Contact is a unique configuration of eight artists, which is structured equally across two exhibitions. These artists work in distinct and interrelated media and forms that explore material, temporal, and spatial relations working with still and moving images, analogue and digital practices, human and machine processes. Their distinct approaches and applications produce different, but related, media engagement, viewing regimes, and cross-disciplinary discourse. They are in contact with materials, forms, contexts, one another, and are part of an ongoing conversation that generates new connections and ideas.
Second part of the exhibition will feature works by Savinder Bual, Jim Hobbs, Simon Payne and Andrew Vallance.
Private view: Saturday, 18 January, 2pm-6pm
The exhibition will run until 8 February.
Savinder Bual (in collaboration with Elena Blanco):
Savinder Bual works with sculpture, performance, installation, moving image and animation. It references engineering advancements from the 18th and 19th centuries, a period that was inextricably linked to new ways of seeing, attempts to control natural forces, with the 24-hour clock replacing the sun as a marker of time. Her mechanical innovations seek to transform the ordinary through movement, providing space to contemplate contemporary concerns, including our relationship with time, our disconnection from nature and the impact of colonialism on contemporary society. Her new body of work for this exhibition was developed in collaboration with Elena Blanco.
Bual’s work has been screened and exhibited widely, including Turner Contemporary, Peer Gallery, Standpoint, Caraboo Projects, CCA Glasgow, Whitstable Biennale, Bristol Beacon, Manchester International Festival and The Crafts Council. She was a recent recipient of a Jerwood Bursary and is an Arts Foundation Futures fellow in Animation.
Blanco is a designer whose background in architecture and engineering has been shaped by a passion for merging technical precision with artistic vision. Elena has worked with some of London’s most renowned studios; Heatherwick Studio, Atelier One, and Penoyre & Prasad. Her approach to design is rooted in bespoke craftsmanship, seamlessly integrating sustainability and recycling into innovative solutions.
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Jim Hobbs:
Jim Hobbs’ work utilizes a variety of media including 16mm film, video, installation, site-specific work, drawing, sculpture, sound and photography. His work and research investigate the personal and social implications of loss, oblivion, history, place, memory and the subsequent acts of remembrance/memorialisation. The work bears particular focus on how the use of architecture (space/place) and monuments (objects) become a type of physical manifestation of that which is absent, and how these ‘stand-ins’ can be used, manipulated, and reformed. More recently, his work has moved into the realm of filmic installations and performances, utilizing film as a time-based material and medium to investigate these concerns. He often collaborates with other artists/musicians to expand the work across disciplines and find new relationships between sound and image. Intrinsically interlinked with this is a constant questioning of the role of the analogue within the digital age – how it functions, if it can override associations with nostalgia, and notions of the quality of image and its relationship to memory.
His work is shown internationally in museums, galleries, art spaces, and festivals, such as Mono-no-aware (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Santiago), Kingsgate Project (London), Stephen Lawerence Gallery (London), sound & Image Festival (London), BEEF (Bristol). He is currently Programme Leader of the MA Digital Arts and member of the Sound/Image Research Centre at the University of Greenwich.
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Simon Payne:
Simon Payne’s video works are predominantly orientated around bold graphic forms, primary and secondary colours, and highly structured sequences that produce conflicting planes and unexpected effects. The systems that underpin them involve the entirety of the screen and every edge. Light and colour spill out of the screen, to illuminate the spaces in which they are shown in remarkable ways.
He studied at the Kent Institute of Art and Design, Maidstone, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee, and the Royal College of Art. His work has been shown in numerous international festivals, cinemas and art galleries including the Ann Arbor, Edinburgh, London and Rotterdam international film festivals; Anthology Film Archives, New York; the European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; Pacific Film Archives, San Francisco; Media City, Windsor, Ontario and the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. In the UK, his work has shown at the Camden Arts Centre; Tate Britain and Tate Modern; the Serpentine Gallery and the Whitechapel Gallery. His single-screen videos are distributed by LUX (London) and Lightcone (Paris).
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Andrew Vallance:
Andrew Vallance’s practice explores the connections between recollection, place and presence, through sound, still and moving images. At New Art Projects, he presents a ‘memory work’ Never Still, which takes the form of a series of free-standing, individually sized, photographic lightboxes.
Each lightbox presents a pair of images, which are all derived from familial photographs, juxtapositions that show different alignments and connotations across time, considering how our identities are bound to one-another. These black and white inverted images, a universal treatment that alters the value of archival images, blurring their historical cast, producing different connections. This suggests memory’s personal and temporal mutability and variance, as even well-worn sentiments change with time, and our urge to structure images, produces new, unforeseen, narratives.
He studied at the Royal College of Art, where he completed a Masters and PhD, Memories Made in Seeing: Memory in Film and Film as Memory. Currently he is Associate Professor at Arts University Bournemouth. He has screened and shown at a variety of venues internationally including, TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto), Visions (Montreal), the touring programme One Minute Vol. 11 & 12, Whitstable Biennale, Open House Festival London, Whitechapel Gallery (London), Camden Arts Centre (London) and International Film Festival Rotterdam. He is also a curator, writer and co-founded Contact, an artist-run organisation, with Simon Payne, which has been regularly curating film, sonic and expanded events since 2013, such as Assembly: A Survey of Recent British Artists’ Film and Video, 2008-13 (Tate Britain), and published Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema, which developed into a North American screening series (2024).
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