Exhibitions: Elsewhere(s) @ Positive Lights
Elsewhere(s) is the title for a series of exhibitions and site-specific installations in Exeter, curated by students on the MA Curation course at Exeter University. Pippa Marriot writes on her spent time at Positive Lights on Sidwell Street and was delighted to find such varied and provocative work.
It was a treat to have such international and assured work on our doorstep. Two areas of the exhibition particularly caught my imagination.
Delicious Poison – works by Pei-Ying Lin and Gyokee, which propose that we are eating the world that we have polluted. Gyokee’s carefully composed photographs employ the palette of a futuristic Vogue shoot and show tiny electronic components and wires poking in amongst bowls of crab and seafood, or studding the banana or ice lolly a young woman is opening her mouth to eat. A silver-clad woman bends to use a juicer extracting a “bitter and metaphorical black liquid” out of a grapefruit-sized globe – juicing the earth.
In the room alongside hang huge panels with tiny writing in columns that list with alphabetical precision every virus we have discovered (so far!). Pei-Ying Lin unsettles us further with pages from a cook book with recipes like ‘Influenza Balut’ – a flu-infused boiled egg: ‘The dish shall taste juicy and slightly gamey, with a follow up of feverish symptoms.’ We look down to watch a hosted zoom call and live encounter with participants exploring ‘Virus Cuisine’, eating their way through death-related goodies each beautifully presented in a style somewhere between Heston Blumenthal and a forensic laboratory. (Curators – Kelan Dong and Hua Pang.)
All of this is clinical, futuristic disturbance is in stark contrast with Herself and Surrounding. Urmi Roy’s touching and emotional work brings earth tones and red threads to images of Bengali women. We see domestic scenes of cooking at a stove, children playing, animals and boats and a timeless lifestyle where outside and inside are indistinct. A whole life unfolds in memories painted onto a long, hung canvas which continues across the floor, like a winding sheet. Elsewhere, women are connected by a spool of red thread to each other and to the past, or – in a wonderful portrait entitled The Kitchen of my Elder Sister-in-Law/Boro Boudir Hensel - the rich orange-reds and blues create the smells and movements of cooking – an everyday act of survival and nurturing that threads through the lives and generations that Roy depicts so movingly. (Curators – Meng Hao, Yifan Wu, Jiarong Zhou.)
