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I and I

Thursday 28 Nov | 6.30–8.30pm

An event to accompany Deborah Findlater’s exhibition Sacred Space with contributions from Derica Shields who will be in conversation with Findlater, followed by Saint Lov’ie reading excerpts from the zine Yam and Other Hard Food and a screening of Cycles, a film by Zeinabu irene Davis.

I and I expands on the themes & research behind the exhibition such as: how oneness manifests for Black Womxn, the balance between Western individualism & forms of communalism that are dependent on unequal labour and what it means to hold space for yourself internally & externally.

Cycles, Zeinabu irene Davis 1989 | 17 minutes. Rasheeda Allen is waiting for her period. Drawing on Caribbean folklore, this exuberant experimental drama uses animation and live action to discover a film language unique to African American women. The multilayered soundtrack combines a chorus of women’s voices with the music of Africa and the diaspora-including Miriam Makeba, acappella singers from Haiti and trumpetiste Clora Bryant. Cycles is screened with thanks to Women Make Movies

Bios:

Zeinabu Irene Davis is a director and producer who has received numerous awards for her work with film and video. Born in 1961 in Philadelphia, she received a M.A. in African Studies in 1985 at UCLA, where she also earned her M.F.A. in Film and Television production in 1989. She has received acclaim for her representation of the African American female perspective through a variety of works, which include documentaries, short narratives and experimental films. Works include A Period Piece (1991), A Powerful Thang (1991), Mother of a River (1995) and Compensation (1999) continued to garner her awards from numerous organizations and festivals, including the Gordan Parks Award for Best Director from the Independent Feature Project. Her latest project, Spirits of Rebellion (2011), is a documentary work-in-progress which gathers fellow L.A. Rebellion filmmakers and explores topics in African American film.

Derica Shields is a writer, researcher and programmer from London. Her work has appeared in the New Inquiry, Rookie, Girls Like Us, Live Art Almanac, Flash Art and more. She is the co-founder of The Future Weird, a (now defunct) screening and discussion series centered on experimental, world-unravelling films. As part of a 2017 Triple Canopy commission, she is developing a multi-format oral history project centering on black people’s accounts of the UK welfare state. She is also working on a book project commissioned by Hannah Black for a new Book Works series

Georgina Johnson, who also goes by Saint Lov’ie is an artist and polymath whose practise spans curation, direction (creative/art direction) and filmmaking. Her work primarily explores legacy, memory, identity and wellbeing. Johnson works between mediums fluidly, moulding and applying her vision through sound, film, photography, installation and other means; most notably completing artist commissions for The Photographers’ Gallery and Now Gallery (2017-2018). Poetry and prose feature largely in her printed works as means to explore memory and present contemporary ideals around blackness and black life. She explores language through these mediums, in its many forms, through observatory means and socio-political ideologies. Johnson’s work with note-worthy cultural organisations, including The V&A, British Council, National Museums Scotland and The Design Museum is an expansion of her practise and outworking of her community interests and commitment towards opening up the creative industries. This is supported through her creative platform The Laundry – which is concerned with engaging with the curious, visionary and creatively courageous. @Saint_Lovie @thelaundryarts

In 2018/19 as part of the Structures That Cooperate programme Cubitt began a conversation with W.A.G.E. around how Cubitt as an artist run cooperative can establish sustainable economic relationships with artists invited into the public programme.

A discussion around Cubitt’s position on paying artists’ fees was raised at the AGM held November 26th 2019. Members were asked to vote on a declaration and process going forward in relation to Cubitt’s commitment to transparency and democratic control and accountability for the fees paid to artists invited into the Public Programme.

Cubitt artists voted at the 2019 AGM agreeing to make a public statement visible on www.cubittartists.org.uk committing that going forward Cubitt's AGM will be used as an annual moment to declare and assess the fees paid to artists for all forms of labour in the Public Programme. This is a commitment to an active conversation of remuneration for cultural work.

From October 2018 Cubitt’s Public Programme committed to paying a minimum artist fee for exhibitions at £750, defining an artist’s fee from the work of W.A.G.E. as follows:

An Artist Fee is the expected remuneration for an artist’s temporary transactional relationship with an institution to provide content. An artist fee is not compensation for the labour or materials of making art and it is not intended as compensation for the content itself. Rather, it is for its provision.*

Time for research, the production of new work, workshop delivery, talks, events, screenings should be considered as separate transactional relationships.

Cubitt Artists voted to continue this commitment.

*https://wageforwork.com/certification

Now Open! Deborah Findlater | Sacred Space

15 Nov–15 Dec 2019

Preview: Thurs 14 Nov 2019, 6.30–8.30PM

Open: Wed–Sun 12–6PM

Aya Haidar | Out Of Service

Preview: Thurs 26 Sept 6.30pm

27 Sept–27 Oct 2019

Open: Wed–Sun 12–6PM

Out Of Service presents a new commission by London-based Lebanese artist Aya Haidar. New work has been developed over a 9-month period through conversations, workshops and time spent with groups, campaigns, community organisers and cultural workers all working with a focus on domestic and immaterial labour. —— bio: Aya Haidar is a London based Lebanese artist whose practice develops artworks through conversations around shared interests and concerns relating to home, diaspora, memory and imagination – often using embroidering, craft and collage. Past works have focussed on the recycling of found and disposable objects making works that explore loss, migration and memory, with a personal connection to the history of a region [the Middle East] explored through the histories contained within personal objects/belongings. Haidar re-uses such objects to re-create narratives, to explore memory relating to home, diaspora, memory and imagination, producing hand-embroidered interventions onto culturally and historically specific objects.

Workshops: July–September 2019

Public Presentation: Sat 7 Sept 2019, 5–7pm

Screening event co-presented with LUX: Wed 11 Sept 2019, 7–8.30pm

Write It Speak It Move It is a project devised by Rita Munus, a writing and events collective comprising of Sop and Charlotte Heather, both of whom live with chronic illness.

Rita Munus will host a series of workshops on writing, vocals, percussion and movement with an invited group of artists across July and August at Cubitt Gallery. Work will be collectively developed to ask how we understand our chronically ill bodies, amplifying words and sounds that need to be heard in relation to capacity, capitalism, institutions, loved ones and the public. The project will not be about generating definitive answers or theories, but to investigate similarities, differences and hidden parts.

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BIO:

Rita Munus are a collective that runs writing workshops and events with a focus on radical creative practice and process as a vehicle for topical discussion, exploration, play and catharsis. The collective is made up of writer Charlotte Heather and artist Sop and focuses predominantly on issues of chronic illness, queerness, otherness and capitalism, engaging with and prioritising participants who have direct experience with the themes.

The first series of workshops ILLTH looked specifically at chronic illness, the sick body and capitalism. The sick body is seen as ‘less than’ within a capitalist framework, because it cannot participate in production to a ‘satisfactory’ level. But the sick body is not ‘less than’. Focus on ‘getting better’ or ‘being well’ puts unnecessary force on the sick body to achieve something that for many chronically ill people is impossible. Often this actually makes the body more sick. Capitalism leads to over exertion – capitalism leads to chronic illness – illness struggles to fit into capitalism, thus the circular plot. There is a distinct parallel between ILLTH’s focus on process, not production, and the need for the sick body to be able to focus on just being, as opposed to the binaries of sick and well and ‘getting better’.

Future workshops will cover mental health, the pharmaceutical industry, the physical body and its movement, gender identity and sexual identities and behaviours, all in conversation with capitalism.

“The workshops let you write, but what you write is not for others consumption. You do not create a final product. You enter an ongoing series of discussions with each other on subjects which apply to the participants. You write something that you can do whatever you want with. You write because you have something to say, even if it is only to yourself. You write to play; with words, ideas, the world, yourself, others. You do not write to commodify your feelings, to conform to production, or to make yourself palatable to others. You do not write to be consumed, you write to experience writing.”

rita – to tear, scratch, write

munus – service performed for the community, duty, work

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Commissioned and supported by Unlimited, celebrating the work of disabled artists, with funding from Spirit of 2012.

Domestic Work is Work An exhibition of recent education projects and campaign work August 7–11 2019 Open Wed–Sun, 12–6pm Sun 11, 12–6pm: on the hour exhibition tours and join the afternoon workshop activities and campaign discussions

Domestic Work is Work is organised by The Voice of Domestic Workers and hosted by Cubitt. The exhibition will present the group’s recent film My Home is Not My Home a collectively produced arts project that emerged as a response to the exploitation, invisibility and marginality of migrant domestic workers due to their class, gender, race and UK immigration laws.

