The Protester – Sophie Molins

Exhibition runs 20th – 26th March 2012
Private view 22nd March
Film screening 26th March
Location: Gallery & Project Space

“1984” was not supposed to be an instruction manual.

This year is designated the UN Year of the Co-operative, and the theme for Davos is “Great Transformation”. Last years ‘The Time Person of the Year” was “The Protester”.

The people demanding change are the subject of Sophie Molins’ new exhibition at Great Western Studios. Since 2009 Molins has worked with Artists Project Earth (APE) a charity which funds groups and projects, which raise awareness about and mitigate climate change.

APE has supported and documented: Its float at Notting Hill Carnival; a film at the infamous Burning Man festival in Utah’s Black rock desert; its participation at the United Nations conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in 2009 and Durban 2011; activist groups such as Liberate Tate, which organized the Reverend Billy’s exorcism of BP at Tate modern: WE CAN at Climate Rush who also organized their children to dress up as endangered animals and visit their MP’s and a Suffragette Tea Party at Heathrow airport against the third runway; recording sessions in Mali for the new Rhythms del Mundo Africa album; and lastly the Occupy camp in London.

The images of these events are an intimate portrait of groups of people who want to change unsustainable systems and try out new ones. There are echoes of the 60’s counterculture revolution in images such as “Occupy The Sky”.  But this new generation of protesters is media savvy, witty, creative and fun. The work explores the slogans and banners with their ironic subversive sound bites that bear witness to deep dissatisfaction and an eagerness for a different model. Slogans:

“Down with that sort of thing”
“the future is on sale”
“the revolution will not be branded”
“time is art not money”

sit alongside poignant portraits of protestors from all walks of life; and burners at burning man and Dogon Dancers in Mali, who star in one of the new RDM videos.

The exhibition premiers a new film of the African Climate March in Durban where song and dance were used in Protest.

On 22nd March at 6.30 Kenny Young APE’s founder will be presenting a sneak preview of the new Rhythms del Mundo Africa Album which features Coldplay, Eminem, Beyonce, Red hot Chilli Peppers, Mumford and sons’  Plan B, Aloe Blacc,  REM, Ali Farka Toure Band, Fleet Foxes, Cee-lo Green and Rokia Traore’. There will be  a guest speaker and an African drumming session.

On Monday 26th March at 6.15pm there will  will be a screenings of The Crisis of Civilization www.crisisofcivilization.com  After which there will be a Q & A  with the film’s author Nafeez Ahmed,  the director – Dean Puckett and the animator – Lucca Benny.

Artists Project Earth  (APE) collaborates with international musicians to produce three fundraising albums to date: Rhythms Del Mundo: Cuba, RDM: Classics and most recently, RDM: Revival. This year APEs fourth album, Rhythms del Mundo: Africa will be released. Profits from sales of the albums have supported over 300 projects all around the world that are helping to mitigate, adapt to and raise awareness of, climate change.

Sophie Molins works in photography, found objects, drawing and web worlds. With an eye for the surreal and the ironic Molins’ work focuses on the physical minutiae of our culture: mundane items that exist in the background of our daily lives; text, fake animals and windows become metaphors for our ethical and emotional condition, poignantly highlighting our projections, our consumption and frailties as a species. She currently has a web commission for the National Trust on at Attingham Park, Shropshire and an exhibition at Riverside Studios has just finished. She has won awards form the New York Times, Westminster Arts, the Arts Council and exhibits frequently here and abroad.

“The Crisis of Civilization’ is a remixed documentary feature film, exploring the interconnected nature of global crises. Documentary filmmaker Dean Puckett interrogates the writer and international security analyst Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It – a powerful critique of a failed global system and a manifesto for constructive social change. The film incorporates an imaginative montage of public domain archive footage, newsreel and stunning original animation to offer a powerful wake-up call, warning that the inability to recognise the interconnections between different crises is preventing us, as a civilisation, from saving ourselves.

Further information: www.sophiemolins.com

Margarita Trushina

Exhibition runs 13th – 19th March 2012
Private view 13th March
Location: Gallery & Project Space

The exhibition of new work by Margo Trushina presents an examination of modes of perception of the Sublime and a case study of the conditions that might guarantee this intensive feeling in the postmodern environment.

‘Sublime And Instruction’ showcases a series of constructed images and installations, where the dichotomy of the two terms in the title are analyzed through the use of new media and paradoxes and metaphors are rendered with minimalist elegance. On the one hand, Trushina’s works appear as a logical continuation of classical landscape tradition, representing the themes of romantic painting, praising nature, skies, waterfalls, and the extraordinary phenomenon of the rainbow. On the other hand, by marrying abstraction, representation and combining the flat didacticism of photographs with the cold surfaces of technological and industrial materials, Trushina addresses the present condition of human relations with nature – our desire to investigate, intervene and make use of it, demonstrating both our perpetual aspiration towards nature and simultaneous desire to transform it according to our own needs.

The very history of the notion of the sublime is bound to its relation with Instruction. In the era of Romanticism, the sublime was seen as a feeling awaken by the forces of nature, by phenomena beyond conventional understanding and beyond human powers. The development of western philosophy in the last fifty years, particularly with Structuralism (Lyotard, Derrida), took the notion of the sublime into a linguistic dimension, stressing the over-regulation and over-determination of human life by language and the difficulty to escape pre-given, common emotional reactions. Trushina’s works investigate this concept as an aspect of the power of the given instructions and detect the fact that the space for experiencing the sublime drastically shrinks in postmodern conditions of existence.

The artist’s playful artistic experiments with her own photographs (which were made during her trips to Brazil and United States last year), objects and brutal industrial materials result in simultaneously sculptural and digital installations. The substance of these unexpectedly powerful, but delicate ‘physical environments’ appears to fluidly oscillate from physical surrounds to other-worldly experiences. Ranging from sentimental to the rational, the works dwell on the rites of passages human relations go through. Emptiness, freedom, uncertainty, enclosure and imbalance are among the sentiments displayed through these encounters between nature and technology. Trushina’s ‘environments’ create images with a totemic power of an object for worship. Although a worship of nature opening a space for self-forgetfulness, this overwhelming experience of mystification is of course illusory – a ‘replica’, an ‘artificial’ Sublime, offering a simulacrum of what we might never know in times when self-consciousness, reason and rational knowledge have taken over the realm of feelings and emotions.

The exhibition is open at Great Western Studios from the 13th to 19th of March. It continues at Salon Vert, London, from 23rd of March to 29th April. Trushina studied Photography at Moscow State University and Institute of Problems of Contemporary Art under Josef Bakhstein in Moscow.

She then went to obtain her MA in Fine Art from the Chelsea College of Art in London. Since 2006 she has shown in various exhibitions in Russia, Europe and the UK. In addition to gallery shows, her works recently featured in numerous public exhibitions, including “Russian Cosmos” at Castello De Rivoli Museo D’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Multi-Media Art Museum, Moscow;  “In The Middle of Nowhere”, Chelsea Parade Ground, London; The Spiral Moment, Archstoyanie, Moscow, and others.

Trushina lives and works between Moscow and London. She is represented by Salon Vert gallery.

Further information:
www.margotrushina.com