Look Again Aberdeen began in 2015 as a festival of visual art and design and is now a unit at Gray’s School of Art that runs exhibitions, pop ups, workshops and learning programmes that are designed to connect, highlight, and strengthen the creative sector in the North East. We support creative practitioners at all stages of their career with opportunities to develop their professional practice in the region, retaining and supporting talent.

Look Again X We Are Here Scotland wish to address the lack of opportunities available to BPoC creatives in Scotland. Through this new commissioning programme, we propose to work together to begin to change this from a North East perspective, providing high quality supported opportunities for emerging BPoC artists, designers and curators.

A key strand of Look Again Aberdeen is their Seed Fund commissioning programme supported by Aberdeen City Council. Emerging artists and designers with connections to the northeast of Scotland have in the past been invited to propose new ideas through an open application process.

This new partnerships provides an opportunity for both organisations to come together in the city to pool expertise, spotlighting Aberdeen and deliver a programme of national significance.

This project is offering 2 x commissions resulting in a total of 2 exhibitions at the Look Again Project Space in Aberdeen City Centre during the first half of 2023. These will be supported by a workshop and talks programme.

As part of the open call, we are excited to be working with Rudy Kanhye whose practice explores themes of identity, history, and popular culture & collaborative duo Helen Love and Noon Abdelrazig, who work across the field of contemporary art practice.

Look Again & We Are Here Scotland Commission

4 - 26 MARCH: COMPOSITION ‘with red and yellow’
2 MARCH: Opening night (Thursday 6-9pm)

In this exhibition Rudy Kanhye 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, those menu are of two curries from  Mauritius island one red and one yellow. On the wall opposite is displayed the spices used in those curry. 

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.