Incubator Open Studio

 Friday 9 and Saturday 10 December, 2022, at Granderson Lab

 

 

Over a four-week period, artists Bianca Peake, Elechi Todd, and Khaffi Beckles have shared an improvised studio space at Granderson Lab, engaged in work that serves their individual practices as well as the resulting collective discourse. While sharing the resources of the space, they aimed to intentionally create communal experiences through shared meals, reading, discussion, and watching films/videos.

On Friday 9 and Saturday 10 December, from 6 to 9 pm each evening, the artists are hosting an Open Studio event to share the results of this project. The work shown in this shared space is the product not of shifting focus on process, learning, observing and sharing.

The Incubator experience is the product of ongoing discourse on the value of collective making and shared spaces and thought. As both an exercise and event, it challenges the notion of solitary studio practice, where exchanges take place intrapersonally, and instead provides an exploratory invitation to create and exchange cultural, artistic, and intellectual knowledge as a group.

As an additional core function of the Incubator experience, the artists have engaged in documentation and reflection through writing. Cataloging and sharing experiences has operated not just as a means of creating accessibility to artistic practice, but also of demystifying the process of creating
knowledge.

All are invited.

Hackney nongkrong

Alice Yard at Ruby Cruel / documenta fifteen 

Tuesday 15 November, 2022 / 6 to 9 pm

 

The 100 days of documenta fifteen are over, but Alice Yard and its collaborators are still thinking and talking about what we did and saw and learned, the friends and the art we made.

On Tuesday 15 November, from 6 to 9 pm, we’ll be at Ruby Cruel at 250 Morning Lane, Hackney, London, for a post-documenta nongkrong — that’s the Indonesian word for hanging out — conversing, sharing some fragments and traces of our documenta fifteen activations, maybe some new activations from old friends, and hoping to make some new friends too.

All are invited.

 

Belmont nongkrong

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen
Wednesday 12 October, 2022 / from 7 pm at Granderson Lab, Belmont

We learned a new word in the documenta lumbung. Nongkrong, Indonesian for “hanging out”, means more or less the same as liming.

documenta fifteen is over. What did we see and hear, what did we learn, who did we meet? Did we “make friends, not art”? Or did we make friends and art?

On Wednesday 12 October, from 7 pm, we’ll be at Granderson Lab for a post-documenta nongkrong — conversing, reflecting, spending time together, and sharing some fragments and traces of the various activations Alice Yard and our visiting artists made in Kassel during the 100 days of documenta fifteen. This is also a moment to belatedly commemorate our sixteenth anniversary in September, and continue imagining the way ahead with friends old and new.

All are invited.

Proximities 3: The sky has no limit / El cielo no tiene límite

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen
Presented in collaboration with the Third Horizon Film Festival

Still from Celaje (Cloudscape), by Sofía Gallisá Muriente

 

From 12 to 21 September, Alice Yard and the Third Horizon Film Festival will present an installation of three short films/videos at the documenta fifteen venue WH22, screening in a continuous loop from 10 am to 8 pm daily. These works, by filmmakers with roots in the Caribbean region (Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, French Guiana), investigate ideas about territory and belonging, family and self-definition, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism — all making use of found or repurposed footage.

Featuring:

Islands, Richard Fung (9 mins)
Cloudscape, Sofía Gallisá Muriente (41 mins)
Listen to the Beat of Our Images, Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste (15 mins)

This is the third in the Proximities series of video works presented by Alice Yard, exploring relationships within the Caribbean region, following previous editions in 2010 and 2015.

Update: Proximities 3 will be reinstalled at WH22 for the final weekend of documenta fifteen, 24 and 25 September

 

Ada M. Patterson, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

Ada M. Patterson is Alice Yard’s ninth artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 11 to 25 September, 2022, she is based at WH22 Kassel. During her residency, she will draft compositions for an upcoming music video installation, using steel pan. As she rehearses in her room in the private living quarters, visitors may be able to hear fragments of pan music trickling into the exhibition space.

Within the exhibition space, there will be a different textile shared daily from her series Kanga for the Present, gifting each day with a new message.

=

Ada M. Patterson (b. 1994, Bridgetown) is an artist and writer based between Barbados, London, and Rotterdam. She works with masquerade, performance, poetry, textiles, and video, looking at the ways storytelling can limit, enable, and complicate identity formation. Her recent work considers grief, elegy writing, and archiving as tools for disrupting the disappearance of communities queered by different experiences of crisis. Patterson was the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial and Art Writing Fellow. 

Photo: Alessandro Sala, courtesy Centrale Fies

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange  #documentafifteen

Bruce Cayonne, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

Bruce Cayonne is Alice Yard’s eighth artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 29 August to 10 September, 2022, he is based between WH22 and Trafo Haus in Kassel, collaborating with other artists and collectives to make hand-painted signs for various activations of the documenta fifteen lumbung.

