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Mythmaking and Visioning in Contemporary Art marks the last Public Programme accompanying the MA exhibition Archipelago: Visions in Orbit. The artist and curator talk welcomes the exhibiting artist Esther Teichmann and two of the curators from the 2024 MA Cohort, Molly Clark, curator and performer and Cosima Straub, art historian and curator.
Mythmaking, as a form of storytelling, blurs the line between reality and the otherworldly, and is a concept which consistently recurs throughout the history of art – often as a means to make sense of the world and self.
Following a presentation of a new video work and a reading by Esther Teichmann, the talk will explore how myth(-making) manifests within Teichmann‘s practice, other artistic practices featured in Archipelago: Visions in Orbit, and beyond.
Supported by Whitechapel Gallery and London South Bank University (LSBU).
Esther Teichmann (b. 1980, Germany) practice moves across still and moving image, textiles and painting, creating alternate worlds, which blur autobiography and fiction. Central to the work lies an exploration of the origins of fantasy and desire and how these are bound to experiences of loss and representation. Our relationship to the maternal, home and female pleasure are themes which are returned to through a layering of voices and visual approaches. Within these works of speculative fiction, bodies are indivisible from landscape – caves as mothers, water as mothers, beds as lovers, mouths as homes, seashells as orifices, sisters at every turn. The work is haunted by night dreams and daydreams, of drowning and sleeping. Thinking about our bodies as sites of knowledge production, Teichmann reimagines space and encounters through feminist subjectivity, exploring the relationship between fiction, myth and lived experience.
Solo museum shows include Heavy the Sea, Transformer Station, Cleveland Museum of Art, USA and Mondschwimmen, Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim, Germany. Collaborations include Phantasie Fotostudio with Monster Chetwynd at John Hansard Gallery, the co-curation and editing of the exhibition and book, Staging Disorder, with artist Christopher Stewart with whom she also created the Wellcome Trust funded film and research project, Constellations. Her work is held in public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Esther is represented by Flowers Gallery. Teichmann received an MA and PhD from the Royal College of Art (RCA) and is Head of Programme of the Master of Research at the RCA.
Molly Clark is a London-based performer and curator. She gained her BA in Contemporary Dance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (2022), completing a dissertation project exploring how dance is curated from archived materials and how liveness can be simulated without a live performer present. She also holds an MA in Curating Art and Public Programmes from Whitechapel Gallery and London South Bank University (2024) and was one of the fourteen curators for Archipelago: Visions in Orbit.
Molly was a performer in the recent activations of Lygia Clark’s works, Corpus Colletivo and Elastic Net, for the exhibition Lygia Clark: The I and the You. She has previously performed in works by Heidi Rustgaard, Joel Brown and Yvonne Rainer (restaged by Sara Wookey). Her interests lie in how bodies exist in curated spaces and the archiving of performance.
Cosima Regina Straub, originally from Berlin, is a London-based art historian and curator. She holds a BA in History of Art and Communication Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and an MA in Curating Art and Public Programmes from Whitechapel Gallery and London South Bank University. She is a DAAD Scholarship recipient.
Cosima has worked for various private galleries in Germany, including Mehdi Chouakri Gallery and EIGEN+ART and as a Provenance Researcher for the Commission for Looted Art. She is now working as an Assistant Curator for a Corporate Art Collection while cultivating her practice as a freelance curator, writer, and translator. Her research connects historical and contemporary art, focusing on the recurring historical references in today’s art.
