Gustavo S Ferro

Get to know SqW:Lab 2018 fellows – today we speak to artist, Gustavo S Ferro.

Where can you be found?

instagram: @gustavosferro @piquetesanonimos
email: piquetesanonimos@gmail.com
website: gustavoferro.org

Wee Sculpture, Gustavo S Ferro, 2018

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

I started to make some experiment with cardboard, trying to transport some drawings I am doing in notebooks to something more physical. Things are constructed and them disrupted in a process of creation and destruction and reconstruction. I use my living room as a studio. Things start to occupy more space. I don’t know where it will take me. I keep making.

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

A place of memory. Home is a place where I can see the horizon. Where I can swim and dive, be naked and in silence. Glaswegians always ask ‘where are you staying” instead of “where do you live”. We are always staying somewhere. Passing by. Everything is a moment. Home is not a place, is a state of mind.

What was the last thing you drew?

I finished a notebook few days ago. I worked on it during 2 weeks, filling the pages everyday. I see it as a catharses. All thoughts composed together in a sequence. Unpredictable shapes. Intimate writings. A form of prediction, or self understanding. Constructions and deconstructions. Superpositions. Accumulation. Fragmentation. Composition. There is another way of making drawings. It happens through the movement of our bodies in the space – in the city… but it is another moment.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

I met Phyllida Barlow’s work few year ago and it had a big impact on me. In 2016 I went to Wakefield to see her installation at the first edition of Hepworth Prize for Sculpture; and more recently I have been to Venice Biennale and again experienced her installation at the British Pavilion. Both times I got ecstatic facing her work, the way it occupy the space and makes our body experience it in a different way. She creates sort of utopian playgrounds, that can be oppressive and cozy at the same time. I love the way her work explores materiality, landscape, memory, body and architecture. In a different way Helio Oticica’s practice evokes a mix of feelings and thoughts about the physical experience, leisure, participation, chance, relationship, art itself, education, process and the city.

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the SqW:Lab fellowship, of being in Mumbai and the project in total.

I am excited with the opportunity of join this fellowship and be able to immerse in a process of learning and exchanges with others artists and creators. I believe that this kind of experience opens a range of possibilities for collaborations, understandings and practices. I am very curious about meeting Indian culture and I’m looking forwards to navigate through the streets of Mumbai.

 

 

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Tash Kahn

Get to know SqW:Lab 2018 fellows – today we speak to artist, Tash Kahn.

Where can you be found?

Anywhere surrounded by friends.

Gum and ringpulls, Tash Kahn, 2018

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

I take photographs every day. Some are used; all are kept.

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

Home to me is the Janis Joplin song ‘Me and Bobby Magee’. Whenever I hear that song I am home.

What was the last thing you drew?

I wanted to say my curtains! Seriously though, the last thing I drew was a chair in Portugal a few weeks ago. It was the first thing I have drawn for a while.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

My son and any walk I take.

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the SqW:Lab fellowship, of being in Mumbai and the project in total.

I hope this experience will enable new collaborations, both with people I know and people I don’t. My practice is becoming increasingly collaborative and I am excited by the play projects. It will enable me to view my practice from a new perspective. I am looking forward to all the new conversations – each new conversation holds potential for me and I hope my time in Mumbai will spawn many future strands of my practice.

 

 

Sutapa Biswas

Get to know SqW:Lab 2018 fellows – today we speak to artist, Sutapa Biswas.

Where can you be found?

I’m based in London, UK.

When Night Comes, Sutapa Biswas

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

I visited the Dorothea Lange exhibition ‘Politics of Seeing’ at the Barbican, London. I’ve long admired her work since I came across it an an undergraduate student in Fine Art and Art History, and this show seems incredibly relevant to our times. It was beautifully curated. Seeing Lange’s work so thoughtfully contextualised alongside the archival material from Lange’s various collaborations – for example with the author John Steinbeck, author of ‘Grapes of Wrath’ – lent nuance which made this a phenomenal exhibition.

