NEWS
2025
John Robinson. “The Shed” - 8 May to 19 July, 2025 - Opening Thursday, 8 May, 2025, 6 p.m.
10 & zero uno, Castello 1830, via Garibaldi, Venice
——
10 & zero uno gallery is proud to present The Shed, a solo exhibition by British artist John Robinson. Opening during the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, at Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, 1830 near the Giardini, the show will run from May 8 2025 to July 19, 2025, with a special vernissage on Thursday, May 8, at 6:00 PM, preceded by a full day of ongoing performances by the artist.
At the core of Robinson’s exhibition stands a shed — originating from his communal vegetable garden near his home, now transformed into a nomadic space for performance, memory, and metamorphosis. Having journeyed from Worcestershire to Rotterdam and now Venice, this modest wooden structure will serve as the setting for a series of intimate and cathartic performances during the exhibition’s opening days: a re- enactment of Robinson’s childhood birthday party and a tarot reading using unique cards created by the artist. As part of the experience, those participating in the performances will become incorporated into the painting itself, becoming an integral part of Robinson’s artwork, their presence permanently captured on canvas during the event, blurring the line between art, memory, and documentation.
Painters have been known throughout history to suffer for their art. In a conceptual about- face, by compelling his audience to participate in his performances, Robinson makes them suffer instead, in order to extract situations that have the potential of becoming unusual paintings. Being inside a John Robinson performance, participants are included in what amounts to a manufactured failure, which may result in embarrassment and awkwardness or even outright humiliation. Surveilling these emotional states allows Robinson to capture moments of visual arrest, which are later rendered in paint. Robinson’s practice touches our concerns of how we as human beings imagine we are perceived by others and our fear of exposure in our more vulnerable psychological states.
Robinson’s practice is steeped in disguise, through self-portraiture, history, and the occult, blending manufactured imagery with visceral, sepia-coloured paintings that document his performance process. His works, which draw from sources such as ecclesiastical architecture, tropes from vernacular mainstream culture and art history, interrogate the self as both subject and object, a fluid entity shaped by the masks we wear—whether they be that of a Velázquez nobleman, a selfie-filter or a grotesque circus caricature.
The Shed itself becomes a symbolic space, both temporary studio and psychological crucible. This physically intimate yet psychologically boundless structure frames his ongoing exploration of performance into painting, capturing fleeting, theatrical moments through the raw urgency of his observations.
About the Artist
John Robinson (b. 1981, Worcester, UK) is an internationally exhibited artist whose practice bridges painting, performance, and the questioning of self-representation. Trained at Falmouth College of Arts and mentored by the late Robert Lenkiewicz, Robinson was awarded the Richard Ford Scholarship at the Royal Academy, leading to a residency at Madrid’s Prado Museum, where he perfected his skillset among the works of Velázquez and Goya. Robinson’s accolades include the Hauser & Wirth Painting Prize, (Somerset, UK) the Premio de Pintura Focus-Abengoa (Seville, Spain), and the Peter Spicer Award for Excellence in Creative Arts. His work is housed in private and public collections such as University of the Arts London, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Wellcome Collection London. The Shed marks the third solo exhibition by the artist in Italy, having previously exhibited in Biella and Turin.
BASEERA KHAN
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist deeply interested in the economies of materials and colour. Khan's artistic practice examines the intersection of these elements with labour, family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being, prompting them to work across a variety of mediums. These include public art installations, photography, sculpture, painting, performance, and music.
For Pocket Diary, Baseera Khan presents two newly developed series of oil paintings, emphasizing the properties of colour through a decelerated image-making process. Inspired by the colour red, the first colour a newborn baby sees, Khan recalls a childhood memory, developing negatives under a red light bulb with their father. Khan creates "Red Paintings", selected from pages of their father's pocketbook-filled with inked images, birth and death dates, events, and desires. In these works, calendars and personal archives transform into emotive colour fields where intensely personal and identity-forming content dissipate into tangible forms, volumes, chroma and material.
Khan is the custodian of their father's fragmented archive which comprises newspaper clippings, diplomas, political cartoons, currency transfers, gold rates, and prayer times. His stories, full of Kashmiri gardens and the effects of The Partition, become unreliable truths, profoundly influencing Khan's concepts of culture, religion, and family. These unreliable memories form the basis of Khan's artistic practice.
A key work in the exhibition, "The Liberator" from the "Bust of Canons" series, merges an 18th-century sculpture of Naro Dakini, a Tibetan Buddhist deity housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, with Khan's own body. Naro Dakini, a known symbol of spiritual liberation, severs humanity's deluded consciousness. On the basis of its recorded history and symbolic provenance the original deity is disrupted and retranslated into a new body that is deliberately misaligned with Khan's own. It highlights the ideas of communal experiences through institutional ownership, but also points to the challenges of private claims to antiquities, which form illegal economies and silences histories. In this way, Khan inscribes themselves into history as an agent of disruption.
