Click the green title above to see the video.
The Tournament of Forever Part 2 was a a production line build of a monotone landscape (to be viewed from a fixed point). Participants were invited to drop into the Supersaurus Studio across the weekend and contribute to the build.
The Tournament of Forever Part 2 was in association with The God’s Teeth Brewery.
Fine Art Students from Swansea Metropolitan University, working with Fern Thomas of Supersaurus. Live action of spoken word and a collection images.
The Glynn Vivian Gallery, Mission Galley, Elysium Supersaurs Ping Pong battle.
Paste Up! From Ape to Adam to Apocalypse by Tom Goddard, another High Street intervention which coincided with his exhibition at Supersaurus back in 2011.
Paste Up! One day workshop with students of Foundation art and Design at Swansea Metropolitan University.
Forever Academy: Term 1
Friday November 4th 11am - 1pm
Studio Supersaurus, Maddison House, Orchard Street, Swansea, SA1 5AW
Artist Hiwa K in conversation with Alicia Miller, Axis Associate in Wales.
PLACES ARE FREE BUT BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL
Hiwa K is the first invited artist for Forever Academy’s First ‘Term’, working in partnership with Axis.
Hiwa K:
Hiwa is an artist and musician from Iraq who lives in Germany as a political refugee. He began his artistic practice as a painter in the eighties, inspired by an informal education with intellectuals, musicians and performers. The major fields of these informal and non-systematic studies were European literature and philosophy, learnt from books translated into Arabic.
In 1998 he abandoned painting and started playing flamenco guitar.
In 2005, he decided to get back to visual arts and began studies in Mainz, with a master class in painting under Professor Friedemann Hahn, art theory with Astrid Ihle and critical artistic practice with Aneta Szylak. Since 2006, he has been collaborating with Wyspa Progress Foundation in Gdansk.
His major interest circles around the notion of event, performativity, as well as the figure of the artist as an amateur. Since 2005, he has been developing a series of projects involving paradoxes of cultural competence, participation, dissemination of knowledge and distribution of the event.
Selected projects and exhibitions include: Manifesta 7, ‘Chicago Boys: we were singing while they were dreaming…’, Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project, ‘Estrangement’ with Polish Curator Aneta Szylak in London, Gent and Gdansk and also ‘Cooking with Mama‘,2006, where the artist cooked with friends and guests in accordance with instructions given via a live video broadcast from his Mother in Iraqi Kurdistan, who he hadn’t seen for four years, which he translated live for his cooking team.
Hiwa speaks six languages: Kurdish, Arabic, Persian, English, Dutch and German.
Hiwa will talk within the context of self-education and the ideas of autonomous spaces relating to the ethos and ideas around DIY Art Schools as well as expanding on elements of his practice.
Image: Hiwa K, See/Saw, 2006
Alicia Miller:
Alicia Miller has a significant track-record of working with institutions and artist-led initiatives. Her previous experience includes the position of Associate Director at San Francisco Camerawork, Head of Education and Public Events at Whitechapel Gallery and Project Manager for the Bristol Visual Arts Consortium and Visual Arts West (BVAC/VAW). She has also written for Art Monthly, Art Review, Flash Art, Afterimage, Sculpture, World Sculpture News, Source and others.
Alicia is now based in Ceredigion, West Wales, where she is currently working on an AHRC-funded doctorate researching the history of SPACE Studios and its relation to regeneration-led community arts development. Alicia also runs an organic farm and will be providing the food for the Forever Academy ‘students’ across the two days.
After the ‘In Conversation’ the selected participating artists for the first term will continue to work with Hiwa across two days.
Tweets and responses to both the In Conversation event and the Forever Academy two day event will be constantly updated on Twitter (@ForeverAcademy ) and on the Axis webzine (link to come soon) which everyone is invited to participate in.
PLACES ARE FREE FOR THE TALK BUT TO ENSURE A PLACE PLEASE BOOK WITH KARA. EMAIL: kara@axisweb.org
More about Forever Academy:
Focusing on dialogue, exchange, cooking and eating together, this new artist led initiative responds to the current cultural and economic climate. Shaped by the participants Forever Academy will explore creative strategies and shared questions resulting in new idea generating processes.
Forever Academy acknowledges that artists can have a very real role in change through intervention, discussion and image-making in a political, environmental and social context. Inspired by Black Mountain College, Free International University, Artist Placement Group and other artist-led DIY projects that enable artists to really focus on how they can work within our current society.
The first term of Forever Academy will be taking place across the 4th and 5th November in collaboration with Axis. Participating artists have been selected from open application procedure.
Feedback Session at Supersaurus. Friday 22 July.
