Frieze Week: Shaftesbury Avenue Takeover
Tuesday 8th October 2024 – Sunday 13th October 2024 , 12:00am to 11:59pm
Launching our first ever central London project space, Bow Arts is taking over 125 Shaftesbury Avenue for London’s Frieze Week with an action-packed programme including site specific exhibitions and immersive performances. We invite you to join us as east goes west, transforming a vast ex-office space into Frieze’s hottest new art venue.
Programming for the takeover will include evenings of immersive performances, led by boundary-pushing performance artist Rosie Gibbens; mechanised sculptural works taking over Shaftesbury’s ex-office space, featuring Gibbens and Tim Spooner; and the site-responsive exhibition Take A Seat, featuring over 40 artist made chairs that mischievously merge the aesthetics of form and functionality, inviting audiences to both play and sit down. Bow’s 2023 East London Art Prize winner Kat Anderson will also be showing her newly commissioned and celebrated film Las, Fiya (Last, Fire), together with new paperworks made from the byproducts of sugarcane.
In an exhibition focused around the “absurd”, mechanised sculptural works from Gibbens’ Parabiosis series and Spooner’s A New Kind of Animal will weave themselves into the office detritus left behind in the Shaftesbury building. Parabiosis unpacks the pregnant body with sculptures that combine ‘puppets’ and machinery. The title refers to the surgical technique of joining two living organisms together to share a physiological system. Inspired by this process and theories about artificial robotic wombs, Gibbens creates various ‘birthing’ contraptions. Made during the third trimester of her pregnancy, these works also document a time of mixed emotions and extreme body changes. Spooner’s animal forms will be tangled and tethered by electrical cables, trapped under bits of remaining furniture, vibrating on empty lockers, and showing off in conference rooms. Originally made for Southwark Park and Bluecoat’s gallery spaces, this new iteration of A New Kind of Animal will be reborn to relate and inhabit the office spaces at Shaftesbury, alongside Gibbens’ ‘birthing’ contraptions which can become activated in performance.
Take A Seat is a collaboration between Bow Arts and curatorial duo ha.lf, (Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell). Several of the participating artists have created their site-specific chairs at Shaftesbury as part of a residency, responding to the building by both assimilating and rejecting the desolate office environment. Each day the artists’ chairs will be set out in a grid formation with visitors invited to reconfigure the show by pulling up a chair and taking a seat. The show was born from ha.lf’s yearning for somewhere to rest while looking at art; audiences will be invited to play, interact with and sit on these curious yet functional objects – exactly what gallery visitors are usually forbidden to do.
Bow’s 2023 East London Art Prize winner Kat Anderson will also be showing her newly commissioned and celebrated film Las, Fiya (Last, Fire), a fictional short film which uses the genre of Horror to explore the subjects of ancestral trauma, dispossession and the power in the return/retrieval. Exploring the impact of sugar on the African-Caribbean Diaspora, the film confronts the haunting legacies of the Industrial Revolution and the Transatlantic Slave trade and will be shown alongside new paperworks by Anderson, made from the byproducts of sugarcane.
A New Kind of Animal was originally co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London, and Bluecoat, Liverpool.
More about Rosie Gibbens
Rosie Gibbens (b.1993, London) makes performances, videos, sculptures and photographs that feature her body. Using absurd humour, she explores the slippery overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire. She often makes sculptures that combine household gadgets with sewn body parts. These are brought to life through low-tech chain reactions in the performances/ films. Rosie playfully blends bodies with objects to unpack and question the prospective future body as it becomes increasingly ‘optimised’ by technological augmentation. The mindset behind her work is of a nonsensical product demonstration combined with a perverse children’s TV show.
Rosie studied ‘Contemporary Art Practice’ at the Royal College of Art (2018) and ‘Performance Design and Practice’ at Central Saint Martins (2015). Solo shows include: ‘Parabiosis’ at the Bomb Factory (2024), ‘The New Me’ at Shoreditch Arts Club with Daata (2023), ‘Skin of my teeth’ at Midlands Arts Centre for Fierce Festival (2022) and ‘Soft Girls’ at the Zabludowicz Collection (2021). Recent group show highlights include: ‘Body Poetics’ alongside Helen Chadwick at Giant (2023), ‘Eye Body’ at TJ Boulting (2023), ‘The Amber Room’ at Matt’s Gallery (2023) and ‘Are you working now’ at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. In 2022 Rosie won the Ingram prize and was awarded a Sarabande residency. In 2023 she was chosen as one of nine ‘best young artists working in London’ by Eddy Frankel from Time Out.
More about Tim Spooner
Tim Spooner works in a mix of performance, drawing and sculpture, aiming for new strong flavours which are strange and alluring. Fundamentally interested in unpredictability, his work is an exercise in balancing control with a lack of it in the handling of the materials and processes he is working with.
His work has been presented extensively in theatres and galleries in the UK, Europe and Asia including Battersea Arts Centre (London), b-side festival (Isle of Portland), Cambridge Junction, Mayfest (Bristol), MAC Belfast and DCA Dundee (for Hayward Touring), Barbican Art Gallery (London), Whitstable Biennale, Alfred ve Dvoře (Prague, Czechia), Terni Festival (Italy), TJP Strasbourg (France), Actoral Festival (Marseille, France), Internationales Figurentheater Festival (Erlangen, Germany), STUK (Leuven, Belgium), Teatro Maria Matos (Lisbon, Portugal), Culture Station Seoul (South Korea), Pesta Boneka Festival (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and Macau Arts Festival (China). Many of his performance works are produced by Artsadmin.
Over the last few years he’s focussed on making several large-scale installations of moving sculpture. Most recently, A New Kind of Animal, a retrospective exhibition of painting, drawing, sculpture and objects used in performances, which was shown and co-commissioned by Southwark Park Galleries, London and Bluecoat, Liverpool. He lives and works in Cornwall, UK.
More about ha.lf
ha.lf was born out of an artistic convergence between artists Haydn Albrow and Flora Bradwell during their time on the Slade MFA. The pair found delicious crossovers in their bombastic, irreverent works, which have grown both in ambition and scale since their graduation in 2021. This nascent creative partnership has continued to flourish in their shared studio at Bow Arts: each artist’s work calls to the other’s across the studio floor. After curating shows in partnership with Staffordshire St, Somers Gallery and The Crypt, the duo now join forces with Bow Arts to bring you Take A Seat.
Access Information
Shaftesbury Avenue has step free access throughout from street level, including to an accessible toilet. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email shaftesbury@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
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 seat near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Nearest train station(s): Picadilly Circus (Picadilly, Bakerloo), Tottenham Court Road (Elizabeth Line, Central, Northern)
Bus: 9, 12, 14, 22, 23, 24, 29, 19, 38, 88, 94, 139, 176, 453
Parking: No parking available.
Bike: No bike shed on site.
