THE PLACE IS HERE 22 JUN – 10 SEP 2017 MAIN & FIRST FLOOR GALLERIES ADMISSION FREE EXHIBITION GUIDE THE PLACE IS HERE LIST OF WORKS 22 JUN – 10 SEP 2017 MAIN GALLERY The starting-point for The Place is Here is the 1980s: For many of the artists, montage allowed for identities, 1. Chila Kumari Burman blends word and image, Sari Red addresses the threat a pivotal decade for British culture and politics. Spanning histories and narratives to be dismantled and reconfigured From The Riot Series, 1982 of violence and abuse Asian women faced in 1980s Britain. painting, sculpture, photography, film and archives, according to new terms. This is visible across a range of Lithograph and photo etching on Somerset paper Sari Red refers to the blood spilt in this and other racist the exhibition brings together works by 25 artists and works, through what art historian Kobena Mercer has 78 × 190 × 3.5cm attacks as well as the red of the sari, a symbol of intimacy collectives across two venues: the South London Gallery described as ‘formal and aesthetic strategies of hybridity’. between Asian women. Militant Women, 1982 and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. The questions The Place is Here is itself conceived of as a kind of montage: Lithograph and photo etching on Somerset paper it raises about identity, representation and the purpose of different voices and bodies are assembled to present a 78 × 190 × 3.5cm 4. Gavin Jantjes culture remain vital today. portrait of a period that is not tightly defined, finalised or A South African Colouring Book, 1974–75 pinned down. Courtesy the artist Screenprint and collage The exhibition traces a number of conversations that In these two prints, made when the artist was at the Series of 12. Each print 60.2 × 45cm took place between black artists, writers and thinkers The Place is Here is curated by Nick Aikens. Slade School of Art London, Burman layered newspaper Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London as revealed through a broad range of creative practice. Archival displays are curated in collaboration with images relating to different political struggles in the UK Against a backdrop of civil unrest and divisive national June Givanni, Lubaina Himid, Andrew Hurman and and abroad. In Militant Women she drew on images taken Produced when Jantjes was living in Hamburg, this work politics, they were exploring their relationship to Britain’s Marlene Smith. The exhibition was originally presented from the Socialist Worker, which she used to sell in Leeds was shown in 1976 at the ICA in London. In 1982, Jantjes colonial past as well as to art history. Together, they show at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2016) and as a student, showing armed women from the Eritrean moved to the UK, where he played an important role as an how a new generation of practitioners were positioning recently shown in an expanded version at Nottingham People’s Liberation Front, highlighting the role they played artist and, later curator championing an internationalist themselves in relation to different discourses and politics Contemporary where it was co-curated with Sam Thorne in opposing the military regime’s occupation of Ethiopia in approach to exhibition-making. Adopting the mock- – amongst them, Civil Rights-era “Black art” in the US; (February – April 2017). It runs concurrently at 1980. In The Riot Series Burman focused on struggles closer pedagogical format of a colouring book, this series of prints Pan-Africanism; Margaret Thatcher’s anti-immigration Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art until Sunday to home, drawing on local British newspaper coverage of is a critical commentary on South Africa’s apartheid regime. policies and the resulting uprisings across the country; 8th October. the uprisings that swept Britain in 1981. References are It begins with Jantjes’ own identity card, which lists him as apartheid; black feminism; and the burgeoning field of made to Chapeltown in Leeds, Toxteth in Liverpool and ‘Cape Coloured’, one of three racial categorisations used by cultural studies. Significantly, artists were addressing these Artists and archives: Brixton in London. Adjacent to these, Burman also alludes the government until the system was abolished in 1991. By issues by reworking and subverting a range of art-historical Rasheed Araeen, Martina Attille, Zarina Bhimji, Black to the ‘5 demands’ made by Irish prisoners in 1981, during politicising techniques and motifs associated with pop art, references and aesthetic strategies, from William Morris Audio Film Collective, Blk Art Group Research Project, the Troubles in Northern Ireland. South African Colouring Book is as much a call to decolonise to Pop Art, documentary practices and the introduction Sonia Boyce, Brixton Art Gallery Archive, Ceddo Film modernism as it is a critique of apartheid. of Third Cinema to the UK. As Lubaina Himid – one of the and Video Workshop, Eddie Chambers, The June Givanni artists in the exhibition and from whose words the title is Pan African Cinema Archive, Joy Gregory, Mona Hatoum, 2. Mona Hatoum borrowed – wrote in 1985, “We are claiming what is ours Lubaina Himid, Making Histories Visible Archive, Roadworks, 1985 5. Rasheed Araeen and making ourselves visible”. Gavin Jantjes, Claudette Johnson, Isaac Julien, Performed for ‘Roadworks’, Brixton Art Gallery, London 4 Ethnic Drawings, 1982 Chila Kumari Burman, Dave Lewis, Pratibha Parmar, Colour video with sound, 6 mins 45 secs Pencil and pen on paper At the South London Gallery, where a number of the Maybelle Peters, Keith Piper, Ingrid Pollard, Donald Rodney, Courtesy the artist and White Cube 85 × 59.6 × 3.5cm artists exhibited in the 1980s and 90s, the focus is on Marlene Smith. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London This video documents a performance that Hatoum made in how artists drew on myriad forms of representation and Brixton, South London in 1985, where she walked barefoot In the 1970s and 80s Rasheed Araeen, the artist, writer, storytelling to interrogate race, gender and sexual politics. through the streets dragging a pair of large boots attached curator and founder of the journals Black Phoenix and Different forms of self-portraiture and representations of to her ankles by their laces. Brixton had witnessed violent Third Text, created a body of work that drew on different the body can be seen throughout the show, a recurring race riots in 1985 and 1981 meaning there was a prominent forms of self-portraiture to address problematics of identity device used by artists as a means to explore intersecting police presence in the area. The boots that Hatoum chose formation and self-representation within the culture of questions of identity, belonging and desire. The 1980s Photography is permitted in the galleries. to use were particular: ‘Dr. Martens’, have traditionally been racism. The four panels of Ethnic Drawings incorporate saw the emergence of important discussions relating to Filming of the artworks is not permitted. worn by the British police, but were also adopted at the English and Urdu over Araeen’s face. In the second panel, black feminist and queer positions. Striking representation time by the skinhead movement commonly associated with we see satirical excerpts from the British children’s nursery of the body in works by Claudette Johnson and Isaac T @SLG_artupdates racist violence. Hatoum’s movement was encumbered by rhyme Ba Ba Black Sheep. Araeen said of the use of Urdu: Julien for example, as well as documentation relating I @SouthLondonGallery the boots that followed her vulnerable steps like a continual, ‘As for western critics, I deliberately prevented them from to significant exhibitions, are included here. Finally, F South London Gallery threatening presence or heavy shadow. understanding it as they would only be interested in my the context of London as a site for political and cultural www.southlondongallery.org/ThePlaceisHere identity which they do get but they are not able to penetrate action emerges across the galleries, whether through and understand’. Araeen had a solo exhibition at the South documentation of Mona Hatoum’s performance Roadworks 3. Pratibha Parmar London Gallery in 1994. in the streets of Brixton following the 1985 uprisings, Sari Red, 1988 or Black Audio Film Collective’s video essay Twilight City Video with sound, 12 mins which explores the effects on London of Thatcher’s urban The exhibition is dedicated to the victims of the Courtesy the artist regeneration programme. Grenfell Tower fire, their families and friends. Sari Red was made in memory of Kalbinder Kaur Hayre, a young Indian woman killed in a 1985 racist attack in England. Presented as a visual poem that evocatively 6. Ingrid Pollard black art’. Taking the archives and legacies of the Blk Art 10. June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive People’s Account was shot during and after the Tottenham Photographs from Passion Exhibition, 1984–89 Group as its starting point, The Blk Art Group Research Archive display curated by June Givanni uprising. The programme was commissioned by Channel C-prints Project promotes enquiry, scholarship and understanding 4, but was never shown as the broadcaster objected to The June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) Dimensions variable of what has become known as the British ‘Black Art its accusations of police racism. Ceddo Film and Video is a 30-year personal collection of films and film-related Movement’ of the 80s. Presented here are posters, audio Workshop was one of the principal black film workshops Courtesy the artist materials. Givanni has worked internationally as a film recordings and ephemera from the archive, much of which operating in the 1980s, and was funded by Channel 4, curator since the early 1980s, and her London-based These photographs were shown as part of the exhibition is available online at www.blkartgroup.info. the Greater London Council and Haringey Council.