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Directed by Holly Willats, Art Licks Weekend, running from 4-7 October, is an annual festival that celebrates the activity of artist-led and non-profit project spaces across London. For 2018, the festival takes on the title, Peripheries, to explore how participating projects actively situate themselves on the edges of the art market and its structure as a way of establishing alternative creative working systems and new possibilities of access. Taking a closer look at this year’s programme, Something Curated highlights five must-see exhibits.

 

A Portable Hole, at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation || Rachel Ara, Laura Fitzgerald, Patrick Goddard, Katrin Hanusch & Tom Mason

‘A Portable Hole’ is an exhibition by 5 contemporary artists that uses the labyrinth as a metaphor for the current political situation. The exhibition takes its cue from the architecture of the exhibition space itself. A project space within a studio complex, it is a connecting room, a central meeting point that links 5 studios and 2 corridors. The show considers an ever-growing and equal need for both shelter and escape.

 

Ana Prata and Hamish Pearch, at Kupfer || Ana Prata & Hamish Pearch

Over the past decade, Ana Prata has created a varied pictorial vocabulary that playfully encompasses the tropes of abstraction and figuration. Without settling into a single style, her works form a personal inventory that ranges formally from expressionist to restrained brushstrokes while exploring traditional genres such as portraiture and landscape. Working primarily with sculpture, Hamish Pearch creates fragmented compositions in which objects often acquire an animistic quality. In these works, images of organic elements are combined with furniture-like sculptural pieces to form landscapes or human characters.

 

Francesca Tamse, Perfection by the Lines: Fine Art Perspiration, at Cypher Billboard || Francesca Tamse

This new work is a nod towards day jobs taken on by artists to subsidise their practices and passions, and interrogates the varied positioning of different forms of labour – whether centred or marginal, visible or hidden, gendered or fluid, financially remunerated, unpaid or in kind. Launching within Frieze Week – where art handlers form a core, but hidden, workforce behind placing the artist’s object within commercial art space – the work seeks to foreground a labour that is often unseen.

 

La Guarida, at MilesKm || Nora Silva & Daphne Politi 

MilesKm presents La Guarida (The Hideout), a two-day event responding to the theme of peripheries, through a showcase of our history as a collaborative research programme, discussing current strategies for collectivity and introducing their next project Tregua (Truce). This first part of the event will include an installation in the form of an anthropological museum showcasing a film and objects from the six projects the collective has initiated over the past seven years.

 

Homework, at GAFF || Paul Coombs & Joe Cotgrave

Homework simultaneously brings together the work of artists Joe Cotgrave at GRAFT, Lancaster and Paul Coombs at GAFF, Walthamstow in a collaborative conversation. Each artist will occupy separate domestic spaces in London and Lancaster, producing and installing work over the course of the show. The video, performance, sculptural and light pieces created and exhibited over the course of these residencies will be both reflective of and responsive to each artists’ practice, as well as being shaped by the domestic spaces the work inhabits.

 

Feature image: Georgia Stephenson (via Art Licks Weekend)

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