Since October 2018 The Voice of Domestic Workers have been a part of the current Structures That Cooperate programme at Cubitt. On a practical level the spaces at Cubitt have been made available to support the group’s ongoing work and collaborations with cultural workers, educators and activists. The sharing of space has also been the grounds for developing forms of solidarity and knowledge exchange in relation to work, education, precarity and collective organising.

Workshops, events and discussions have asked how strategies of art production and distribution can inform and support social movements related to labour and visibility – intending also to build new alliances that can propose strategies for continued collective working. This collaboration to align and support labour struggles across different sectors is in tandem to conversations with W.A.G.E. the Cubitt Cooperative and others to address models of cooperativity and resource distribution in the arts.

On the last day of this six-day presentation join members of VODW 12–6pm, for an ‘open studio’ format which will present hourly introductions to their work and the work on display and 2–4pm join a workshop with Barcelona based illustrator Abigail Tarraso who is supporting the production of a new campaign publication.

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A self-organised network and campaigning group calling for justice and rights for Britain’s sixteen thousand migrant domestic workers. The Voice of Domestic Workers provide educational and community activities for domestic workers – including English language lessons, drama and art classes, and employment advice, and mount rescues for domestic workers stuck with abusive employers. Their work seeks to end discrimination and protect migrant domestic workers living in the UK by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training, healthcare and legal advice.

www.thevoiceofdomesticworkers.com

Serena Lee: Second Tongues

14 June–14 July 2019

Let’s imagine the future of language;

Not simply the languages that we hear most often and take up the most space today, nor those that experts predict will survive and those that will not, but every single possible future for all languages that have ever existed, and for everyone to whom they belong, and those that come to belong.

Second Tongues is the title of a speculative fiction narrative developed by Toronto-based artist Serena Lee, developed collectively with others and exhibited in multiple parts for Cubitt’s ongoing Structures That Cooperate Programme.

The project departs from a premise where in the future, we all speak a second language not of our choosing. Second Tongues becomes a speculative fiction world-building framework for critically engaging with experiences of nationhood, kinship, market-driven globalisation as they relate to histories and practices of language. A proposition for reimagining futures decentered and reorganised.

Presented across video, installation and augmented reality, the exhibited elements of Second Tongues have developed through conversations with London-based language education organisations, migrant worker and newcomer community services, linguistic researchers and public audiences. In addition the artist has collaborated with Black Shuck, a London-based co-operative developing augmented reality layers for further speculation and translation.

The installation continues to use and adapt Clemence Seilles’ ongoing scenography for the Structures That Cooperate programme.

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Serena Lee is a Canadian artist whose practice stems from a fascination with polyphony – a musical term for multiple, simultaneous melodies – and its radical potential. Serena’s art work integrates a broad range of media: for example, current projects involve elements of VR, textile-based sculpture, public conversation, and tai chi. More broadly, she incorporates cinema, performance, voice, image and text, and references classical piano performance and musical theory.

Her work has been presented across Canada and internationally in Europe, the UK, the USA, Indonesia and China; she is a member of the feminist art collective, Read-in, based mainly in the Netherlands, which explores the embodied, situated, and political aspects of collective reading aloud. Serena also collaborates with artist Christina Battle as SHATTERED MOON ALLIANCE, to unpack narratives of time travel through a series of participatory workshops and transmedia publication. Serena holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL) and an Associate Diploma in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music (CA). She is an active member of the creative community in Toronto as an artist, educator, and in artist-run-centre governance. .http://www.serenalee.com/

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Ongoing and off-site collaborations include working with Clemence Seilles on the scenography of the gallery space, The Voice of Domestic Workers in residence, Schooling & Culture working at Arts and Media School Islington and research with W.A.G.E.

This is exhibition is supported by Canada House, Canada Council for the Arts, Arts Council England and Outset Contemporary Art Fund.

Ain Bailey And We’ll Always Be A Disco In the Glow of Love installation image.

Recycled foam floor by Clemence Seilles.

Photography Mark Blower.

Audio:

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