Author: peer2peer_uk-hk

Shezad Dawood,  Leviathan Cycle, Episode 3: Arturo, 2017, single screen 17:25 mins.
Nominated by Skinder Hundal, New Art Exchange.

Leviathan Cycle is a multi-episode film series and part of Dawood’s groundbreaking multimedia Leviathan project (2017-), exploring the intersection of climate change, migration and mental health. Each film has been crafted as a self-contained work blending fictional narrative and documentary footage, with the possibility of being endlessly reconfigured with other episodes to create distinctive storylines extending from the evolving corpus of Leviathan material.

Ben and Yasmine arrive at a strange and enigmatic community based on an island in the lagoon of Venice. They engage in scavenging raids to the mainland and partake in the group’s Bacchanalian orgies. Their gluttonous sexual vagrancy is paralleled with images of overfishing and unnecessary cruelty in the fishing industry of the Mediterranean.

Dawood (UK) works across the disciplines of painting, film, neon, sculpture, performance, virtual reality and other digital media to ask key questions of narrative, history and embodiment.

shezaddawood.com/

leviathan-cycle.com/information/

Commissioned by Leviathan – Human & Marine Ecology

Sarah Eyre, Twitch, shift, jerk, slip, repeat, 2020, still from animated GIF.
Nominated by Stephanie Fletcher, University of Salford Art Collection.

‘Twitch, shift, jerk, slip, repeat’. These are words that describe both my animated GIF and the feeling of being on the cusp; of being suspended between different spaces and states, and the feeling of fragmentation as we navigate unfamiliar terrains, constantly re-drawing our boundaries as our physical presence and visibility in the world continually slips and changes. The piece reflects the way that many of us find ourselves existing in an in-between place, somewhere between virtual and physical worlds, communicating through barriers, windows and screens and having to negotiate the unexpected materialities of this new space including the disruptive buffering, freezing and glitching of our virtual lives.’  

Eyre (UK) is a lens-based artist based in-between Manchester and Leeds.  She recently completed a practice-led PhD at Manchester School of Art. 

saraheyre.co.uk

Courtesy the artist, commissioned by University Of Salford Art Collection in partnership with Open Eye Gallery.

Parham Ghalamdar, Birds or borders (2020) Stop motion Animation, commissioned by University Of Salford Art Collection in partnership with Castlefield Gallery.
Nominated by Matthew Pendergast, Castlefield Gallery.

Birds or Borders is the title of a short film created using stop-motion techniques, drawing, and collages of archival footage. The film engages with socio-political subjects such as freedom of movement, in a poetic approach to depicting a state of suspension, a situation which most people have experienced during the Covid-19 disruptions.  In order to animate such a subject, the film attempts to explore the medium of time by proposing an Absurdist anti-narrative structure of story-telling where there are no punch lines to any of the sequences. 

Ghalamdar (UK) is an Iranian-born painter, researcher, and curator based in Manchester. Due to the Covid-19 disruptions and inaccessibility to his studio he is expanding his painting practice into the digital realm by creating montages of stop motion animation from drawings edited alongside collages of archival footage. 
ghalamdar.com/

Courtesy the artist, commissioned by University of Salford Art Collection in partnership with Castlefield Gallery.

Megan Broadmeadow, Above The Firmament, 2016 – 2019, VR/360 film
Nominated by Peter Bonnell, QUAD Derby.

Broadmeadow (UK) is a visual artist of Welsh heritage, who lives and works in Bristol. She makes immersive exhibitions which include video, sculpture, performance and digital installation technologies. Above The Firmament  is a VR film  made as part of Broadmeadow’s touring artwork SEEK PRAY ADVANCE.  In biblical cosmology the firmament is a border-space mapped out as a section of the universe which isn’t quite of earth, but is also not quite inside the realm of God. It has been reported as a dome or sphere within which water is held on the earth, a space from which land was formed, a shield from the infinity of deep space and even a vault of heaven.

meganbroadmeadow.com

Luke Ching Chin Wai, Folk Art Series: Cockroach, 2006, video and double sided tape.
Nominated by Tang Kwok Hin, 一九八三 (1983).

