28 July–12 August
Curated by Ben Broome: Stéphanie Brossard ‘Notre Dame Des Laves’ and Jesús Hilario-Reyes ‘Waywardly in Low Tide’
‘Notre Dame Des Laves’ presents artist Stéphanie Brossard for the first time in the UK. Two large-format installations will be exhibited, both concerning the anthropology and ecology of the artist’s home, La Réunion. Glissement de terrain and Rendez-vous are informed by the omnipresence of disaster for residents of La Réunion with the threat of hurricanes and volcanic eruptions punctuating daily life. Through these works, Brossard addresses the violence of displacement and upheaval that arises when the natural world collides with the socio-economic conditions of the French colony. The exhibition’s title ‘Notre Dame Des Laves’ (‘Our Lady of the Lava’) pays homage to a church of the same name which, in 1977, was miraculously spared when the lava flow from the eruption of Piton de la Fournaise split to flow around it. Brossard is interested in the mutations the church experienced in the wake of this mystical event – the physical mutation of the landscape vs the cultural mutation.
‘Waywardly in Low Tide’ presents a series of sculptural works by Puerto-Rican and Dominican artist Jesús Hilario-Reyes. Utilising sound installation, cement, metal, salt, and dehydrated hog bladders, this new body of work pulls from the artist’s ongoing exploration of fugitivity through the modes of queer nightlife, the carnival, and destierro (an untranslatable Spanish term akin to ‘torn from the land’). ‘Waywardly in Low Tide’, employs motifs of the mangrove, the hurricane, and the carnival towards notions of both black and queer fugitivity. In this body of work, Hilario-Reyes argues that the fugitive, and by extension the migrant condition, must be mobile and fluid; embodying many spaces in order to persist.