NEWS
Eduardo Kac in ‘Electric Dreams: Art and Technology before the Internet’
Tate Modern
Until 1 June 2025
Three of Eduardo Kac’s 1980s Minitel works are included in Electric Dreams – an exhibition at Tate Modern that celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, and brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation.
Kac was a pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-web 1980s, and his Minitel works evolved from his explorations of the relationship between experimental poetry and new media, leading to him to create animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform.
Electric Dreams is curated by Val Ravaglia and all three exhibited works by Kac, plus an additional minitel work are now part of the permanent collection at Tate. Kac is interviewed in the winter edition of Tate Etc. magazine.
Paule Vézelay: Living Lines
Royal West of England Academy
25 January – 27 April 2025
England & Co are pleased to have arranged numerous loans for this celebratory retrospective exhibition spanning Paule Vézelay’s career held in the city of Bristol where she was born in 1892 as Marjorie Watson-Williams. She later adopted the name Paule Vézelay after moving to Paris in 1926. On display are more than 60 of her works, including paintings, prints, sculptures and textiles, in addition to material from her archive.
Anne Bean and Monica Ross: Sit-In 4 / Outside the Circle
Cooper Gallery, Dundee
18 October 2024 – 1 February 2025
This exhibition (part of a five-chapter project) at the Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee, brings together archives, drawings, ephemera, manifestos, paintings, performance, photographs, sculptures, video works and writings by artists, activists, collectives, writers, and thinkers. They include: Sam Ainsley with Anne-Marie Copestake, Anne Bean, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Phyllis Christopher, Akwugo Emejulu, Margaret Harrison, Barbara Howey, Carol Massey Lingard and Jenny Stevens, Alexis Hunter, Tari Ito, Derek Jarman, Amelia Jones, Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacy, Audre Lorde, Katharine Meynell, Annabel Nicolson, nussatari, Griselda Pollock, Monica Ross, Georgina Starr, Marlene Smith, Jo Spence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Maud Sulter, Ronald Wright, Ajamu X, alongside collective actions and groups including Blk Art Group, Castlemilk Womanhouse, Cyber feminist collective Old Boys Network, Fenix, Feministo: Women’s Postal Art Event, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Haven for Artists, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, The Hackney Flashers, OutRage!, Womanifesto, Womanhouse and Women in Profile.
Anne Bean at Southwark Park Galleries
18 October 2024
To celebrate their 40th birthday, Southwark Park Galleries are holding a performance night and fundraiser evening in their Dilston Gallery, featuring Peter Liversidge’s Gin Bar and live performances by artists Florence Peake, Anne Bean, Fani Parali and Patrick Cole.
Anne Bean: towards a new ceremony
VSSL Studio, London SE8
11 – 12 October 2024
Anne Bean will be speaking at Autobituaries, an artist lab exploring catalysts for creating ritual. She will speak about aspects of her work and propose solo and collective actions towards a new ceremony.
Nek Chand: Tropical Modernism at V&A
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Until 22 September 2024
England & Co have arranged the loan of five sculptures by Nek Chand for the exhibition Tropical Modernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Nek Chand Saini (1924-2015) was a self-taught Indian artist who created the Rock Garden of Chandigarh – a vast fantasy kingdom inhabited by a myriad of sculptures of people and animals constructed from recycled materials such as broken crockery. Now hailed as a visionary environment and a much-visited site in India, the Garden was initially built without permission within a city redesigned as a modernist utopia by the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier. England & Co first exhibited works by Nek Chand Saini in 2001 following a memorable visit with him at the Rock Garden in Chandigarh.
David Medalla: In Conversation with the Cosmos
9 June – 15 September 2024
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The portrait of David Medalla taken by Clay Perry in 1964 greets visitors to the exhibition In Conversation with the Cosmos at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
The curators write that it is ‘the first comprehensive survey in the United States dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla (1938–2020). The exhibition contextualizes the elusive and experimental practice of an artist whose pioneering work spanned kinetic, performance, and participatory art movements… Beginning with paintings and drawings from the late 1950s and concluding with the works he produced before his death, In Conversation with the Cosmos presents the accumulations of a creative life imbued with an anti-institutional ethos and a commitment to impermanence and change.’ England & Co were pleased to assist the project with exhibition loans and images for the accompanying publication.
Christine Khondji: Beyond the Thread
Bin Matar House, Muharraq, Bahrain
22 April – 30 May 2024
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-1970
Turner Contemporary, Margate
3 February – 6 May 2024
Paule Vézelay and Anthea Alley are included in Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-1970, a group exhibition at Turner Contemporary presenting abstraction as a radical global language shared by women artists in the twenty years following the Second World War. Guest curated by Dr Flavia Frigeri, the exhibition brings together the works of more than 50 artists to examine how, through abstract forms, materials and modes, women pushed the boundaries of artmaking while tackling seismic cultural, social and political shifts. Comprising more than 80 artworks, predominantly sculpture, the exhibition traces how the language of abstraction developed on a global scale. Paule Vézelay is represented by two constructions from her ‘Lines in Space’ series; and Anthea Alley by Resting Circles, an architectural, polished metal sculpture from 1970, and an earlier work from the Arts Council Collection.
The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy?
Edinburgh College of Art, 13 February 2024
‘The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy?’ was the title of Lynn MacRitchie‘s public lecture on 13 February at Edinburgh College of Art – the site of the Scottish avant-garde art happening she instigated as a student there more than half a century ago.
The intention of ‘The Participation Art Event’ (PAE) was to explore the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. So, over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023).
PAE itself saw Medalla present A Stitch in Time, in which visitors sewed en masse either side of a long sheet of cotton. Medalla also produced his first iteration of Porcelain Wedding prior to a London show the following year. This event involved participants covering a naked couple in clay, effectively transforming them into statues while becoming ‘witnesses’ at their wedding. Dugger presented the self-explanatory People Weave a House!, which he had instigated in London the year before.
“I think it was both [provocation and prophecy],” recalls MacRitchie. “Within the institution, it was seen as a huge provocation, and for some people, what they saw was the provocation rather than the art. Coming back to PAE fifty years later, the things we were exploring and experimenting with have now become kind of the norm in the art world, which one could not have predicted at all. So at the time, PAE was a provocative event, but in terms of the changes that have worked their way through the art world since then, it was prophecy.”