Come Closer
Leo Costelloe, Brieke Drost, Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban, Kinke Kooi,Laila Majid, Niamh Porter, Qian Qian, Mohammed Z. Rahman, Mireille Tap and Tenant of Culture
1 December - 27 January 2024
‘...a radical softness could be found in the anti-spectacular, in the spaces in-between, in that which is not staged with specific intentions, a space for emotions, a softening of roles and stable identities, the imperfect, the risking of oneself, the awkward, the stuttering of the voice, all that which does not seek to categorise. Taking one’s time to dwell, to not accept the invitation of drama and conflict, grasping the complexity which rests in the space between people...’ ^
Come Closer is a collaboration between Indigo+Madder and Netherlands-based collective Syzygy.
The exhibition brings together work by ten local and international artists to explore various ideas around the role of ‘softness’ in the creation of spaces of belonging, social connection and vulnerability. The works considers the radical potential of these spaces and seek to recover an alternate possibility by expanding and enriching our understandings of the ephemeral, the multiplicitous, the subversive and the handmade.
Several texts on ‘softness’ or ‘radical softness’ discuss how such a stance may have transgressive potential. Using that as a departure point, artists in the exhibition explore diverse methodologies where emotionality, vulnerability and tenderness – hallmarks of a ‘soft’ approach, become the starting point for encountering otherness, resisting deep-seated patriarchal frameworks and commenting on inequality and the nuances of consumer culture.
Both Brieke Drost’s and Kinke Kooi’s works defy categorisation, restrictive patriarchal frameworks and reconstruct a positive conceptualisation of vulnerability. Drost’s small scale paintings in velvety tempera, capture objects made of precious metals and jewels, just as they catch the light. The paintings reference 17th century vanitas, a genre of symbolic still-life painting, popular among Dutch painters. However, instead of symbolic assemblages, her work focuses on singular pieces – A Pierrot brooch by Van Cleef & Arpels made of pearls, gems and gold, painted in soft details not only suggests mortality and vulnerability, but celebrates a craving and desire for beauty. In Kooi’s work, voluptuous, bulging forms with cavities and crevices embedded with pearls, molluscs and other objects resist sharpness and push against the confines of two- dimensionality. In In Touch, a surreal landscape is laid out with soft pin cushions, which rigidly hold and curtail the sharpness of pins and needle points. A delicate thread runs through the needle heads and connects all the cushions together.
Leo Costelloe’s work similarly explores how feminine symbols exist in and subvert patriarchal landscapes. He is especially interested in using ephemeral, sentimental visual signifiers, and handmade techniques, such as in the flame worked glass sculpture Glass Bow Number 9, to delineate non-normative space, and imagine gender and space in a more nuanced manner. Feminine symbols are often marginalised as they are considered a weaker term in the gender binary and therein lies their radical power. In these contexts, feminisation loses its power as a hierarchical strategy and rejects restrictive norms. In a similar vein, imagination of spaces of belonging, longing, desire and joy play an important role in both Mohammed Z. Rahman and Niamh Porter’s work. Rahman’s Buff Basement is a deeply personal representation of a queer utopian domestic space, where themes of comfort, togetherness and romance play out. The tender scene draws on concepts of queer futurity as theorised by José Esteban Muñoz (2009) by creating a deeply personal space through objects that bring Rahman joy - grow bags cultivating oyster mushrooms, a library, a mattock, their childhood cat, a portrait of Audre Lorde, a yoga mat and food cooking in an oven-like hearth.
Ireland-based Niamh Porter’s paintings feature domestic interiors and objects that are mostly designed by, or for the use of, women. Alluring, seductive and glamorous, they present desire, longing and yearning for these spaces and what they represent – rooms for rest and intimacy, cleansing and renewal, comfort and connection. The works are layered with subtle suggestions of detail and softened edges to capture the ever-changing nature of light. Both Rahman’s and Porter’s works imagine safe spaces for emotional vulnerability.
Laila Majid’s sculptural and image-based works explore desire, longing and tenderness through the connections between the object and the corporeal. Liminal spaces are created through transitional moments filled with sensory cues. In these spaces, emotions are summoned by subtleties - soft feel 04, a print from a series of cat paw images, navigates visual culture references and their impact on us. 20, a light-based sculpture, whose proportions are based on Majid’s front door window, emits a warm, sensual glow through its reeded acrylic front, suggesting the porous space between public and private. Tenant of Culture’s work explores ideas of value, consumerism and production by disassembling and rebuilding garments to give rise to new forms. Liminality as a framework and the ambiguity it suggests, is used to explore a multiplicity of perspectives. In the Haul series, garments in unopened packaging materials from leading online retailers are slashed, stitched open and decorated, mimicking 16th century ‘slashed sleeve’ decorative techniques. While exploring fashion trends and their manufacturing processes, as well as the profound discord between personal consumption and global production, the works slip through the networks of categorisation, enabling us to explore multiple positionalities and the complexities between them.
