FAILURES & REPETITIONS
15-21 February 2021
GWENBA, Katarina Ranković, Aled Simons, Tom Cardew, Bláithín Mac DonnellA Five Years Instagram Residency @fiveyearsarchway
fiveyears.org.uk | info@fiveyears.org.uk | Instagram
Schedule:Monday 15 February - GWENBA
Wednesday 17 February - Katarina Ranković
Thursday 18 February - (film night / insta live: hosted by Aled @ 7pm)
Friday 19 February - Aled Simons
Saturday 20 February - Tom Cardew
Sunday 21 February - Bláithín Mac Donnell
Works:
For Failures and Repetitions, Katarina Ranković presents two video works that theatricise the act of writing. This is followed by a reading from her in-progress novel, Anomaline: a philosophical romance about a solitary protagonist navigating the vacated vestiges of a cliché literary world.
Bláithín Mac Donnell will perform a new work situated in multiple landscapes over various time periods each linked by a natural or synthetic event which has altered the land irreversibly. From football pitches to Roman streets the viewer will be taken on a cyclical narrative which draws on highly descriptive colloquial and scientific language to both fix and un-fix the viewer in the specificity of time and place.
GWENBA: BLØØD ORANGE is a moving image piece that explores performance, sculpture and video which are permeated with magic realism in their attempt to get closer to other worlds, other life forms and unexplored places. Set within a dream, the film probes a satirical approach to mass-media advertising through existential questioning and isolation; focusing on the transition into ‘womanhood’ in a self-proclaimed connected world.
Aled Simons: Lost and forgotten photographs recreated from memory. Charged totems. Hundreds and Thousands, joke shop vomit and a homemade Hulk Hogan costume from 1991. Imagine a drumroll that goes on forever, the joke gets old fast, it’s like a fanfare for an event that may never happen, or that is happening over and over and over again.
Wellness™ in the age of the exhausted. Tom Cardew will present an ongoing digital character performance, Inspired Believe, of quick fixes & how to’s as atomising sticking plasters onto systemic ills. This work explores the parasocial relationship that is formed between an online personality and an audience, & how this is subject to fissures and collapses in the influencer’s attempt to address themes, ideas and concepts out of their depth.
Profiles:
Katarina Ranković is a video, performance and text-based artist currently working on a practice-based PhD project at Goldsmiths College. She is exploring the extent to which personhood is encoded in character, and whether fictional characters can be reverse-engineered into something approximating persons; as prototypes of general artificial intelligence.
@rankovic.k http://www.katarinarankovic.art
Aled Simons. Half-forgotten heirlooms and the misremembered. Past, present and future all at once. Performative whims born of pseudoscience, bedroom witchcraft and misinterpreted ritual, an impulse that becomes compulsion - all filtered through a childhood dressing-up box. This is Aled Simons’ practice. Imagine a dream in which you strip naked in the living room of your grandparent’s council house. You are nude, jumping from armchair to settee, then from settee back to armchair singing Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh or Cliff Richard’s Living Doll - the one with The Young Ones. This is also Aled Simons’ practice.
@aled.simons http://www.aledsimons.com
Working with spoken word performance Bláithín Mac Donnell’s work seeks to fix an image in the specifics of time, place and narrative. Currently a PhD researcher at NCAD exploring Storytelling in the digital age, Mac Donnell holds an MA Photography from The Royal College of Art and a BA Fine Art from Goldsmiths London.
http://www.blaithinmacdonnell.com @blaithinmacdonnell
GWENBA is a multidisciplinary artist [new:media] artist currently based in South Wales. Her work explores the relationship between organic and virtual spaces, forming digital growths from the earth’s core with performance, sound, video and text experiments. She is interested in exploring communication and connection through the digital realm, mimicking the forms of Nature to deliver a complex and layered narrative rich in dark humour, laid over a phantasmagoria of homespun alien-like forms. https://www.gwenba.com/ @g.wenba
Tom Cardew’s film, installation & writing practice processes and explores tacit societal structures of competitive and comparative worth, meditating upon the markers, materials and histories that shape them. Taking reference from Mark Fisher’s writing, his work addresses the weird & the eerie inherent within neoliberalism with works and projects both on and offline.
https://www.tomcardew.co.uk @cardewgram
