Being Here

There is a palpable air of change around us as our living and embodied experiences move towards unknown futures. Right now, we are experiencing a collective corporeal happening, in a fluid state of metamorphosis, shapeshifting, meandering, adapting, expanding, and existing against all the odds. How do we navigate, live through, and overcome the present? Fractured and isolated, we look for ways to remain connected to ourselves and to each other. We ask ourselves: What does it feel like, being here?

Being Here explores embodied realities through a surrealist and post-apocalyptic lens, looking at how the human body exists within our current landscapes. It considers the body through a phenomenological perspective, examining how we live in relation to the objects surrounding us, the spaces we inhabit, on the premise that reality consists of events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood within human consciousness.

Saelia Aparicio (b. Spain) is a sculptor and installation artist whose practice operates in the paradoxical spaces found within the normal and the everyday. Saelia uses a unique symbolic system to represent and digest a stark reality, creating a speculative universe for the audience and inviting them to imagine with her. The artist creates an ecosystem of characters and situations which drive us, without guiding us, into this fascinating thing we call the present. Saelia Aparicio has an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. In 2019, Aparicio took part in Generación, an exhibition and competition organised by Fundación Montemadrid to promote young artists under the age of 35 at the Casa Encendida (Madrid), and was commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery to make the film ‘Green Shoots’.

Solo exhibitions: Planta, Alzado, Raiz, The Ryder, Madrid, (2019); The World of Craig Green and Saelia Aparicio, Matches Fashion and Frieze art fair, London (2019). She is currently working towards a solo presentation at Liste 2021, Basel.

Selected Group shows: Three Dead Astronauts, Part of Jerwood Survey II, London (2020); In the Castle of my Skin, participative show with Sonia Boyce, MIMA, Middlesbrough (2020); From Creators to Creators, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg (2020); Dancing at The Edge Of The World, Sarah Zanin, Rome (2020); Sarabande x Joyce, Joyce, Hong Kong (2019).

Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou (b. Athens, Greece) is a sculptor and multi-media artist whose work comprises installations that explore ideas around otherness, disassociation, and care. She is interested in human curiosity and our inability to make sense of our surroundings, inviting us into a haptic experience that activates the viewer's senses. Evangelia creates work that allows the viewer to step into a sensual, exploratory space. Working with various materials like olfactory and edible ingredients, her installations work with forms, shapes, and ideas revolving around the uncanny. Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou has an MA in sculpture from Goldsmiths University.

Solo exhibitions: Phaneromene, Palfrey Gallery, London (2020); To Host, The Change Room, London (2019).

Selected Group shows: Me and my friends (Part 1), Korai project space, Cyprus (2020); London Graduates, Saatchi Gallery, London (2020); A Sight Of, Proposition Studios, London, (2019); [heterotopia], Kabelvåg, Norway (2019); Pou sou nefko you paeis, Korai Project Space, Cyprus (2019).

Roxman Gatt (b. Malta) is a performance, multi-media artist and sculptor who explores sexuality, identity, gender, and consumption within his practice. Recently, the artist has been working with themes of humanising and interacting with consumer objects, making the inanimate iconic and fetishized. He is also interested in documenting and archiving trans and queer experiences and has recently started working on a project in Malta called Rosa Kwir. This project revolves around alternative notions of masculinity, bringing together stories of Maltese trans men, non-binary & LBQI masc- presenting people. Roxman has an MA in Visual Communications from the Royal College of Art and was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, ICA, London, and Bluecoat Liverpool (2016).

Solo exhibitions: Chapter 5/ Behind the Times: A literary arts project, Abby Lloyd & Alyssa Davis Gallery, online (2020)

Selected Group Shows: Sugar Cum Pro' White and Viscous Gold', out_sight, Seoul, KR (2020); Strangers in a Strange Land, Muza, Malta (2020); The Real Thing, Fashion Space Gallery, London (2020); Strawberry Hill, Orange Garden, London (2020); But Love left no Room for Hydration, UltraStudio, LA, (2019); 3hd: Fluid Wor(l)ds, Berlin (2019), Absinthe §3, Spit and Sawdust, London (2019).

Jack Jubb (b. United Kingdom) is a painter whose practice explores and connects to the materiality of digital images; the way these images are subject to entropic decay through successive replication, subsequently forming a sedimentary bedrock in colossal server farms in the desert. He often paints from pictures uploaded by strangers onto e-commerce sites, social media, or poorly maintained websites. These include images of car parts from long-expired eBay advertisements that were never intended for longevity but nevertheless may be retained for millennia, like a plastic bag that takes 500 years to degrade. In painting these images, Jack seeks to engage with temporalities that transcend human experience's remit through the banal by-product of late capitalism. Jack completed his BA from Goldsmiths School of Art.

Forthcoming exhibitions in 2021 include shows at The Residence Gallery (London), Franz Kaka (Ontario), and DJ Berlin (Berlin).

Davinia-Ann Robinson (b. United Kingdom) is a sculptor, writer, and performance artist. Her practice examines how 'Presencing,' fugitivity, and tactility undo colonial and imperial frameworks through which nature and Bodies of Colour are articulated. She explores the relationship between Black, Brown, and Indigenous soil conservation practices and what she terms as 'Colonial Nature environments.' Her work addresses personal interactions with 'colonial emotions' she has encountered in local, national, and global environments as a Black Female Body, building on her intense relationship with soil as a living material explored through sculpture, sound, writing, and performance. Davinia-Ann is currently completing her MFA in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She is a recipient of the Felix Slade Scholarship 2019-2021 and a recipient of the 2021 SET Studio Prize. She is also a founding member of Narration Group, an art collective for Women and Non-binary People of Colour.

Selected Group shows: I Am Unsure As To If It Is Still Alive, Quench, Margate (2021); Tactile Belonging, Mimosa House, London (2021); Bold Tendencies, London (2020); Freedom Is Outside the Skin, Kunsthal 44Møen, Denmark (2020); Working Progress, South London Gallery, (2020); PRESENCE, Deptford X, London (2019); The Politics of Pleasure, Genealogies Series, PLASTICISED SENSATION, ICA, London (2019)."

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