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Ikon Programme – 2015-2016
Nástio Mosquito
DAILY LOVEMAKING
4 February – 19 April 2015
Nástio Mosquito is one of the most energetic and versatile artists of his
generation. Using music, photography, film and performance poetry, Mosquito
reflects on the nature of our globalised world and proposes ‘DAILY LOVEMAKING
is the expression of the joy I find when confronting the contradictions of my
emotional, social and cultural realities. It is a declaration of love to consequence
and not action … All works/pieces are first about loving, being loved, giving,
receiving and making sure I do not die before sharing why my mother made a very
good decision when she decided to go through with all those labour pains the
day I was born … That creates inevitably contexts where political, social and
cultural realities are addressed… A daily commitment to die satisfied with “now”.’
A K Dolven
please return
4 February – 19 April 2015
Ikon is pleased to present a new exhibition of work by A K Dolven, one of
Norway’s most prominent artists. Through a variety of media - painting,
photography, film and sound - she is concerned essentially with the
representation of sublime natural forces. In this respect she identifies with the
renowned nineteenth century Norwegian painter Peder Balke (1804 - 87), whose
work is also included in the exhibition. In his landscapes of the far north, Balke’s
human subjects are dwarfed by their circumstances, as small figures in the
landscape; Dolven is more overtly philosophical, dealing with the nature of
perception and the subconscious functioning of memory and emotions. It is
significant that she focuses on densely multisensory situations, in which her
main subject is at once very present and resonant with lost time.
Robert Groves
Golden Years
4 February – 4 May 2015
On 5 April 1965 Ikon opened the doors of an octagonal glass-walled kiosk in the
Bull Ring shopping precinct. Now to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary, there will
be a constellation of small golden paintings (c. 1965) by founding artist Robert
Groves. They still shine with a luminosity derived from the superimposition of thin
layers of oil and lacquer on hardboard, to reflect the artist’s strong interest in
Middle Eastern and South Asian culture, leading him to collect icons and in turn
suggest the name ‘Ikon’ for the gallery.
Artists for Ikon
24 April – 4 May 2015
Ikon’s 50th anniversary celebrations will culminate in Artists for Ikon, an
exhibition at the gallery (24 April – 4 May 2015) followed by a major contemporary
art auction at Sotheby’s, London in July 2015. The exhibition will preview works
donated for the auction by some of today’s most important artists, all of whom
have exhibited at the gallery. It will be a survey of Ikon’s greatest hits.
Artists include Ian Davenport, Marcel Dzama, Antony Gormley, Beatriz Milhazes,
Cornelia Parker, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Hurvin Anderson, Giovanni
Anselmo, Giuseppe Penone and Martin Creed, amongst others. The proceeds of
the auction will lay the foundations for Ikon’s 50th Anniversary Endowment Fund,
dedicated to the gallery’s artistic programme and the commissioning of new art
work.
Pavel Büchler
(Honest) Work
13 May – 12 July 2015
Pavel Büchler is a Czech artist who has been based in the UK since the early
1980s. This is the most comprehensive exhibition of his work in the UK to date.
Utilising a variety of media including text, obsolete technologies and material
discovered on the internet, Büchler frequently pairs seemingly unrelated things,
often through accident or chance, drawing attention to the everyday and
revealing it as fundamentally strange. Relentless in his consideration of art as an
institution and his own place within it, Büchler explains that “a lot of my work is
realised, polished and resolved recognising the potential link to art history, to the
work of artists that interest me.”
At Home with Vanley Burke
22 July – 27 September 2015
Vanley Burke, born in Jamaica in 1951, resident in Birmingham since 1965, is
renowned as a photographer concerned especially with black culture in Britain.
Next summer the entire contents of his flat in Nechells, north-east Birmingham
will be transferred to Ikon’s first floor galleries. Besides furniture and other
household items visitors will have an opportunity to explore his archive, a vast
collection including printed material - posters, flyers, publications etc - clothes,
records, ornaments and countless other items that provide invaluable
insights into our African and Caribbean communities. In this way the artist will be
revealed as a subject of his own enquiry. His personal story, in which it vital
archival impulse, is integral to the bigger picture he is making for us.
