What are artists thinking and doing? We hope you enjoy the ninth in our series of ‘Reflections from Home’.
‘It’s now July, and the spare bedroom has been my ‘studio’ since March. Though really my studio is my laptop, my phone and my body. My practice is very rooted in performance, participation and situated events. Many projects have been postponed. I feel like the air has been let out of some of this ongoing work. At some point I’m going to have to re-inflate them. Though it’s hard to imagine the future. This time has allowed me to revisit and edit footage I took of a project in Toronto, Canada in 2018 for a festival called Nuit Blanche. The 12-hour event brought to life histories of Toronto’s queer night time. We transformed an underground car park into a nightclub and 17,000 people came along for a mix of talks, performances and DJ sets. A world of no distancing.
Our suburban garden has its own grotto – a fabricated remnant from a previous work. I occasionally find myself posing in it. A strand of my practice has been concerned with the politics of posing and visibility of the black body, so it’s become a place to play, read and think.
The murder of George Floyd and the resulting looped spectacle of his death has haunted and transformed my experience of the lockdown. In my bubble, I felt connected and energised by the call for change and the challenge to the historical abominations of slave trader statues still polluting our public space. While I’m glad this tragedy has been a catalyst for raising consciousness, I am mindful of the suffragette’s mantra, ‘deeds not words’. I’ve been most heartened by the sharing of resources and reading. My own current reading list is an eclectic mix, including the new book by the amazing Lola Olufemi, the black feminist writer and Cambridge University graduate and activist for decolonising curriculums.’ – Harold Offeh, July 2020
Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard, writes: ‘we are asking artists we have worked with to offer their reflections from home, at a time when millions around the world are homebound.
Jim Ede, its creator, described Kettle’s Yard as “a space, an ambience, a home”. For Ede, the home was a social place in which art and life might become inseparable. As the artist Anthea Hamilton has observed, the Kettle’s Yard House can also be understood as ‘a state of mind’. Of course, for many the concept of ‘home’ is also deeply personal, and often economic and political too, as our recent exhibition ‘Homelands: Art from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan’, explored. For Jim Ede, who never forgot his time in the trenches in WW1, Kettle’s Yard was a welcoming sanctuary, a place of renewal and insight which could sharpen how we engage and act in the world’.
More about Harold Offeh
The exhibition Actions. The image of the world can be different marked the opening of the new Kettle’s Yard in February 2018. Harold Offeh was one of the thirty-eight artists.
Harold Offeh was also one of the artists in the 2019 exhibition The Cambridge Show. The exhibition showcased the work of 22 Cambridgeshire based artists, selected by a panel from an open call of 460 artists.
We also welcomed Harold Offeh to be the Open House Artist in Residence for 2017, where he worked with the local community in North Cambridge.
Reflections from Home No. 7: Jennifer Lee, Peckham, London
Reflections from Home No. 8: Seher Shah, New Delhi, India
