Collaboration is central to this exhibition;
between us, the artists, and the public.
Throughout the lead-up to the exhibition, several artists and collectives held collaborative workshops, inviting the public to develop some featured artworks.
Through these workshops, we created the space for participants to slow down, immerse their senses, and engage with the exhibition themes more deeply through working with thread, literally and figuratively.
Fikayo Adebajo & Duchamp and Sons
| 12 July 2023
How are you feeling now? What would be a perfect day for you? What do you need to feel close and connected to people? What’s one thing you learnt about yourself today?
There were some of the questions that members of Duchamp and Sons, Whitechapel Gallery's youth collective explored with one another at a recent workshop with photographer Fikayo Adebajo.
After conversation, eleven members of the Whitechapel Gallery’s youth collective worked together using string as a material and metaphor to create structures that speak of shared community: tying furniture, objects and themselves together to create structures of connection.
What if knitting, and other acts of creativity, are not just solitary pastimes?
Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner Collective led a wholesome collaborative knitting workshop promoting well-being and taught us how to knit individually and, most importantly, collectively.
Starting with a central shape that participants gathered around, they began knitting outwards. Yarns intertwined, and patches gradually connecting, a large blanket was created. The workshop was an opportunity to connect and converse over the shared process, and discuss the connective potentials of knitting and textiles making.
The finished Safety Blanket is hung and exhibited in the exhibition.
As a collective, we wanted to move away from a conventional idea of a publication and redefine what it is and how it is made.
Resonating with spoken word poet Kae Tempest’s suggestion that ‘connection is collaborative’, the workshop by Gut Feeling encouraged participants to come together and explore ways of combating alienation through embodied creativity in the form of collective reading, writing and making.
Each participant had a fabric square upon which they expressed their thoughts through writing, drawing, and collaging. We then stitched these pieces together, creating a collaborative publication with a handmade and DIY aesthetic, which is in sync with our collaborative and collective process in preparing the exhibition.
The publication is hung and exhibited in the exhibition.
Julia Dèng Hànzú and collaborator Kun Li will performed Con-Current: Tuning Intervals, at Borough Road Gallery.
The audience was treated to a stunning sonic experience, that left the audience feeling emotional.
The performance consisted of 6 segments, exploring different moods and roles between the two participants. The project incorporates Julia’s reflection upon growing up playing string instruments whilst being born in an only-child and single-mother family, and the connection between these two facts.
Starting in silence, the performers sat with entangled wires and began to express their feelings towards each other. As they collaboratively install the 'non site-specific musical instrument' and adopt new roles, a soundtrack starts to play. The strings are activated by Kun's body, in a series of dance moves that form a melody. The lights dim and a glowing red spotlight follows Julia's choreographic response as she scrunches the wires. The performance builds to a dramatic crescendo where the music cuts as she rips the strings off the wall with her body.
A short film of the performance is on display at the exhibition.
