Sunday 17 September 2023, 7.30pm
‘Feature’ is an event series inviting interactions between the worlds of art, poetry, and performance. This edition welcomes Katrina Palmer, Carl Gent, Jordan/Martin Hell, and Bart Seng Wen Long. The series is presented by Rory Cook and Alan Fielden.
Katrina Palmer writes and locates objects, bodies, and voices as covert material presences in narrativised contexts. Using an expanded conceptualisation of sculpture, she explores the edges of language, focusing on uncanny physical displacements, marginalisation and absence. This work often results in confrontations with holes.
Among Palmer’s solo exhibitions are What’s Already Going On (Mead Gallery 2023); Hello (England’s Creative Coast 2021); The Coffin Jump (Yorkshire Sculpture Park 14-18NOW, 2018); The Necropolitan Line (Henry Moore Institute 2015); End Matter (Artangel, BBC Radio 4, Book Works 2015). Her publications include Black Slit and The Dark Object (Book Works, 2023 2010), and contributions to Documents of Contemporary Art, (Whitechapel/MIT 2013 2021). Palmer was a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists (2014).
Carl Gent is an artist from Bexhill-on-sea. Their recent work has sought to refictionalise the life of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of Mercia, through a range of amateur dramatics, tabletop gaming, and the parading of decapitated kings in community carnivals. Through their collaboration with Kelechi Anucha they made new recordings of English folk songs embedded in sculptures that investigated the girly and divine links between folk and church song. Their ongoing collaborative work with Linda Stupart has given birth to a range of live, published and exhibited projects that restaged 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin as an artist’s play.
They have exhibited their songs, sculptures, vehicles and printouts at Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe; Istituto Svizerro, Rome; the De La Warr Pavilion and Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-sea; Wysing Arts Centre; Goldsmiths CCA, ICA, Somerset House, KELDER, and Jupiter Woods, London. They have a new commission as a part of this year’s Deptford X’s and have recently published with Kelder Press, Sticky Fingers Publishing, HOAX and Arcadia Missa. The Balls of Alban was published by Monitor Books in 2022.
Jordan/Martin Hell is a black trans (2s) artist, writer, & researcher. He is the author of CONSTANT VIOLINS (Arcadia Missa, 2022) as well as many other speculative novellas, hybrid genre, & critical texts in the CV universe. His writing on art, etc. & interviews have appeared in 032c, Real Review, Mousse Magazine, & others. He will be launching a new publication at this event, AUTOLINGO DIDACTICA (Monitor, 2023).
Born and bred in Singapore, Bart is a visual artist and curator currently based in London. His multi-media practice conjures uncanny scenes inspired from contemporary life, where fluid identities collide and intermingle, situating within these narratives an array of themes like self-fetishisation, otherness, trauma, intimacy, mythology, internet subcultures and neoliberal politics. With an approach to art-making that centres mistranslation across mediums, aesthetics, (im)materiality and contexts, Bart hopes to reveal unexpected modes of feeling and being, desiring and labouring.
Bart was selected to be part of Dazed x Circa’s Class of 2021, is a Tour de Moon grantee, and is co-curator of Kawaii Agency. His work has been shown on SHOWstudio, the Wrong Biennale, London Short Film Festival, Queer East and the Barbican.