Khan engages with the identity, cultural and economic value of materials, prioritizing this over art historical genres. At their recent solo exhibition, 'Floral Fix' in New York City, Khan composed floral paintings using the chemical foundations of acrylics, crude oil, alcohol, and oil paint. Several small works on paper from this series will also be included in Pocket Diary. Khan continues their exploration of slow processes, meditating on the emotional states linked to colour.
The "Grand Trine" series features geometries of light overlaying floral ornamentation. These geometries are based on Khan's astrological birth charts and draw the viewer's attention away from the painted walnut foundation. The use of walnut panels honor historical Kashmiri wood carving traditions, crafted by unknown artisans and relegated to decorative arts. By carving into the panels and employing shallow picture planes, pigment and geometry, Khan redirects the viewer's gaze and obscures the culturally significant material beneath.
Gallery 2 showcases wall-mounted draped sculptures called "Backdrops," depicting scenes from Khan's former apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Initially created as sets for a pilot television program at The Kitchen, New York, these objects suggest the artist's gaze while the body is absent. "Acoustic Sound Blanket," part of Khan's ongoing performance work, further emphasizes this absence. These objects shelter and offer safe space. Selfie-lights illuminate the "Backdrops" from within, hinting at the artist's presence. The viewer is invited into the artist's living space, but the artist remains just beyond reach, a paradox of invitation and distance. Two slowly rotating chandeliers, resembling cosmic disco balls, also hang with the "Backdrops." Their vibrant colours and intricate patterns, which are similar to those in Khan's paintings and "The Liberator" sculpture, reflect their family's artistic legacy of sketching and textile design. The chandeliers' rotation animates the room, casting light and creating a dynamic space for movement and dance.
Khan (b.1980, Denton, Texas) is a New York-based artist whose wide-ranging conceptual practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Their work draws on their South Asian cultural heritage in order to explore the convoluted economies of materials, and the often hidden links to invisible labour, family structures, power and surveillance. Khan's work poetically navigates issues around cultural identities, gender and desire. Khan has had one-person shows at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2023), High Line, New York (2023), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2022) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021). This will be Khan's first solo exhibition in the UK.
JOHN ROBINSON
VERSO
03/11/2023 - 26/11/2023
VERSO is the new exhibition by John Robinson, curated by Domenico de Chirico and organized by Zuecca Projects, opening in Turin on 3 November 2023.
On view, a rich selection of Robinson’s “self-portrait, in disguise”, including a new series of paintings resulting from his art residency and “Seance” performance hosted in Venice at Zuecca Projects (February 2023).
Painting a performance – that has been previously enacted privately in the artist’s studio or precariously in more public settings – is what Robinson has been focused on in his practice.
In his paintings, he studies the human psyche through its’ rituals and ceremonies and even its less appealing self-congratulatory manifestations. He often portrays himself behind a mask to gain access to the most obscure parts of human pathology, where embarrassment, empathy, cruelty and humiliation – but also the sublime – reside.
Complete press folder: drive.google.com
VERSO
November 3-26, 2023
Opening: November 3, h 5.00 pm
Via Giovanni Camerana 8, Turin
Open from Tuesday to Sunday, 11 am – 7 pm, by appointment
Appointments and info: +39 340 120 7932 | info@zueccaprojectspace.com
BASEERA KHAN
September 1, 2023 - Baseera Khan joins Stjarna.art Artists Management.
We are delighted to welcome Baseera Khan to Stjarna.art as our newest addition to our artists management program. Khan is a multi-disciplinary installation artist with an emphasis on sculptural volumes, born in Texas of Indo Muslim heritage. Khan is focused on giving form to safety culture, drawing from deeply personal narratives but also its opposite, accounting for surveillance cultures and behavioural patterns of the masses. Of particular focus is their archiving of the body.
Khan is interested in the play on colour applied to their works, but here reiterated as a language, with the knowledge that colour only exists through the use of language. They place focus on the relationship between what is created and what is experienced through the use of soft materials, textiles, upholstery and the transformation of utilitarian objects into larger statements about the self. Her investigation into materials themselves as identity forming parts of our lives take the form of interactions with petroleum-based plastics, crude oil, hair and indigenous rugs. Khan exposes how resources and technologies are not apolitical, but catalysts of global migration and empire.
Baseera Khan’s work was recently exhibited in their solo show at Brooklyn Museum of Art as well as Art Basel Statements 2023 and at Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati. Their monumental work can currently be viewed at The High Line in New York until 2024. We are enormously grateful to be given the trust and mandate to further the artistic career of Baseera Khan as it enters their next stage.
Acaye Kerunen: "Iwang Sawa - In the Eye of Time", at the Courtauld Institute, 30 MARCH, 2023 - For more information please click the link above.
