This Is London 4 September 2020

EXHIBITIONS TO WATCH AT
DANIELLE ARNAUD GALLERY
The Danielle Arnaud gallery was
founded in 1995 with an aim to encourage
artists to develop their practice without the
constraints of market or trends. Danielle
regularly programmes curated exhibitions,
solo shows and projects, both within the
gallery and the public realm.
Later this month the gallery will
present Holly Davey’s first solo exhibition,
the artist will create an environment out of
unusable props, half-made costumes and
semi-constructed sets, that will sit
alongside a central script: ‘A Script for an
Archive’. Together, these components will
explore society’s fascination with
archiving human existence and the way
we perform our stories.
The exhibition emerges out of Davey’s
work and research during her fellowship
at the British School of Rome in 2019,
where, inspired by a member of
Cinecitta Studio staff saying to her that
‘It all begins with a page, without the
script there is nothing’, she made a
series of model sets and dysfunctional
props, and wrote a script.
A central theme throughout the
exhibition is the lone female figure, the
outline of an absence. This motif derives
from the photographic collection of the
work of Agnes and Dora Bulwer, two
unmarried sisters, who lived in Rome in
the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Together they went on field trips,
photographing ruins, the landscape and
local people. In the photographic trace
left, a lone woman is often pictured in
the landscape; she is presumed to be
one of the sisters. Agnes and Dora
Bulwer’s lives are now almost invisible,
yet this lone woman comes to signify
their forgotten story. All that is left is an
outline, a silhouette, a cut out of a life.
Inspired by and using archival
photographs from the Bulwer collection
at the British School of Rome, alongside
research visits to the city’s Cinecitta, to
explore the studio of Oscar winning set
designer, Dante Ferretti, ‘A Script for an
Archive’ was written. It investigates the
Holly Davey, Scene no. 7. A Script for an Archive.
connections between the constructed
reality of a film set; how we create a sense
of belonging and what remains of our
lives. During the exhibition, the audience
will be able to wander through the stageruins
experiencing the imagined remnants
of these women’s lives, our lives. On the
last day of the exhibition, A Script for an
Archive will be inhabited and performed
by two actors.
In November, Danielle Arnaud will
present Katharine Fry’s first solo show at
the gallery, ‘Please call me home’, where
the artist transforms the intimate space
into a series of unsettling encounters
with uncanny screen bodies. Each video
will reveal the same female figure
contained by an interior space and by
the video frame, staging a separation
between her and another surface.
Underpinning ‘Please call me home’, is a
condition Fry calls house arrest, the
figure’s desire for a lost home, for a
return to a fantasy state of wholeness,
and the impossibility of this return.
Holly Davey: ‘A Script for an Archive’
will run from 25 Sept to 24 Oct and
Katherine Fry: ‘Please call me home’ will
run from 6 November to 5 December.
www.daniellearnaud.com
OCTOBER GALLERY PRESENTS
FOCUS ON TIAN WEI
October Gallery is to exhibit a
selection of artworks by Tian Wei, an
artist renowned for his striking
monochromatic canvases in bold
colours that explore the written word and
the plasticity of meaning. The exhibition
will run from 3 – 26 September.
Both theoretically and formally, Tian
Wei’s work constructs a bridge between
things that appear as polar opposites or
complementary pairs. Using the Chinese
idea of contraries held in balance (yin
and yang), words and quotations in
minute script fill the backdrop of Tian’s
paintings, forming a patterned ground
on which larger semi-abstract shapes
are drawn. On trying to read these
foregrounded lines as Chinese
characters, however, anyone familiar
with Chinese ideographic script is soon
frustrated, since the unfamiliar writing
can only be resolved in English. In fact,
the cursive lines spell out simple
English words, such as ‘sexy,’ ‘soul’ and
‘red.’ These selected English adjectives
and nouns represented in Chinese
calligraphic style give the viewer insight
into the artist’s lived experience of an
emerging synergy between eastern and
western sensibilities.
www.octobergallery.co.uk
Tian Wei, Zen, 2009. Acrylic on canvas.
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