ASAFE GHALIB

QUEER IMMIGRANTS

Photography

Ubicua Gallery is delighted to announce multi-award-winning photographer Asafe Ghalib as an artist of our gallery. We'll be celebrating by showcasing more of his works from the series QUEER IMMIGRANTS : Asafe Ghalib (they/them) is an artist born (b.1990) in Nilopolis, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and has been based in London since 2013. They work primarily with the medium of photography in collaboration with the LGBTQIA+ community. As a self-taught artist, Ghalib has been exploring their own identity and relationship to the environment they inhabit, exploring photography as a way of survival and telling of stories that are being neglected. Coming from a religious family and background, Asafe’s work embraces rebellion in order to reclaim their identity and history. They are best known for their imagery that challenges dominant ideas around masculinity, gender, sexuality, and representation of LGBTQIA+ people in the United Kingdom.

22.08.2024
Ubicua Gallery 
6-8PM
72 Charlotte Street
London W1T4QQ

By appointment

HELEN IRELAND

SPACES
OF RHYTHM

Paintings

SOUND OF FLOWERS – A Summer Event

John Gallas – Rachel Bingemann

Sounds of Flowers is a summer event that celebrates moments of pleasurable contemplation at the cross-roads of different cultures and aesthetic forms; moments when the frantic rhythm of life slows and we allow ourselves to stop and smell the proverbial roses and feel the poetry that surrounds us.

Flowers are at the centre of this exhibition; their rhythms, the life they breath into the world, their capacity to speak a universal language that needs no translation; one that moves sensibilities beyond any borders and inspires artistic expressions and encounters that know no formal limitations. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1949), following English poet Alfred Tennyson, pithily noted that if we could understand one single flower, we would know who we are and what the world is. Virginia Woolf also ‘beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower’ (Popova 2018). As powerful metaphors for how we experience the world, flowers offer fresh perspectives on the cross-disciplinary and transcultural practices that we nurture at Art Ubicua. By exhibiting them in the gallery space in multiple forms we aim to produce an estrangement effect that allows visitors to appreciate their beauty and – hopefully – to consider different ways of approaching and experiencing life. This action reminds of the works of 20th Century American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who magnified flowers in her paintings in order to force viewers to pay attention to, and take the time to appreciate, them. But here, instead of magnifying them as O’Keeffe did, we are multiplying and altering their form in order to create a unique space for new urban encounters.

The exhibition starts with a flower poetry installation. Hanging bed linens out to dry on a sunny summer day evokes a time of restfulness, when the weather invites us to go out in the open air and enjoy the slow pace brought about by the season’s tropes. Clothes hanging from washing lines are, as well, reminiscences of exotic foreign destinations, an idyllic vision that appears while we wander around strange cities and take the time to observe the wonderful beauty in the everyday. In this summer event, we wanted to recreate the allegories embedded in those washing lines, inscribing in the free-flowing linen poems of flowers that would intensify their poetic spirit. These are not any poems about flowers, but rather haikus and tankas, typical Japanese poetry forms, written by an award-winning New Zealand poet who has been living in the UK most of his life. Our conversations with John about poetry, aesthetic forms, cultural hybridity and feelings of belonging and transculturation follow the explorations at the core of Art Ubicua’s practice.

In the following room, fresh flowers floating in the space create an immersive universe that brings an ‘explosion of wild beauty’, to cite florist Rachel Bingemann’s description of her installation – itself a response to John Gallas’ poems. Hanging in the middle of this floral outburst, two poems, one of them a translation by John into English, puts into play other challenges faced by the processes of inter-trans-cultural translation. How to capture in different signifiers the soul and musicality conjured and communicated in a different form and cultural context. We aim to explore through this not the feeling of being lost in translation, but rather the appreciation of the multiple concessions undertaken in the passage from one media to another, from one culture to another, from one perception of the material world to another. A voiceover inundates the space, reminding us of the rhythms of the life of a flower, the orchestration involved in a hybrid state of being, which continues Art Ubicua’s work in the in-between spaces of sound/music and visual arts.

