Glynn Vivian Art Gallery has commissioned a special series of performances as part of Carlos Bunga’s exhibition Terra Ferma.
Installation view, Carlos Bunga, Terra Ferma, 2021, Courtesy the artist. Photo: Polly Thomas
The performance programme expands on the themes of Terra Ferma with four artists responding to the large-scale site-specific works, Habitar el color (2015-ongoing) and Reflejo – Disnivel (2021).
Urban and natural landscapes are in dialogue throughout the show, pointing to the tension in our sense of belonging in this ecosystem. The Gallery’s Edwardian Atrium is filled with a large-scale floor painting; an intense yellow paint covers the floor. The colour reflects upwards and surrounds us as we walk into this elegant but domineering space. By walking on the cracked surface, it feels as if you could be in a sun-baked landscape or that we are drenched in sunlight. The yellow changes daily and explores ideas about time, cycles and process.
Reflejo – disnivel is a site-specific participatory piece consisting of a grid of seemingly endless square cardboard boxes, painted white on the outside. They resemble an aerial view of a town or city, containing our movement and compartmentalising our lives. The grid as a geographical metaphor for, place, territory and boundaries, can grow infinitely and in multiple directions. We are asked to move within and amongst the squares.
The performance programme will be available online to be enjoyed by everyone on our channels.
Meet the artists:
Jaffrin Khan
Jaffrin is a Welsh Bangladeshi writer and visual artist based in Cardiff. Having had an interest in literature from a young age, she has gone from reading a book a day and filling out journals to completing a BA degree in English. Citing Def Poetry Jam poets as large sources of inspiration, Jaffrin started writing and performing poetry as a form of activism, to work through personal traumas and discuss topics that are deemed taboo in South Asian communities such as relationships, body image, feminism, injustice and religion.
Working closely with the Where I’m Coming From team, has allowed her to progress with her spoken word, opening up opportunities to perform all over the UK and being published on several platforms. In addition, she has worked collaboratively with other Welsh organisations such as the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC), Carpet Spoken Word, National Theatre Wales, Literature Wales and the BBC to deliver performances, workshops and take part in research and development programmes.
Most recently in 2021, her piece SKN has been featured on the second series of the Critically Speaking podcast, as well as having poetry videos commissioned through Jukebox Collective by the WMC and BBC for the Festival of Voice. She has also had poems alongside an interview published in the second issue of Al Naeem Magazine. She has recently worked with Arcade Campfa as an online artist in residence.
You can follow her creative journey on Instagram page @_jxffrin
Tess Wood
Tess Wood is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Swansea. Wood’s practice aims to explore the possibilities of physical and vocal means of communication through somatic experimentation. They are looking to uncover the limitless combinations of ways we can re-connect with ourselves, our bodies and the spaces we inhabit, and how this can develop deeper, more intuitive relationships. Their current research looks at how embodiment practices and use of character analysis can help us explore relationships with self and others, highlighting questions around gender, sexuality and whiteness.
Wood uses field recordings, documentation of physical movement and freeform writing inspired by site visits, to help realise their work. At its source, is a deeply engaged and ever curious child who is interested in what it means to be human.
Wood graduated from BA (Hons) Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art in 2019 where they were awarded the Steven Campbell Trust Hunt Medal Winner prize for performance ‘Cannot Contain’ (2019).Wood has performed with the Monster Chetwynd troupe at the CCA (2017) and Glasgow and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2019). Recent works include; ‘POV’ (2021), with Wassili Widmer for Glasgow International Festival, Civic Room, Glasgow. ‘Oracle of Receptacle’ (2021), with Jin Wei, Asylum Chapel, London. ‘Sites Of Union’ (2021 – ongoing) with Kate Stonestreet and Eleanor Dalzell Jenyns, Post Card Response Project. Print and Performance residency (2021) hosted by Stephanie Black Daniels and Edward Bruce, Online. ‘Bubbles’ (2020) with Stereoskopp Performance Festival.
Jessica Lerner
Jessica Lerner is a visual and movement artist. Originally, from London, but living in Carmarthenshire, Wales since 2002, where she has a movement studio. Lerner’s practice focuses on questions of materiality as natural choreography, the body and self and relationship to objects and relational environment. Influenced by her drawing practice and somatic movement Lerner’s pieces have been described as autobiographical improvisations where movement is in conversation with objects, images and location.
Lerner has been making and showing work since 1989 within experimental dance venues and galleries. She has collaborated with film, dance and sound artists. Her work is live performance, installation, film and painting.
I use movement as a sculptural material, which acknowledges my identity and sense of, embodied imagination as a woman. Through the simultaneous mapping of my interior landscape in connection with the exterior space, in my movement practice I conjure up emotive scenarios and play out surreal connections. Responding to what is present in the moment; I draw out imaginative landscapes which are grounded in the details of the body. Seamlessly shifting between every day and stylised movement, in this performance-score I am exploring my sense of weight – its actual and metaphorical presence in the body – in terms of sensations of substance as well as an awareness of the layers we accumulate and carry through time_ Jessica Lerner
Rhodri Davies
Rhodri Davies is immersed in the worlds of improvisation, musical experimentation, composition and contemporary classical performance. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics, builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations, and has released six solo albums. His regular groups include HEN OGLEDD, Cranc, Common Objects and a duo with John Butcher. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Sofia Jernberg, Lina Lapelyte, Pat Thomas, Simon H Fell and Will Gaines.
For the last ten years, Davies has been closely associated with the pioneering composer Eliane Radigue performing seventeen of her pieces. She composed OCCAM I for Davies in 2011, the first in an ongoing series of solo and ensemble pieces for individual instrumentalists in which a performer’s personal performance technique and particular relationship to their instrument function as the compositional material of the piece. New pieces for solo harp have also been composed for him by: Christian Wolff, Carole Finer, Philip Corner, Phill Niblock, Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Mieko Shiomi and Yasunao Tone.
In 2008, he collaborated with the visual artist Gustav Metzger on ‘Self-cancellation’, a large-scale audio-visual collaboration in London and Glasgow. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists Award, he was a Chapter Associate Artist (2016-19) and in 2017 he received a Creative Wales Award. He is a co-organiser of the NAWR concert series in Swansea.
Swansea Open 2021 – call for entries