This exhibition will be supported through a crowd-funding project Art Happens
devised by the Art Fund, the national fundraising charity for art. We aim to raise
£17,000 and anyone who makes a donation receives an exclusive reward
designed by Vanley Burke, including a compilation CD, tickets to Ikon’s summer
party celebrating African Caribbean culture and a limited edition art work.
Takehisa Kosugi
22 July – 27 September 2015
Takehisa Kosugi is a Japanese composer and artist. A pioneer of experimental
music in Japan in the early 1960s, he was closely associated with the Fluxus
movement before joining the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in the
1970s. This exhibition features three of the artist’s sound installations, including
one made especially for Ikon. Involving everyday materials and radio electronics
they interact with wind, electricity and light, making sonic relationships between
them.
Fiona Banner
10 October 2015 – 17 January 2016
This will be the most comprehensive exhibition of work by Fiona Banner (b.
Merseyside, UK 1966) to date. Comprising a wide variety of text pieces, drawings,
sculptures and films, it will demonstrate a remarkably coherent artistic
proposition, arising out of semiotics. Starting from a preoccupation with forms of
written language, Banner’s work plays off connotations of all kinds of style and
design in contemporary culture, ranging from aircraft design to menswear. The
nature of masculinity is often considered, either as subject matter or as a way of
apprehending the world, but not in order to arrive at a prescriptive scheme of
sexual politics, as she explains, “I don’t want to get caught up in gender issues.
Art is fragile – conceptually it is a very fine thing and issues are clumsy and tend
to be didactic”.
Janet Mendelsohn
27 January – 3 April 2016
Janet Mendelsohn was an American student at the University of Birmingham’s
newly-established Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) between
1966 and 1968 where she began to explore the ways in which photography could
be used in field research. This exhibition, in collaboration with the University of
Birmingham, features original prints from Mendelsohn’s archive of over 3,000
photographs taken predominately in the Balsall Heath area of Birmingham. They
focus in particular on a prostitute called Tina, with whom Mendelsohn formed a
close relationship. Mendelsohn thus captured the changing dynamics of the city
and provided insight into a community in an acute state of flux, especially due to
the recent arrival of immigrants from the Caribbean and South Asia, and ongoing
issues relating to poverty.
Dinh Q. Lê
27 January – 3 April 2016
This exhibition, organised in collaboration with Artangel, will be a video
installation by acclaimed Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê. Each of its three parts will
feature newly filmed footage, staged scenarios and animated sequences based
on picturesque 19th century depictions of a cluster of islands off the coast of
Peru, rich in guano, a powerful fertilizer. Exploring the drama of absurdity, greed
and human suffering, all for the brown gold of bird shit, Lê’s narratives will revisit
three important episodes in the islands’ brutal history: the 19th century imperial
wars between Spain and its former colonies Peru and Chile; the horrific fate of the
indentured Chinese labourers; and the US Guano Act of 1856 that authorised over
one hundred claims for uninhabited islands, reefs and atolls in the Pacific and
Atlantic.
As the first of his film installations not directly to reference the Vietnam War, this
work marks a significant development for Lê. However, the plight of individuals
caught up in the currents of history which has characterised some of his most
powerful work to date remains central to this new work.
Note to Editors:
1.
Ikon is open Tuesday – Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays, 11am - 6pm.
Admission is free.
2.
Ikon Gallery is supported using public funding from Arts Council England
and Birmingham City Council.
3.
For more information and high-res images please contact Sophie Campos
or Emma Gilhooly at Pelham Communications on 020 8969 3959 or email
sophie@pelhamcommunications.com or
emma@pelhamcommunications.com
Ikon Gallery, 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace, Birmingham B1 2HS
tel. +44 (0) 121 248 0708 / fax. +44 (0) 121 248 0709
www.ikon-gallery.org
Ikon Gallery is a registered charity no. 528892