25 – 28 MAY 23

Priysha Rajvanshi & Elise Guillaume

Gasworks Participation Space

Blue Space is a collaboration between the artists Priysha Rajvanshi and Elise Guillaume. The project has been brought together by a team from the RCA’s Curating Contemporary Art programme in partnership with the host venue, Gasworks.

The Global Climate Emergency and other issues we face with nature largely come from our (human) exploitation of it. We often share stories in relation to our experiences with these challenges; our feelings of injustice, the discomfort we experience, our fears, and even at times, our tales of displacement. Yet, despite our fraught relationship with our living environment in which we co-exist – we persist.

In the Blue Space, each artist responds to our evolving relationship with nature through the creation of a provisional shelter that gives voice to the environment. Large cyanotype sheets made in the River Thames by Rajvanshi have been adapted to form the tent’s canopy with a related projection across the interior walls. While, an original soundscape produced by Guillaume incorporates the vibration-based audio of natural elements with spoken word, to allow for a speculative conversation between humans and our surroundings to occur. Through this, the artists invite visitors to slow down and listen to the earth, as to hear its perspective as we look to adapt to our changing world. 

This project was formed from recognising the stresses that our friction with the environment are inducing. As a proposed place of solace for local people, it aims to offer a soothing and open-minded plateau. Here, through interacting with the artistic practices brought forward, we introduce a moment of calm confrontation and learning by hearing. Through this, we look to present an opportunity to begin the process of healing a fractured but essential relationship with the place we live. Crucially, to consider the Blue Space in a gallery in London, this also connects us with the other people we share our earth with, whose struggles like the environment are not always acknowledged. 

Through entering the space, audiences are invited to not only take from nature, as is too often the scenario, but by listening to it; acknowledge it as a collaborator, a living entity, to recognise its stresses and its sorrow, its moments of courage and its ailing contentment. In embracing this meeting of perspectives, one can slow down, be immersed in the comfort of the shelter, and take advantage of the moment of reflection, familiar recognition, and re-connection being offered as we look to adapt to our changing world. 

Biographies 

Priysha Rajvanshi is an Indian artist based in London whose work is predominantly focused on using photographic techniques to explore the overlapping relationship between bodies and the environment, in the context of healing. Recently, her practice has begun to handle ideas relating to enchantment and mobilising the photograph as a mode to reflect.

Elise Guillaume is a Belgian artist and filmmaker whose work explores our complex relationship with nature. Interested in the connections within our (eco)systems, she uses audio-visual mediums to create contrasting narratives to question what it means to be human in a time of crisis and extinction. 

Exhibition Credits

Artists Featured: Elise Guillaume, Priysha Rajvanshi 

Consultation and Technical Support: Julia Frendo & The Technicians Collective 

Curatorial Team: Aleda Wood Roberts, Blythe Thea Williams, Genevieve Fisher, John Dougan Nealon, Kangin Park, Nathalia Oliveira, Wanlan Chen, Zihan Wen

Acknowledgements: Laura Valles Vilches, Sabel Gavaldon, Gasworks Team 

Exhibition Photography and Video by Gregor Petrikovic

The works in this exhibition are inspired by Triss’ travels in Cambridge. On her trip to Cambridge, Triss created the first stripe for the ‘Quack Agent’ series. She was inspired by a suited 'boatman' whose canoe travels over River Cam across snowy white ducks. From then on, a suited man with a raft of ducks became the protagonists in this illustration. 

How will the wild and active duck flocks get along with the rules of a society dominated by the suited man? This illustration series invites you to explore their stories in a sense of wit and expand possibilities beyond your imagination. By dividing the characters into 'good people' and 'evil elite’, the illustrations provided a sarcastic approach to unpack the power dynamics existing with populism. While there can be thousands of ways to read this small book, don’t forget to enjoy the cute furry duck-butts as well.

20th – 26th May 2022

M P Birla Millennium Art Gallery, The Bhaven, 4A Castletown Rd, W14 9HE, London

What exists between "Home" and "Away"? Is it a border, a journey, or a midway of nonplace? Once a stranger has been identified, a story is expected to justify their being elsewhere, a story that needs to be narrated according to your/their personal experiences but has to make sense in a “common way.” However failed by personal memories to articulate your/our/their past, collective narratives become the compensation for defining who you/we/they are. 

The narratives of dislocation have been so far celebrated as new adventures and poeticised as bohemian nomads, overshadowing those painful and unbearable ones to be seen. Globalization is a beautiful fairytale, never mentioning there are walls tilted, allowing some people to pass through easily, preventing some from ever returning, and confining some forever in their places. 

The narratives of estrangement, on the other hand, reinvent the otherness by characterizing subjects’ former closeness and affection for the home from afar. A stranger is not identified as anybody who has crossed a border, but as somebody who fails to stay at the original place as one should be, or somebody who is always questioned by “where are you from?” 

“Being an Asian” itself is the perfect illustration of both dislocation and estrangement. “Asian” denotes a continental concept, but is used to connote a race. Wherever you/we/they were born, carrying the name of  “Asian” is a constant reminder of the betrayal of ancestors and the absence of roots –– the stories that you/we/they are forced to carry and always expected to tell. 

Can Asians tell our/their own stories about home and away? The exhibition features 20 artworks providing us with diverse perspectives to unpack how the narratives of dislocation and estrangement have (un)associated Asians with the notions of home and away. Nostalgia about foods, families, mother tongues and the scenes of homelands may reshape our/their memories of the places where we/they used to belong. Yet the failure or rejection of connecting the memories back to these places reveals those unspoken factors that have made our/their journeys of being away. 

By collaging every individual story together, the exhibition aims to not only unlearn the “common sense” imposed on Asians, but also touch on the invisible discourse to reconsider how “Asian” has been generalised as an abstract figure.

“Who are you/us/them?”

“Where are you/we/they from?”

“Why are you/we/they here?”

“Who is defining Asian?”