Kings Commissions, will be a series of one-off, mobile projects that will manifest in a range of forms, whether that be web based presentations, performances, public outcomes or whatever artists can imagine. The commissions signal a new stage in KINGS history and continues our ongoing engagement with, and support of emerging artists.
War Mixtape, Katayoun Javan
23 December 2020 – 30 January
War Mixtape is a video collage about life in Iran during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. The video is comprised of a mish-mash of images that elicit feelings of nostalgia, pain, humour and sarcasm through a seeming clash of imagery drawn from a context of war and 80s pop culture. View War Mixtape here
Collectables, Ezz Monem
15 January – 19 February 2021
I have been thinking about abandoned objects in the street, and how each found object creates a lineage of ownership, linking different individuals together in a unique narrative. With this project, I enter the space between owners, interrupting the object’s path and the different contexts it moves through in an effort to capture the stories that are quietly narrated by found objects.
In the process, I make multiple transformations from found object to photographic print and back into found object again. First, I locate an object in the street that might be collected. Rather than removing it, I take a photograph of it in its location. After multiple rephotographing and processing, I print the photograph in the darkroom in a limited edition and frame it at home. Afterwards, I return this representation to the object’s original location. Written on the back, instructions ask the finder to take a photo of the framed portrait in its new domestic context and send it to me. The returned image of the collected artwork (in a context determined by its ‘collector’) gives evidence of a collaborative process between artist and collector.
}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{, Daniel R Marks and Mohamed Chamas
12 February – 26 March 2021
}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{ is an accumulation of cross-modal collaboration, sedimented to four streams of faux video-game “Let’s Play” footage. The videos are loosely bound by the archaic biopsychology of the “four humours” (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) through which we navigate with a tangential poesis.
A symbology hardens like stomach stones in the convolutions of this navigation, re-scripting inter-facial gameplay perspectives and allowing for the perforation of an anonymous and ruined game-logic.
A networked subjectivity of panoptic dissonance here bleeds-out the clotting of agency, and recurrent cues of gamification choreograph the blooming of our “protagonist”: a feedback loop of psychogeographical self-intervention.