About The Exhibition:
The finale at Kosar Contemporary’s current industrial location in 2020 will bring together the diverse art practices of TAPS core-members, their artistic resilience and ingenuity in the face of a pandemic.
Their fourth collaborative show touches upon the fluidity that is required to stay cohesive. The walls of Kosar Contemporary are about to come down. This current dystopian uncertainty and transience translating to a flat-packed TAPS: Assemble, un-assemble, reassemble; agile, sharp, undulating and reflective. Expect the unexpected.
Curatorial & Technical Support:TAPS
24 participating artists include;
Lisa Scantlebury, Shawn Sobers, Zarabéa Esfendiar Kayani, Robert Luzar, Huma Mulji, Sarah Rhys, Andrew Neil Hayes, Yuko Edwards, Matthew Roy Arnold, Brendan James Arnold , Andrew Brooks, Michelle Forrest-Beckett, John Steed, Anna Haydock-Wilson, Caroline Bugby, James Norman, Beth Luxton, Molly Harcombe, Bryn Fray, Ben Hartley, Annie Lilygreen, Shaun Harrigan, Suzie Walters, Rose Shuckburgh
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Ben Hartley
Ben Hartley is an eco-anxious artist based in Bristol. Concerned with the environmental impact of the art world and it’s obsession with material perfection. Believing perfection to be a wholly unsustainable concept, Ben believes the rejection of it constitutes a radical act. Ben’s practice attempts to produce a sustainable approach to art making, using waste materials from the ever-expanding mass of indigestible rubbish from our capitalist society scavenged from the actual and virtual explorations of pre-apocalyptic urban space. These disparate materials are moulded by Ben into sculptural collages, two-dimensional and digital explorations, resisting the temptation of permanence, using inherently ephemeral and reversible methods of construction such as fastening, tying and folding.
Ben graduated with a degree in Art & Visual Culture from the University of the West of England in 2019. He is currently a studio holder and associate member at The Artist Project Space.
Zarabéa Esfendiar Kayani
To process the stresses of the pandemic, Kayani has been occupying herself with growing plants since March 2020, which has led to an intuitive exploration of nurturing Vs domestication of plants root systems into tangible sculptural forms and paintings using natural earth pigments. Growing paintings and sculptures with living organisms. These groundbreaking innovative works can be seen in TAPS /now exhibition.
Zarabéa is a prolific maker who is excited by technology and new mediums. Her elemental artworks unfold between the medium of photography, moving images, printmaking, sculpture, painting and installations. She considers herself a witness of her time and thus her works reflect this intention; ephemeral and experiential, an exploration, documentation or a comment in the context of socio-political, philosophical and cultural aspects of identities, architecture, histories, memory and time.
Zarabéa has had solo exhibitions in NYC, USA and Bath, UK,(2012, 2014) Group shows at SCOPE Art Miami (2014), Castle Fine Art Galleries Mayfair, London (2014); Victoria Gallery, Bath (2014, 2015), Exeter with the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts (2015), Mall Galleries, London (2015), Royal West Of England Academy (2016), Kayani’s work on Lampedusa resides in the Museo del Mare, Lampedusa, Italy (acquired February 2016), MA degree show, Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Tate Exchange, Tate Modern (2017), Kopfkino, Bristol (2018), RWA 166th Annual Exhibition (2018), Passion For Freedom, La Galeria, London (2018), Seities, Bristol (2018), Visions Of Science, The Edge Art, Bath (2018), REIMAGINED spaces, Kosar Contemporary, Bristol (2018). She is a studio holder at Spike Island 91 b.
In leadership roles, Kayani has contributed to the visual art sector in Bristol since 2017. She is the founder and Director of Kosar Contemporary (2018-2020) and Programme Director for The Artist Project Space (2017-2020)
Instagram: @bea_kayani
Huma Mulji
Huma Mulji works with sculptural installation, photography, collage and drawing. The city, the everyday and the overlooked, all serve as subjects in her deliberately awkward artworks. Mining out the dysfunctional, the futile, the funny, the sorrowful and the resilient, the works stand as unwieldy, inconvenient witnesses to time and place.
She completed her BFA in Sculpture, from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi (1995), and an MFA in New Media Practices, from Transart Institute, Berlin, (2010).
