recent projects
2019-18
Floating
a performance and publication
VERY Project Space Berlin 2019
curated by Gigi Köhler and Ola Bielas
Two External Light Sources At the Same Time
a project of sculpture, print and performance in collaboration with Jenna Collins
curated by AEMI for Temple Bar Gallery 2019
Two External Light Sources At The Same Time
Was produced in collaboration with artist Jenna Collins, this performance features ‘The Nomoli’ in conversation with ‘Ronald’ , a malformed clay bust created by Collins based on a video of a hologram of Ronald Reagan’s face. The performance takes the form of a combative interview between two sculptures and is a new version of work developed as part of a two-person show at Five Years London in February and at Stanley Picker Gallery in July 2018. The premise of the performance was to make the two bodies of work on display come into direct conversation. This was done literally by giving voice to two of the sculptural elements in the exhibition, the bust of Ronald Reagan and the Nomoli, and by using light to indicate which sculpture was speaking the pre-recorded text at any given time. This approach was a theatricalisation of artworks ‘being in conversation’ and allowed for a comedic element to come through as well as a temporary shift in the exhibition space by the simplest of means. The text was based on the idea of an interview with three references, an excruciating conversation between Susan Sontag and John Berger, his delicate and decorative consideration of the place of narrative meeting Sontag’s no nonsense clarity; a particularly tough interview Bresson gave about Pickpocket and the video works of Steven Sutcliffe. The artists wrote the text simultaneously while installing the exhibition over the course of seven days. The 10-minute performance took place on the preview night and was repeated each evening of the exhibition thereafter.
Broken Diorama
a broadcast/exhibition organised with artist Alison Ballance
Dublin Art Book Fair 2018
Diorama: a model holding various temporalities in one place, in one scene and usually in 3 dimensions.
Broken Diorama was originally broadcast on Radio Quantica Lisbon, as a guest mix by Alison Ballance and Alice Rekab for Diana Policarpo's HERETICS #12 on 17th November 2017. For this broadcast, artists, architects and theorists were invited to contribute recordings that gathered loosely around the theme of the Diorama as a place in which multiple stories or broken retellings can be read as one or in parts; where the sequence of these narratives is dependent on the onlooker.
Contributors to Broken Diorama in order of appearance: Ingrid Berthon-Moine, Tina Kinsella, Katharina Ludwig, Alice Rekab & Alison Ballance, Ishita, Alexa Jean Barrett, Uma Breakdown, Elin Eyborg Lund & Anders Brasch-Willumsen, Susan Conte, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Jenna Collins, Sarah Lederman & Lola Bunting, Tai Shani, Alice Rekab & Stephen Rekab
Content warning: Listeners to the broadcast may wish to be aware that track 3 “Holes, Portals, Wounds and the Traumatised Text - How to get back from here?”, K Ludwig, (playtime 16mins 56secs) contains references to self-harm, rape, abuse and mental and physical illness.
Fugitive Subjects
limited edition riso print
text contributions from Adelaide Bannerman and Anne-Françoise Schmid
presented at Stanley Picker Gallery and at Whitechapel Gallery for London Art Book Fair 2018
The Shape Shifter
a digital tapestry presented at Stanley Picker Gallery (2018) and Temple Bar Gallery (2019)
What is a Nomoli?
a film and sculpture installation presented at Copperfield Gallery (2019)
Stanley Picker Gallery and Five Years Gallery (2018)
A Nomoli is the Temne name given to the strange figurative objects of unknown origin found buried in the ground both deep and shallow on various sites in Sierra Leone. Sometimes it is marking the rich seam of gold in a mine deep inside the earth; other times their placement is seemingly random, unearthed by hand or spade in a rice field. They are believed to bring or to signal abundance. If you take them out your harvest will fail. Some believe they are man-made and others that they are formed by the earth to resemble gods. The Sheela-na-Gig is the name given to an ancient figure carved in grotesque relief across the medieval architecture of Europe, with the highest concentration of 101 carvings found in Ireland. The Sheela-na- gig are said to ward off death and evil as they display their large distended vulva, their faces gently smiling or agape, reflecting the shock of life’s origins and the power of fertility across the ages Alice Rekab’s nomoli, which replicates the Temne nomoli yet resembles the Irish Sheela-na-gig, engages two distinct cultural forms one sexless the other sexed. Each becoming a motif of biographical expression for the artist as both Irish and Temne by descent.
Conjuncture In-film
a film and sculpture installation
presented at Copperfield Gallery (2019) _ display _ Berlin, Stanley Picker Gallery Five Years London (2018) and The Showroom London (2017)
Conjuncture In-Film is a video work in 3 parts shot on location in Sierra Leone in 2014, just before the outbreak of the Ebola Virus. The first part opens with footage of me trying to rework an existing sculpture and giving instructions as to how I would like this process to be filmed. The outline of the object is then overlaid with the outline of another sculpture, this time a public monument commissioned for the Memorial Garden at the Sierra Leone Peace Museum. The film shows my conversation with the tour guide about the commissioning process for this monument and we are left wondering how and where the artist fits into the process. The second part of the film cuts to a moment of conflict between two men, and proceeds in fragments to tell the story of a farmer who discovers a mysterious object in his rice field. We recognise the object as the original sculpture from our first scene, but this time it is repurposed as a prop in the telling of this story. In the final part we see the object alone within a strange dreamlike landscape, a kind of ideal space or folly, and hear a recording of my interview with the comedian Saidu Temperature as we discuss the value of the sculpture in the telling of the story. Throughout the film we see glitches, it is as though the transmission is being interrupted or scrambled, colours melt slowly or images burst through momentarily, overlapping with moments in the film.
Intrication In the Park
Presented at Stanley Picker Gallery and Five Years Gallery (2018)
The video work shows performances and interviews with the philosophers Anne-Françoise Schmid and François Laruelle. In each of these scene the same object appears and is integrated into the conversation, these conversations in turn appear alongside audio recordings of the artists questions and footage taken on an improvised tour of Square Sarah Bernhardt in Paris June 2014. Taken together their voices form a disjointed chorus of enquiry, demanding, venerating and denigrating as they question and attempt to surmise the object they hold in their hands.
Through comedy, melodrama and documentary the work seeks to perform in the most explicit, hyperbolic way questions concerning the relevance of the artist, the transference of value onto objects and the reproducibility of that value through various economies: financial, aesthetic, affective, knowledge based or otherwise. Caught on film, these fractured and inconsistent narratives are the lasting impressions of a time where the artist and her role as a producer of contemporary art felt radically inadequate yet persisted in that inadequacy for better or for worse