Mx.D.P

Forming an art-positive Network to combat climate chaos means getting out and about. I went to the Aberystwyth Arts Centre this Tuesday 7th of May to see the Aberystwyth University Creative Arts students put on their annual show this year’s title, Beyond Logic.

Aberystwyth University has a traditional discipline focus Art school but you do have an opportunity to take a joint interdisciplinary module with the creative arts department and study with a diverse set of students from around the university, it is also not year-specific so some of my old classmates are in their final year.

Interestingly, how art is staged and how it has ‘legs’ has taken on a new focus for me this year. That, in one way, shouldn’t surprise me; there should be a change to how I view artwork, but it clicked in instantly.

There were two performance pieces I wanted to explore further here in my blog.

The first is Sofia Gil de Biedma – Resonance (2024)

…you must remove your shoes…

You enter the round studio. It is only lit by the glimmer and the small detail lights… you walk onto the silver mat… your steps alter what you hear… breathe sounds… while surrounded by simmering images cast on the walls

It’s simple, but it’s not… technically it is inventive.. but its technology becomes hidden as it takes you to another place…

I deliberately didn’t read the artist’s description for this piece… it didn’t need it… it was exquisite.

Nevertheless, Gil de Biedma says this work ‘…creates an ephemeral space’ to reconsider how we move and assert ourselves in the world. They go on to say that the artwork looks ‘…at the effects that a gendered spatial existence has on women’s bodies, and how these embedded social constructs have become part of our common psychology and relationship to self.’

This work has a SoundCloud piece from the interviews with five women who informed this installation. It’s an artwork that gives you more…

I reflected on its meaning afterwards. The steps I took onto the silver mat spoke of how I entered the world… watching others in the room… some didn’t want to step onto the mat… some eventually lay and then rolled on the mat… you could sit around in the dark as a voyeur… is this what it is like to be seen as a woman?

The second is Somatic Ancestors (2024) by Abidish Hussain. This is another piece that is outwardly simple but is complex to stage and deliver; it has conceptual depth. We enter a dark room and take our seats. Projected on the wall is a man moving on a sandscape in a room. He is dressed in a white decontamination suit and wearing a breathing apparatus. He shapes the sand with his hands and his feet. At the same time, two large electric fans are also affecting the sand. What we don’t immediately realise is the man is in the adjacent room, that this is a live stream…

Hussain says of his powerful durational piece, ‘The semi abstract bodily forms will gradually cover the performance floor before it all disappears.’

This piece offers you so much, but to tell you what that could be would be wrong, as your mind now shapes the sand…