Abel Shah: Practice makes Practice – Residency
1 – 28 March 2020
The Practice makes Practice Residency is an opportunity which provides artists with time to test out ideas, experiment, develop networks, research new works/projects and explore new aspects of their practice without any expectation to produce new work.
Throughout March we will host London-based artist duo Abel Shah (Alex Bell and Giulia Shah) whose collaborative artworks manifest as multi-media installations. The duo are also interested in finding alternative forms of exchange. For example, they facilitate Residency 11:11, a free self-funded residency within their home, for young and emerging practitioners based outside of London to whom it is relevant to spend time being in London. Often coinciding with the residency programme, they organise and host performative casual dinners of invited guests who can connect and share ideas over the immediate intimacy of sharing a meal. These projects, alongside their studio-practice, inform their approach to art-making.
Their aims for the Practice makes Practice residency are to connect with other practitioners engaged in artist-run initiatives, and use the time to experiment and create a community outside of London. They will ask questions about collaboration, the ethical conflicts that can arise when working this way, what strategies can be used to approach institutions to be more accepting of non-individual artists, and what tools artists can share to help support each other in producing and creating work. In their own words:
“Collaborating since 2016, we share similar interests in “authorship”, the (re)presentation of “things”, generation of knowledge and structures of power. We have been developing a dialogical approach to art making, and found that alternative ways of communicating, language, meaning and translation have since become a core subject within our practice. By collecting and constructing objects, texts, image and sound, we try to obstruct notions of substance and confuse signs of hierarchy. The relationships between image/object, real/fake, virtual/physical, visible/hidden, written/oral are all important dualisms in our practice, reflecting our approach to the ongoing exchange and opposition that exists when making art as a non-singular artist.
We are very excited to be part of the Practice Makes Practice residency in March 2020. As a duo we are interested in non-hierarchical forms of making, and the questioning and experimenting with ideas of what it truly means to collaborate. During our time at The NewBridge Project, we would like to organise a group of participants to experiment, hold workshops with and discuss ideas around collaboration and problems we as art practitioners face when working this way. We plan to create an open-source digital library to collect and distribute material to benefit future collaborative art production, and open up possibilities of sharing and exchange. We hope that these group meetings shape and build this library and vice versa, both contributing to each other, evolving long after the month of March.”
These group meetings will take place on four consecutive Sundays in March (8th, 15th, 21st and 29th) across the afternoon (1-5pm). For more info or to be a part of this, please send the duo an email expressing your interest to abelshahstudio@gmail.com
The duo will also present a public sharing event in late March. Keep an eye on our Programme page for details.
