Month: August 2021

23 September – 30 November 2021
Thursday – Sat  12pm – 8pm
Strange Brew, Bristol
10-12 Fairfax St, Bristol BS1 3DB, United Kingdom

Photographs chronicling Bristol’s music scene since the 1980s by Mark Simmons will go on display, many for the first time, as part of Bristol Photo Festival. Studio portraits of artists will be displayed alongside photographs capturing music events and venues across the city. Collectively, these photographs demonstrate the diversity and energy of music in and across Bristol during a period of great creativity.

For the exhibition, Simmons revisited his archive of over one hundred thousand images — approximately 20 thousand focusing on music— to select 30 to represent the city’s recent musical heritage — both mainstream and counter-culture. The exhibition includes early portraits of well-known figures such as Massive Attack and Roni Size & Reprazent alongside influential but less-well known figures such as John Stapleton, AKA Dr Jam, the Moonflowers, Sub Love, Phantom Limb and Rob Smith AKA RSD of Smith & Mighty, pivotal pioneer of the ‘Bristol Sound’.

Alongside these portraits the exhibition includes images documenting deep house nights at Trinity, early Drum & Bass ‘Jungle’ sessions at Malcolm X,  St Paul’s Carnival sound systems and street revellers, the crowds at Ashton Court Festival, and dance competitions at Easton Community Centre amongst others.

Simmons was most active on the music scene in the 1990s, working for club promoters, local and national magazines. As a result, many of the images in the exhibition were taken as professional commissions where Simmons would often stay for several hours to dance and immerse himself in the ambience. Being a part of the collective experience gained him tacit acceptance to record these often unguarded and open portraits. In addition to his work documenting music, Simmons has worked as a photographer/photojournalist in the fields of the arts, community activity and wider political engagement.

“When taking photos you’ve got to be in the eye of the storm to really capture that moment and Mark has always been that guy” 

Daddy G (Massive Attack)

16 October – 16 January 2021
ARNOLFINI, Bristol
16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA, United Kingdom
Tue – Sat 11.00 – 18.00 Sunday 11.00-17.00

In Autumn 2021 Arnolfini will celebrate over thirty years of extraordinary practice from Bristol-born photographer Stephen Gill, drawing together new previously un-exhibited work including his latest series Please Notify the Sun alongside works from other iconic series including Hackney Flowers, Buried, Talking to Ants, Night Procession, Pigeons, Coexistence and Coming up for Air.

Also featuring the first UK presentation of images from award winning photographic series and book The Pillar, the exhibition will explore Gill’s rich sense of space, leading us through the flea markets and towpaths of Hackney Wick in London, to his current rural surroundings amidst the Swedish countryside.

Creating numerous distinct bodies of work, Gill – described as a ‘documentarist’, ‘anthropologist’ and ‘dazzling visual poet’ – has built his photographic career upon an ethos of experimentation. Eschewing a signature style in order to adapt both his creative and technical approach to the subject at hand, has led to alchemical ‘experiments’ including photographic burials, floral collage, in-camera photograms and submerging work within a watery world.

Informed by the artist’s own extensive and meticulously ordered archive, the exhibition provides a portal into Gill’s unique world, one in which the very constraints of photography are turned upon their head and strangely poeticised. Exploring this vast resource, artist proofs, original photo books and archival material, are displayed alongside prints, selected by the artist, highlighting the often unseen poetics of urban and rural environments.Coming up for Air : Stephen Gill – A Retrospective is curated by Stephen Gill and Arnolfini’s Executive Director Gary Topp and forms part of Arnolfini’s 60th anniversary programme, celebrating its past, present and future, as well as the inaugural Bristol Photo Festival.

Stephen Gill (b. 1971 in Bristol, UK), became interested in photography in early childhood, thanks to his father, an interest in insects and an initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope. As a child he enrolled on his first photography course at Bristol’s Watershed, photographing the streets and cityscapes around him.

