Recursions: when it feels like home
10 February 2024, 12pm – 4.30pm
Join us for a special day of performances at Kettle’s Yard, to celebrate our current exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends. During the afternoon, experience performances by Noel Ed De Leon, Annie Jael Kwan and Nicholas Tee as you explore the exhibition and the spaces at Kettle’s Yard.
12–12.30pm – Noel Ed De Leon, ‘To Set Foot on this Land’
12.45–1.15pm – Annie Jael Kwan, ‘Let It Be a Tale’
1.30–4.30pm – Nicholas Tee, ‘Communing with Li’
Noel Ed De Leon, ‘To Set Foot on this Land’
Noel Ed De Leon is a British-Filipino transdisciplinary artist and environmentalist, whose creative pursuits extend into the realm of historical exploration and artistic expression. Notably, he possesses a profound passion for collecting World War I and WWII memorabilia, reflecting his deep appreciation for the historical narratives embedded within these artefacts. De Leon’s work encompasses archiving as an artistic practice, vernacular architecture, conceptual art, installation, sound art, video, site-specific, and multimedia sculptures. Through his work, he delves into themes of remembrance, DNA, history, ancestry, and memory, navigating the intricate intersections of historical conflicts, migrations, ecology, cosmology, and exchanges by tracing their imprints on surviving artefacts. He is also the Founder of Transnational Movement and Co-director of Batubalani Art Projects with Eva Bentcheva, a non-profit organisation working to promote Philippine art across museums and universities in Europe.
Noel Ed De Leon’s To Set Foot on this Land is a performative engagement with the challenges of displacement experienced by different groups historically and in the present – where intergenerational trauma accentuates a sense of precarity, nomadism as strategic survival, and the ongoing desire to seek sanctuary. Activating objects from his World War (as military agendas have historically inflicted mass enforced migrations) and personal archives, De Leon explores the perimeters and interiorities at Kettle’s Yard.
With handfuls of soil from his hometown of Bautista in Pangasinan, where stands Casa Hacienda, famed for where poet Jose Palma wrote what was to become the lyrics of the Philippine national anthem more than a century ago – the artist plays with the notion of ‘origin’ in relation to earth, and the nurturance of independence and resilience. De Leon recounts how in the 1960s, mentor and fellow itinerant David Medalla wrapped his feet with Philippine dirt and newspapers to pronounce his land rights at an anti-American demonstration at the US Embassy in Manila.
Nicholas Tee, ‘Communing with Li’
Nicholas Tee is a live artist from Singapore – they collage action, image, sound and material through body-based durational and endurance performance. Nicholas’ work has been presented internationally, notably at Haus der Kunst (DE), Manchester Art Gallery (UK), ICA London (UK) and Point Centre for Contemporary Art (CY). In 2019, their work was featured in the British Art Studies journal published by the Paul Mellon Centre.
Communing with Li is an intergenerational duet across time and space that meditates on the life and work of Li Yuan-chia. Li died in 1994, the same year I was born – in the first action, I play a sound recording of Li whistling on a hand crank cassette player. His whistling calls out to me and I whistle back, almost 30 years after his death.
The second action reflects on the span of Li’s life as a migrant artist as I move from the warmth of an interior space to the coldness of the exterior courtyard. Referencing Li’s obsession with world-making and the cosmic point, I unpack a large red circular floor cloth from my bag and establish a meshwork of objects and relations within it – echoing Li’s magnetic points. In the background, an audio recording of two phrases play on loop: “You will not feel this way forever”/ “加油!”. The former serves as both a hopeful reminder and fatalistic warning that reminds us of the impact and transience of Li’s work while the latter – a Chinese phrase often used as a rallying cheer to encourage others – speaks to Li’s persistence and the persistence of his legacy. This is translated literally into repetitive action as I physically “add oil” from one gold bucket to another. The repetitive cadence is punctuated by breaks where I extend Li’s invitation to build community, by encouraging audience members to join me on the “cosmic point” and share in a cup of tea, thereby making a new world.
