Expanded Bodies
“If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom. In our bodies that we accept or end our slavery.” Ursula Le Guin (Four Ways to Forgiveness, 1995) Outer space, Earth, land, home, body.
Expanded Bodies explores corporeality and its relation to the environments we inhabit, through play, posthuman worldbuilding, relationships to home, land, pain and freedom.
It constructs a material landscape of ceramics, sound, painting, installation, and video, producing alternative encounters with the environment to suggest a different relationship to our bodies, and the notion of the self.
BIOS
*Maia Lonergan*
Maia is exploring the profound impact of toys and play on the socialisation of children through animation and sculpture. She wants to dissect societal biases and challenge these preconceived notions, particularly within the realm of ADHD. I want to unravel the boxes imposed on individuals with different brain types, offering a unique perspective on the intersection of neurodiversity, and the power of play that places a child in a role as creator. Drawing inspiration from dreams and nightmares, as well as from children’s toys and stories. Pondering on the climate crisis and the need for neurodiverse ways of thinking and empathy when uniting in the face of planetary destruction.
Instagram @maimaielyy
*Anna Usadi*
Through imaginings of speculative futures, Anna Usadi’s work aims to prompt reflection on our reality. Deeply concerned with human-induced ecological and geological trauma, her practice interrogates ideas such as units of time, progress and gender as social constructs, and explores their effects on people and the planet. In this exhibition, Usadi employs sculpture, moving image and sound to imagine how a decentralised and disembodied artificial intelligence might question notions of the body and the individual.
Instagram - @annausadi
*Ana Carolina Vidal Alves *
Anna is a Brazilian visual artist, educator and researcher whose central axes are race and gender, Afro-Atlantic connections and Brazilian popular cultures. She mostly works in oil paint, ceramics and installation constructing a language that orbits on female regeneration, identity, dysmorphia, violence, trauma and demarcations of the body’s limits. In the present work, Vidalinvestigates identity and seeks to record and create links between collective, family and individual memories on spiritual heritage, legacy and fertility.
*Gabriela Lehmann Rodriguez*
Through animation, comics, manga, and other forms of narrative art, Gabriela Lehmann Rodriguez explores the formulation of identity and memory through satirical, comedic, and provocative approaches. Utilizing illustration and video in this exhibition, she seeks to critique marketing and social bias, visibility, memory, and identity construction through visual storytelling, character creation, and merchandising.
Instagram - @aximilya
*Evolene Xiaohua*
Evolene is a middle-aged artist and a wanderer who has uprooted herself twice: first from China, then from the USA to the UK. As a life-long outsider, her work looks at human otherness, alienation and the possibility of integration to a unified Bio-universe. Her works are marked by an ambiguous, dichotomous and poetic style as a result of being sensitive and curious to the materials she engages with. She works with oil, acrylic, watercolor, charcoal, leather, steel, printmaking and words. Her art practice involved an interplay between sculpture and painting. She introduces abstract and expressive elements into sculpture and then transforms structural elements into painting. She is developing her own metaphysical symbols and text to shed light on the postmodern concern and challeng: ‘the unrepresentable.”
Instagram: evolene9
*Yujin Ha*
Yujin aims to liberate women's bodies from the patriarchal gaze through a feminist lens, navigating between subject and object, passivity and activity, in the realms of space and body. Her work continuously questions how women, living as 'housewives' within the domestic space, experience oppression and liberation, drawing from her upbringing in Korean society and research on her family and mother. Through the integration of Eastern philosophy and Korean shamanistic elements, Yujin represents the overlapping realities and memories of herself and her mother, creating fictional events in physical spaces using installation, sculpture, photography, digital collage, and sound.
Instagram- @uyzynh
* Kristianna Betta*
Kristianna is interested in the liberation of the female form. Her paintings explores female nudity paying attention to themes of beauty, desire and essence. Beta’s art provides a critique of female objectification in art. Her paintings make commentary (sometimes through sarcasm) on notions of the male gaze, putting into questions ideals of beauty.
Instagram: @Kris_Betta_
*Leena Al-Nasser*
Leena’s art is about awakening the lost Queendom of her planet and rewatering it anew. She is interested in excavating sacred lost and buried material and bringing it to life. Her work plays with what is hidden and what is revealed and can involve participatory elements that require both time and vulnerability from the viewer. Some layers are available to all viewers, but other layers are only available to ones who are willing to give back. She uses writing, painting, collage, installation, and performance.
@Mnzlee
*Louisa*
Louisa is an intermodal artist who uses performative sound assemblages, in real time, as a response to an increasingly digital world. Vibration, Sound and Voice are set alongside home-made, organic, repurposed materials and unique substrates to create immersive cave like soundscapes and echo chambers. These ephemeral spaces are inhabited by incorporeal beings and colourful rhizomatic creatures. Her current work titled “The Ocarina of Thyme/Tears of the Kingdom,” is a graphic score guiding the viewer-avatar through sound, language and story to a fictional biosphere where hidden and displaced voices will ultimately be revealed.