Gray’s creative unit, Look Again and the community interest company, We Are Here Scotland are working together on new projects to support BPoC (Black People and People of Colour) artists in Scotland.
Following an open call, two selected commissions will transform Gray’s Look Again Project Space on St. Andrews Street this spring, with art installations, performance and creative participation in the city centre space, running over four consecutive months.
The first project, entitled Composition ‘with red and yellow’, opens fully 4 March and will be led by curator and environmental arts producer, Rudy Kanhye, whose practice explores themes of identity, history, and popular culture.
To celebrate Rudy will be in conversation with writer and editor Arusa Qureshi to talk about the exhibition and its inspiration.
Date/Time: 7 March 2023 | 6.30pm
More about the exhibition:
In this exhibition, Rudy offers 8 works reflecting on the politics of Food, decolonisation and the economy of time through the lens of : Mauritius Island (where his father is from).
The centrepiece of the show and new work supported by Peacock and Gray’s School of Art is a Token offer to each visitor. The modest gift with the effigy of the dodo (symbol of Mauritius) can be taken home and kept for life or can be used by the visitor to activate other work of the show. The visitor can choose to reactivate the work of Julius Koller, and play ping pong in the middle of the gallery, or choose to use the token to receive spices and menus of the original performance (composition of red and yellow) that can be cooked later at home.
The menu shown at the end of the gallery represents the menu of the original performance, composition of red and yellow that will be reacted to on the open day the 2nd of March, the menu consists of two curries from Mauritius island - one red and one yellow. On the wall opposite is displayed the spices used in those curries.
Like entering an arcade, the gallery space is home for play and exchange through an alternative economy. Visitors will be invited to occupy the exhibition space and experience the activation of the work. The artist is trying to engage with the audience in an inventive sharing game centred around the idea of consumption, food and storytelling, in order to create a space to be activated and appropriate by the visitor. By participating in the play elements (ping pong table, exchange), the visitor enters into a sharing game, proposed by the artist.
As a result, the shared experience is making visible an artistic intention that is not limited to the creation of a work of a contemplative and material nature, but rather a participatory work, in other words, event-driven, materialised as a circumstance and created through an exchange game captured through the act of sharing. What matters here is how the visitors who decide to enter the game, participate in the performance by the dialogue which is established during the exchange, and through the appropriation of the space. Here we seek that the passive visitor becomes himself an active participant, like the actor of a work in progress.
Rudy Kanhye’s research for this exhibition or part of a bigger collective that he co-created with artist and activist Lauren La Rose on the notions of decolonisation, BPoC and disability rights.
Exhibition Open:
4 - 26 March 2023
Sat + Sun 11am - 4pm
Venue:
Look Again Project Space
32 St Andrew Street, AB25 1JA
https://lookagainaberdeen.co.uk/project-space
About the speakers:
Rudy Kanhye - Rudy's work is fundamentally about bringing people together. He incorporates diverse cultural spaces, practices, and temporalities to challenge and expand the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the special and personal spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. Through his real-time experiences, Rudy often addresses broader social and political concerns, such as protest movements, and colonial past. He has also come to incorporate into his art and installations a wide variety of media, including painting, printmaking, video, photography, mixed-media assemblage, and music.
Arusa Qureshi - Arusa is an award-winning writer, editor and speaker with a passion for music, diversity and accessibility within arts and culture. Her book about women in UK hip hop, ‘Flip the Script’, is out now via 404 Ink. She has bylines in The Guardian, NME, Clash, Time Out, The Forty-Five and The Scotsman.