Finally, in the basement we move from large-scale installations to encourage an intimate dwelling on the simplicity of a flower. Bingemann stated that ‘perhaps like the haikus written by John, these tiny arrangements invite us to consider more closely the beauty within them’. The rhythmic recitation of When you are gone (Gallas) exposes the natural circle of life, but that nostalgia for what is gone is left in the dark of the room for what could be: the promise of more flowers in an open field.

Dr Clara Garavelli

Director of Research for Art Ubicua

References:
Borges, Jorge Luis (1949) El Aleph, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada S.R.L.
Georgia O’Keeffe cited in Elizabeth Hutton Turner (1999)
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Yale: YaleUniversity Press.
Popova, María (2018) ‘Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing’.

WHERE I LIVE

Jorge Bosso, Abel Cassanelli, Asafe Ghalib, Gabriela Golder, Marcelo Nisinman, Anna Price, Henry Singer

With these words, the Bulgarian-French intellectual, Tzvetan Todorov, described in his book El hombre desplazado [The Displaced Man] what he felt the first time he went back to Sofia, his city of birth, after living many years abroad in France. The state of transculturation here described is present in the works we now bring to Ubicua Gallery under the title Where I Live.

This show builds on an exploration of the complex questions “Where is home?”, “Where do I belong?”, “How do places/spaces define us?”, that was the focus of a series of interviews previously carried out in London by the Transtango collective, as part of their nomadic transdisciplinary performance of the same name, which inspired the current selection. Founded in 2006 by Argentinean Patricia Bossio and supported by the Arts Council of England, Transtango was the artistic collective which, in 2020, became Art Ubicua, the multidisciplinary group at the core of this exhibition. Where I live, in the exhibition format we are proposing here, is the result of collective exchanges and curatorial work carried out by various members of Art Ubicua. It aims to bring to the gallery space those discussions on where and how we live when we are displaced from our familiar habitat that were explored in the live performances by Transtango, and thus to take them to a new level.

In order to do so, we start with the story of Asafe Ghalib, a Queer Brazilian migrant artist living in London. In the live performances, as can be appreciated through the images of these, dancers Antonio Luppi and Laura Domingo offered a corporeal – even ‘visceral’ – interpretation of Ghalib’s personal journey. Having left Brazil feeling rejected by their own father, one of the very few items Ghalib brought to the UK was a dress of their mother. This dress was placed at the centre of Where I live performance and is the focus of our attention on these walls. Its materiality not only makes tangible a nostalgic memory that is fading away with adulthood and a new state of transculturation, but also connotes the embracing of a more feminised self-representation and the challenges to gender constrains and stereotypes. Since this last performance was put together, Ghalib’s artistic career has developed at an impressive rate, so this exhibition aims to mark two crucial points along his artistic journey, bringing to the fore discussions of the body as sites of ontological mobility and transcultural hybridity.

It is Ghalib’s new works that welcome visitors when they enter the gallery. The revolutionary spirit of that dress that travelled across the ocean defying family ties and gender norms, lives on in each one of the photographs of individuals that are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. These portraits bring awareness to the long-resistant and historically mis-represented Queer community that has taught Ghalib to express themself without boundaries, and where the artist has found a sense of freedom and belonging. With the aim of provoking the viewer, the use of monochromatic colours in this mostly black-and-white and sepia photography intends to resemble old books and magazines, as well as old, traditional family pictures, powerfully visibilizing those previously kept in the shadows in and by those historical formats by placing them in front of the camera lens. As the artist expresses it: “it is by embracing these parameters that I create a place to be reclaimed, showing the importance of each and every person that I photograph in their own manner”. The collaborative art practices nurtured by Art Ubicua are also an intrinsic part of these productions. Ghalib creates a unique space by portraying the subjects during the photoshoot where they learn from each other. As the artist explains, this “is a collective effort to reshape the narrative surrounding our community and challenge the misconceptions that have perpetuated its misrepresentation”. Through this visual storytelling, they say, “I invite viewers to embark on this journey with me, immersing themselves in the complexities and triumphs of our lives”. In this sense, the exhibition explores new layers of feelings of belonging and displacement, drawing into play both the bodies we inhabit and the clothes that socially de/codify them.