Mulji’s participation in recent exhibitions includes In the Open and in Stealth MACBA, Barcelona (2018), We look at Animals Because, Critical Distance Center for Curators, Toronto, Canada (2018), Witness, Karachi Biennale 2017, welcome to what we took from is the state, Queens Museum, New York, USA (2017), A country of Last Things, Koel Gallery, Karachi, (2016), The Great Game, Irani Pavilion, Venice Biennale, (2015) Burning Down the House, 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, (2014). She was a recipient of the Abraaj Group Art Prize 2013, and the Nigaah Award for photography in 2017
Molly Harcombe
Molly Harcombe is a Welsh artist based in Bristol. Her work looks at meanings and tensions within architectural and industrial objects using sculpture, narrative and installation. 'Lost' or otherwise displaced objects are collected, and a kind of slippage of meaning is cultivated by making copies of them.
The study of how buildings affect our feelings and behaviours is a niche subset of environmental psychology, best described as architectural psychology. Through a process of mouldmaking and casting, Molly re-makes objects, allowing for their psycho-architectural features to surface. The work is assembled in a way that imitates the emotional connotations of the original structure, sometimes alongside its real-world twin, ready for comparison. The structure’s original role is recognisable, but restaged, cast in a new material providing new associations. Alongside her physical works, Molly writes short pieces of fiction but chooses to keep them secret.
Molly graduated with an MA in Fine Art from UWE Bristol in 2020. She is an associate member and studio holder at The Artist Project Space, and a member of Flooring Collective.
Michelle Forrest-Beckett
As a process-led artist my work generates potentially unbounded sequences and iterations. Actively thinking with complexity in mind, I encourage encounters between diagrammatic drawings, film and acts of modelling and remodelling.
In the spirit of contradiction, creative play challenges predetermined outcomes, thus, I form conceptual/visual propositions not to solve problems, but to frame them, intensify them and draw attention to them as things in themselves. In short, I curate and present decentred, constellations of signs and utterances, which actively converse but remain inconclusive.
To fund my practice and research, for the last two decades I have worked within the data industry,and there is no doubt that thinking with data has impacted upon and fed my thinking. Currently I am a Data Fellow sponsored by the South West Creative Technology Network (SWCTN). Working with a cohort of fellows, with a range of skills and interests from creative, academic and industry backgrounds, I am approaching this fellowship as an artistic researcher, to explore the human-data realm as a supranatural force of life in the world. Methodologies I am exploring, include; how to get inside the machine to encounter what lies behind human-data (dis)connections, ways to summon supranatural data, listening for a new form of human-data voice, and what form(s) of (mis)communication may evolve.
Website: http://www.mmforrestbeckett.com/
Instagram handle: mmforrestbeckett
Bryn Fray
Bryn Fray is a small human currently living and working in Bristol, UK.
A graduate of Fine Art from the University of the West of England, Bryn has been a TAPS member and studio holder since February 2020.
Bryn’s work prods and pokes ideas of failure and mortality; habitually painting, dealing with (and attempting to manageable) the upheaval of personal loss. Musings on himself as a grieving artist acts as the catalyst of his creative process. Through humour, Bryn’s paintings concern double meaning and contradiction. Laughing at his own self-pity, with text based works that hold obscure, and unrelated titles. This incongruous approach allows the viewer an opportunity for a double-take; aiming to create a relaxed and open space for reflection upon heavy, or more personal themes.
Beth Luxton
Beth is a painter, printmaker and animator who lives and works in Bristol, UK.
Materials, primarily domestic and associated with touch, are the starting point for Beth’s paintings. Those that are ephemeral in nature, home to memories, feelings and intimacies; at once everything and nothing. She is influenced by digital and photographic processes; combining and collaging fragmented imagery, distorted perspectives and speeds of production. The surface of each painting is important, where Beth aims to highlight nuances in texture, transparency and finish. However, reminiscent of a digital screen, the paintings deny the viewer any contact or true sense of reality. This alienation is further enhanced by the animations, and brings into question the need for proximity and the comfort of distance.
Beth graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Leeds in 2015, has been practising as an artist since 2018 and is an associate member and studio holder at the Artist Project Space.
Curatorial & Technical Support: TAPS
360 documentation: Magnetic North Design Studio
Web support: Cedric Bousquet
Photos courtesy of Kosar Contemporary
Documentation courtesy of Ben Hartley and Zarabéa Kayani
@The Artist Project Space #theartistprojectspace
(twitter) @tapsinitiative
@Kosar Contemporary #kosarcontemporary
(twitter) @kosarcontemp1