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

‘Home’ means so many different things for me. London, UK, is my geographic home. It’s the complex city in which I was nurtured from the age of about 5 to 18 when I then went to Leeds (UK), to study before finally returning back to London where I currently live again. Of course, in between I’ve spent extended periods of time living in other places, and when I return to those places, sometimes that also feels like ‘home’. But like all my four siblings, I was born in Santinekethan, India, where my father had taught at one of the universities and was based at the time. In my mind’s eye, it’s the first place I encountered trees, forests, and the love of my family – in particular my grandmother on my father’s side. So this too means ‘home’. Leaving India was not a choice for me or for my family at a complicated time in India’s post-independent history. Home in an ideal sense is perhaps a place that one imagines you can be at peace with oneself. For so many people there is a restlessness consequence of the violence of recent global histories. As such it seems that there is always a searching for home.

What was the last thing you drew?

The last thing I drew was an image of one of the photographs by Dorothea Lange, which I encountered at her exhibition that I mentioned earlier I had visited in London this week. The portrait is an historic record of a mother who is a refugee from the American dust bowl. The title of the work is ‘Drought Refugees from Oklahoma Camping by The Roadside (august 1936). Visitors to Lange’s exhibition were not permitted to take photographs, and I was so moved by what I saw, I felt compelled to stop and make a sketch of this work. Lange’s photographic image portrays a young woman in dishevelled clothing feeding her young infant. Both she and her child look directly back at the viewer, but it’s the mother’s gaze back at the camera that is so haunting. As if she is looking straight at the government who had commissioned Lange’s reportage. The look of desperation in her face stopped me in my tracks and brought me to tears.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

This is a really good question, which I like because you have to think very hard about what it is that moves you through life as if it’s an invisible but hugely present force. It’s difficult to choose just two subtle influences. But if I really think hard, its perhaps my becoming a mother and through this re-learning what it is that connects me to the world. The second subtle influence is perhaps sound. And if I can list a third subtle influence, it would perhaps be light. All three things are embodied in the art and film that most ‘sits’ in my body.

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the SqW:Lab fellowship, of being in Mumbai and the project in total.

I’m very honoured to be invited to participate in this SqW:Lab fellowship. I haven’t been to Mumbai for a number of years. Consequently, I am looking forward to being back in India and having time to reflect on some research that I have been doing for a while relating to the Dutch East India Company. Moreover, I am delighted to spend time in a geographic location that was the last place my family and I had departed from India in the 1960s. I am looking forward to making new art works on site in relation to this research and subject (I hope). I also look forward to an exciting dialogue and exchange with my fellow participants and of course with our hosts.

 

 

Rosanna Van Mierlo

Get to know SqW:Lab 2018 fellows – today we speak to art writer, Rosanna Van Mierlo.

Where can you be found?

In transit with a book. Usually a 50/50 state of lost & curious

ICA floor, photograph, Rosanna Van Mierlo, 2018

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

I have had multiple fantastic conversations with creative practitioners about the future of art writing, fiction and poetry

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

Lit up window panes & the smell of smoke

What was the last thing you drew?

A venn diagram, i am sorry to say.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

Drag & Derridian theory

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the SqW:Lab fellowship, of being in Mumbai and the project in total.

Creating the creative connections and maintaining / improving existing ones, exploring possible collaborations for new project space in Denver

 

 

John Ros

Get to know SqW:Lab 2018 fellows – today we speak to artist / curator, John Ros.

Where can you be found?

new york, new york, us

harrisonburg, virginia, us

Citizen, John Ros, 2018

Tell us about a creative action you have taken this week.

(curated) and installing “the 613” by archie rand at duke hall gallery of fine art (james madison university). also installed a solo project at driveby gallery in new market, va.

What does ‘home’ mean to you? 

coffee in bed with my husband

What was the last thing you drew?

layouts and ideas for upcoming 2-person exhibit in oct.

Tell us about 2 of your most subtle influences.

air density. found buzzing or humming sounds from things near me.

Please share your thoughts / a few words about your expectations of the SqW:Lab fellowship, of being in Mumbai and the project in total.

time to share. time to be exposed. time to make a mess. time to figure shit out. together. alone. then together again.

space to share. space to be exposed. space to make a mess. space to figure shit out. together. alone. then together again.

to make alot. to make nothing. to draw. to erase. to remember. to forget. to be.