Qian Qian’s distinctive abstract aesthetics emerge from her interest in mythology, spirituality and science. Through a fluid application of paint and building up of translucent layers the works are hybrid expressions of references from spheres as varied as Zen Buddhist philosophy, quantum mechanics, and sci-fi imagery. In Echo, molluscs-like forms appear alongside vegetal patterns, abstract vortexes, atoms, and other symbolic imagery. Her compositions are often enclosed in fields of radiating colour and appear bathed in it, proposing new ways of experiencing form and energy. Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban’s assemblages comprise found images, trinkets, stickers, bindis and other ephemera on community noticeboards. The layering of pop culture references and images from Bollywood result in a smorgasbord of nostalgia that help explore its productive potential. Be my baby, explores the remaking and refashioning of diasporic identity and the hybridity of the duo’s teenage experiences. Referencing cinematic representation of women in old Bollywood and ideas of utopian romance, the work comments on otherness, displacement, migration, feminine desire and vulnerability. Mireille Tap’s works utilise emotionality as well as ‘feminised behaviours’ to dwell on issues such as ‘cuteness’ as a survival strategy and the importance of accessible healthcare and housing. I want you to have your period at the same time as me, made with silver, found playhouse and mohair fibres, plays with infantile, ‘cute’ appearances that induce feelings of familiarity and security. Through this, Tap comments on darker themes of a lack of adequate housing for young people and negotiates emotional vulnerability through the tensions inherent in her approach.
The works in the exhibition softly propose non-specificity, instability and the liminal, allowing multiplicity to be acknowledged and diverse meanings to emerge.
^ Radical Softness: Artistic Methodology of Encountering the “Other”, Peter Kærgaard Andersen et al. in Parse, Issue 10, Spring 2020)
SELECTED WORKS
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Leo Costelloe (b. 1994, Australia) lives and working in London. Costelloe graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA (Hons) in Jewellery Design. Exhibitions include and if this is the end I want a boyfriend, a solo show at Ridley Road Project space London, 2022; Waiting room, Kupfer Gallery, London, 2023; Beautiful Bride in the City, Kupfer Gallery, London, 2023; Function Room, Photobook Gallery London, 2023; Soft When Warm, Guts Gallery, 2023 and Meltdown, Ridley Road project space, 2022.
Brieke Drost (b. 1957, Netherlands) lives and works in Wolfheze, Netherlands. She is part of the Netherlands-based artist collective Syzygy. Drost attended the Academy for the Visual Arts in Arnhem. Syzygy will present an upcoming project at Vleeshal, Middelburg in 2024. Selected exhibitions include Body Tide,WARP#10, Syzygy-collective, SEA Foundation, Tilburg, 2023; Waar halen ze het vandaan? H29/De Hes, Oosterbeek, 2023; Body Tide, Syzygy-collective, Off the Grid, Leuven BE, 2023; TheTinyArtGallery, Posta Space, Sofia BG, 2023; Togetherness, Het Kunstgemaal, Bronkhorst, 2023; Tekenkabinet, Projectruimte BMB & Galerie Artsingel 100, Amsterdam; State of Cling, Syzygy-collective, Omstand, Arnhem, 2022; Found & Loss, Zero Fold, Keulen DE, 2022; Leo rising, sun in Scorpio, concepts of self-care, Syzygy-collective, Sugar Pop Institute/37PK, Haarlem, 2022 and Moon’s Gambit, Syzygy-collective, Dit is …, Arnhem, 2022.
Athen Kardashian & Nina Mhach Durban (both b. 2000, London) are an artist duo who live and work in London. Recent exhibitions include Athen & Nina: Sleepover, at Gathering, London, 2023, Full Fat Cola, WASTE! STORE, London; Beauty Tech Art Spa, Cornershop, London 2023; Fear of the Dark: Viewing Room, SOUP, London, 2023; First Edition, Collective Ending, London, 2023; The State of It, GALLERY 46, London, 2023; Fracture Me Tenderly, Greatorex Street, London; (Homing, or), Keepsake Project, London, 2023; The Ultimate Bootleg Experience, Studio Chapple, London 2023. Upcoming projects include a collaboration with Doc Martens (2023) and a solo with Soup Gallery, London (2024).
Kinke Kooi (b. 1961, Leeuwarden, Netherlands) lives and works in Arnhem, Netherlands. She attended the Academy for the Visual Arts in Arnhem. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, Netherlands, and has participated in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany; CAPC Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT, among other venues. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Arnhem Museum, Arnhem, Netherlands; Rijksmuseum Twente, Enschede, Netherlands; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden, Netherlands; and the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.