=

Bruce Cayonne is an artist and sign painter based in Arima, Trinidad. He has been painting fete signs for the past thirty years. His iconic work has come to define the visual landscape and history of Trinidad and Tobago with his signature fete style — bold, precise lettering against colourful and vibrant gradient backgrounds, each sign hand-painted on hardboard and hammered onto lightposts.

Over the past three decades, Cayonne has produced thousands of signs and has collaborated with numerous artists and musicians, such as DJs like Kabuki, Dr Hyde, Howie T, Foreigner, and Nyahbinghi, and visual artists like Christopher Cozier (T&T), Blue Curry (UK/Bahamas) and ds4si/Intelligent Mischief (USA).

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange  #documentafifteen

Michelle Eistrup, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

 

Michelle Eistrup is Alice Yard’s seventh artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 14 to 28 August, 2022, she is based at WH22 in Kassel. While in Kassel, she is organising a programme of discussions and meetings around her ongoing Bridging Art + Text Incubator (BAT INK) project. She has invited a small group of artists, researchers, community representatives, and curators to exchange deep knowledge, collaboration, and scientific and artistic approaches. “On the brink of disaster, future scenarios must envision rediscovered life-giving and sustainable cultural and spiritual practices concerning nature.”

Find more information on BAT INK here.

=

Michelle Eistrup is a visual artist, and initiator of artistic collaborations who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Eistrup’s art incorporates themes of identity, corporeality, faith, memory, and post-colonialism, where her transnational background (Danish, Jamaican, American) is sometimes a point of departure. Rooted in a vibrant global arts community, she has exhibited internationally and organised events that facilitate in-depth dialogue and research between artists, writers, and curators, for the overall purpose of encouraging a more integrated, sensitive, and equitable creative exchange.

She curated BAT, Bridging Art and Text Workshop and Seminar, together with coordinator Annemari B. Clausen, and BAT (3-volume publication, 800 pp) (2012-2018).

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange  #documentafifteen

Versia Harris, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

Versia Harris is Alice Yard’s sixth artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 31 July to 13 August, 2022, she is based at WH22 in Kassel. Her video works They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once (2013) and A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes When You’re Awake (2012) are installed at the Grimmwelt venue for the duration of documenta fifteen. During her time in Kassel, she will produce a series of small drawings and sculptures that intervene and intersect with the Grimmwelt museum space, “drawing attention to secret, discreet, or hidden worlds that may exist parallel to our current reality.” She will also be joined by artists Tessa Mars and Razia Barsatie for a series of informal conversations and collaborations around parallel themes and concerns in their respective bodies of work.

=

Versia Harris (b. 1990, Bridgetown) is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and work in Barbados. Harris has done a number of residences in the Caribbean and North and South America, including Vermont Studio Center and Alice Yard, Trinidad, and has shown in multiple countries including the UK, China, Nigeria, Russia, Germany, Aruba, and the US. Her first solo show in 2015 in Barbados was titled This Quagmire. She was awarded a Fulbright Laspau Scholarship in 2017 and received her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan USA in May, 2019, where she also earned a Mercedes-Benz Financial Services New Beginnings Award.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange  #documentafifteen

Shannon Alonzo, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

 

Shannon Alonzo is Alice Yard’s fifth artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 18 to 30 July, 2022, she is based at WH22 in Kassel. During this time she will engage in a series of projects which are an extension of work created during her residency at Granderson Lab in 2020, investigating space and collective action in Trinidad Carnival. This will include the video installation Subterranean Sentiments of Belonging, which documents the erasure of three charcoal and graphite murals created over a period of one year on a single wall at Granderson Lab in Belmont, Trinidad.

=

Shannon Alonzo (b. 1988, St. Joseph, Trinidad and Tobago) is an interdisciplinary artist focusing primarily on drawing, soft sculpture, and performance. Her practice explores themes of collective belonging, place attachment, and the significance of Carnival ritual to the Caribbean consciousness. She holds a BA from London College of Fashion and a MRes Creative Practice from the University of Westminster. She has exhibited work at Alice Yard, Loftt Gallery, and Black Box in Trinidad and Tobago, Ambika P3 and London Gallery West in the UK, and the Atlantic World Art Fair on Artsy.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange #documentafifteen

Hand to hand

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

Three activations and a reading by four writers
Saturday 16 July, 2022 / from 6 pm TT time at Granderson Lab, Belmont

 

 Marlon Griffith’s Score for a Procession activated at WH22, Kassel

 

The Book of the Ten Thousand Things, a project by documenta fifteen participants La Intermundial Holobiente, is a polyphonic publication written and edited by fourteen writers and artists from Argentina “to imagine and give shape to a posthuman, non-anthropocentric world where anything and everything is taken into account.” Audience members are invited to explore and interact with the book “as an open archive.”

Score for a Procession is a participatory drawing project conceived by artist Marlon Griffith, connecting people across time and space through the shared phenomenon of a heartbeat.

Carter Drawings, instigated by Nicholas Laughlin, invites participants to enter a poem by the late Martin Carter by transcribing its lines in their own handwriting, creating a tangible archive of “readings” of the poem that are also literal re-writings.

These three projects, linked by a process of hands-on engagement, will be activated at Granderson Lab on the evening of Saturday 16 July, and the results will later travel to Kassel, Germany, to be presented as part of Alice Yard’s participation in documenta fifteen.

On that evening we will also host an informal, intimate reading by four T&T-born writers: Katherine Agyemaa Agard (of colour), Desiree C. Bailey (What Noise Against the Cane), Arielle John (Containing in Itself All Sweetness), and Shivanee Ramlochan (Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting), produced in collaboration with Novel Niche and the Bocas Lit Fest.

All are invited. Audience members are asked to wear face masks and follow COVID-19 safety protocols.

Luis Vasquez La Roche, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

 

Luis Vasquez La Roche is Alice Yard’s second artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 4 to 17 July, 2022, they are based at WH22 in Kassel. During their time there, they will present a series of performance and video works by themselves and a range of other artists, extending the documenta fifteen lumbung to various past and present collaborators. These include their solo performance work How to Jump the Rope the Right Way; the video installation En Function del Interes Nacional, in collaboration with Mariana Parisca; and Let That Be Your Cautionary Tale, a collaborative project among eleven artists that centres on social behaviour as an extension of structured artwork, using land, performance, collaboration, movement, migration, and history as points of departure.

=

Luis Vasquez La Roche (b. 1983, based in Couva, Trinidad and Tobago) holds a BA in Visual Arts from the University of the West Indies and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. They have exhibited work and performed in institutions such as Field Projects in NY, ICOSA in Austin TX, Denison Art Space in OH, Deakin University in Melbourne Australia, La Vulcanizadora in Bogotá Colombia, MCLA Gallery 51 in MA, Fresh Milk in Barbados, Alice Yard, Medulla Art Gallery and Y Art Gallery in Trinidad and Tobago, LACE in Los Angeles CA, AIR gallery in NY, The Carr Center in Detroit MI and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond VA. They were the recipient of the Fulbright scholarship in 2018. They are currently a full-time lecturer at the Academy for the Performing Arts at The University of Trinidad and Tobago.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange #documentafifteen

A conversation with Richard Fung

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen
Friday 24 June, 2022 / 12.30 pm TT time / 6.30 pm Kassel time

 

Richard Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist and writer. He joins Alice Yard co-director Christopher Cozier for an informal conversation about his current work in progress, centred on the late Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo, and questions of the local and the global.

Fung will participate from Alice Yard’s space at WH22 in Kassel, and Cozier will join him virtually from our home base at Granderson Lab in Belmont, Port of Spain. The conversation will also be live-streamed. All are invited to join — virtually online at Alice Yard’s YouTube channel or in person at Granderson Lab.

=

Richard Fung is an artist and writer born in Trinidad and based in Toronto.

His work comprises challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS, justice in Israel/Palestine, and his own family history. His single-channel and installation works, which include Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians (1984) and its redux Re:Orientations (2016), My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000), Jehad in Motion (2007), Dal Puri Diaspora (2012), and Nang by Nang (2018), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada, the United States, and Trinidad and Tobago.

Fung’s essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002). He is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange #documentafifteen

Blue Curry, artist in residence

Alice Yard / documenta fifteen

 

Blue Curry is Alice Yard’s first artist in residence at documenta fifteen. From 18 June to 2 July, 2022, he is based at WH22 in Kassel, responding sculpturally to other documenta fifteen artists and ideas. Working with co-curator Christopher Cozier, he is also instigating a revived version of the Out of Place project, originally presented in Port of Spain in 2016 — a series of actions by other artists, further extending the documenta fifteen exchange through our networks.

=

Blue Curry (b.1974, Nassau, Bahamas) is an artist working primarily in sculptural assemblage and installation art who uses an idiosyncratic language of commonplace objects and found materials to engage with themes of exoticism, tourism, and material culture. He has exhibited at Tate Britain, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Liverpool, SITE Santa Fe and Jamaica Biennials, the Caribbean Triennial, the Art Museum of the Americas, the World Bank, the Museum of Latin American Art, the Frost Museum and the Nassauischer Kunstverein, among many others. He is a graduate of the Goldsmiths College Fine Art MFA programme. He currently lives in London and works between there and the Caribbean.

He is also the director of Ruby Cruel, a creative space in Hackney, London.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange #documentafifteen

Alice Yard at documenta fifteen

 

From 18 June to 25 September, 2022, Alice Yard will participate in documenta fifteen, curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa.
 
Taking the lumbung — a communal rice barn typical in rural Indonesia — as a conceptual model, documenta fifteen is built around “principles of collectivity, resource building, and equitable distribution.”

When Alice Yard was invited to join the documenta fifteen lumbung and work alongside dozens of other collectives from around the world, the curators asked how we might “translate” what we do to a new physical location — the German city of Kassel — and a broader context.

What does Alice Yard do? For fourteen and a half years, from our founding in 2006, we were often described as an art space, based at Roberts Street in Woodbrook, Port of Spain. In February 2020, when we permanently relocated to Granderson Lab in Belmont, it was clear to us that Alice Yard is not merely a physical location, but a series of relationships and ideas, ways of thinking and working — not a project but a practice, not a programme but a process.

How do we translate this to documenta fifteen? Rather than inventing some unprecedented new spectacle, we have opted to do what we’ve always done: create a space, both physical and conceptual, to bring artists and others together to talk, experiment, exchange, and play, with an ethos of self-determination, generosity, spontaneity, and friendship.

During the 100 days of documenta fifteen, Alice Yard will host nine artists in residence at the WH22 venue, who will create and present site- and time-specific works and actions in diverse media at locations around Kassel. Building on relationships that, in some cases, stretch back to the earliest days of Alice Yard, these artists are:

18 June–2 July: Blue Curry
3–17 July: Luis Vasquez La Roche
5–19 July: Nicole Cecilia Delgado and Amanda Hernández
18–30 July: Shannon Alonzo
31 July–13 August: Versia Harris
14–28 August: Michelle Eistrup
29 August–10 September: Bruce Cayonne
11–25 September: Ada M. Patterson

We also look forward to welcoming other friends and collaborators to our space in Kassel for informal visits, interactions, and activations, some planned and some improvised.

Simultaneously, Alice Yard will present a series of works and actions in Port of Spain to extend the documenta fifteen conversation beyond Kassel.

During our time in Kassel, instead of concerning ourselves with whether or how an international audience may or may not understand our process, we prefer to ask ourselves: What do we make or do when no one is watching us? What do we talk about when no one else is listening?

The exact scope and content of our documenta fifteen participation are unknown to us now — these will take shape over the 100 days. To use one of our favourite phrases, there is no end in sight.

Follow us here and on social media, visit us in Kassel or Port of Spain, and join our conversation.

#AliceYardD15  #ayardexchange #documentafifteen

Artist in residence Pascale Monnin

Lena et Romy from Serie :: Histoire d'O :: O Stories (ink, acrylic on canvas, 150 x150 cm, 2022)

 

Since mid-January, Alice Yard has been hosting artist in residence Pascale Monnin at Granderson Lab in Belmont. This is our first international residency since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic almost two years ago.

During her time in Port of Spain, Monnin has been working on a series of works on canvas called Histoire d’O :: O Stories, while engaging in conversation with members of the Erthig Road community.

Due to current COVID-19 restrictions, Alice Yard is not able to host a public event or presentation of Monnin’s work in progress. However, anyone interested in meeting the artist and exploring this new work may contact us at helloaliceyard@gmail.com to arrange an informal private viewing on Thursday 10 February. (COVID-19 health measures will be in effect: all visitors to Granderson Lab must be fully vaccinated and masked at all times.)

Pascale Monnin’s residency at Alice Yard is part of a multi-year regional exchange organised by Le Centre d’Art in Haiti, with funding from UNESCO’s International Fund for Cultural Diversity.

 

Idelmonde Youains from Serie :: Histoire d'O :: O Stories (ink, acrylic on canvas, 150 x150 cm, 2022)

About the artist:

Pascale Monnin was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1974 and was raised in Switzerland where she studied. She currently lives and works in France. This double culture nourishes a complex imagination that she uses in many techniques: she paints, sculpts, engraves copper, creates mobiles, and makes installations, and has shown her art around the world. She founded the cultural association Passagers des Vents in 2010, and with poet James Noël she launched the artistic and literary Review IntranQu’îllités in 2012.

The Galerie Monnin in Port-au-Prince, founded in 1956, is a family affair. Monnin was also artistic director of Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince from 2014 to 2016.

She has exhibited at the Grand Palais, the Villa Médicis, Agnès B, the OAS Museum, the Waterloo Museum, the Fowler Museum, and Halle Saint-Pierre, among other venues, and she represented Haiti at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She has works in the collections of the MUPANAH (Musée du Panthéon National Haitian) and Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, and other international museums and galleries.