SH/FT, Sam Hutchinson/ Sam Blackwood/ Haffendi Anuar/ Veronika Neukirch/ Rhiannon Hunter/ Davinia-Ann Robinson/ Elisabeth Molin/ Serra Tansel

No Show Space is pleased to present SH/FT, a temporary assemblage* of artists at its shop/front on Temple Street, Bethnal Green, London.

SH/FT’s assemblage grows as each artist invites the next participant and the works accumulate in the same space.** The names of artists are revealed as the handovers take place with an online conversation. Works on display create space for each other and their context shifts with every addition. In these times of distance, disconnection and disruption, the process of coming together and finding new ways of self-organising is the framework of SH/FT.

This spatial and temporal meeting breaks away from the old normals. / Can we really talk about a time stop? Or zooming in on other rhythms; like that of bees and dust, smoke even./ Plunged into soil, connections to dispersed histories and corporeal intimacies uncovered. /Unearthing connections to the textural materiality of being in my environment, Observing and playing with the slippery meshy-ness of being part of a physical and felt world. / We can't help but embody the fundamental chasm between inner and outer space; between the finitude of external matter and the infinity within./ Sowing connections in a season of restrictions, how materials in space could be activated as seeds for shared meanings. / Interactions with objects. Maybe they've gone now, or completely changed but “Memories are motionless”, Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. Public space coordinated via objects /

The newest addition to the temporary assemblage is by Sam Hutchinson on view from 15 July 2021.

The first work was by Serra Tansel on view from 14 April followed by Elisabeth Molin on 28 April, Davinia-Ann Robinson on 12 May, Rhiannon Hunter on 26 May, Veronika Neukirch on 15 June, Haffendi Anuar on 23 June and Sam Blackwood on 6 July 2021.

Sam Hutchinson (b.1993 Sunderland lives & works in Leeds) is an artist working with photography, sculpture and appropriation. His work is predominantly centred around imagining future utopias, constructed from present day visual truisms questioning the idea of an image as a representation of reality. His practice spans various mediums, studies potential failures and social phenomenon, and the application of authority through the visual world in a contemporary societal cityscape.

Hutchinson graduated from BA Photography, Leeds College of Art (2014) and School Of The Damned (2017). Selected exhibitions include The Desire to be Part of a Story, Index festival (2019), Two Thousand and Nineteen *84, Village, Leeds (2019), Selling Crass Tees to Upper Class Kids w/ Michaela Cullen (2017). Selected publications include HopeHope (2020), Marx CCTV Grave (2020) & Two Thousand and Nineteen* 84 (2019).

Samuel Blackwood (b.1992 Hartlepool. Lives & works in London). Heavily influenced by his childhood and adolescence in Hartlepool, Blackwood takes particular interest in modes of creativity born from boredom, frustration, aggression and under stimulation. The artist considers how instances of mundane, unnoticed creativity exists as a form of outsider art; for example, a coke can crushed between fence posts or scrawled graffiti that reads 'SAM IS A GRASS’.

Blackwood studied MFA at Ruskin, Oxford (2020) & School of the damned (2019). Exhibitions include: Local Haunts Like a Little Disaster, Italy (online)(2020); Working Class Creatives published by Outpost Gallery, Norwich (2020); Hard faced, Enclave projects, London (2019); Paper cuts, Kristian Day Saatchi Gallery (2018); Its kind of hard to explain, Sluice, London (2018); Docile Bodies, Vitrine, London (2018); TURBO, Goldtapped Gallery, Newcastle (2017). Residencies include Spareroom Residency, Liverpool & Zabludowicz Master Class, Northern participant, London. Awards include NE artist award, MiMA, Middlesbrough & S1 Bursary Scheme, S1 Artspace, Sheffield.

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.

Rhiannon Hunter is a visual artist whose work responds to physical and psychological connections to belonging. She is interested in the relationships between self, place and space. Her work is an ongoing exploration into notions of ‘home’ as a material or imagined entity that may be rooted, familiar or fluid. Her work spans mediums to include digital film, audio soundscapes, print, sculpture and participatory research that involves working with individuals and groups.

