dotdot dash, Birgitta Hosea 2018-9
Participatory light action with lasers and improvised voice designed for public space. Originally commissioned by InspiralLondon. More info here.
Night Walking North Kent Festival, Gravesend, 2018:
London As Park City Festival, Regents Canal, 2018:
Directions for the visual music come from a chance-based score made by walking on musical paper:
A Book of P.I.F.f.d. (Pictures inspired by film and found through dreaming), Maryclare Foa (as R & F Mo), 2018
12 images (mixed media on paper) in a soft fabric sewn and folded book, for the exhibition A History of Drawing at Camberwell UAL Jan 2018-Feb 2018.
Maryclare Foa (as Ray & Flare Mo), Song for The Wꜵnderfull Gentle Ones
Enshrine, Crypt Gallery, St Pancras Parish Church, London, July 2018
The Work: A short action, performed once, leaving traces as a prayer.
Background:
Narratives of the past and present have most often written those of a gender other than male as insignificant, but there have been many gentle and other ones who have contributed much wꜵnder to the world.
From Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya, who knew of the howless, to Mother Meera who came to find how to activate electricity, our world has been peopled by seekers, and mystics of many different beliefs, each one perpetuating the light and love of all creatures and also of this planet. Poems in celebration and word’s of these mystics are sung in this crypt of prayer, as a collective [t]h[e]ymn in these times ‘when things fall apart’ to ‘set the world ablaze’ with ‘… a new culture of compassion’.
Empire II is a touring exhibition of artists film curated by Vanya Balogh. Originally devised for the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, different iterations of the show with additional works were exhibited at venues including Castello 1610/A, Venice Biennale; Brussels Art Week; Unit 1 Gallery, London; White Post/Corridor Gallery, London; SPEKTRUM, Berlin; Provincial Project Space, Kendal, Cumbria; (2017); Haus Gallery, Tallinn Art Week, Estonia; Rogue Gallery Studio, Hastings; Super Pop, Madrid; Etablissement Culturel Solidare, Paris (2018) and 58th Venice Biennale; Oaxaco Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico (curated by Vanya Balogh and Marissa Polin, 2019).
Works included:
Nearly, Not Quite (Short film, Maryclare Foa as M.M.Kizi, 2017)
Tensione: How is that going to work? (Short film, Jane Grisewood, Carali McCall, 2017)
Erasure (Animation, Birgitta Hosea, 2017)
Each artist made additional photo works for EMPIRE II: Playing God, a new version of the exhibition for Tallinn, and abstract videos for a new section, The Void, shown at MACO, Oaxaca and 58th Venice Biennale.
All The Ghosts I Know and One Other, Maryclare Foa (as R&F Mo), 2018
Untitled Hitchcock Still #1, Birgitta Hosea, 2018
Notes on a Table (Folkestone Green) and (Folkestone Blue)
(Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall)
Residency at Whelkboy Gallery, Creative Quarter, Folkestone, August 2016
Notes on a Table (House of Illustration) 2016 (performance by Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall)
8-9th July 2016, MarKings, Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins UAL/House of Illustration
Approximately: 240 x 128 cm, conversation, sound, graphite and coloured crayon on paper
Event review by John Miers in Spark Journal
Line Dialogue VI (2013), Carali McCall and Jane Grisewood
30-minute performance drawing in front of live audience, charcoal and graphite, overall 400 x 200 cm. ‘Draw to Perform’ exhibition at Performance Space, Hackney, London.
Posted in drawing, performance art, performance drawing
Tagged Carali McCall, Draw to Perform, drawing, Jane Grisewood, performance drawing
Migration – a slow scattering (2016) images from Maryclare Foà’s initial proposal:
Migration – a slow scattering (2016) performance by Maryclare Foà
Shadow Ship (2016) projected animation and smashed sugar by Birgitta Hosea
Posted in expanded animation, performance art
Tagged Birgitta Hosea, expanded animation, MaryClare Foá, performance art
[Rosary Drawing XII performance, rehearsal in studio, Birgitta Hosea, 2015]
[Remnants from Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, 2015]
This work was developed by Birgitta Hosea during a residency in a former convent in Atina, Lazio, Italy that was organised and curated by Rekha Sameer.
Although brought up aetheist, Birgitta Hosea spent the entire residency drawing her recently deceased and much mourned Swedish grandmother’s broken rosary beads and trying to learn more about the Catholic faith of her mother’s family.
The more she drew, the more she began to think about about both of her grandmothers, one Swedish, one Scottish, and indeed about all of the women who work tirelessly and selflessly for their families: invisible labour that is taken for granted and forgotten about.
[Image by Chris Simpson, 2015, cropped]
By the 12th drawing, she decided to use the tools and materials of domestic cleaning to make a drawing of the rosary beads – scrubbing away the paper to create the highlighlights on each bead. As the antique Roman floor was too delicate to make a performance using scouring on, out of the the many drawings she had made, at the final exhibition she chose to only show these.
[Rosary Drawing XII, Atina Residency exhibition, Palazzo Ducale dei Cantelmo, Atina, Italy, 2015]
For Hosea, this work captured everything she had learnt on the residency – that the actions of cleaning and the time taken to scrub each piece of paper could be recorded in a sequence of images that ressemble a filmstrip. Like a filmstrip, the rosary is also a device to record actions over time – the prayers that are supposed to be said for each bead. So for her, this work is a type of animation.
Asked to submit experimental animation for Beyond Noumenon, an exhibition and forum at Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts in Chongqing, China, she submitted a proposal to perform this work as a piece of live animation and, to her surprise, was accepted with great enthusiasm and generosity by curators Tingting Lu and Tianran Duan.
She then performed the drawing at the private view next to other wall-based sequential images she had made. Scrubbed clean of all makeup, on her hands and knees, she said invocations while going through the rosary beads and scrubbed one piece of paper for each bead on the string.
[Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, 2016]
Following this exhibition, she performed the work again at 51% Remember Her, a group exhibition of feminist art curated by Rebecca Feiner at Tower Gallery, London.
[Rosary Drawing XII performance, Birgitta Hosea, Tower Gallery, London, 2017]
Click here to view the 51% Remember Her catalogue: 51%_Catalogue
This work then became part of her solo show Erasure, at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul, Korea in 2018. View catalogue here.
Interview about the show by Studio International.
Footage of the show (silent) with video documentation of Rosary XII performance at the private view:
Notes on a Table (Kleine Red), 2016 (75cm x 123cm)
This table top drawing was made by Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea, Carali McCall in July 2016, in Kleine Wharf, Hackney immediately before attending the anti-BREXIT demonstration.
Drawn Together: 