Press room

Re:Repair
Sat 7 – Sun 8 May 2022, 12pm-6.30pm, Level G, Barbican, FREE

The Barbican has today announced the launch of Re:Repair, a collection of newly created multidisciplinary artworks by 16 emerging artists, aged 18-26, which will be exhibited at the Barbican. All artists are participants in this year’s Barbican Creative Learning’s Young Visual Arts Group programme. Working together since October 2021, the collective has been engaging with, and challenging, the theme of ‘repair’ as an ongoing process. The interventions in this free exhibition span a wide range of media including photography, performance, installation, participatory practices and audio works. The collective has explored themes of repair across labour, institutional injustices, decolonisation, rest, connection and technology.

The artists exhibited in Re:Repair are: Fikayo Adebajo, Sena Appeah, Sally Barton,  Harry Cross, J Frank, Victoria George, Kevin Ishimwe, Jan Kamiński, Nefeli Kentoni, L U C I N E, Maite de Orbe, Karina Sellers-Hardy, Cora Sehgal Cuthbert, Ioana Simion, Sam Stewart and Phoebe Wagner.

Commenting on the work, the collective said:

“What could it take to repair ourselves, let alone the world? These 16 interventions, each the product of six months’ work, seek to explore a holistic approach to the act of mending, while also remaining critical of the implications of embarking on a journey of repair, the labour required to sustain the process, and the scars that might remain. In deconstructing repair, the contradictions inherent within it are drawn out and laid bare. This exhibition is an invitation for visitors to question, interrogate, dismantle and build their own idea of repair.” 

Re:Repair also introduces ‘Repair Studio’, a reimagined approach to a repair café and alternative avenue for public programming. The temporary studio-space on the Barbican’s Level G is designed to invite visitors to explore the idea of repair through a series of cooperative workshops and discussions over the weekend.

The collection of artistic interventions has been developed with help from artist mentor Jordan McKenzie and supported by external guest facilitators including artists Abbas Zahedi and Adam Farah, as well as curators Anna Colin and Priya Jay.

This exhibition has been conceived as part of Barbican Creative Learning’s Young Visual Arts Group, an annual, free learning programme which supports a group of young creatives, aged 16-25, to work collectively towards a public exhibition, and develop their skills in curating, marketing, design and project management. Members of the programme receive support from Barbican staff, as well as professional artists and facilitators in developing their creative practice and ideas.

 

More details of the artists and artworks in Re:Repair:

Fikayo Adebajo is a photographer and visual artist. She is passionate about using visual mediums to present people of colour, especially black women, through a three-dimensional lens. She tells stories that explore the full spectrum of the black emotive experience, creating space for existence outside the narrow confines of the marginalisation that seek to define.

String Figures - a thousand tethered knots between you and me is a photographic installation born from a desire to tether in physical form the ineffable nature of the love and connection we extend for others and ourselves.

Instagram: @fikayoadebajo

Sena Appeah is a self-taught artist who lives and works in London. Her paintings explore imagined surreal worlds which she paints spontaneously, following the automatism school of thought. She is inspired by dreams, philosophy and colour theory.

Baobab epilogue: Oshun meets Doondari tells a story through painting of two deities from different cultural groups (yoruba and fulani) coming together, in dance and play, to create life.

Sally Barton is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores class, the North of England, intergenerational relationships and storytelling. 

Brutal Bricks – the reimagining of Barbican history uses a poster aesthetic to provocatively engage the audience with the working-class histories involved in building the Barbican.

Instagram: @bartonmade

Harry Cross is a multidisciplinary artist. He uses installation, sound and moving image to explore the relationship between time and memory, ritual and mental health, as well as isolation and escapism. He believes everything is interconnected and seeks to understand the correlation between important issues. 

Solitary Birthday Wishes is an installation that centres around a font and soaps, using multiple senses to open up discussions on rituals and memory.

J Frank explores the intersection between queerness and the cultural landscape in which it exists. Through making, the artist hopes to fully realise his own experience as a trans* being: “when I am queer I am.”; His work art is made up of fragments of acknowledgment, exploration and celebration of this.

