MEME 01, 2022
The Tell Tale Rooms Virtual Reality will be available by appointment on Saturday 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th. Andrew & Eden Kötting will be at the gallery for the experience on all of those dates.
Sessions are available hourly on:
Saturday 9th July
Saturday 16th July
Saturday 23rd July
Saturday 30th July
To experience the VR, please contact the gallery via email or book through Eventbrite and email to confirm your timeslot.
New Art Projects are delighted to present the first London solo exhibition by Andrew and Eden Kötting. Excuse me, can you help me please? I’m terribly worried brings together their work collaborating in one capacity or another for over 34 years. Questions of authorship can be raised: Who made what? Who instigated what? How did this magical world arrive and from who’s universe? While this uncertainty can be questioned, here it is celebrated and laid open, as ownership and authorship are replaced by a creative partnership, with startling results.
Working across a wide variety of media, the artists employ it to stand as a portal that cuts through different cognitive worlds and uses it to break down barriers and lazy definitions between traditional visual and neurological pathways. The exhibition includes drawings, collages, paintings and sculptures that were made before during and after the production of their award-winning film Diseased and Disorderly, which will also be shown. Tell-Tale Heads from the film are let loose through the galleries en route to the Tell-Tale Rooms Virtual Reality Experience which will also inhabit the gallery further breaking down the barriers between the artists and the worlds they have created.
This exhibition aims to firmly confront the idea that this kind of collaboration is unequal and instead looks to celebrate diversity within collaboration and to let every voice rise up equally. Here the freedom to create is an open door through which many people can enter in their own way. The exhibition not only gives a platform to the different voices that come to us in singular and complex ways it gives you access to the diverse world people around you inhabit, which are so often overlooked.
DOWN THE STEPS IN SHEEP LANE and into a pink Pleistocene: a Hackney cave of wonders, thronged with kite faces, and swaying heads on stalks, anticipating or provoking the birth of cinema. Eden’s art is ripe with the seeds of self-animation. Every drawing is a stilled instant twitching for movement, for joining the dance. Her magic-mirror portraits bristle with narrative possibilities. The art of the two interwoven Köttings, father and daughter, is active and in-your-face: it stares right back. It grins its cannibal Wild Things grin through rows of strong square portcullis teeth…. Look around. Walk around. Feel free. Grids of lovely pink lotion-plastered faces. Floating amniotic sacs. Soft stars. Head-butting tadpole embryos. Sock fish. Puff pillows. Spatter faces like blood-eggs smashed with a hammer. Andrew says that he is ‘phishing against the tide’. A lovely coinage: part micturation, part frustrated fisherman on the pier. He is drunk and reckless in the fugue of creation. – Iain Sinclair
???????????? ????, ?????? & ???? ???????, ‘?????? ??, ??? ??? ???? ?? ?̶?̶?̶?̶?̶?̶? ?’? ???????? ???????’, ??????, 09 ???? — 30 ???? 2022.
All installation photography taken by Christian Trippe.
“They make art as they breathe, hard and fast and memorable; paintings, postcards, installations, rants, poems and freewheeling film ‘songs’…. Eden ventriloquizes her father to provide the written text for her drawings and paintings that are already replete with meaning…. she provides a commentary and series of foot-notes for the Grand Projects that her father is undertaking…. An agenda or appendix in a different form and much truer or closer to the original sign makings and drawings on the walls of caves….”
Iain Sinclair
“Andrew Kötting has been making films for a long time. But are his films even films at all? Or are they by-products, documenting other processes, their purpose known only to the artist himself? To me the film Gallivant seemed immediately one of the greatest things any human being had ever made. We spend a lot of time peering over our shoulders at the artists we’ve lost, forgetting that, if we look for them, some of the greatest are amongst us now.”
Stewart Lee
Andrew and Eden Kötting are part of The Project Art Works collective, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. As part of their Turner exhibition they showed a constructed space that held a physical and digital archive from over 4,000 works by neurodivergent artists and makers over two decades. The archive embodies a visible trace of people who are often hidden in the world.
Andrew and Eden Kötting were the focus of two episodes of Radio 4’s Film Programme in 2021 when they moved from their studio in the Old Town Hastings to their new one on The Ponswood Industrial Estate in St Leonards-on-Sea.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000v9c7
Diseased and Disorderly is a film released in 2021 directed by Andrew Kötting in which Neurodivergent artist Eden Kötting, who was born with Joubert Syndrome, takes the viewer on a journey into her reality through her collages, self-portraits, and still-life drawings. It was funded by the BFI and the National Lottery. This film is showing in Gallery 3 for the duration of the exhibition.
Tyke Films work with original voices to produce cinematic storytelling exploring the intersection between documentary and fiction. To deliver this project, they collaborated with leading visual and video artist, Andrew Kotting, with academic input from the University of York.
The project celebrates the life and unique experience of artist Eden Kotting, through an immersive storytelling experience.
The Tell-Tale Rooms enables audiences to explore Eden’s memories and lived experience through virtual rooms modelled on her childhood home. A labyrinthine series of tell-tale rooms inspired by Eden’s artwork explores concepts such as the Room Of Nostalgia, Room Of Regret, and the Room of Make-Believe. Animated tell-tale heads encourage audiences to explore every nook and cranny to unearth archive footage and materials.
The project explores how audiences might explore Eden’s memories in and through a virtual world and encourages discussions around neurodiversity and lived experience.
This project was funded through the OpenXR funding call.