Acaye Kerunen is a wearer of many hats and robes of creativity. The multidisciplinary artist works across curation, activism, creative writing, choreography, performance, sculpture and making to deliver powerful narratives about artmaking from within the great lakes region of East and central Africa.
Born and based in Kampala, Uganda, Kerunen made her international art debut in 2012 when she was highlighted by Vogue Italia as a creative, social activist to watch. Her practice provides her with passage into a renewed storytelling realm that had long been relegated to women’s domestic rituals of function. Most notably, Kerunen’s installations were seen by thousands at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 as part of Uganda’s first-ever national pavilion presentation, which earned the biennale jury’s special mention award.
Kerunen’s sculptural installations challenge Euro-American art hierarchies that too often overlook craft-based practices in favour of painting or other more “heroic” materials which are mostly associated with male and white imprinting of art history. Her work features biomorphic sculptures, sounds, moods and textures, which are constructed and derived from natural fibers and intergenerational labour and skills of women. The women artisans source materials such as raffia, banana fibre, stripped sorghum stems, reeds, papyrus, palm leaves and others from wetlands and other natural environments. These materials become her media of collaboration through hand-stitching, knotting, stripping, braiding and weaving techniques, which in turn have been transmitted through generations.
Kerunen’s practice is thus a cyclical dance of conservation through co-existence with nature and a continuous collaboration with women artisans. She shows less visible narratives on materiality, the storage of language over vast oceans of time, and heritage artisanship of Africa through her retelling of these heritage narratives in a time of distracted short-termism and erasure.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.
Organised by Dr Pia Gottschaller (The Courtauld) and Professor Jo Applin (The Courtauld).
This event is support by the Sculptural Processes Group.
ACAYE KERUNEN & COLLIN SEKAJUGO
Uganda National Pavilion at The 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2022
The Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development announces the Uganda National Pavilion in the forthcoming 59th Art Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia 2022. The Commissioner of the Uganda National Pavilion is Mme Juliana Naumo. This opportunity was made possible through a partnership between Stjarna.art and the Uganda National Cultural Centre (UNCC). The Tanzanian born, British curator, Mr. Shaheen Merali, will present the works of the Kampala-based artists Ms. Acaye Kerunen and Mr. Collin Sekajugo in Uganda’s first appearance as a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
Says curator Shaheen Merali: “We are looking forward to presenting the works of Ms. Kerunen and Mr. Sekajugo, whose dual approaches to art making, while diverse in their respective aesthetic approach, finds a common ground in their respective imaginations on materiality and form. ‘Radiance - They Dream in Time’ refers to the essential knowledge and lived experiences of Kerunen and Sekajugo in speaking to the many different territories of Uganda, as well as to urban trade and living conditions in its urban centres. Both artists have been actively working with formal and informal archives of Uganda’s dynamic visual culture.”
Acaye Kerunen’s process as a socially engaged artist foregrounds the work of local and regional Ugandan craftswomen, celebrating them as integral collaborators and elevating the artistic practices of local artisans who are the gatekeepers of their local wetlands, drawing upon a sacred and unspoken knowledge of ecological stewardship. By deconstructing utilitarian materials and artisan crafts, Kerunen repositions the work in order to tell new stories and posit new meaning. The act of re-installing these deconstructed materials is a response to the agency of women’s work in Africa and an acknowledgment of the role that this artistic labor plays in the climate ecosystem.
JOHN ROBINSON
"THUG" - Woolbridge Art Gallery, Biella
John Robinson 'THUG', a solo exhibition at Woolbridge Art Gallery, Biella, Italy, March 26 - May 29, 2022. John Robinson's paintings have been called fantastical, kitchen sink aesthetics, cathartical, absurd, and revelatory. He prefers to call them "(self) portrait; as other". He makes pictures that are recorded from reality by way of performance which is then rendered in paint. ‘The work is equal parts art history, part performance and part humiliation culture' (In English & in Italiano, 58 pages.
REZA ARAMESH
14 Bienal de Havana
British-Iranian artist Reza Aramesh will present, as part of the program of the 14th
Havana Biennial, the solo show entitled “Ruptura; Una y Mil Veces” (Rupture; Once and a Thousand Times).
The opening will take place on January 21 at 4:00 p.m. at
the National Museum of Decorative Arts, the exhibition continues until the end June. 2022.
Working across a wide range of materials and processes, Aramesh examines simultaneously the history of Western art and a contemporary commentary on the politics and history of the Middle East, conjuring a unique visual language in addressing the contemporary conditions of violence and geo-politics, to that of the classic standards of beauty. He successfully delivers the unwanted transgressions of society by employing beauty as the delivery agent. Aramesh often expresses, “my role as an artist is to contribute to the ongoing conversation towards art history and to challenge the boundaries of European Art history in relation to the absence of the other.