center NYC, The Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Glasgow International and the Ford Foundation Gallery NYC. lids-sewn-shut.typepad.com