Ching (HK) sees himself as a spontaneous observer of the city.  The cockroach is the first object he chose for his Folk Art Series. He is interested in the close relationship between folk art and everyday life, and the value of inheritance.  He aims to develop a form of folk art that is unique to the modern Hong Kong experience. Currently, there are over 4,000 people who have attended his workshops to learn how to use double-sided tape to make a cockroach.  He hopes that one day this will become an original folk art product from Hong Kong.

blindspotgallery.com/artist/luke-ching-chin-wai

John Wong, RuChu AR, 2020, 27 min, AR App.
Nominated by K11 Art Foundation.

RuChu, “如初” in Chinese characters, means “as the beginning”. This work is inspired by and based on I-Ching, the book of changes and a classic Chinese philosophical text that Wong (HK) has been studying over 10 years. He noticed an interesting and mesmerizing pattern hidden in the repeated keywords: Pattern visualisation is a core aesthetic in Wong’s work. The artist is interested to explore and trace back to the beginning of Chinese culture’s subconsciousness or ‘DNA’ through looking at the frequency of characters that appear in the full text, forming the pattern of our subconsciousness. The AR work displays the full text (4152 Chinese characters) of I-Ching as the visual base. A cursor runs from top left to bottom right. When the cursor hits any word or phrase that frequently repeats itself in the whole text, the same word or phrase (All) will be translated into English and pronounced in English by the computer. For example, “无咎” will become “NO REGRET”, “吉” will become “GOOD”, “凶” will become “BAD”, etc. The cursor loops the whole text again and again like a hypnosis with the I-Ching’s pattern analysis.

johnwong.asia/

Hui Wai Kung, Re-Dürer, 2016, generated graphics from video game hacking.
Nominated by Angel Leung and Kyle Chung, Videotage.

Hui (HK) reworks three well-known engravings by Albrecht Dürer through hacking a video game to generate graphics.  He presents the result as a three-channel video installation (or screening). Hui is convinced that the ancient definitions of inspired melancholy from Pseudo-Aristotle are inscribed on Durer’s engravings.

“Our melancholy, as well as our lives, are classified into three types (or stages): imagination, reason, and intellect. I’ve reworked the concepts based on my own interpretation and emotion.” Hui Wai Keung

Having attempted various art forms, Hui Wai Keung is now focusing on digital media, such as game, generative or algorithmic art. Hui is now researching the topics of expanded space and perception, such as the visual study of the fourth dimension. He believes it is time for art to go back to sublime, but a new definition of sublime.

huiwaikeung.org/

 

Elaine Wong, Tomorrow in a Glass, 2017, digital video.
Nominated by Bess Chan, Hong Kong International Photo Festival.

Wong (HK) received her Master of Fine Art (Creative Media) from the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong in 2019.  She explores and unveils diverse daily encounters through experimentation, for example with a storm glass (now considered a decorative item but historically used to ‘predict’ the weather).  Tomorrow in a Glass generates unique videos from a video database, depending on real-time images captured with a webcam attached to a storm glass, to provide a forecast for the following day in Hong Kong. During the Peer to Peer: UK/ HK Festival, the storm glass will be placed in 4 different locations in Hong Kong, where online viewers can submit videos to be included in the database.

Insta @miss_elainewong
Facebook: /elainewongsukyin

Curator, University of Salford

Lindsay has led the strategic development of the University of Salford Art Collection since 2013, including brokering key partnerships with artists and arts organisations across the UK and increasingly China. She pioneered a new collecting policy based on three strands: Chinese Contemporary Art, About the Digital and From the North, reflecting her passion for supporting artists and for creating a collection that tells ‘a story of now’.  Working in partnership is at the heart of all activity, with most acquisitions being co-commissions.  Lindsay has expertise in curating exhibitions and developing public collections of contemporary art, particularly in underrepresented areas such as installation and digital art.  She has commissioned new work by numerous artists from the UK and China and continues to contribute to national debate about developing contemporary collections.  In 2014 she established a Graduate Scholarship Programme, supporting a small number of artists in their first year after graduation, now in its seventh year.

Previously Lindsay has held positions at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Tate Liverpool and The Walker, Liverpool. She is currently a trustee of the Peter Scott Gallery Trust at Lancaster University and on the advisory board for the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool.