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Takeover: East London Art Prize x Whitechapel Gallery Takeover
Thursday 3rd August 2023 , 6:00pm to 10:00pm
Get to know some of this year’s inaugural East London Art Prize shortlist of 12 phenomenal artists as they take over Whitechapel Gallery in an after-hours programme featuring a host of workshops, music, talks, screenings, performances, and more. Bring your friends, grab a drink, and bask in the multitude of creativity and imagination that brings together this community of east London artists.
Featuring live performances from Lulu Wang and xiaoyu1002, workshops by Alaa Alsaraji, Woo Jin Joo and Cora Sehgal Cuthbert, films by Kat Anderson and Ufuoma Essi, and talks from David Aston, Lulu Bennett and Sophie Cunningham, plus an audio installation by Damien Cifelli, and more.
Bring your friends, grab a drink, and bask in the multitude of creativity and imagination that brings together this community of east London artists. Find the full programme outlined below!
Please note: Whitechapel Gallery’s spaces have limited capacities – they recommend arriving early to avoid disappointment. Find out more on Whitechapel Gallery’s website here.
Gallery 2: Talks and performances
18:00 Talk: David Aston in conversation with Anders Sandberg on the intersection of art and AI
Join artist David Aston and researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute Anders Sandberg in conversation on the intersection of art and artificial intelligence (AI), as they speculate what the future might hold as we navigate an increasingly technological and data-driven world. They will speak to the Future of Humanity Institute’s academic research into future technologies and their Future Progress report, teasing apart how they connect with David’s AI inspired artistic practice and helped inform the genesis of his shortlisted work, Oracle.
19:00 Talk: Lulu Bennett in conversation with Eloise Hendy on navigating the art world, self-preservation, and creative interventions
Come and listen to artist Lulu Bennett in dialogue with writer and culture journalist Eloise Hendy, as they sift through the changes and transformations that Lulu’s work has taken in recent years, particularly in relation to her most recent solo show. Lulu and Eloise will speak to their shared experience of creativity and how this manifests through messages of self-preservation, and resistance in Lulu’s own practice.
20:10 Performance: xiaoyu1002 – Secret Symbiosis, Soft Submission
Secret Symbiosis, Soft Submission is an audio-visual performance and installation that whispers about unspeakable queer East Asian trauma. We are absurd subjects; shrouded in a transparent net, never seeing the light of day. All we can do is stretch out our tentacles, try to hug everyone who passes by, and make our own sound to protest and resist, softly but loudly.
When invisible sunlight projects on the transparent net, can you see the inevitable shadow, branded on the fluffy scabs? When the tentacles spread out from the alien body, the grasses grow out of whitewashed pixels, the mouldy hope crawls out of the sewer, can you hear my softest protest?
Stranger, before you run over me, could you feel that I am ready for a hug?
Credits: Sculpture and costume used in the performance are made in collaboration with Leslie Tan.
20:40 Screening & Talk: Sophie Cunningham & Dr Francesco Mazzarella on more caring and conscious approaches to fashion
Join artist Sophie Cunningham in conversation with Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Design for Social Change at London College of Fashion (UAL) Dr Francesco Mazzarella as they delve into the complexities of supply chain transparency and the disposable mindset perpetuated by fast fashion brands. Taking Sophie’s shortlisted film Papier-mâché Boots and its interrogation of the detrimental practices of fast-fashion brands, dominated by low costs, fast trends and carefully orchestrated return policies as their starting point, together they will explore our capacity to act and discuss more caring and conscious approaches to fashion and clothing.
21.45 Performance: Lulu Wang – Lulu X
Lulu X is a new performance character from Wang’s latest project Prototype. This imagined character is an anthropomorphic vessel – an entity with the power to embody the connection between human emotions and futuristic fantasies, through a deep entanglement of sound, movement and visual art.
Bringing together more traditional performance practice with new technologies, by using a newly created sensor system and sound coding, the artist will create a live soundscape of a melody created by Lulu X that articulates a story of self-seeking and discovery through movement, choreography, and music.
This is a seated performance of around 15 minutes.
Credits: Sound technician – Jared Bennett; Visual Consultant – Jahnavi Sharma; Dancer- Yanki Yau; Product Designer – Rain Paul Mueller; Animator – Yiqing Chen
Zilkha Auditorium: Films
6-10pm Screenings: Ufuoma Essi and Kat Anderson
Ufuoma Essi – From Where We Land (18 mins 52 secs)
From Where We Land examines a group of second-generation Black British women and their relationship with identity, feelings of cultural displacement, and their shared histories. Informed by contributions of the 1980s Black feminist movement in England and the legacies of first-generation children of African and Caribbean immigrants, the film incorporates archive, VHS and 16mm footage.
Kat Anderson – Bad Man Nuh Flee (42 min)
A collection of audio/visual notes on oppression, Black liberation and the white imagination. Bad Man Nuh Flee was commissioned by Transmissions TV, Chisenhale, Somerset House and Wysing Arts Centre
Video and audio credits: ‘Healing’ – Tarrus Riley; ‘Running up the Road’ – Kate Bush; ‘I Just Wanna Live’ – Keeydron Bryant; ‘Run, Nigger‘– The Last Poets; Kimberly Jones – Filmed by David Jones Media (Youtube); Newspaper clippings found at Black Cultural Archives; ‘Mad’ – Solange (Sound from fan vid on Youtube); ‘I was just jogging’ – Michael Jr. (Youtube); ‘Runnin’ (accapella) – The Pharcyde; 7 Black Americans Express Their Rage in the 1960s (Youtube); Angela Davis on Violence and Revolution (Youtube); ‘Shadowboxin’ – GZA feat. Method Man; Sounds by Leisha Thomas – Taken from ‘John’ by Kat Anderson (2019); ‘Brutal Imagination’ – Cornelius Eady ; ‘Gestures’ by Kat Anderson; FUNNIEST VIRAL VIDEO EVER! Iguana Vs. Hundreds of Snakes! LIVE Reaction (Youtube); ‘FUCKKNOWSBIGNOSE’ – Gold Teat; ‘It’s Nation Time’ – Amiri Baraka ; ‘Seize the Time’ – Elaine Brown; ‘Black Transgender Women – Influencer Panel How to Overcome Obstacles’ – Ashlee Marie Preston (speaking) (Youtube); ‘You’ – Written and performed by Kat Anderson / Sound by Leisha Thomas – Taken from ‘John’ by Kat Anderson (2019)
Gallery 3: Sound Installation
6-9pm Sound Installation: Damien Cifelli
There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You of)
We can’t help but imagine other worlds – whether through natural curiosity or a search for an alternative way of living, and by virtue of searching for an alternative, we critique the present.
Cifelli’s audio work imagines several travellers encountering the unknown land of Tarogramma. Consisting of field recordings and often contradictory testimonies, it explores how much of a place exists solely in the interpretation of the visitor.
The flags represent both physical places and ideas. We use flags as statements of allegiance to a place, but also for sports teams, religions, gender identity or political parties. If the place we are in does not work for us, we search for a new home. Flags, then, symbolise both tribalism and community and are often a foundation that, for better or worse, we form an identity around. The tent represents the new home we build in these places.
Creative studio: Workshop (drop in)
6-8pm Drop-in Workshop: Alaa Alsaraji
Lino Printing: Mapping our sanctuaries and safe havens
What does ‘sanctuary’ mean to you? Where are the places that you feel safe? Drawing upon the themes of belonging, community, and finding home that ground Alaa’s artistic practice, in this practical hands-on workshop you will pay tribute to the spaces and places where you feel seen and held.
By riffing off pre-cut lino designs and patterns or carving out your own designs using foam board, you will visually map out you own sanctuaries and safe havens, before bringing them to life in coloured ink and print.
No experience required and all materials provided.
Study Studio: Workshop (drop-in)
7-9pm Drop-in Workshop: Cora Sehgal Cuthbert
Make a Self-Love Care Pack
Multi-disciplinary artist Cora Sehgal Cuthbert invites you to join her for a cosy, intimate workshop where we will create our own personalised self-love packs to interrogate what deep love and affection mean to us personally.
Using the themes of love and loss that are intrinsic to Cora’s artistic practice as a starting point, we will decorate our self-love packs, before writing affirmations and making badges that speak to our own relationships with ideas of love, care, and finding home within ourselves.
