Sonia E Barrett : Solo installation at London ICF'S DIASPORA PAVILION 2 presented in partnership with Block 336
Diaspora Pavilion 2: London will present two new, site-specific, solo installations by artists Sonia E Barrett (TT ALUM) and Kashif Nadim Chaudry.
WHEN : 10th March - 10th June 2023
PREVIEW : 10th March, 6 - 9pm | Thursday - Sunday 12 – 5pm REGISTER HERE
WHERE : Block 336, 336 Brixton Road London SW9 7AA United Kingdom
The exhibition is curated by ICF (International Curators Forum)
The show will be the final iteration of a series of peripatetic events that form ICF’s Diaspora Pavilion 2 (DP2) project. This trans-national, collaborative project advances ICF’s engagement with diaspora as a critical concept following the first Diaspora Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. DP2 interrogates and complicates the term diaspora across various curatorial formats as part of an ongoing mapping of the rich and complex material cultures, mythologies, alternative histories and re-imagined landscapes that are born from the distinct and yet shared reality of belonging to a diaspora.
Image courtesy of the ICF
For the exhibition, Sonia E Barrett will present Here Tell, Quantum Black, which consists of a new sculptural installation and moving image work addressing the material histories of flint, the black sedimentary rock used in Britain to construct tools, property and weaponry.
Found in abundance in the fields around the artist’s home in the South of England, it is a material Barrett has been collecting for years. Barrett assembles fragments of flint to create a suspended installation of hand-gathered, hand-painted flint fragments in the gallery’s centre. In the lead-up to and during the exhibition, Barrett invites members of different communities to paint pieces of the flint with her in the gallery space, contributing to a growing constellation.
Barrett addresses themes such as property, extraction, violence, and humanity through her engagement with flint. Through this installation, Barrett creates space for communities to meet, co-create and contemplate a celestial, quantum black.
ABOUT THE ARTIST :
Of German Jamaican Parentage brought up in England, China and Cyprus Sonia Elizabeth Barrett has an international range of cultural influences. A graduate of St Andrews University where she studied Philosophy, Literature and International Relations and the Transart Institute (MFA) Sonia has shown her work at the NGBK Berlin, the OCCA California, the Format Follow Contemporary in Milan, The Museum of the Sea in Italy and the National Gallery in Jamaica.
Image courtesy of the artist