In the second room, the impact of urban geographies and interpersonal encounters that underpinned the live Transtango show’s aesthetic explorations again takes centre stage. Stills taken from the film Two Journeys (2009), by Adam Finch and Patricia Bossio, freeze in time the moments when we are transformed by others, as well as by the overwhelming immensity of a new architectural territory. Juxtaposed with those, Ghalib’s photograph of his hometown opens up a new reading of Transtango’s actions. On the opposite side, a series of talking-head interviews are projected, filling the space with their voices and tales of the conflicting identity traits arising from their experiences of displacement. This particular video was co-directed by Henry Singer, one of Britain’s most acclaimed documentary filmmakers, and Anna Price, a renowned film editor. While in the live Where I live performance the pace of this audio-visual piece followed the rhythm, space and corporeality of the musicians and dancers, in the white cube of the gallery space the stories and physical presence of those portrayed acquire a more palpable dimension. They do not talk to an audience, but to us as individuals more directly; interacting in the same space, sharing a semantic dimension.

In the corridor, further stills of the live performances emphasise the key role of music composers and practitioners in the development of Where I live and Art Ubicua’s unique inter-trans-disciplinary aesthetic, and anticipate the new audiovisual work exhibited in the basement. We invited artists that were not part of the original Transtango group to work on the contemporary tango piece Pourquoi tu te lèves? [Why Do You Rise?] written by composer Marcelo Nisinman and performed by him (bandoneon), Tim Garland (sax, flute, clarinet), Eduardo Vassallo (cello), and John Turville (piano). The result is a video called El viento arrasa y se va [The Wind Destroys and Sweeps Away], by Gabriela Golder and Abel Cassanelli, members of Continente, the Research Centre in Audiovisual Arts at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (Buenos Aires, Argentina). This piece offers a particular view on contemporary migratory flows and the displaced conditions associated with them, inviting us to experience territories in constant transformation.

References:
Garramuño, F. (2007) Modernidades primitivas: Tango, samba y nación, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Todorov, T. (1998) El hombre desplazado, Spain: Taurus.
Tsagarousianou, R. and Retis, J. (2019) ‘Diasporas, Media, and Culture. Exploring Dimensions of Human Mobility and Connectivity in the Era of Global Interdependency’, in Tsagarousianou, R. and Retis, J. (eds.) The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

SUSPENDED VERGES

Edson Luli, Erjola Zhuka, Luca Marcelli Pitzalis and Gaia De Megni

Suspended Verges proposes a poetic experimentation of those moments in which we find ourselves approaching the edge of an existential threshold. It captures instances when we are paralysed by ideas of what could be if we take a specific pathway, feeling terrified yet excited to be in the limbo of possibilities. These works oscillate between the routine repetition of certain acts that reaffirm our being and the chaos of the unknown that will come into view when we surpass their restrictions. There is a sense of urgency and disorder that pervades the exhibition space, which appears in a contained and latent way.

The fact that the four artists are based in Italy has also sparked further reflections on how this lingering at the limits is experienced in different socio-cultural contexts. We perceive another way of understanding time and agency in the works of these Mediterranean artists; a different form of apprehending the temporal dimension of liminality.

Edson Luli’s installation Fragmented chairs produce fragmented thoughts (2021). A high-visibility neon sign warns us of an imminent danger: ‘chairs on the verge of collapse’. Yet, the implied commodity value of this stimulating media lures us to buy into the possibility of trying those chairs and risking a fall. On the opposite side of the room, the complexity of the installation piece meets the powerful simplicity of I don’t see any nouns .

A selection of images from Erjola Zhuka’s MyTh-ing (2020) dominates the next room. In this artist’s case, photography becomes an instrument of reflection to unveil hidden, unglamorous moments of the everyday that, in spite of their banality, define us. These stolen moments of absolute spontaneity are far-removed from the picture-perfect images of social media, bringing to the fore a more authentic, uncurated vision of Zhuka’s own family. Zhuka’s images are shown in opposing pairs; diptychs that encourage a comparative view, making the mundane extraordinary.