Laila Majid (b. 1996, Abu Dhabi, UAE) lives and works in London. She received an MA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2021 and has additionally completed an MSt in Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford (2022). Majid has recently shown work at solo exhibitions Things to Come, Sherbet Green and Harlesden High Street, London (2023); Wipe Clean, Rose Easton, London (2022); and at group exhibitions including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, Enjoy, Wellington, New Zealand (2023); HMW, Darren Flook, London (2023); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery, London and Firstsite, Colchester (2021); and Nude, Fotografiska, Stockholm (2021), New York (2022) and Berlin (2023). Last year, her video work south florida sky, made in collaboration with Louis Blue Newby, was selected for the CIRCA x Dazed Class of 2022 award.
Niamh Porter (b.1994, Ireland) lives and works in Cork, Ireland. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art, Painting, from Limerick School of Art and Design in 2016, and a Master of Education in Art & Design in 2023. Recent exhibitions include The Tyranny of Ambition, Highlanes Gallery, Hennessy Craig Award Exhibition at the RHA; Juxtapose Art Fair, Aarhus, with Ormston House, and State of Cling, Arnhem, with Syzygy. Niamh has recently been shortlisted for the RCSI Award in association with the Irish Times at the 193rd RHA Annual Exhibition and the Hennessy Craig Award for a second time. She was recently an Artist-in-Residence at Ormston House, Co-Director of spacecraft Studios, and member of Wickham Street Studios, Limerick. Her work is in the Drogheda Municipal Art Collection, The Office of Public Works, and several private collections in Ireland.
Qian Qian (b.1990, China) lives and works in London. She received her MFA Fine Art in from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2018. Qian Qian’s past exhibitions include In Her Landscape, Lychee One, 2023, London; Metempsychosis, an online solo at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 2023; X Museum Triennial, X Museum, China, 2023; Mother Art Prize, Zabludowicz Collection, 2023; Embryos, West Norwood Project Space, London, 2020; Syncopes, Mimosa House, London 2021. She is the recipient of the 2023 Mother Art Prize Online Award and was shortlisted for FBA Futures in 2019. Her works are included in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Collection, Marcelle Joseph Collection, Weissman Family Collection and other renowned private collections.
Mohammed Z. Rahman (b. 1997, UK) is a British-Bengali artist based in London. Rahman received his BA Hons Social Anthropolgy from SOAS University of London in 2018. His work was included in the Brent Biennial, London, curated by Eliel Jones in 2022. Phillida Reid, London, opened Rahman's first solo exhibition, City of Burrows, in March 2023. Other exhibitions include Atavism for the Future, Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, 2023; Group Portrait, Phillida Reid, London, 2023; Department of Unruly histories, Cubitt, London, 2022; Unfurnished, Kingsgate Project Space, London; The Conch, South London Gallery, London, 2022.
Mireille Tap (b. 1990, Netherlands) lives and works in the Netherlands. She is part of the Netherlands-based artist collective Syzygy. Tap received her BFA Fine Art from the ArtEZ University of the Arts, Arnhem, NL. Recent exhibitions include Past to Present, RUIS, Nijmegen, 2023; Warp #10, Syzygy/ SEA Foundation, Tilburg; 2023; Body Tide, Syzygy/ Cas-co, Leuven, 2023; Untied Knots, Reneenee, Amsterdam, 2022; Hoe = Het Nu, ACEC Apeldoorn/ Het Kunstgemaal, Bronkhorst, 2022; Morgana, Extrapool, Nijmegen, 2022; State of Cling, Syzygy/Omstand, Arnhem, 2022 and Leo rising, sun in scorpio; concepts of self-care, with Syzygy, Sugar Pop Institute/37PK, Haarlem, 2021 amongst others.
Tenant of Culture is the artistic practice of Hendrickje Schimmel (b. 1990, Arnhem, Netherlands) who lives and works in London. She has received her BA in Fashion Design at ArtEZ School of the Arts, Arnhem, NL followed by an MA in Textiles at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. Recent exhibitions include, Present Future, Artissima, Turin, 2023; Ladder, Soft Opening, London, 2023; In Situ: Tenant of Culture, MUHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art), Antwerp, 2023; ^, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, 2023; Soft Acid, Camden Art Centre, London, 2022; Autumn Cloth, Sophie Tappeiner, Vienna, Austria, 2021 and et al, Kunstverein Dresden, Dresden, Germany, 2021. The work of Tenant of Culture is in the col- lections of the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and The Pier Arts Centre, Orkney. In 2020 Soft Opening published the artist’s first mono- graph in collaboration with Charles Asprey which was one of the winners of the Swiss Most Beautiful Books Award.
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In Touch, 2007
Acrylic, pencil, fineliner pen, gouache on paper
21 x 27 cm