With a text by Tom McDonough.
Unbidden Tongues #8: Feelers brings together three photographic series by artist and activist Alexis Hunter. In a storyboard-like fashion, her ‘photo narrative sequences’ forensically detail her manhandling of artefacts of patriarchal oppression through the caressing touch of an array of characters: the Marxist wife, an interventionist secretary and a manicured mechanic. Born in New Zealand, Hunter moved to the United Kingdom in 1972 where, at the age of twenty-four, she joined the Women’s Workshop of the Artists Union and invested devotedly in feminist organising alongside her artistic practice.
Drawings for If the Universe Were Watching, an installation on ASTRON’S LOFAR Telescope on the occasion of Into Nature: Time Horizons, the 4th edition of Into Nature’s outdoor biennial, 29 July–29 October, 2023.
Programme produced on the occasion of Playbill Act V: Anna Daučíková & Helena Jiskrová at Torpedo Theatre, Amsterdam June 9, 2023.
Completely adept at taking on institutions that wield normative forms of power, Anna Daučíková is unashamedly informed by the value of her lived experience, a personal history that takes a guiding role within her practice, particularly the period of time during which she lived under surveillance in the former Soviet Union.
In an early photographic series titled Acadamey of the Arts (1988), Daučíková rightly takes up her position atop a plinth built into the side of the Academy of Arts building in Moscow, a subversive move given that it was a position traditionally reserved for the male greats. Daučíková went on to become a professor herself, and was for a long time one of the few women teaching at the academy in Prague. This biographical trajectory evolved into a series of films titled Portrait of a Woman with Institution, which plot out the relationships of various women to the institutions they inhabited. For Act V, one film from this series was screened, dedicated to Czech architect Helena Jiskrová. Alongside the screening, four pieces of furniture redesigned by Jiskrová from salvaged street materials set the scene for the viewing.
Richard Nonas: Collected Printed Matter 1971–2020 is a tribute to an artist who has superbly captured the essence of the artist’s book, the poster and the invitation as well, by integrating them as symbiotic components into his artistic research; that is, a poetic narrative contaminated by those memories of landscapes and figures that have animated his personal history and that have never left him. This book showcases 138 records of artist’s books, catalogues, posters, invitation cards and ephemera (with an essay by Jan Meissner). Richard Nonas (1936–2021) was a major figure in American post-minimalism.
Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, Curtis Cuffie moved to New York as a teenager, first residing with his brothers in Brooklyn. In his adult life, Cuffie spent time unhoused in the streets of Manhattan where he found both inspiration and materials for his work as an artist. Cuffie’s sculptures interpret material street culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, using discarded and found objects assembled and transformed into collaged figures that speak to both the abject reality of urban surplus as well as the magical alchemy of artistic creation. Built by Cuffie outdoors, primarily on the sidewalks around Astor Place and along the Bowery, his sculptures were subject to the whims of weather, police interference, and the sanitation department, as well as Cuffie’s own continued interventions into his work. Edited by Scott Portnoy and Robert Snowden with Ciarán Finlayson and designed by Julie Peeters.