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Curator's Column: Sophie Hill on Cross-Cultural Identity, Gender and Sexuality in the Arts

Apart from living & working in the East End for almost a decade, I was brought up to greatly admire the melting-pot Cockney heritage of my father's family. So curating the Bow Open was a personal delight, and all the more so for the eclectic nature of the works submitted. Despite certain toxic narratives currently being bandied about, this exhibition indicates that diversity and incoming new perspectives are clearly an important catalyst for the continued progressive creativity of East London, and elsewhere”.

Anj Smith, Curator for 2016 Bow Open Show

Selecting a group show is always hard, especially when there is no specified theme. The only original theme behind the Bow Open Show is that all considered artists are part of Bow Arts; that is, they hold a studio in one of their eleven buildings, or work with their Education Department (bringing the increasingly dismissed art back into east London’s schools). So when little themes emerge from a seemingly disparate group – small threads of unity and echoes of sentiment, issues that are clearly on the hairs of the artist’s brush as well as the tip of our tongues – it is reassuring.

Of course art doesn’t need to have obvious meaning; art doesn’t need to make a point; but when our papers and radios are full of answers that avoid questions, a picture that brings something to the table is really worth a thousand words. Such were the pictures Anj Smith and I explored, marvelling at the fanatical industry of the artists working in London’s disused warehouses, flats marked for development, the old news international building, new (and unfilled) commercial space and even over the Nunnery Gallery’s head (all are Bow Arts buildings). Artists brilliantly fill – and bring life – to the curious of spaces. Energetic, provoking and beautiful, a variety of work passed before our eyes and what came together brought not only a cohesive exhibition, but revealed many themes that are probing contemporary artists’ work.

Mette Sterre dresses woman in the scales of the snake that tempted Eve as a feminist statement according to her interpretation of the Biblical narrative, which she reads as shaming women’s body and her thirst for intelligence. Sterre says “we should praise Eve for picking this apple, she wanted to be a miss smarty pants, by eating the fruit of knowledge, and I agree with that”. The dark intensity of Sterre’s model and her understated but gripping expression – weighted by the fact that she is the artist’s mother – sears through us, cascading with the curve of her snake-scaled tail.

Emily Whitebread asks What is England, alphabetically, openly and heavily, beginning with “Delusion, Democracy, Dialects…”. Juxtaposing and emphatic, these words resonate; each meaning changing with each word that follows; igniting and dousing the complex sparks of our country’s debates. Nitin Amin’s Selfhood Series recalls old England, or what was considered so. Born in British occupied Tanzania, Amin looks to his family history in seeking to re-perform and observe childhood memories – memories that are muddled between distant dreams and the tangibility of old family photo albums. Our colonial history also impresses upon Victoria Burgher’s work. Suiker Piet – delicate ceramic sugar shakers decorated with the blue open-mouthed faces of those enslaved in the sugar trade – references the Netherlands' use of slaves to produce sugar and its ongoing legacy in the controversial tradition of Black Pete.

Sexuality and gender are also part of these works’ conversation. Thick and expressive paint quietly presents female eroticism in Anna Ilsley’s Call me, Call me Any, Anytime, while Ryan Hodge’s Ladies and Gentlemen takes us through an investigative comic strip of gender identity: pencil drawn self-portraits illuminated with screams of bright pink hair and make-up. Faces swell and bristle with brush-strokes in Jaime Valtierra’s Not Always but Anytime, which, in his own words, “looks to explore sexuality against a background of polarising emotions such as failure, empowerment, repression, sublimation or abjection”.

Creating new dialogues between them, the unified power of these works is not only admirable but accessible. They will speak to everyone differently, but are adjoined by an expressive determination. Though we started with artists’ open east London, what we are left with is an openness of mind; no mean feat for an exhibition.

Sophie Hill, Gallery Director - Nunnery Gallery

2016 Bow Open Show Private view: Friday 17 June 6-9pm Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ

Exhibition continues until 28 August 2016.

Image credits:

1. Anna Ilsley, "Call Me, Call Me Any, Anytime," 2015, oil on board, 13 x 18 cm

2. Felicity McCabe, "Ayan and Dead Tree, Gargara IDP Camp, Somaliland,” 2015, C-Type Print, 75cm x 112.5cm

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