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An evening of performance and film featuring The London Open 2018 artists Rachel Pimm, Tom Lock, Alexis Teplin and Larry Achiampong, showcasing live works.
First shown at the 20th Biennale of Sydney and restaged for the first time in London, Alexis Teplin’s Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation) takes it’s gestural references from Indian street theatre, 1960s Hollywood films and the tradition of Russian abstract theatre. Performed by three actors and using excerpts from a slide work by artist Noah Sherwood, the drama unfolds over three acts, asking the question ‘when decadence fails us in our quest for Utopia, where do we end up?’
Rachel Pimm explores environments and their materialities, histories and politics often from the point of view of non-human agents such as plants or minerals. In dialogue with her work in The London Open, here she presents the premiere screening of Resistant Materials: Part 2 (2018).
Larry Achiampong presents a special screening with a live reading of Relic 0 (2017), a short film that moves between African and Western based vistas and focuses on specific architectures of colonialism as delivered by an anonymous narrator. These discoveries deliver poetic moments of the sublime met with increasingly harrowing tales of trauma – speaking to the sinister way that states of anxiety, fear and displacement are both generated and policed in postcolonial society.
Developed out of Tom Lock’s installation Within and in collaboration with sound artist Tom Richards, this performance brings together a mesmerising collage of sound and vision inspired by Octavia E. Butlers 1987 book Dawn. With the use of animation, Lock’s work illustrates the narrative of a hybrid organic form in an alternative future in which humans coexist with extra-terrestrial beings.
Alexis Teplin’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in the 20th Sydney Biennale, the Migros Museum, Zurich, the Hayward Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery in London, Mary Mary and Tramway for Glasgow International, Glasgow.
Larry Achiampong‘s solo and collaborative projects employ imagery, aural and visual archives, live performance and sound to explore ideas surrounding class, cross-cultural and post-digital identity. With works that examine his communal and personal heritage – in particular, the intersection between pop culture and the postcolonial position, Achiampong uses performance to crate-dig the vaults of history. Achiampong has exhibited, performed and presented projects within the UK and abroad including Tate Britain/Modern, London; The Institute For Creative Arts, Cape Town; The British Film Institute, London; David Roberts Art Foundation, London; SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin; Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation, Accra; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; Logan Center Exhibitions, Chicago; and ‘Diaspora Pavillion – 57th Venice Biennale’, Venice.
Tom Lock is an artist based in London. His work has been exhibited and screened at places such as Focal Point Gallery – Southend, Tate Britain, CCA – Glasgow, The Institut Français – Japan and the Nottingham Contemporary. Science-Fiction and Fantasy literature regularly inform a research base for his practice. The authors that inspire Lock range from Octavia E. Butler to Ursula Le Guin, amongst many others. He is drawn to writers that explore issues related to both humanistic and other worldly ideas.
Rachel Pimm works in sculpture, video and performance to make work that explores environments and their materialities, histories and politics. Recent Solo Shows include Hales Gallery, London (2017) Jerwood Space, London (2016) and Zabludowicz Collection (2014). Her work has been included in recent programmes including ANDOR, Tenderpixel, Chisenhale Gallery, Royal Academy, and Serpentine Gallery (all London 2014-2016). Recent Residencies include Rabbit Island, Michigan, USA (2017), Hospitalfield, Scotland (2016), and Joya Arte E Ecologia, Spain (2013). She has an MFA from Goldsmiths, was a founder of London project space Auto Italia and lectures in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Art, UAL and Arts University Bournemouth.