Something has happened nothing has changed
15 April - 13 May 2011
The teenage Gordon Dalton is under strict instructions to tidy his room. He crams rubber chickens, footballs, whoopee cushions, a plastic Incredible Hulk, a motorised Gene Simmons doll with extendable tongue as well as books and pads full of scribbled lists in marker pen. All are thrown into his cavernous wooden wardrobe. Dalton looks up at the casing which is fit to burst, it bulges and we are suspended between the premise and the climax of the joke. The ultimate pay off would be the whole contents of the wardrobe spilling out onto the unassuming Dalton burying him but it never comes, he just keeps looking up.
The work of the adult Gordon Dalton, curator of Mermaid & Monster, writer and artist, has taken him all over the world but he’s back with his first show in Wales in almost 10 years at the home of the artist-led Supersaurus collective. But don’t worry he hasn’t grown up. Why should he? His work either sucks you in or kicks your legs away from under you and he doesn’t mind which.
A teenage humour underpins works such as Hello…, there is the initial surprise, a smirk turning into a giggle or possibly confusion and the need for the joke to be retold. This is a painting of Lionel Ritchie with his cock out after all and how could anyone paint this with a straight face? The Hello in the title becomes a proposition HELLO! or possibly Hello. Dalton is clearly having fun and when his paintings work - they let it all hang out.
Paint is thinly applied, balanced between humbled and finished. It is an interesting scruffiness that says if you add any more you’ll ruin me. Each painting is small, modest and economical. These are works hanging out with one another, all untucked t-shirts and ghetto blasters with the volume up. But when they are right, they are just right sitting outside the headmaster’s office with Peter MacDonald and Philip Guston. In Come on Die Young, Dalton extends a nod to the work of Neil Jenny and references his own earlier work, a series of printed bunting pieces that push the nihilistic declaration of punk rock onto colourful triangular fabric flags bearing the words No Future.
Regardless of what media he chooses, there is always a playful way in - whether it’s a slap in the face, a tickle under the chin or a poke in the eye. Colour, form and anything else he has in his locker goofs around and we’re the ones left asking questions. Are they just for laughs? Are they jokes at our expense? The work is there to pickle you, opening up a can of worms that will probably make you realise that yes, it is your fault and you probably could have done something about it but you haven’t.
With titles like Stegasaurus died at the disco, Last House on the left and Tourist info said I’d have a good time, there is a conscious decision here to distort, to throw you off the scent or take you to the X that marks the spot and hand you a shovel. These snippets and misheard song lyrics are effective in adding understanding and making it a little more difficult in equal measure. Despite the casual and accidental way of bringing the images together there is a conscious and studied awkwardness to the formal structure of each piece. Some work better than others but hit or miss, Dalton knows well the look he wants.
Each work is vulnerable, strong yet wonky, however much it takes advantage of you, it is they that are flashing. But however exposed the work is I am confident that Dalton could and would paint anything. Which is why he chooses random objects, or his own rudimentary assemblages to work from. For this show he has asked for donations from visitors which he will use in future paintings. He consistently tests himself and it is this attitude which drives Dalton’s new work, making it his most urgent and because of that he consequently leaves himself open like a sitting duck but this lighter, more sensitive Dalton flickers and that this is why it will be so interesting to see what comes next.
These paintings may look slap dash but they have been a long while coming and there are signs of a battle. It is these signs that are essential to their success. They are more than paintings, instead resembling found objects, battered after a long campaign both laboured and considered. To make something look ridiculous, to paint a giant whopper or make that a whoopee cushion takes real skill. There is much joy to be found here and at times there is perfectly pitched melancholia hovering between the suggestion and celebration of the banal, each jockeying for your attention, offering the climax of a joke left untold.
We’re back now with the teenage Dalton, in school he sits at the back of the class, arms folded slackly creasing his Judas Priest Defenders of the Faith T-shirt. He leans back on his chair to see his school mates out in the yard pretending to be Boro legends. He’d be Colin Cooper or Bernie ‘The Wolfman’ Slaven if he was playing. As the hands of the clock and his detention ticks by, he fumble in his pockets fingering a cheap lighter, some loose change not enough to buy anything worthwhile, a red topped ticket stub, some cigarette papers with a drawing of a naked women on. He’d casually raise his two feet onto the desk and slouch back. You’d think he wasn’t paying attention, almost slacking, but when you meet his eye you know he means business.
Writer detail:
Tom Goddard - artist, cerbyd and would be writer based in Cardiff
We are very pleased and excited to announce Craig Wood as the next artist who will be working with us in the Supersaurus Studio. Craig intends to spend a lot of his time at the studio working between the Artist in Residence Space and the Project Space where he will explore the idea of collaboration with Supersaurus whilst also focusing on his own research. Updates on Craig’s time at Supersaurus as well as any related events will be publicised on our blog and through email and we will host an end of residency party for Craig at the studio. Keep in touch for more details.
image caption: Craig Wood, Carmarthen - Leeds Return
Supersaurus –noun
