Gallery 31: Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise

Featuring video, sculpture, sound and printed works from Josiane M.H. Pozi, Majed Aslam, Ilona Sagar, and Col Self in collaboration with Farvash and vvxxii (Sp0re), the show borrows its title from the ‘records continuum model’ - a conceptual model used to understand and explore recordkeeping activities.

Curated by Stella Sideli, Create, Capture, Organise, Pluralise takes influence from the theory's non-linear and holistic approach to the idea of the archive - one that understands the archive as a process, rather than a static collection of things - to reflect on the body as a similar type of site: one where collective memories and stories are preserved, passed on, reinterpreted, and adapted.

In considering this discursive, imaginative terrain where the body simultaneously holds the past and present, the works in the exhibition articulate different bodily narratives. Josiane M.H. Pozi’s newly commissioned film Marlonsworld documents the mundane and profound daily existence of living bodies in an intimate portrait piece set against the backdrop of the current global pandemic.

Col Self works with collaborators Farvash & vvxxii (Sp0re) to embody the notion of temporality in the sculptural work Threshold Objects (dreaming of alterity from the inside of capitalist cultural form), speaking to ritual and speculative practices.

Majed Aslam’s pharma-chemically modified photo works evoke a state of semi-completion, blurring the line between wellbeing and addiction - an ambiguity echoed in Ilona Sagar’s Soft Addictions series; a print and sound piece reflecting on the relation between technology and the body, abstracting the alternating lines between function and dysfunction as a bodily state.

Gallery 31 is an exhibition space generously supported by The Rothschild Foundation and dedicated to platforming work by Somerset House Studios’ resident artists, and work developed through residency programmes.

Marlonsworld by Josiane M.H. Pozi is commissioned by Somerset House with the support of the Adonveya Foundation.
Photography by Tim Bowditch.