The latest edition of Civilization: The Way We Live Now photography exhibition will one show at Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée (Mucem) in Marseille, France from February 24 – June 28 2021. See website for updated opening hours and programming. I have several works included in the show.
‘Stonehenge’ (2020) is the 51st flyingleaps poster since the day of the UK/EU ref. back in 2016. The ‘Welcome to Little Britain’ photograph mimicking official Visit Britain government tourist posters chimes with the end of a chapter in our recent political history: ‘Visit the wonders of Stonehenge and experience a post-Brexit Britain, cut off from Europe and enamoured of its own insularity.’ So, what’s to be done? What’s the way forward?
The posters will be visible on the streets of London, Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Brighton between now and the end of January 2021.
Limited edition blue backed version of this street poster (numbered and signed on the reverse) is available to purchase via Flyingleaps here: https://www.flyingleaps.co.uk/product/stonehenge-2020/
The Brexshit Machine will be exhibited at The Container, Tokyo, Japan from 23 December – 7 March 2021 as part of the ‘Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit’ international exhibition.
“With days before the official separation of the UK from the EU, there is no more timely occasion to present Simon Roberts’s Brexshit Machine in the confined space of The Container. Radiating monotonous “Brexit terms” in green LED letters, all bearing the prefix Brex-, as became ubiquitous in the UK since the decision to separate in 2016, to share the anxieties surrounding this moment of change. The work was initially created to mark 31 January 2020, the day that the UK’s membership of the European Union ended and the start of the “transition period”, and is reinstalled again, at The Container, symbolically at the end of this transition, still with many “brexieties”. The installation doesn’t only paint a portrait of a country during an identity crisis, but also of the discourse surrounding this moment of change.” Shai Ohayon, Curator, The Container gallery.
Download a press release here. And copies of the exhibition catalogue are available online here:
Complex States was created by Vassiliki Tzanakou (Director of ARTinTRA) and Catherine Harrington, and is a platform for critical engagements around Brexit by artists including Jeremy Deller, Jason Decaires-Taylor, Richard Littler, Stephane Graff, Michal Iwanowski, and Rita Duffy.
The exhibitions brings together a wide selection of media, from paintings and sculpture to videos and installations with the aim of shedding light on the ways artists have responded to Brexit, and the urgent topics of identity, migration, globalisation, social media, and ‘fake news’ that Brexit has provoked. Selected artworks will be exhibited individually at one of a variety of venues and locations, and all artworks in the show will be brought together on an online platform (www.complexstates.art) featuring cutting-edge augmented reality experiences made possible through our collaboration with the mixed reality specialist afca.
Image: The Celestials #009B_06_2020, 2020
I have two of my Celestials series included in the group show, Small is Beautiful XXXVIII at Flowers Gallery. Due to Covid restrictions, the exhibition is online and can be viewed until 10 January 2021 here: https://www.flowersgallery.com/exhibitions/505-small-is-beautiful-xxxviii/
Small is Beautiful was first established at Flowers Gallery in 1974, inviting selected contemporary artists working in any media to present works with a fixed economy of scale, each piece measuring no more than 7 x 9 inches, offering a rare opportunity to purchase smaller pieces by internationally recognised names and discover new talents.
Image: The Celestials #005A_06_2020, 2020
***Please check T.A.F website for opening hours due to Covid-19: https://www.facebook.com/tafTheArtFoundation/ *****
My Brexit Lexicon video work will be exhibited at The Art Foundation Athens (T.A.F) from 28 October to 31 December 2020, as part of the Complex States: Art in the Years of Brexit international exhibition.
Complex States arrives as a timely and urgent response to both the divisive events of “Brexit” and the “Covid-19” pandemic; and featuring over 30 artists, multiple venues worldwide and a cutting edge online AR platform. As an exhibition that traverses nations, as well as the physical and virtual, Complex States hopes to offer a platform for renewed trans-national dialogue, collaboration and cultural exchange.