Tea and snacks will be served during this session. No experience necessary and all materials are provided.
Reading Room: Workshop (drop-in)
7.30-9.30pm Drop-in Workshop: Woo Jin Joo
Collective Embroidery: Stitching East Asian Mythologies
Nodding to the legacies of traditional East Asian folklore, mysticism, and mythology that inform her artistic practice, join mixed-media artist Woo Jin Joo in this collective embroidery workshop, as we conjure and dream up our own mythical landscapes and ecologies.
After being guided through some simple embroidery stitches, you will use a range of fun materials to design, stitch, and create your own mythical creatures to build out a vivid, imagined world together – an entanglement of the different stories and tales that are carried and passed down to us.
No experience necessary and all materials are provided.
Foyer: DJ mixes
6-7.15pm xiaoyu1002 – If we never met, wish u all the best
In this ambient, dynamic, bittersweet journey, a guardian angel of sound leads us through life’s beginnings, love’s embrace, playful video game adventures, and the beauty of emotional fragments.
7.15-8.30pm Nexcyia – rebirth is necessary
rebirth is necessary primarily focuses on themes of rebirth and transformation, I carefully selected tracks with interesting dynamic changes and gradual build-ups to represent growth and change. Some tracks shift in key to signify a change in perspective and spatial environment and some of the musical arrangement evoke feelings of hope and healing. The organic beats, piano, ASMR sounds, and vocals aim to deepen our listening experience and to suggest moods of solitude and peace. The idea of rebirth and transformation can be portrayed with a sense of freedom and joy or it might hold melancholic undertones, I thought it was important to reflect both moods in this mix.
8.30-9.45pm Nanzhen Yang – <The Q&A for the travel>
On the moon, Tim gradually realises that the people he yearned day and night, the past life he’s longed for, and even his memories don’t really belong to him. No one knows he exists, and the planet brimming with water, air and lush greenery, is not his home. He looks to the other Tim, the one who has been implanted with the same narrative of memories, and decides to send that Tim back to earth by the only escape pod. Tim says to Tim, “Go travel, because I know how much I want to get on to the journey.” What makes humanity as humanity? If Tims not, where do the thinking and compassion from?
More about Whitechapel Gallery
Founded in 1901 to bring great art to the people of east London, the Whitechapel Gallery’s beautiful historic building is a house of adventure, full of great art and ideas from around the corner and around the world.
Driven by a century-long commitment to art education and participatory experiences of art, Whitechapel Gallery is internationally renowned for its exhibitions of modern and contemporary art and its pioneering education and public events programmes for local schools, communities, families, and young people. With free exhibitions, collection displays, film screenings, public debates, and a world-class bookshop and restaurant, Whitechapel Gallery is one of the UK’s great cultural hubs, playing a unique role in the capital’s cultural landscape and pivotal to the continued growth of east London as a leading contemporary art quarter.
More about Alaa Alsaraji
Alaa is a visual artist, and creative facilitator. Through her creative practice she aims to explore themes of belonging, reimagining space and community, predominantly using the medium of digital illustration. Alaa is also the arts editor of Khidr Collective, a multidisciplinary artist collective creating platforms and spaces for young Muslim creatives through the annual Khidr Zine and online platform. www.alsarajialaa.co.uk
More about Kat Anderson
Kat Anderson is a visual artist and musician, working under an artistic and research framework called ‘Episodes of Horror’, which uses the genre of horror to discuss representations of mental illness and trauma as experienced by or projected upon Black bodies in media and society.
Anderson was the winner of Bow Arts’ inaugural East London Art Prize (2023). Her work has been presented with Serendipity, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Transmissions TV, Block 336 and KW, Berlin. In 2019, she was awarded a Jerwood New Work Fund. In 2022, she was longlisted for Aesthetica Art Prize. Her work has also been acquired by Wellcome Collection.
More about David Aston
David Aston is a British artist who’s mixed-media practice lies at the intersection of art, anthropology and technology. Examining society through a diachronic lens, he raises questions about our collective humanity at a time of accelerated change. His multimedia works observe our transition to an age where we need to attest our humanity to machines, proclaim our rights to data, question our cultural legacy through acts of digital archaeology, and experiment with AI futurist possibilities, predictions and gamification.
More about Lulu Bennett
Lulu Bennett (b. 1995) graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2017 and Slade School of Fine Art in 2021. Her practice explores gender, history and politics through figurative paintings that draw on archival, found imagery and, increasingly, the artist’s own photography. Solo exhibitions include Alive in Actual Time, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2023), Period Drama, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin (2022) and Tears Like Northern Rain, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2020). Recent group exhibitions include Jupiter Walk, Sherbet Green, London (2023), East London Art Prize 2022, Nunnery Gallery, London (2023), Untitled Miami Beach, Art Fair, Miami, USA (2022), Northern Deviants, Unit 3 Projects, London (2022).
More about Damien Cifelli
Damien Cifelli is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist from Edinburgh, now based in London. His work explores a fictitious land named Tarogramma.
Inspired by personal histories, the creativity of the diaspora, ancestral stories and recent collective experiences, he has built a detailed culture with its own aesthetic, way of living, and understanding of the world; one that is at once alien, and eerily similar to our own.
More about Sophie Cunningham
London-based artist Sophie Cunningham (b.1992 West Midlands) creates sculptures as a critical exploration into the irrational psychology behind the expediency and disposability of Western shopping habits. Cunningham is the winner of the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors (2023) and was shortlisted for the East London Art Prize at Bow Arts (2023). She was also invited to speak as a Guest Speaker for ‘Live Conversations: Designed to Make a Difference’ at the V&A (2021). Recent exhibitions include group show Baggage Claim at Staffordshire Street Gallery (2023) and solo show Systems at the Seams at The Stone Space (2023).
More about Cora Sehgal Cuthbert
Cora Sehgal Cuthbert is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Her work explores the intersections between the personal, the cultural, and a universal spirituality/humanity. Through this, Cora aims to expand her own and the audience’s worldview, to encourage the sharing of stories, and to encourage the recognition of the beauty and love within our own everyday lives. Specific themes Cora has recently explored include ideas of home, immigration, faith, grief, desire and disability.
More about Ufuoma Essi
Ufuoma Essi Is a video artist and filmmaker from Lewisham, South East London. She works predominantly with film and moving image as well as photography and sound.
Her work revolves around Black feminist epistemology and the configuration of displaced histories. The archive forms an essential medium for her as an artist and it’s through explorations with the archive that she aims to interrogate and disrupt the silences and gaps of political and historical narratives. By using the archive as a process of unlearning and discovery she seeks to re-centre the marginalised histories of the Black Atlantic and specific histories of Black women. Drawing from a range of influences including Black popular culture, films, music, historical texts and Black feminist theory from writers such as Claudia Jones to Daphne Brooks. Essi’s work also seeks to examine the historical and contemporary links between the Black Atlantic and explores intersectional themes.
More about Eloise Hendy
Eloise Hendy is a writer and culture journalist based in London. She writes regularly for The Independent’s Culture & Lifestyle section, and has also had features published by Art Review, Dazed, Frieze, The Face, Time Out, Elephant Magazine, and Plinth, amongst others. She was shortlisted for the White Review Poet’s Prize in 2018, and her debut pamphlet ‘the blue room’ was published by Makina Books in January 2020. She is represented by Kat Aitken at United Agents.
More about Woo Jin Joo
Woo Jin is a mixed-media artist specialising in soft sculpture. Taking cues from traditional East Asian folklore, mythology and philosophy, Woo Jin explores ways of re-enchanting stories around the everyday and mundane. Mediating on the value humans endow objects in our current materialist and consumerist society, Woo Jin playfully postulates a new way of living, being and learning from objects – one that is more caring and lasting. In her work, she subverts the more traditional, gently-spoken character of soft sculpture and textile, instead using them as conduits and means of engaging in the discourse around climate justice, capitalism, and more generative ways of living.
More about Dr Francesco Mazzarella
Dr Francesco Mazzarella is a design researcher, educator, and activist, striving to plant seeds of hope and change, especially working with marginalised communities. He is Senior Lecturer in Fashion and Design for Social Change, teaching in a number of courses across London College of Fashion, UAL, especially on the MA Fashion Futures. Francesco works at Centre for Sustainable Fashion, exploring ways in which design activism can be used to create counter-narratives towards sustainability, in and through fashion. His research spans the fields of fashion sustainability, design activism, decolonising design, textile craftsmanship, social innovation, and place-making.
