Benedetta Turlon

28th June – 2nd July 2016

Punctum Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip St, London SW1P 4JU

EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Natalie Anastasiou, Mustafa Boga, Irini Folerou, Maria Luigia Gioffrè, Nicola Lorini, Lazeez Raimi, Juan Covelli Reyes, Ilia Rogatchevski, Lorraine Williams, Neale Willis.

CURATED BY: Co-Thinking About Future curatorial team Alexandra Chernaya, Alessandra Di Lorenzo, Azzurra Pitruzzella and Benedetta Turlon.

SELF/CONTROL is a collaborative exhibition that explores how technologies have affected the construction of the self, control over information and collective and individual memory making. It is a conversation between the immediate present, the long forgotten past and the impending future.

Collectively, we ask you the question: Are you in control?

The exhibition originated from Co-Thinking About Future, a project where four curators from different University of the Arts London courses met their peers from MA Fine Art, MA Photography, MA Sound Art and MA Animation to exchange ideas on the future of New Media in varying art practices.

Made possible through the Postgraduate Student Communities Fund, University of the Arts London.

SELF/CONTROL will run from the 28th of June until the 2nd of July in the Punctum Gallery in Chelsea, with an opening event on the 28^th.

Image Credit: Mustafa Boga, “where do we go now” performance-video-2016- Image courtesy of the artist.

12-20 April 2016

Cookhouse Gallery, Chelsea College of Arts, London.

Curated by MA Curating and Collections

For the second year, the Exhibition Studio Workshop collaborates with the National Theatre Archive to highlight the seminal work of Jocelyn Herbert (1917 – 2003) who was among the most important and innovative theatre designers in the UK since the 1960s.

This year, the exhibition focuses on the extensive relationship between Jocelyn Herbert and the theatre director and poet Tony Harrison (Leeds, 1937). This was a long-lasting collaboration, which started in the early 1980s and since then gave birth to six creative and innovative plays including among others The Oresteia (National Theatre, 1981), The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (Delphi and National Theatre, 1988), Square Rounds (National Theatre, 1992) and the film Prometheus (1998).

Jocelyn Herbert and Tony Harrison showcases various materials from the Jocelyn Herbert Archive, including photographs, drawings, costumes, masks and written correspondence which were selected by the MA Curating and Collections students. With Jocelyn Herbert and Tony Harrison the students collaborated to join together what captured and inspired them in the study of this creative and productive relationship.

The duo found its strength and creativeness in a shared commitment to the text. Herbert believed that stage design should support the text without illustrating it but rather maintaining a “beautiful neutrality”, a term used by Harrison in his essay for Jocelyn Herbert – a Theatre Workbook.

Herbert would focus on enhancing Harrison’s text by keeping the design minimal and adding only the most necessary elements. For example, the simple design for Square Rounds is known as one of her most striking works. In being actively involved in the staging of each of the productions, Jocelyn was always dedicated to the realisation of their shared vision and, with her positive attitude and adventurous spirit, was able to adapt her work creatively to different conditions.

Image credit: Tony Harrison and Jocelyn Herbert during the rehearsal of Square Rounds. London, 1992. JH/3/1/32-1, Jocelyn Jerbert Archive at the National Theatre. Photograph by ©Nobby Clark.

18 November – 18 December 2015

Exhibition Studio Workshop E101, Chelsea College of Arts, London

Curators: Benedetta Turlon, Chanchan Liu, Chong Liu, Giovanni Rendina, Kinga Szlama, Qingfang Li, Rui Pan

Blue to Blue explores the process that lead the two artists Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994) and Yves Klein (1928 – 1962) to the understanding of the void through the use of blue. Our aim is to offer an original glimpse into the vastness of void as both a physical and abstract space.

The main idea for the exhibition came from Derek Jarman’s Blue film dated 1993, which directly links to Yeves Klein’s patented IKB (International Klein Blue). He was losing his sight while making this film, and this influenced significantly the choice of using a monochrome screen to identify his actual state of living in a world with no images.

As we watch the blue screen, we leap into the big void created by Jarman’s minimalist practice of cutting out any image.

A fragment of the test reel of the Blue in the centre of the main wall, surrounded by eight scans of Jarman’s notebook Almost Bliss, communicates the contemplation of the filmmaker giving an insight into the creative process of the movie. The facsimiles provide a deeper understanding of Jarman’s diverse production as painter, poet and filmmaker.

Yves Klein’s work and life were influenced by both Western and Eastern culture. The long practice and his deep understanding of Judo, lead the French artist to rid his painting from any superficial feature which were locking his canvases into the world of shapes and lines. Gradually, Klein’s work went through monochromes, and blue became the colour that allowed the most powerful effect on the visitor.

“Blue has no dimensions. It is beyond dimensions, while the other colors have some.

Those are psychological spaces. Red, for example, presupposes a heart giving off heat. All colors bring forth associations of concrete, material, and tangible ideas, while blue evokes all the more the sea and the sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature”.

Klein, Yves 1928 – 1962 Dépassement de la problématique de l’art et autres écrits, translated by Ottmann Klaus in 2007

One of the three prayers Yves Klein wrote for Saint Rita of Cascia in 1961 envelops the Western aspect of the artist’s spirituality, and it gives us the opportunity to understand the importance that both art and Saint Rita’s worship had in his life.

The three glass vitrines are left empty in the spirit of Yves Klein’s visionary exhibition Le Vide(The Void), which took place on 28 April 1958 at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris. Le Vide represented the apotheosis of Klein’s whole thought and on this occasion he showed the void as the perfect expression of artwork like a concept rather than a physical thing.

A showcase of books about the two artists’ ideas on colour, perception and void closes the chain leading to the finale of Blue to Blue.

Image Credit: Derek Jarman, Blue, 1993, screenshot.