Christina Kimeze @ South London Gallery

Christina Kimeze

South London Gallery

31 January – 11 May 2025

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Screen (I), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

110 x 90 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Soaring (I), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

210 x 165 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Soaring (III), 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

210 x 165 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

CHRISTINA KIMESE

Arches, 2024

Oil, pastel and oil stick on suede matboard

110 x 90 cm

© Christina Kimeze, image courtesy of the artist.

Photo: Matthew Hollow

The South London Gallery (SLG) presents London-based artist CHRISTINA KIMESE’s first institutional solo exhibition.

Christina Kimeze’s paintings depict often lone female figures, immersed in natural landscapes or set within abstracted interiors distilled to focus on patterns or isolated architectural features, such as arched doorways and spiral staircases. The protagonists are based on the artist's friends, family, and sometimes herself, in works which she says, 'belong to a new exploration of the idea of existing between two emotional spaces and the feelings of "otherness" that can arise from this space'.

The work explores themes of interiority, belonging and ideas of home. Evoking the feeling of nostalgia and remembering in her work, at times Christina Kimeze has drawn on memories of visiting her father's home country of Uganda. The scenes she creates are often set against richly coloured foliage, capturing the heat of the country. She is also inspired by a broad range of literary references including a number of Black, feminist 20th-century writers. Unusual surface materials form an important part of Kimeze’s practice, lending the paintings a distinctive luminosity and texture created using dry chalks, oil pastel and wet paints applied to suede matboard, paper and canvas.

For her SLG exhibition, Christina Kimeze has created a new body of work to be shown in the Main Gallery. Originally inspired by the resurgent popularity of roller skating in Black communities in London and beyond, they explore broader ideas around movement, flight and freedom. These expressive works evoke sensations of the body moving through space, and how those feelings might be conjured in the mind's eye. In the Fire Station galleries other new paintings and works on paper will be shown alongside a newly commissioned tapestry made by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh (*).

The exhibition is accompanied by a new, hard-backed catalogue, designed by ‘A practice for everyday life’. This beautifully illustrated book will bring together images of paintings made in recent years alongside a selection of smaller works on paper. It offers a space to reflect on Christina Kimeze's practice to date and discover her new body of work, shown for the first time at the South London Gallery. The catalogue features essays by curator and writer Ekow Eshun; Eleanor Nairne, The Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and a conversation between the artist and Alayo Akinkugbe, writer, art historian and founder of Instagram platform, @ABlackHistoryOfArt.

ARTIST CHRISTINA KIMESE

Christina Kimeze lives and works in London. Kimeze studied at The Royal Drawing School postgraduate programme 2021-2022 where she was awarded the Sir Denis Mahon award; and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford in Biological Sciences.

Recent exhibitions include: Women & Freud: patients, pioneers, artists, Freud Museum, London (2024); Drawing Biennial 2024, Drawing Room (2024); Soulscapes, Dulwich Picture Gallery (2024); Present Tense, Hauser and Wirth, Bruton (2024); Something other than the world might know, White Cube, Paris (2023); Interior, Michael Werner Gallery, London (2023); and The Great Women Artists IV, Residency at Palazzo Monti, Brescia, Italy (2022).

(*) About Dovecot Studios

Dovecot is a world-renowned tapestry studio in the heart of Edinburgh and a landmark centre for contemporary art, craft, and design. Established in 1912, Dovecot continues a century-long heritage of collaboration with international artists to make exceptional and engaging works of art. Dovecot Studios undertakes public and private textile commissions, with major tapestry projects including collaborations with Chris Ofili, Alison Watt, and Garry Fabian Miller. Also specialising in handcrafted rugs, Dovecot has worked with various artists such as Linder, Jim Lambie, and Nicolas Party. Occupying an extraordinary building, formerly Victorian baths, Dovecot also has an engaging programme of exhibitions and events, which expand the conversation around art, craft, and design.

SOUTH LONDON GALLERY - SLG

Main Gallery & Fire Station galleries

SLG, Main Building: 65–67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH

SLG, Fire Station: 82 Peckham Road, London, SE15 5LQ 

www.southlondongallery.org

Michael Armitage @ South London Gallery, London

Michael Armitage: The Chapel
South London Gallery, London
13 December 2017- 23 February 2018

MICHAEL ARMITAGE

Exorcism, 2017

© Michael Armitage

Photo © White Cube (Ben Westoby)

The Chapel is London-based, Kenyan-born artist MICHAEL ARMITAGE’s first major solo show in a public sector gallery in London. A new series of large-scale paintings, made with the chapel-like qualities of the SLG’s main space in mind, explore the ambiguous boundaries between religion, folklore and social consensus, particularly in relation to issues of mental health in East Africa. Drawing on historical and contemporary news stories, socio-political issues and the artist’s own experiences of Kenya, the works blend dream-like figuration with compositional references to Titian, Gauguin and other masters of Western art history. Painted in layers on Ugandan lubugo bark cloth, the texture and ruptures within this distinctive material are integrated into Michael Armitage’s surreal imagery, the seductive colours and surface beauty of which belie the disturbing subject matter upon which it is based.