Luca Marcelli Pitzalis series of flags float in the gallery space with symbolic and resounding stoicism. MANIFESTO (2021),: ‘I couldn’t move nor speak, We will never surrender (2022), where salvation and defeat are part of the same contradictory, yet truthful, rhythm’. The last work in the series, which we are exhibiting here, is The flag on the highest tower (2022). In this case, the artist explains, he climbed the highest tower to ask his mother if he could come back home, and on that tower he raised his last flag, a dual depiction of beauty and disaster.

Il mito dell'eroe [The Hero’s Myth] (2021), by Gaia De Megni, announces the video that we will see in the basement. For the performance, De Megni decided to add glass medals to the uniform of the soldier in order to give ‘a sense of recognition without belonging’. For her, in a performance, the costume is like a second skin and the actor is the body that bridges the invisible space between fiction and reality. The still we are exhibiting freezes a moment when the restricted march of a military officer inundates the space of the Maremma Natural Park, becoming one with nature in spite of all odds. The rhythmic sound of the steps inundates the space of the gallery, inviting spectators to join in an imaginary procession. The video also aims to break barriers between the dogmatism of man-made institutions and the untameable force of nature..

Clara Garavelli in conversation with Patricia Bossio

References: Tsagarousianou, R. and Retis, J. (2019) ‘Diasporas, Media, and Culture. Exploring Dimensions of Human Mobility and Connectivity in the Era of Global Interdependency’, in Tsagarousianou, R. and Retis, J. (eds.) The Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Scannel, P. (1996) Radio, Television, and Modern Life, London: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

NOT TO TAKE

Classical typologies in resonance with a contemporary imaginary,  in both theme and his treatment of the image, coexist in Malara’s work.

Re-enacting scenes of Velazquez’s characters into the contemporary, Malara emphasises their oblivious attitude in the face of human tragedy as a witness of Argentina’s and the present international social struggle, where displacement and inequality intensifies.

STRING MUSIC

It is difficult, or at least uncomfortable, to view Ontivero’s images only once; to take them in with a single glance. It is almost impossible to contemplate them as part of a casual stroll around an art gallery, without the insistent need to return to them once again. This goes beyond questions of personal interest, like or dislike. Rather, it is down to the unstable relation between foreground and background, each of which insists on holding our gaze.

From a distance, each image is a sharp silhouette cut out upon a uniform background colour. The silhouette is that of a living thing, either whole or in part. It may come from another time - a heraldic figure or Pompeian mural - or be purely graphic, such as the miniature of an illuminated manuscript. Apparent repetitions within the series invite the search for a common thread, yet this proves elusive or inaccessible.

In many cases, the silhouette is also an object with weight and volume that floats in a void, leaving the projection of a shadow as the marker of its presence. Yet the shadow is a dark oval, the geometry of which does not coincide with the light obstructed by the form of the floating matter.

The silhouette is also the cutting-out of a space that becomes a stage curtain. Through the opening, we spy on elements of a scene. We can observe people using 20th Century machines to talk, register sound, draw, study, practice or exercise. Occasionally, we may see animals instead.

The scenarios are not, in themselves, intimate. They are rather neutral or unimportant. Intimacy is created through our act of spying. These innocent scenes are forced into mystery and the observer into a spy through the simple act of their involuntary coming-together through the window of the silhouette.

The only possible reading is that of the passage of time suggested by the actions themselves: the time it takes to write a line in a notebook, to complete a ballet movement or to turn some dials. The chosen moment does not appear to be significant in itself, rather the opposite. With all the elements of open-ended roleplay, the images refract the narrative possibilities.

There are signs that reference an age of technology and art, yet these are simultaneously dismantled by their promiscuous coexistence with other, seemingly anachronistic, markers. Through the silhouette of a medieval griffin, we spy upon a woman working a film projector. The clash of eras seems to be random. Perhaps it is.

The binding together of Ontivero’s imagery creates a hive of interlocking and alternative ways of seeing. These open, close and contradict themselves with each successive wave of our returning gaze.  Even where the image can be located in time, there remains the unease of being unable to view it as a unified whole.

If we look at the scene, the silhouette that frames it vanishes.
If we look at the silhouette, the scene beyond stretches out like a skin.

Roque Larraquy

WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS

Curators: Clara Garavelli & Patricia Bossio

This exhibition brings together a series of works done by late Argentinian artist Graciela Sacco that explore the challenges faced by feelings of belonging and displacement. Throughout her extensive career as one of Argentina’s leading female artists, Sacco was concerned with the idea of unveiling the strategies at play in the spaces, images, and discourses that surround and define us. In order to do so, her artistic practice aimed to provoke an ‘interference’ in the semantic logic that gives them meaning and, thus, bring to the fore the other images, discourses, forms that question the veracity of the established order. From the most intangible to the utterly corporeal, Sacco’s works pose questions about the admissible tensions that hold us together as human beings.

For her, Art is always political and has the power to interject and question our very own existence. In this respect, this exhibition is an invitation to reflect, from the multiple pathways proposed by some of Sacco’s iconic works, on our own realities in constant motion. At a time of social and political unrest, in-between a global pandemic that changed social order and the haunting prospects of a world war, these works continue to be highly contemporary, inciting discussions on migration, our sense of belonging, the location of memory, and the anxious condition of waiting in fear of the unknown.

Graciela Sacco
Graciela Sacco (Argentina, 1956-2017) represented Argentina in several international Art biennials including Shanghai (2004), Venice (2001), La Habana (1997 and 2000), Mercosur (1997), Sao Paolo (1996). She has been awarded various distinctions and international accolades, including Artist of the year, by the Argentine Association of Art Critics (2001) and the Konex Award (2002 – 2012). She has published numerous books and has been featured in leading publications such as Bomb, Art Nexus, Art News, Le Monde and the New York Times. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in Argentina, UK, Germany, France, Switzerland, Israel, United States, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Peru. Today, her work forms part of prestigious national and international collections such as MAMBA (Museum of Modern Arts, Buenos Aires, Argentina); MACRO (Museum of Contemporary Art from Rosario, Argentina); Bronx Museum of New York (USA); Museum of Fine Arts Houston (USA); Museum of Arts Fort Lauderdale (USA); The Microsoft Art Collection (Washington USA).

Dr Clara Garavelli
Associate Professor at the University of Leicester (UK). Her research interests include the connections between cinema and fine arts, as well as the more experimental spheres of the moving image. Since 2018, she has been working with the collective, art ubicua (www.artubicua.com) invited by Patricia Bossio exploring core aesthetic and conceptual concerns that form the basis of the present exhibition.

Patricia Bossio
Patricia Bossio has worked as an artistic director and multidisciplinary performing arts curator for over 30 years, initially setting up a venue dedicated to chamber music in Buenos Aires, attracting leading international talent from Latin America, the ex Soviet Union and Europe. Throughout her multidisciplinary performance works  ‘Urban Encounters’, Transtango and Art Ubicua she has invited and worked with leading world composers such as Tim Garland, Jorge Bosso, & Alexander Balanescu, and film makers including Henry Singer and Adam Finch, touring the UK and Europe supported by the Arts Council of England. Since joining Birkbeck College in 2002, Patricia has been researching and developing themes of interdisciplinary artistic collaborations, hybridity and migration alongside her artistic practice.

Ubicua Gallery is a new space dedicated to create conversations between artists across cultures and disciplines. Seeking interactions between visual artists, performers, musicians and academics, exploring within a new shared space of mutually informing practices, new possible forms and meanings yet to be unfolded.

R E S O N A T E

Resonance is Ubicua's latest project, working with Mark Francis and Andy Cowton.

This set of paintings is primarily inspired by sound, but not necessarily always audible sound. These paintings are also inspired by graphic charts depicting information on numerous topics that, as a result, look like sound wave diagrams.

Sound is a constitutive element in Francis’ paintings. Cowton engages to his work, interweaving sound and creating a site where the visual and sound have the opportunity to expand, affect each other and be perceived beyond their respective disciplines.

Common actions and analogies, from the physical movement in the production of both painting and sound as well as elements such as tension, space, time, vibration, texture, colour, form and harmony are played and explored. In Shaw's words, "the sustained sound interacts with the environmental space, the focus on the temporal nature of music is offset and replaced by the occupation of space, a transgression from the borders of the aural to the border of the visual. In addition, a sound of certain volume - the dynamic is also not specified - can become almost palpable and corporeal when the body is vibrated by its air pressure waves”. Sound and painting in a state of flux giving life to a new Corps Sonore that Resonates.

Mark Francis
We can agree, Francis’ painting renders the invisible visible, vibrating like a signal (vector, scalar, electric, magnetic), recording energy, waves.His painting is a sort of particle detector of phenomena invisible to the naked eye, we might say quantum. It has the appearance of exact and polished realism on account of its precision, its technique, its constituent attention to details painted with an obsession that would delight a 17th-century Flemish still-life painter.
Francis stands as one of the most contemporary painters of the moment, in step with the most technologically advanced means of measurement of what takes place within the subtlest layers of matter. He is not contemporary because he depicts political, social or media reality, but rather because he equates painting with the most innovative means of researching the fundamental principles of our sense experience, as if it were a high- definition scanner that imprints the deep structure of phenomena on its reflective surfaces.
Francis’ proposition has been simply to see the fabric of painting in a new way, refocus his observation of it, or perhaps, more simply, pose himself the problem of painting as something to be seen and be a means of seeing reality at the same time. Hence it no longer makes sense to talk about abstraction and figuration.

Marco Tonelli, Mark Francis: New Vision, New Real

Andy Cowton
Composer

Having originally trained as a dancer at Dartington College of Arts, Cowton switched to composing after studying electro acoustic music at Morley College and performing with the industrial agitprop percussion group Test Dept.
Since then, Andy has been working as a composer for more than 30 years combining electronics with instrumental and found sound. The work is contextual, adapting and responding to contemporary dance, narrative film or visual arts.
Cowton's work happens between mediums, it is here essentially that a sonic landscape is discovered, each work presenting different questions; different possibilities.
In this work with Mark Francis, essentially, sound or music becomes as much a physical phenomenon as an acoustic one, something to be perceived spatially and kinetically as well as aurally.

Recently Andy has composed on the 2020 Netflix series The Surgeons Cut which received a BAFTA amongst other awards. Dying to Divorce: a documentary, received many awards in 2021 and was nominated for the BAFTAs and the Oscars.
As a composer for contemporary dance he has written for numerous companies, most notably for Russell Maliphant whose works include Push & Two with Silvie Guillem which received Olivier and South Bank Awards.
Lest We Forget for the English National Ballet was scored for electronics and live orchestra.
Lessons of the Hour by Isaac Julien is a multi-screen video installation, recently screened in Piccadilly Circus as part of London Major Art Takeover.
Ride an animation short by Paul Bush received numerous awards including best sound design at Ottawa Animation Festival. Leonora Carrington : The Lost Surrealist won the Grierson award for Best Arts Documentary and an RTS award 2018. Transitions: a film by Jannane-An-Ali was commissioned for the opening of the National Museum of Qatar.

Patricia Bossio

Patricia has worked as an artistic director and multidisciplinary performing arts curator for over 30 years, initially setting up a venue dedicated to chamber music in Buenos Aires, attracting leading international talent from Latin America, the ex Soviet Union and Europe. As part of her multidisciplinary performance works ‘Urban Encounters’ she has invited leading world composers such as Tim Garland, Jorge Bosso, and Alexander Balanescu amongst others, and film makers including Henry Singer and Adam Finch, touring the UK and Europe. 

Ubicua Gallery her latest project is a new space dedicated to create conversations between artists across cultures and disciplines. Seeking interactions between visual artists, performers, musicians and academics exploring within a new shared space of mutually informing practices, new possible forms and meanings to be unfolded. 

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BEYOND DISTANCE

(Fine Art Photography)

Beyond Distance explores the mental process of transition, and examines our conflicting relationship with a dematerialised world, turning faster and faster.

Cañete's work interweaves photography and painting as a field of experimenting with the strength of colours, spaces of contemplation and movement. Looking into the metamorphosis of memory within our experience of landscape and nature, perceived beyond distance.