Francesco is currently the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Decolonising Fashion and Textiles‘ research project, on project ‘ReGo’, and the ‘Fashion Values‘ knowledge exchange project. Previously, Francesco was AHRC Design Leadership Fellow Research Associate at Imagination, Lancaster University, supporting design research for change. Francesco was awarded a PhD from Loughborough Design School, funded by the Arts and Humanities Design Star centre for doctoral training. His doctoral research project explored how service design can be used to activate textile artisan communities to transition towards a sustainable future.
More about Nexcyia
Nexcyia is an American sound artist and experimental ambient musician based between London and Paris. His compositions combine immersive sound design and swooping soundscapes with samples that bridge many moods, emotions and places through noise, granular synthesis, textures, and rhythms.
His work explores themes of otherness, alienation, and belonging by mangling and layering archival audio from home videos, bending pads, and manipulating voices with the attempt to create ever-evolving work.
Nexcyia has played in various venues/festivals across the UK and Europe such as Barbican Centre, Institute of Contemporary Art, Cafe OTO, Chisenhale Gallery, Primavera Sound, and has been featured in FACT Magazine and Wire Magazine. Nexcyia has performed with the likes of Caterina Barbieri, Kali Malone and Ulla and has released “Crawl” on Alien Jams and “Origin” on Cafe OTO’s in-house label Takuroku.
More about Anders Sanberg
Dr. Anders Sandberg is senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at the University of Oxford. His research at the FHI centers on management of low-probability high-impact risks, societal and ethical issues surrounding human enhancement, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. He is a fellow for Ethics and Values at Reuben College, Oxford.
More about Lulu Wang
Lulu Wang (she/her) is a London-based Chinese interdisciplinary artist. Through visual work and performance-making, her practice explores the body as a vessel and a shifting space that forms the shape of human identity.
By incorporating AI technology, dance and posthumanism narratives, her practice uses abstract visual language and character to translate the symbiotic connections between emotional worlds and their physical embodiment – reflecting the reality of imperfection inside humanity and its nature and fantasies of its existence in the multiverse.
More about Nanzhen Yang
Nanzhen Yang is an Interdisciplinary artist and DJ based in London. Her art practice is not limited by media, weaves together sound, videos, CGI and A/V live performances. For her sound practice, her narrative-led mixes and lives, toys between the cinematic and the emotional, also skipping past genre boundaries to create her sonic adventure. Intertwined with her fine art graduate background, she makes full use of her animism-based mind in her music journey.
Social handle : IG @Nanzhen_____yang
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/nanzhen-yang
More about Xinyao Yu / xiaoyu1002
Xinyao Yu, also known as xiaoyu1002, is a Chinese artist who self-identifies as Wu Gui to grapple with issues around queerness and East Asian identity. They create whimsical and tender bubbles to counter daily, overwhelming absurdities around gender, identity, alienation and contemporary culture, whilst sending moist hugs.
Access information
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this event or would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of attending, please email us on nunnery@bowarts.com
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a table near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
About the East London Art Prize Events programme
The East London Art Prize events programme is a dynamic, free public programme open to all, which builds on the Prize’s ethos of providing ongoing support, development, and networking opportunities for artists in east London and beyond.
Featuring a constellation of workshops, talks, panels, lates, socials, labs, walks, and takeovers in collaboration with our Prize partners and featuring some familiar faces from our inaugural shortlist of 12 fantastic artists, this year’s events programme celebrates and pays homage to the huge abundance of talent and creativity nestled in east London.
These events have been developed in collaboration with our Prize partners the British Council, The Line, London College of Fashion (LCF), London Legacy Development Corporation, University College London (UCL), V&A East, Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Dulux.
Find out more about the wider events programme here.
More about the East London Art Prize
The East London Art Prize is an all-media art prize designed to showcase the talent of artists working and living in east London, with an accompanying event programme supporting artists’ careers and opportunities. The Prize is generously funded by Minerva and Prue MacLeod. Find out more on the Prize webpage here.
