Intermission 2020
0 January 0000 - 1 March 2021
Adeola Dewis - Aled Simons - Aurora & Nasima Begum
mwnwgl - Rabab Ghazoul - Radha Patel - Sarah Jenkins
Nasima Begum, 2019
Intermission is a series of newly commissioned artworks that engage with people and places outside of the gallery walls. Artists from across wales will develop new works using conversation and research, writing and filmmaking, online-space and local neighbourhoods as starting points. Selected from an open call we are pleased to support these artists to create new work.
Adeola Dewis works with identity, diaspora and our performances of fragments; the bits and pieces that we make resonant through ritual, movement, voice and costume. For this project she looks at the traditional Trinidad Carnival character – Midnight Robber, said to be linked to old west characters from novels and western films. Characteristic of the Robber is the ‘robber talk’ that historians argue is rooted in the griot traditions of West Africa.
Aled Simons is presenting a live stream of new work by invited contributors will draw on the theme of Calan Gaeaf/Samhain/Halloween taken from the perspective of 'backyard witchcraft, amateurish pseudoscience or a druid doing their big shop at Aldi.”
Nasima Begum, working with a selection of women from Aurora Trinity Collective is working on a short film which opens up thoughts and feelings in relation to housework and exploring the value and worth of housework from women’s stories and experiences. The project creates a safe space to share feelings and thoughts at a time when isolating has brought our relationships with ‘home’ into focus.
Sarah Jenkins’ proposal is for a new film work, ‘Request Stop’, which focuses on her home village, Ferryside, Carmarthenshire. Ferryside is a small village with roughly 1000 residents and is one of only 150 request rail stops in Britain, with more than 60 of these in Wales. Bringing together local legends, historical facts, and anecdotes, this collection of stories in Welsh and English follows in an oral tradition and looks at how storytelling and legend building can be used to break down hierarchical accounts of history and contemporary culture.
Radha Patel is a writer and artist whose work intersects across colonialism, nature, religion and the future. Inspired by Alia Syed's 'Fatima's Letter', she will be working on a futuristic narrative about a young woman who goes to space to look for her missing sister, exploring different planets along the way and communicating everything she sees / feels / hears back to their mother. As part of this, she will be building up a narrative in conversation with artists of colour about their relationships with their mothers, and “frame both the letter and the film as a shared dialogue aiming towards reconciliation between the mother and the daughter, the Earth and other planets.”
mwnwgl is a publication and fforwm for contemporary art and writing, which does not yet exist. Initiated by Elin Meredydd, Esyllt Lewis and Dylan Huw, it aims to explore the fertile ground for new forms of imagination which minoritised cultures and languages possess. “We are interested in the potential held by gaps, missing pieces, kinks and misunderstandings in the formations of new worlds.”
For Intermission, mwnwgl are producing a series of events and lo-fi publications, distributed for free, that move fluidly across medium and language, united by the theme: anghyfiaith - which means 'not of the same language, speaking or pertaining to a foreign language, in a foreign language, in the original language, untranslated; foreign, alien, strange. '
Rabab Ghazoul is a socially-engaged artist whose work explores points of contact between systems of power and individual agency, voices that are yet to speak, spaces of in-between-ness, and the body politic. For Intermission, she’ll be excavating the archive that comprises two decades worth of her own personal and creative notebooks. The intention is to revisit and curate these materials, so as to generate prompts that can inform a new set of conversations with her immediate neighbours. Concurrently, she will explore reflections around the etymology of the word ‘curate’ which, dating back to the Latin for care – ‘cura’ – evolved through the religious art of the Middle Ages, into ‘curatus’ – the care of the soul.
While we work on re-shaping g39 for re-opening Keep an eye on our website and social media over the next few months. We will post more details as the commissions develop.
- The following Artists were in this show:
- Rabab Ghazoul
- Aled Simons
- Radha Patel
- Nasima Begum
- Adéọlá Dewis
- Sarah Jenkins
