Imagining Otherwise
Courtesy & copyright Jasleen Kaur.
EXHIBITING ARTISTS: Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid
PREVIEW: Friday 7 June, 6-9PM
EXHIBITION: 8 June - 17 August 2024
OPENING TIMES: Thursday - Saturday, 10AM-6PM, or by appointment.
WHERE: Gallery 1
Exhibitions should not necessarily be fixed; they have the potential for change. To explore this idea, Primary is engaging in a reflective process of exhibition-making.
Imagining Otherwise initially comprised three pre-existing works by artists Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid, which have now been transformed as of 1 July. Framed by a series of live events (e.g., readings, performances, screenings or discussions), the artists have returned to the artworks presented in the exhibition and given their own related additional artworks, allowing us to witness better the connections made between the works inhabiting Primary.
We are interested in removing unrealistic or rigid expectations in order to reframe the relationship between institution and artist, as well as artist and artist. Throughout the development of Imagining Otherwise, exhibiting artists are invited to have three collective conversations with Primary’s programme team. During the first of these conversations, we all noticed concepts of layering, archiving, and stacking emerging. Taking this as our starting point, the exhibition began as a space within a space, a game on a game, playing with what it means to conceal something or someone. Although made in different contexts, each artwork hones in on an energy, an attitude, or a refusal. After the second conversation, the exhibition showcased vulnerable personhood and the relationships between the artists and their art and personal experiences.
We invited artists who have an existing connection to Primary to contribute to Imagining Otherwise, encouraging us to revisit past work and existing relationships and develop new ideas and ways that we might work together again in the future.
Events and changes to the content of the exhibition are initiated by the artists in dialogue with Primary’s programme team: Rebecca Beinart (Engagement Curator), Jade Foster (Public Programme Curator), Colette Griffin (Artist Development Curator) and Niki Russell (Director).
Imagining Otherwise is part of TRANSFORM, a City Takeover taking place across cultural organisations between May and September 2024.
Artist Bios:
Ashley Holmes is an artist, DJ and broadcaster working with sound and collaborative projects to produce work for exhibitions, performance and radio. His practice is centred around social, historical and relational knowledges and iterations of Dub, Blues and Grime music. Recent projects and performances have explored melancholic spaces between these genres and the culture of bootlegs, riddims, versions and covers to amplify frequencies, voice and memory.
Ashley hosts Tough Matter, a monthly show on NTS Radio and is a resident on Mondo Radio and at No Bounds Festival, Sheffield. He facilitates Open Deck, a series of gatherings started in 2018, giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University.
Jasleen Kaur is an artist making with the slurry of life. Raised amidst betrayal, secrecy and banished outsiders, her work is to make sense of what is out of view or withheld. She is called towards plurality, declassifications, polyphony, the blur. Jasleen refuses funds from Baillie Gifford, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Zabludowicz Collection and Freelands Foundation. She is practising singing in the sediment till she is intoxicated.
Her work has been shown at Tramway, Scotland (2023), Touchstones Rochdale (2021), Wellcome Collection, London (2021), Serpentine Civic, London (2020), Glasgow Women’s Library, Scotland (2019), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle (2019), MIMA, Middlesbrough (2018), Cubitt Gallery, London (2018), Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017), Jerwood Space, London (2015). In 2019 her book Be Like Teflon was co-published by Glasgow Women’s Library and Dent-de-leone. She was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Artist Award in 2021.
Jala Wahid’s work across sculpture, film, sound and installation is rooted in archival research into colonial and diasporic history and politics. Aesthetically alluring, sensual and even delirious her works seek to establish a counter narrative to colonisers’ accounts, and is interested in the emotive potential of Kurdish music, literature, dance and theatre. In this way, her work brings together contested histories, politics and poetic expression. She is interested in the complexities of nationalism, history and iconography and methods of archiving and existence.
Access:
Imagining Otherwise will be located in our ground floor gallery space which has full level access from our new main entrance on Seely Road.
If you would like to make a group booking or visit our exhibitions at a quiet time please contact us on admin@weareprimary.org or 0115 924 4493 to arrange.
Large print and braille versions of the exhibition text will be available, please ask our Front of House Assistant for details. Below you will find an audio version of the exhibition text.
Please email admin@weareprimary.org or call 0115 924 4493 with any access inquiries.