Hunter studied BA Textiles at Goldsmiths College between 2005-2008 and is undertaking her MFA at the university. She has undertaken public art commissions for Festival Stoke 2020 supported by Arts Council, exhibited internationally and is Co-Founder of Surface Matters, an intergenerational grassroots arts platform.

Davinia-Ann Robinson (b.1987, Wolverhampton). Davinia-Ann’s practice examines how ‘Presencing’, fugitivity and tactility undo colonial and imperial frameworks through which nature and Bodies of Colour are articulated, by exploring the relationship between Black, Brown and Indigenous soil conservation practices and what she terms as ‘Colonial Nature environments’.

Her work addresses personal interactions with ‘colonial emotions’ she has encountered, in local, national and global environments as a Black Female Body, building on her intense relationship with soil as a living material explored through sculpture, sound, writing and performance.

Davinia-Ann is currently studying in her final year at the Slade School of Fine Art on the MFA Sculpture programme. She has been included in solo and group exhibitions and delivered public programmes within arts institutions - I Am Unsure As To If It Is Still Alive, Quench, Margate (2021); Tactile Belonging, Mimosa House, London (2021); Bold Tendencies, London (2020); Freedom Is Outside the Skin, Kunsthal 44Møen, Denmark (2020); Working Progress, South London Gallery, Feb & Aug (2020); PRESENCE, Deptford X, London (2019); The Politics of Pleasure, Genealogies Series, PLASTICISED SENSATION, ICA, London (2019).

Davinia-Ann is a recipient of the Felix Slade Scholarship 2019-2021 and a recipient of the 2021 SET Studio Prize. She is also founding member of Narration Group an art collective for Women and Non-binary People of Colour.

Elisabeth Molin (b.1985, Denmark) explores the world through an associative, process driven approach to storytelling. Writing and stories - in one form or another - is always part of her process, which materializes itself as printed matter, installations, sculptures and video works. Molin's work often responds to an accelerated yet fragmented time feeling, and through them she attempts to suggest new intersections, new materialities of time and new modes of belonging.

Molin studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and MA Photography at Royal College of Art in London. She has recently shown work at Wiels in Brussels, Sundy in London, Sixty Eight Institute in Copenhagen, Austrian Cultural Forum in London and MAW, ISCP and Columbia University in New York.

Serra Tansel (b. 1989 Istanbul) lives and works in London. Tansel’s practice engages with the ways in which we settle into our world, our cities, our houses and our bodies and the structures, the relationships we establish within them. She is a member of the collectives Makkam they founded with Alper Oruç, Daniela Nofal and Yamen Makdad; and Bonnington Café in London. She is one of the faces of Hayırlı Evlat.

No Show Space hosted her first solo exhibition, Sera Tansel Unlimited, in 2015. Other exhibitions include "Passion can create drama out of inert stone"?!, Peak, Elephant & Castle Shopping Mall, London (2020); HIGHER, Pilot Gallery, Istanbul (2020),  Heavens!, Battersea Arts Centre, London and Bilsart, İstanbul (2019); Sinopale 7, Sinop (2019); Billboard 8171, Annin Arts, London (2018); Dünya Döner, Museum aan de Stroom, Antwerp (2015); Water is on the House with Duval Timothy, Polistar, İstanbul (2014).

*Temporary assemblage is a term antropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing uses in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World. “Ecologists turned to assemblages to get around the sometimes fixed and bounded connotations of ecological “community”. The question of how the varied species in a species assemblage influence each other - if at all - is never settled: some thwart (or eat) each other; others work together to make life possible; still others just happen to find themselves in the same place. Assemblages are open-ended gatherings. They allow to ask about communal effects without assuming them. They show us potential histories in the making... Assemblages don’t just gather lifeways; they make them. Thinking through assemblage urges to ask: How do gatherings sometimes become “happenings”, that is, greater than the sum of their parts? If history without progress is indeterminate and multidirectional, might assemblages show us its possibilities?”

**The artist chain is a continuation of the method artist Gizem Karakaş has developed for Transfer in Istanbul. The chain is initiated by Serra Tansel in conversation with Elisabeth Molin.