The final action closes the loop on the first encounter with my body, as I pack up, walk off and leave no trace behind.
About the Curator
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London and working between the UK, Europe and Asia. Her exhibition-making, programing, publication, and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogical activism with an interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative histories and knowledge, collective practice, and solidarity. She leads Asia-Art-Activism (AAA) an interdisciplinary and intergenerational network of artists, curators and academics investigating ‘Asia’, ‘art’ and ‘activism’ in the UK. She is the founding council member of Asia Forum that unfolded across digital gatherings in 2021 and an inaugural programme in Venice at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in 2022.
The programme Recursions is inspired by Li Yuan-Chia’s artistic practice that is philosophically and aesthetically energised by the ‘point’ and playful mathematical concepts, and his invitational hospitality in converging over 26 years, constellations of artists, practitioners and friends at his LYC Museum in rural Cumbria. Li’s practice evokes an alternative spatio-temporal sensitivity that speaks to the migrant experience of disrupted lineage, and the LYC Museum situated a peripheral locus of belonging that also creates networks of circulations for co-inhabiting a new world.Recursions, curated by Annie Jael Kwan, returns to the migrant’s urge towards seeking refuge and new relations, amidst the ongoing geopolitical conditions of forced exclusions, deprivations and displacements, domicide and ecocide. Beyond the poetic and nostalgic, “find your way home” expresses revolutionary longing. Even when the return is deferred, self-reflexive moments of respite offer a step towards home. We rest together as resistance.
Perambulating from within the galleries and into the gardens outside the historically conserved Ede House, the programme features two site-specific durational performances by British-Filipino artist Noel Ed De Leon and Singaporean artist Nicholas Tee. The performances are interspersed with a live participatory reading session, Let it Be a Tale, featuring migrant voices in prose and poetry.
About the Exhibition
The exhibition retraces Li’s commitment to fostering creativity, his interest in play and his investment in new ways of being in the world. Through the LYC, Li showcased Roman artefacts, works by major figures of British modernism, local artists and contemporary practices including kineticism, land art and video. The LYC’s children’s room provided a place for young people to experiment with art making, while craft workshops played host to communities of making. Much like Kettle’s Yard, the LYC also had a library, a garden, and spaces to socialise, transforming how we encounter art.
The exhibition puts the LYC into conversation with Kettle’s Yard. Both projects evolved over time, with collections (in the case of Kettle’s Yard) and exhibitions (in the case of the LYC) being shaped through friendships and personal affiliations, including with the artist Winifred Nicholson, who was an important presence at both the LYC and Kettle’s Yard.
Li’s practice – as both artist and organiser – is at the centre of the exhibition, along with those artists he exhibited at the LYC and those who were part of the cosmopolitan networks he enabled and enriched. Making New Worlds will also include works by contemporary artists reflecting on the afterlives of Li’s work in the present.
Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends has developed in partnership between Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art as part of its ‘London, Asia’ project, and is accompanied by a new publication produced by Kettle’s Yard and supported by Paul Mellon Centre.
It is co-curated by Hammad Nasar (Curator, Strategic advisor and Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre), Sarah Victoria Turner (Director of the Paul Mellon Centre) and Amy Tobin (Curator, contemporary programmes, Kettle’s Yard).
Find out more about Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends
Access
- The galleries, where exhibitions are shown, and all areas of the Clore Learning Studio (level -1), the Research Space (level 1) and the Ede Room (level 2) are fully accessible.
- We have wheelchair accessible toilets on the lower ground (level -1), ground and first floor (level 1).
- There is a lift giving access to all floors located past the galleries, just beside the Clore Learning Studio on the ground floor.
- Kettle’s Yard welcomes assistance and service dogs in all areas.
- We have large-print versions of the wall text available.
- We can lend visitors small folding seats for taking around exhibitions or using at non-seated events. Please ask a Visitor Assistant for help finding a seat.