Embodied is an audio installation that explores trans* identity.

Instagram: @fickle_dreams

Victoria George is a London-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work explores experiences through spiritualism and textile practices. She has been awarded Gifted & Talented throughout her adolescent years, shaping her to always scout a new experience.

SKL: THE EXPERIENCE welcomes participants in to enjoy the reparative benefits of textile arts.

Instagram: @RUGFUN

Kevin Ishimwe describes himself as a ‘chaotically curious artist, seeing the world through a colourful lens’. His photography fosters and champions a healthy disrespect for the 'impossible'.

You might not make it through the night… is a triptych of photographic works of scars that explore trauma, repair, memory, and abstraction.

Instagram: @byaudience 

Jan Kamiński is an interdisciplinary artist completing his BA at Central Saint Martins in Fine Art. With a passion for cinema, he tries to investigate subjects of violence, death, body, feminine tropes, and the peripheries of mental states. 

EverGrim is a sculptural installation in a lift that invites the audience to dwell on life and death, up and down, heaven and hell, beginning and end.

Instagram: @belongstojan

Nefeli Kentoni is an interdisciplinary artist, theatre-maker and writer. She is fascinated by the intersections between different disciplines, by the spaces where scenography and philosophy, aesthetics and theatre, filmmaking and poetry meet.

Το[πύον] / the pus / landscape explores the irreparability of a traumatised landscape through etching and poetry.

Instagram: @nefairy

L U C I N E is a transdisciplinary music artist that believes in using a cross-arts approach to create unique, immersive experiences for people to enjoy and feel equal in. As a citizen of the world, they wish to retell stories of the human experience including their own, enabling them to express their innermost thoughts and feelings.

The Circle of UBUNTU is an exploration of the aftermath of colonisation. Through sculpture, video, performance and sound, the artist seeks to understand their process of decolonisation as a form of repair.

Instagram: @lisforlucine

Maite de Orbe is a photographer and artist working across photography, video and technology. Their work is based on three main themes: gender, belonging and spaces. The result is an amalgam of performative narratives that aim to raise questions about identity.

The Uncomfortable Room is a performance and installation responding to the theme of repair in defence of discomfort and awkwardness.

Instagram: @maitedeorbe

Cora Sehgal Cuthbert is a multi-disciplinary artist. Her work observes the connections between the personal, the cultural and a universal humanity/spirituality, with the aim of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Unbound Love, Inspiring and Sustaining exhibits shrines made by participants during a series of workshops run by the artist, exploring shrine-making as a practice for commemoration and repair.

Instagram: @coracuthbert

Ioana Simion is an arts facilitator and creative programmer based in London. Her facilitation practice involves developing collaborative learning methods based on the process behind making, play and creative intuition.

Repair Studio (with Karina Sellers) is a programme of workshops and guided discussions considering the creative potential of repair as an aesthetic, intuitive and embodied practice.

Instagram: @artizineuk

Sam Stewart is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with how physical and virtual spaces affect their occupants. This ranges from exploring the relationship between private and public space as mediated by hostile design, and his own experience as a young artist growing up online.

I love it when the images, when the images wash over me tells the artist's experience growing up with a meme account narrated by a deep-fake modelled on himself.

Instagram: @Sam953_

Phoebe Wagner is a poet and community artist. Her work explores the politics in the personal, working in collaboration with people.

LIMPIEZA EN PROGRESO [Cleaning in Progress] is an audio work co-created with the cleaning staff at the Barbican, platforming their stories and rituals. See the architecture of their invisible reparative work.

Instagram: @phoebesarahwagner

The Barbican believes in creating space for people and ideas to connect through its international arts programme, community events and learning activity. To keep its programme accessible to everyone, and to keep investing in the artists it works with, the Barbican needs to raise more than 60% of its income through ticket sales, commercial activities and fundraising every year. Donations can be made here: barbican.org.uk/donate