There's no way I can know it, the object, or the body
This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz explores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?
Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the multi-media exhibition featuring performance, painting, sound and moving image works also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.
Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.
‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
—Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)
Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines. Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.
Work descriptions:
Sophie Seita, My Contact Aureoles, installation, 2022, birch ply panels (104x69cm), gesso, graphite, and drafting film sheets, projection, sound (6’33”). Sound recorded and mixed by Rupert Clerveaux. Projected photographs by Laura Cobb.
[full title] after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles
Sophie Seita, Cloudiness, video essay / lecture performance, 2021, HD video, 14 mins 41 seconds