Veronika Neukirch & Haffendi Anuar in conversation

On 30 June 2021 Veronika Neukirch and Haffendi Anuar hosted an informal Zoom session to talk about their respective works, 'Coming out of the Woodwork' and 'Sunlight', in the shop/front of No Show Space. This was a handover event for SH/FT from Neukirch to Anuar and introduced by Serra Tansel.

SH/FT was initiated with the idea of forming temporary assemblages with fluid dynamics and finding ways of self-organising to create intimacy and new associations.

Haffendi Anuar’s (b. 1985, Malaysia) current work looks at the ‘kain pelikat’, a type of colourful tubular transnational “male-skirt” usually worn domestically and sometimes as an informal labour uniform in parts of the Global South. Oriented in relation to his childhood memories of encountering and being enveloped by the fabric, his research and exploration into the iconography of the garment encompasses personal family photos, archival photographs, images from social media and the Internet and look the fabric’s origin, social utilization, visual patterns and formal structure.

Anuar graduated from MFA, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (2020) and BA CSM (2013). Recent exhibitions include: Midday Stanza (solo), Richard Koh Fine Art, Singapore (2019), Elephant Utopia (solo), Art Taipei (2015), The Foot Beneath the Flower, Nanyang Tech University ADM Gallery, Singapore (2020), For the Few and the Many, Beers London (2019) and head, heap, heat, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Singapore (2018). His works are in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Kuala Lumpur.

Veronika Neukirch (b. 1986, Germany) has been based in London since 2005. In her practice constantly evolving materials and found objects come together in mixed media sculpture and installation. Neukirch focuses on investigating our strangely intertwined relationship with objects, matter and the spaces we inhabit. Her work aims to inspire an overspill of human compassion onto the inanimate.

Neukirch graduated from MA Sculpture, RCA in 2019 and was recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Trust Sculpture Award. She completed her BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2013 and briefly studied at University of the Arts UdK Berlin. She has exhibited, taken part in artist residencies, worked as occasional art writer and curated widely in the UK, Europe and Southeast Asia, including: Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Graduate Residency & exhibition A Sculpture of Site, an Object of Play, Standpoint Gallery London (2020); Contact curated by Thorp & Stavri (2020); The Haptic/The Virtual curated by Conscious Isolation (2020). She was recently Solo Artist in Residence, Unit1 Gallery Workshop.