NEWS
2023
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.