The inclement weather has ceased by the time I enter Sheffield’s Site Gallery for Jerwood Survey III, a major biennial touring exhibition of ten artists from around the UK representing innovative and intriguing multidisciplinary practices. Jerwood Survey aims to commission artists capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary visual art, presented here in a symbiotic group exhibition in Site Gallery’s main space. I expected formally experimental reflections on social justice and politics from this show, yet was not expecting the utopian impulse shared by many artists – and which feels necessary in our increasingly doom-laden present.
A cursory glance around the room indicates a commitment to representation and difference through a variety of aesthetic strategies. Aqsa Arif’s arresting textile and film piece ‘Marvi and the Churail’ (2024) constructs a portico with Islamic fabrics and braided rope; Philippa Brown’s central playground-like installation ‘A Summoning (I would shed my skin for you)’ (2024) relishes in a spectral interplay of colour and light; Alliyah Enyo’s ‘Aphotic Archaeology’ (2024) possesses a gloomy corner of the space, a grey sand circle littered with relics organised around a hanging chain. (Later, during the opening event, Enyo activates the space around her work, performing in relation to her apocalyptic beach. A futuristic selkie swathed in an algal costume designed by Kiera Saunders using latex, spirulina and wax cotton, she interacts with the artefacts with torchlight before finding a concealed microphone and singing a siren song, delayed vocals looping and drenched in reverb. According to the artist, performance is about identifying and unleashing ‘utopianism in the present through embodied practice’.) Aside from those initial visual impressions, there is an incessant cushioned rumble, which I soon realise emanates from Paul Nataraj’s ‘Repetitions of 108: Counting almost nothing’ (2024), a sound installation comprising nine record players spinning calico-covered vinyl records of the 1981 BBC deep relaxation show, ‘Taking the Strain’ by Penny Yendell.
Moving through the space as directed by the exhibition map, MV Brown’s curtained silent disco invites me into an uncanny realm with a video showing an AI avatar of the artist dancing to a corrupted amalgam of pop songs. Familiar and unsettling, popular lyrics and melodies merge and overlap across an eighties-inspired karaoke track. Also present in this semi-circular enclave is a head-shaped disco ball rotating on a plinth. Critiquing the music industry’s auto-cannibalism set about by tech giants Spotify and TikTok, ‘System of Touch’ (2024) considers media consumption, corruption and reproduction in the hyper-digital age.
Standing over a ream of stamped and numbered sheets of paper on a Perspex plinth, I hesitate to take sheet number 1/372 in the physical exchange established by Che Applewhaite’s trickily titled and multi-part ‘untitle “HANDLE WITH CARE”’ (2024). Interrogating hurt and colonial power through reproduction and participation, the work encourages attendees take a printed sheet (‘untitle’) and download a PDF (‘HANDLE WITH CARE’) containing poetry and photography. The finite poetry object and digital download are accompanied by email conversations between the artist and gallery hung on the wall detailing the conditions for printing and exhibiting the work. According to the conditions, the artist calculated how many sheets were to compose ‘untitle’ by dividing the number of frames in video footage showing Ornella Greaves being shot while protesting police brutality in Trinidad and Tobago by the number of still photographs in ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’. As technology becomes intertwined with human lives, it may bring us closer to loved ones and vital information, but also to hate speech and videos of violence and war. New strategies of representing this complex and messy digitalisation are being tested in both Applewhaite and MV Brown’s work. While I understand this technology-based representational desire, I would like to see more critiques of technological societies operating outside digital mediums.
Colonial empires have impressed their subjugation onto the landscape through resource extraction, infrastructural development and habitat destruction, creating feral ecologies such as Donegal’s ‘loughs’, here explored by Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh. An installation featuring scientific diagrams, glass and ceramic sculptures of internal organs and healing tools, ‘Caoimhín’ (2024) probes the complex webs of human entanglement with the other-than-human world. Dochartaigh’s diagrams explore tangles such as invasive zebra mussels accidentally introduced to various freshwater sources, gizzards in a particular species of trout in Loch Meilbhe, and bird-fish parasitic relationships. The artists’ father, whose name the work borrows, had his stomach removed due to an aggressive form of cancer and underwent a radical procedure to construct a new stomach organ from the small intestine. His modified stomach is rendered in a pink ceramic piece, enmeshed within this queasily brilliant installation.
Similarly engaging with an examination of the Anthropocene, Kandace Siobhan Walker’s ethereal domestic installation ‘Dreamerism’ (2024) creates a soft nostalgia through a 90s-style bedroom with a turquoise double bed, bedside table and pink velvet chair, concealed by baby blue sheer curtains. Facing the bed, an apocalyptic film-poem about the climate catastrophe challenges the pastel bliss. Simulating climate anxiety, the public infiltrates this private sanctum to demonstrate how global networks of devastation impact our personal lives and interactions with humans and other-than-humans. Walker’s ‘world-making beyond capitalism’ is among the strongest works exhibited, its blistering film-poem challenging Western climate discourse with a precise relation between form and content.
Unassuming compared with larger sculptural installations, Ebun Sopido’s sculpture ‘Left Hand of the Sisters’ (2024) sits atop a bespoke shimmering blue flocked plinth reminiscent of the ocean. It fuses together scanned images of hands from the Black trans community close to the artist and casts them in bronze. In certain African cultures, Sopido tells me, the left hand is deemed feminine and diminutive, yet the left hand of the Mugwe (of the Meru people in Kenya) is said to have divine power. In spite of their modest size, these loving hands possess an emotional force.
Perhaps lacking the urgency of some other works on display, ‘Tired as the Land’ (2024) by Sam Keelan is an absurdist durational video work exploring queer intimacy, operating within the broader, sometimes ambiguous, theme of healing. A man cuddles an anthropomorphic hot water bottle with a smiling face. Following the pandemic, I’ve noticed two trends in contemporary art: overstimulating, sensory, mixed-media installations mirroring digital saturation, and prolonged, somatic pieces grounding the body as a site of healing – I see Keelan’s work and Nataraj’s next to it as belonging to the latter.
Arif’s ‘Marvi and the Churail’ develops a split world through two-screen video and juxtaposed colours around the ornate fabric wall covering. South Asian folkloric figures representing two female archetypes, the moral heroine Umar Marvi and the ghost-witch Churail, slip between screens, uniting through anti-patriarchal stories. Centrally positioned in the gallery, Philippa Brown’s ‘A Summoning (I would shed my skin for you)’ also operates in the installation mode that dominates Jerwood Survey III. Downlit by pink, orange and blue hues, the freestanding steel structures bear objects creating small moments of still life as you interact with it – a ladder and vase, a mug and rug, shells embedded in wool. Mine is a tactile experience of colour, texture and space, evoking a nostalgia for subcultures and communities. As a poem displayed here says, ‘Belief is a portal. Your sculpture takes me there.’
Well-balanced and representing an array of concerns and practices, Jerwood Survey III provides some models for politicised aesthetics in the digital age. The utopianism connecting themes of hope, futurity and healing works with multi-media and interdisciplinary forms to sidestep traditional Western discourses by occupying space and time differently, creating non-conventional, affective experiences that defy linearity and pragmatism.
Tom Branfoot is a poet and critic from Bradford.
Jerwood Survey III is on show at Site Gallery, Sheffield, from 27 September 2024 – 26 January 2025. Jerwood Survey III is led by Southwark Park Galleries, touring nationally in collaboration with Collective (Edinburgh), g39 (Cardiff) and Site Gallery (Sheffield), and is supported by Jerwood Arts.
This review is supported by Site Gallery.
Published 18.10.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,362 words
