Harsh Light: A Particular Reality, Part 2 - Francesca Telling & Rehana Zaman
Wednesday 23 November, 7 – 8:30pm
Online (via Zoom)
Free & open to all
We are delighted for the 3rd instalment of Harsh Light in 2022, to take place on 23 November.
Started during the first wave of Covid in 2020, Harsh Light has become an online gathering space for practitioners and publics alike to parse out the ways we have been surviving these critical, changing times. All sessions are BSL interpreted.
Our speakers use Harsh Light as a platform to work through one or two more precise questions related to their practice, particularly ones that are connected to systemic challenges of public health, politics and Arts Council England’s strategy. We invite you to look back at our archive of conversations if you are interested in understanding the many different concerns and strategies that practitioners have articulated over the course of Covid.
Video still from Alternative Economies (2021), Rehana Zaman. Image courtesy of the artist.
In collaboration with A Particular Reality (APR), Bloc Projects is pleased to present two conversations this autumn that foreground the practices and life experiences of artists who are differently marginalised. The first one on Casteism (September 2022) can be found here, and in this second instalment artists Rehana Zaman and Francesca Telling will continue a conversation that began when Rehana was Francesca’s studio practice tutor on the BA Fine Art course at Goldsmiths University between 2019 and 2020.
Rehana and Francesca will discuss the role of education in relation to their practice, both within and outside of the institution, before taking up their recent works; Francesca’s 81 years in Fungal Time (Year of the Snake), 2022 and Rehana’s Alternative Economies (2021) and Rubus (2022), to expand on their shared interests around ecologies and relationships to land.
Working predominantly in sculpture - incorporating elements of writing and photography - Francesca’s practice extracts familiar objects and iconographies to be viewed through the lens of the artefact or heirloom; in order to investigate their relationships to gestures of heritage, memory, grief and assimilation. Searching for the specific moments where objects and symbols within the remit of the everyday can come to embody the talismanic, votive or ritual - and how the care with which these images are preserved can reference languages of the souvenir, collection or archive - she constructs speculative studies of personal and microcosmic histories; alongside the wider political, cultural, ecological and mythological contexts of the landscapes these emerge from.
Rehana Zaman is an artist from Heckmondwike. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work. Recent presentations include Serpentine Projects (forthcoming) British Art Show 9 (touring), ICA Miami, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Borås International Sculpture Biennial (Sweden), Artist Film International Whitechapel, London and worldwide. In 2019 she co-edited ‘Tongues’ with Taylor Le Melle, published by PSS and was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award. She is currently a board member of not/nowhere artist workers cooperative and her films are distributed by LUX. Rehana lives and works in London.