Conjestina, 2017, depicts former world middleweight boxing champion, Conjestina Achieng, as a naked, boxing-gloved figure attended to by animalistic nuns while a pair of copulating baboons carry on regardless in the background. This bizarre and disturbing composition can be read as a critique of the questionable nature of the Kenyan popular media’s documentation of Conjestina’s situation, exposing deeply personal and vulnerable moments of instability but with little clarity as to whether the help offered to her on camera is genuinely for her well-being or merely a crass form of entertainment.

This sense of ambiguity characterises another work, Exorcism, 2017, in which Michael Armitage portrays a ritual he observed through online documentation of a ceremony for which women gather to be publically exorcised. In his painterly translation of the event, its true origins are intentionally obscured so that the atmosphere could as easily be read as being celebratory as that of a ritualistic ousting of the devil.

The Flaying of Marsyas, 2017, takes its title from Titian’s masterpiece of the same name, as well as borrowing from its composition and dark subject matter whereby Marsyas, a centurion like satyr from Greek mythology, is killed by flaying. Michael Armitage’s equally chilling work portrays a contemporary scene in which a figure tied to a tree is surrounded by a group of spectators. Through these beautiful but deeply unsettling paintings, Armitage attempts to both locate and destabilise his subject matter, harnessing the tensions in his works through tableaux of bewildering social interactions which ask of the viewer what is comfortable, while simultaneously addressing questions of exoticism and ‘otherness’ through their implication of the viewers as voyeurs.

Michael Armitage: The Chapel is accompanied by a publication with essays by Mukami Kuria and Roger Malbert, and a conversation between Michael Armitage and SLG director, Margot Heller.

SLG - South London Gallery
65-67 Peckham Road, London SE5 8UH
www.southlondongallery.org

Ilona Sagar @ South London Gallery, London

Ilona Sagar: Correspondence O
South London Gallery, London
13 December 2017- 25 February 2018

ILONA SAGAR

Still from Correspondence 0, 2017

(c) Ilona Sagar

In her first institutional solo show in the UK, ILONA SAGAR presents Correspondence O, a new installation, exhibition and publication exploring the history of the radical Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham and its subsequent conversion into a gated community.

Ilona Sagar’s two-channel moving image installation presents the complex, changing landscape of public health and the social shift towards a more egocentric, user-focused and technology-infused understanding of wellness. Following a female protagonist and group of young boys, the fragmented, non-linear narrative collapses past into present, melding architectural and human physicality with historical and experimental medical research, personal testimony and archival footage. The exhibition will also feature rarely seen material from The Peckham Experiment archives, including interview transcripts, publications, photographs, letters and other ephemera assembled by the artist.

In January 2018, a publication will be launched, expanding the ideas explored in the exhibition. Conceived as an arrangement of text drawn from Ilona Sagar’s research, the publication presents original photographs and film stills, correspondence and the architectural plans for the Centre amongst other material. The book also includes commissioned essays by writer Owen Hatherley; Professor Paul Fletcher, Director of Studies in Medicine (pre-clinical) at the University of Cambridge; artist Ilona Sagar; Dr Felicity Thomas, Research Fellow on the Cultural Contexts of Health at the University of Exeter; and Dr Nina Wakeford, artist and Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Correspondence O is informed by extensive research within the archives of the Pioneer Health Centre held by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and contemporary medical research conducted by the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge. Embodying the original collaborative nature of the Experiment, Sagar has also worked closely with residents of the present day Centre on the production and development of the work.

The Pioneer Health Centre in South London was founded in 1926 in response to rising public concern over the health of working class people and an increasing interest in preventative social medicine and social experimentation. It culminated in the Peckham Experiment, a twenty-four year study founded on principles of self-organisation, local empowerment and social connection as fundamental to health. The Experiment took place in a new, purpose-built space comprising large, airy rooms with floor to ceiling windows which enabled biologists to observe members of the local community as they took part in physical exercise, games and clubs. The Centre closed in 1950 when its innovative approach conflicted with the ideals of the new National Health Service, though its influence continues to resonate.

In parallel to Correspondence O, the South London Gallery’s young people’s forum Art Assassins are exploring the history of the Peckham Experiment with the Pioneer Health Foundation, the Wellcome Library, the Science Gallery at King’s College and community partners Peckham Vision and the Wilderness Wood, alongside a historian-in-residence, heritage experts and artists.

Correspondence O is co-commissioned and produced in partnership with The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Supported by a Wellcome Arts Award. Sound Partner: Bowers & Wilkins. With thanks to residents Tom Bell of Mowma Projects, James Hardy of Live Fit and Luke Frost of Heretic Studio for their contributions to the project.

Correspondence O will be presented at CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art for Glasgow International, 20 April – 7 May 2018.

SLG - South London Gallery
65-67 Peckham Road, London SE5 8UH
www.southlondongallery.org