The smallest dungeon cell featured in this series of work is from Chester city walls, and, as with all of the dungeons featured, is hidden deep underground. There is an interesting contemporary account of the size of this cell by someone who visited it as a gruesome tourist attraction, long after it was last used. They described it as a small space, carved out of the rock to fit the dimensions of a man. It had room for the head, and became wider to fit the shoulders and chest. When the door was closed on the person inside they had no room to sit or lie down.
Being forced to consider how certain events have made us feel allows us a way to deal with and potentially make peace with our past. For Khan the process of setting up a performance necessarily means setting up an air of disquiet in which to work, for him this is the past colliding with the present.
“A Study of Aperiodic Tiling With Special Reference to the 3rd Dimension” underscored how the curation of the space is capable of moving quickly, following up on previous work and exhibitions and providing a valuable mechanism for artists to explore themes over time.
I love having the mind of the artist around, and the work ethic; contrary to what lie you may have been fed, there is a lot of hard slog behind what may be described as ‘ I could do that’. I especially love that a space in my house can be transformed and I can venture down with glass of wine in hand and feel that transformation for the first time, along with both friends and strangers.
" I come out of a different frame, that frame relates to stories that don’t exist in the neat tropes, themes and intellectual and historical properties of what we may like to call the dominant culture." Sohail Khan. Cape Point. Gambia. Inscribe Literary Festival 2008 prior to performing his seminal Live Art work " Who is the Ninka Nanka?"
" Artists as special kinds of people?... we have to rid of all that crap."
I have learned to value and cherish my playfulness and to recognise where it comes from. I have to guard and protect my boy inside me as he is the driver of my creativity. I am naturally very playful… when I was a small boy I made things all the time and really nothing has changed.
RightNow Studio launched this project to provide a space for young artists to showcase their work in the emerging field of post photography. “ Beyond Photography features 15 artists who really challenge the limits of photography today”, explains co-director Ryan Blackwell.
Thinking back, it’s actually quite refreshing that we only ever thought about starting our own thing from scratch as opposed to joining an already established studio group somewhere.
Growing up by the seaside, there is a constant reminder of a physical corner you cannot turn, the ocean, which creates an awareness of ones own mortality.
Happy New Year to everyone. We at BasementArtsProject hope you all had a lovely Christmas and hope to have the pleasure of your company again at some point in 2018.
As we bring the 2017 programme to a close with the final month of the current exhibition Jill and Josh and their Dead Petz, we can also announce elements of this years forthcoming programme
As the city fills with art world luminaries in some of the swankiest venues London has to offer, so to do the train arches and un-let spaces with artists whose worlds are similarly governed by this most strange and incomprehensible of life choices.
Now We Have Met is, strictly speaking, not entirely about performance but about closure and treating a body of work, which just happens to be performance based, as a point of departure.
Welcome to My World is the second exhibition in 2016 that has been led by artist and musician Ian Pepper, and it comes on the back of the Leeds Inspired funded project A Feast of Beeston.
…the sedimentary nature of her creative practice seemed to run parallel with another strand of thought, present in much of her work, surrounding kitsch objects; that which is cheap and mass produced.
For BasementArtsProject, Borkowsky proposed the re-creation of two artist’s studios; one of whom he had met before but did not know well, and the other whom he had never met at all, but both of whom he has exhibited alongside in other circumstances.
In January 2016 artist Ian Pepper began a project, commissioned by BasementArtsProject and supported by Leeds Inspired, to realise an exhibition that had at its core life in South Leeds.
Utilising a system of tiling that involves two differently shaped rhombic tiles, Hopkinson creates for BasementArtsProject a large scale installation expressing five-fold symmetry that extrapolates the flat tiled plane into the third dimension.
‘MantlePiece’ is a sculptural installation by Leeds based duo Lens&Chisel; sculptor Keith Ackerman and light artist / photographer Adam Glatherine. Gallery of Images
“Daily’ the Basement Arts exhibition of the work of Phill Hopkins, is entered through a lively domestic kitchen, you open an unassuming paneled door and descend steep stone steps into another world. Above that door there should be a warning, “THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO THE CITY OF WOES.” (2)
The city of Leeds is home to three major educational establishments that deal in some way with art education. Over the years these institutions have served as a Launchpad for the careers of some of the most famous British artists of the twentieth century such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Damien Hirst. They have also played host to the radical ideas and practices of the likes of George Brecht, Robert Filiou, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono
