Love
19 May – 17 September, 2022
Bold Tendencies, London
Martin Creed, Rhea Dillon, Nan Goldin, Paloma Proudfoot, Dominique White, and Gray Wielebinski.
Bold Tendencies 2022 explored the subject of Love. Faced with struggles of solitude, anger and grief, one must return to love. Gathering its 2022 programme under this elusive and urgent theme, Bold Tendencies welcomes acclaimed international practices alongside new leading voices in contemporary art to speculate on the future of love, care and intimacy through six new site-specific artworks and an ambitious live programme in its rooftop home at Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, asking what love looks and feels like in the 21st century.
Taking the scale of a public monument, this sculpture is composed of nine triangular prisms made from African mahogany, rotating to create a bird’s eye view of a nine-pointed star. Referencing Nine Nights that is celebrated in Jamaican culture, where on the ninth night after a person’s death families hold a large celebration to finally see off the spirit, to see off the “duppy.”
Evoking the presence of a number of plinths from which a statue has toppled from, the obelisk abstracts the human body with minimal and rhythmic composition — on the one hand, creating a lyrical expression of the spiritual connection to heaven; on the other, a darker abstraction which calls to mind the trifocal points of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (Africa, The Caribbean and Western Europe), as well as the many slave ships constructed from indigenous African woods.
Through formal and conceptual juxtaposition, the work presents a complex and shifting relationship between history, identity and who and what we choose to memorialise in our society.
For the Q&A interview see here
9/3 or I know how to fall (3) and I was born to nights (9), 2022
Sapele mahogany and steel
460 × 65 × 65 cm
Sapele mahogany and steel
460 × 65 × 65 cm
Photography: Deniz Guzel