Curated by Vassiliki Tzanakou (Director of ARTinTRA) and Catherine Harrington, “Complex States” platforms critical engagements with Brexit by artists including Jeremy Deller, Jason Decaires-Taylor, Richard Littler, Stephane Graff, Michal Iwanowski, and Rita Duffy. The exhibition brings together a wide selection of media, from paintings and sculpture to videos and installations with the aim of shedding light on the ways artists have responded to Brexit, and the urgent topics of identity, migration, globalisation, social media, and ‘fake news’ that Brexit has provoked. Selected artworks will be exhibited individually at one of a variety of venues and locations, and all artworks in the show will be brought together on an online platform (www.complexstates.art) featuring cutting-edge augmented reality experiences made possible through our collaboration with the mixed reality specialist afca.
A new series of work made during the Covid-19 lockdown and released today on Flowers Gallery’s online Viewing Room.
The Celestials are a series of cyanotypes made using negatives of pictures I’d taken from plane windows during my work expeditions over the preceding years, partly because they had immediately become an estranged perspective and partly because the spectre of climate change was dominating my thoughts, and much of the media coverage I was seeing. Satellite images released by NASA and the European Space Agency showed a dramatic drop in nitrogen dioxide emissions during lockdown; the skies were clearer, bluer, the earth was breathing again and like many people, I saw this as a sign of hope and of the changes we desperately need to make.
Guest curators include:
Melanie Chambliss, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of African American History
Joshua A. Fisher, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Immersive Media, Interactive Arts and media
Joan Giroux, Professor, Art and Art History Department
Ames Hawkins, Ph.D., Professor of English and Creative Writing
Raquel L. Monroe, Associate Professor of Dance
Onur Öztürk, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Instruction, Art and Art History Department
Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, Associate Professor of Journalism
For more information about the exhibition, please visit the exhibition web page here.
Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph, is the first exhibition of Odette England’s book by the same name, which was published in the US in March 2020, marking the 40th year of Roland Barthes’ renowned work, Camera Lucida (La chambre claire). As part of this project, England invited more than 200 photography-based artists, writers, critics, curators, and historians from around the world to contribute an image or text that reflects on the instigator of Barthes’ semiotic musings—a photograph of his mother, Henriette, aged 5, that is never seen in the book, and is perhaps one of the most famous unseen photographs in the world.
My contribution is the above photograph: ‘The crowd in the hotel seem quite a jolly lot (1966)’ from the series, New Vedute.
Other invited artists include the likes of David Levi-Strauss, Alec Soth, Rosalind Fox Solomon, and Mona Kuhn as well as emerging and mid-career artists and critics including Stanley Wolukau Wanambwa, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Jess T. Dugan. From a diverse array of found photographs to intimate portraits of artists’ lives, this exhibition creates a multitude of platforms from which to consider the theoretical conversations about photography—not only what we see but how we see—that continue to shape our understanding of the medium today. In addition to coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Camera Lucida, this exhibition opens two seasons of programs celebrating the 40th anniversary of Houston Center for Photography.
More information here.
Facing Britain – British documentary photography since the 1960s
27 September – 8 November 2020
Museum Goch, Germany
Curated by Ralph Goertz and organised by the Institut für Kunstdokumentation und Szenografie, Facing Britain brings together for the first time almost all important representatives* of British documentary photography in a large overview exhibition outside the UK.
Long forgotten and only recently rediscovered positions such as John Myers, Tish Murtha or Peter Mitchell are shown alongside works by more well known photographers such as Martin Parr. The show thus offers a unique insight into the developments in the field of photography in the United Kingdom, which are interwoven with continental Europe and North America, but also independent of them. The documentary aspect proves to be one of the great strengths of British photography, which is capable of depicting a part of Europe in transition in a multifaceted, surprising and artistically original way. Facing Britain was therefore deliberately chosen as a temporal bracket for the period of Britain’s membership of the European Union and its forerunner between1963 till 2020. Particularly in view of the current Corona pandemic, the exhibition proves to be a break in the artistic development of an entire nation.
More information is available here
Image: Mr Jackson, 1974 © John Myers
AOP Photographer and one of the AOP’s board directors, Carol Allen-Storey hosts the fourth in this series and asks the panel, how has COVID-19 impacted your assignments and personal projects as a visual storyteller? I joined fellow photographers Jillian Edelstein, Liz Hingley and Gideon Mendel.
Watch here: https://vimeo.com/432625248
And all eleven of the Breakfast Club conversations can be viewed here: https://www.the-aop.org/what-s-on/videos