Stephen’s photographs are held in various private and public collections and have also been exhibited at many international galleries and museums including London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The Museum of London, Agnes B, Victoria Miro Gallery, Christophe Guye Gallery, Sprengel Museum, Tate, Centre National de l’audiovisual, Galerie Zur Stockeregg, Archive of Modern Conflict, Gun Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, Leighton House Museum, Haus Der Kunst and has had solo shows in festivals including – Recontres d’Arles, The Toronto photography festival, Festival Images – Vevey and PHotoEspaña.

Gill has self-published numerous award-winning photo books such as Invisible, Hackney Wick, Warming Down, A Series of Disappointments, Archaeology in Reverse, Hackney Flowers, Buried, Off Ground, Coming up for Air, B-Sides, Trinidad 44 Photographs, A Book of Birds, Outside In, Coexistence, Hackney Kisses, Pigeons, Best Before End, Talking to Ants, and most recently The Pillar, which won the Les Rencontres de la Photographie author book award.

5 – 30 October 2021
Tuesday -Friday 11.30 – 16.30
The Vestibules, Bristol
City Hall, College Green, Bristol BS1 5TR, United Kingdom

‘If there is no image, there is no identity’

The exhibition ‘We Are Still Here’ focuses on individuals affected by HIV/AIDS and their living spaces. The project aims to counter a decline in visibility of the HIV/AIDS community by inviting the audience in to these personal spaces, which have been curated to better the mental health of their inhabitants.

Portraits by photographer Mareike Günsche will be displayed alongside images selected by the participants of objects from, and areas in, their living spaces which bring them joy .The exhibition allows the subjects to represent their own sense of place, both as individuals and within wider society. Due to stigmatisation in the past, the subjects of the exhibition may have been excluded from traditional living rooms, and there is presently a steady decline in awareness about HIV/AIDS in the public consciousness. The exhibition, and wider ongoing project from which is it drawn, affirms ‘We Are Still Here’. The project  also exists online so that those within the HIV-community across the world, can add their own stories in perpetuity.

‘Photography can immortalise victims and offer remembrance, but this medium is also a poignant and reassuring tool for survivors. Not to be forgotten are the families of both, and the difficulties that come with understanding a disease that’s also experienced second-hand. The family portrait will be examined as an institution of both exclusion and inclusion, with participatory photography to be used as a means of reclamation for the absence of a whole community. Due to stigmatisation, HIV+ people have been excluded and even banished from many traditional living rooms in the past. If there is no image, there is no identity. This is even truer in today’s times of expanding social media, where the image becomes the medium of legitimation. Photography and its crucial role as a means of identity, visibility and representation will therefore be used as a resource to help negate such stigmatisation.”

Martin Burns – Writer, HIV/AIDS activist and equality advocateThis interdisciplinary research project is a collaboration between Dr Adrian Flint (University of Bristol, SPAIS), Mareike Günsche (Photographer/Educator and Lecturer of photography at the State University of Arts, Mongolia) and Martin Burns (Writer, HIV/AIDS activist and equality advocate). This exhibition has been produced as a result of the festival commissioning programme in collaboration with the Brigstow Institute (University of Bristol).

October 2021 (TBC)
The Georgian House Museum, Bristol
7 Great George St, Bristol BS1 5RR, United Kingdom

‘Dipina tsa Kganya (2021) features two performances informed by a notion of healing, enacted through acts of naming and cleansing.

The word dipina means ‘songs’ in my mother language of seSotho. The song referred to is that of my family clan names, traditionally passed down through oral tradition. Additionally, the Sotho word for ‘light’: kganya – is in the etymology of my last name: Kganye.

A central visual component is the lighthouse featured in the middle channel of the video work. A light beam, in perpetual motion, casts light onto the surrounding ocean scene and in turn creates shadows in the two peripheral channels of the work. In the first or left video channel, a lighthouse keeper appears as a custodian of this light, tending to it by continually cleaning the bulb – a light source that symbolically guides those lost at sea. The song featured in the work (composed by musician Thandi Ntuli) plays from a large, custom-built Polyphon music box, which is hand cranked in the third or right video channel.

These performative gestures are in conversation with the southern African practice of the ‘praise-singing’ of clan names as a way of passing down the origins of the family story as an act of resistance to historical erasure, to ensure its unwritten continuity.

Lebohang Kganye was born in 1990 in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. Kganye is currently doing her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand. Notable awards include the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/22, the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize (2020) and Camera Austria Award (2019).

Kganye is currently participating in major museum group exhibitions in 2021 including: ‘Family Affairs. Family in Current Photography’ at the House of Photography in Deichtorhallen, Hamburg and ‘The Power of My Hands’ at Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. She has exhibited her work extensively within curated group exhibitions and biennales including: ‘Afterglow’ Yokohama Triennale (2020); ‘Africa State of Mind’, a travelling exhibition presented at the Royal West of England Academy (2019 – 2020), the Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco (2019) and the Impressions Gallery, Bradford (2018); ‘Recent Histories’, a touring exhibition of the Arthur Walther Collection at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam (2018–2019) and ‘Give Me Yesterday’ Fondazione Prada, Milan (2016)South African artist Lebohang Kganye, has collaborated with The Georgian House Museum to create an installation as part of Bristol Photo Festival. The black and white three-channel video installation offers a response to the violence of historical erasure of names and oral traditions. The house was once home to a sugar trader and his enslaved staff. Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the light when you leave for good invites us to reflect on the legacy of colonialism as a shared history.

The Georgian House Museum 

The installation will be on display in the Drawing Room of The Georgian House Museum. Following the fashions of the time, the Drawing Room was on the first floor, at the front of the house, with three large floor to ceiling windows.  As the grandest room in the house, it would have been set with the family’s best pieces of furniture and paintings, possibly including a carpet.  Here, evening guests might have been entertained by musical performances or amused at card parties, while day time visitors would have taken tea with the ladies of the family. 

The house was built, between 1788 – 91 at number 7 Great George Street as the city home of John Pinney, a wealthy sugar planter and slave owner, and his family. Pinney inherited sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Nevis, and the family’s wealth was founded on sugar grown and harvested by an enslaved workforce.  Now the Georgian House museum, the house is presented as it might have looked at that time, with rooms revealing life above and below stairs. 

16 September – 19 December 2021
Martin Parr Foundation
Paintworks, 316, Arno’s Vale, Bristol BS4 3AR, United Kingdom
Thu- Sun 10.30 – 17.30

I AM NOT INVisible is a visual account of homelessness in America. Over a period of 4-years Danish photographer, Thilde Jensen, set out across the US to create a document of this community excluded from mainstream society. The exhibition will be Jensen’s first in the UK and also the first time that the majority of the works from this project have been exhibited.

Jensen began the work that led to this project when in 2014, she met Reine and Lost, two homeless men in Syracuse, New York. Reine and Lost lived under a highway, and had survived three Upstate New York winters, huddled together on a small concrete ledge. Their openness in sharing their lives with Jensen drew her into a wider project photographing in Gallup, New Mexico, Las Vegas, and New Orleans as well as Syracuse. The resulting photographs represent the social cost of a system valuing profit over human welfare — homelessness representing a tangible consequence of an ever increasing chasm between rich and poor.

Jensen, herself had spent two years living out of a tent in the woods after becoming sick with Environmental Illness. She had been living well and working hard but had not made enough money to cover health insurance and she had no American safety net to catch her. These years of illness and isolation became the subject of her first book, The Canaries.

‘Though I had lived outside myself, the people I encountered in the street were there for reasons other than mine. I wanted the pictures to authentically show the often brutal reality of life in the streets of America. This meant learning a new way of making unposed photographs with my old medium format film camera, simply following and mirroring the people and their unfolding experiences. I spent many hours over weeks and months, gaining the trust of the homeless and understanding their struggles. I listened and I let the pictures come naturally. I tried to work from a place of extreme empathy instead of getting in the way of the people I was with.

´Most of the homeless people I met had life stories so full of trauma and neglect that I was surprised they had made it this far. An unkind world and a system not designed to help them succeed had deeply scarred many of them. They feel cast out, unwanted, invisible, forgotten. They endure constant harassment from cops, business owners, kids or drunks throwing rocks or lighting them on fire as they slept. Unsheltered, vulnerable to sexual assault and violence. Sleepless nights with drugs and alcohol to dull the pain. Slowly, your reality stops making sense or becomes too painful to inhabit, and the thin veil that separates you from madness starts to slip.’

Thilde Jensen was born in Denmark and moved to New York City in 1997. Six years later her life and career as a documentary and editorial photographer was cut short by a sudden development of severe Environmental Illness. The Canaries, her series about Environmental Illness, has been published in The New York Times, FT Magazine, The Observer, Esquire Russia, Wired.com rawfile, Vision Magazine China, Business Insider and Slate.com. The book of the series of work from this exhibition, The Unwanted was published in 2019. Jensen is a NYFA Fellowship and Light Work Grant recipient. In 2017 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete photographing for The Unwanted project. Her work has been exhibited in galleries internationally.

25 September – 23 October 2021
Centrespace, Bristol
6 Leonard Ln, Bristol BS1 1EA, United Kingdom

Wed – Sat 11.30-15.30

Opening – 25th September 2021, 11.30am, Centrespace Gallery
BOOK TICKETS EVENT – Helen Sear and Robert Darch in Conversation with Ken Grant, 25 September 2021, 2-3pm

Turn to Return brings together two series of work, ‘Within Sight’ by Helen Sear and ‘The Island’ by Robert Darch, both exhibited here for the first time. Sear’s series was made whilst repeatedly walking the same mountain passage in Majorca and Darch’s work was made in response to Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016. On the surface, the series are disparate both visually and in subject matter. However, when presented and interacting within the exhibition space, further similarities become apparent.

‘Each set of photographs ask us to respond to an imbalance, a rift in what we assume to be true and the way we see reality. They ask us to pause and consider the routes we haven’t taken – to recognise that movement and stasis can coexist.’ – Millie Bethel, curator.

Sear’s ‘Within Sight’ was created during the month of December 2019, whilst she was artist in residence at CCA Andratx. The series consists of black and white images of dense but delicate pines alongside images focused on large boulders manipulated into bold colours. 

‘‘Within Sight’ explores visual noise and density within a series of photographs taken at different times along the same mountain path on the island of Majorca. The images exist at the interface between inner vision and exterior reality, where the path forward grounds the viewer in the proximity of the present rather than promising a distant view depicted in many traditional landscapes. The similarity of the black and white images evokes the repetitive nature of enchantment, the gemstone colouring of the rocks playing with scale and physicality, bringing the entire body into the act of viewing.’

– Helen Sear

Darch’s series, ‘The Island’, is a reaction to Britain’s leave vote in 2016. It was shot over a period of 17 months and comprises both monochrome landscapes and portraits.

‘The island reflects the current political uncertainty about the future of this country and expresses my anxieties, hopes and fears about a decision that will affect generations for years to come. There is an overriding sense of melancholy within the series emphasised by the bleak monochrome imagery and cold winter light, shifting from dark corners, intimate portraits, misty landscapes and isolated figures. There is an unreality to ‘The Island’, a dreamlike quality that reflects the surreality of the current political landscape.’ 

– Robert Darch

Helen Sear’s practice focuses on the co-existence of human, animal, and natural environments and is rooted in an interest in Magic Realism, Surrealism and Conceptual Art. She studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London, Slade School, and her photographic works became widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain. Sear was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015. She was recently voted one of the key 100 women photographers practicing globally by The Royal Photographic Society : Hundred Heroines. She was visiting professor at the Royal Academy Schools, London between 2014 and 2019.

Robert Darch is a British artist-photographer based in the South West of England. He has published and exhibited widely and his photographs reside in public and private collections. His practice is motivated by the experience of place, in which the physical geography and material cultures of places merge with impressions from contemporary culture that equally influence perception. He holds an MFA with distinction in Photographic Arts and a MA with distinction in Photography & the Book from Plymouth University. He also has a BA with honours in Documentary Photography from Newport, Wales.  Darch is an Associate Lecturer in Photography at Plymouth University.