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18 October to 5 December 
Open daily, 12–5pm

and then, a harrowing brings together work by three of Wysing’s 2020 residents, Linda Stupart, Carl Gent and Kelechi Anucha.

 

A harrow breaks up the surface of the earth or the skin, an agitation of soil that has been left dormant too long where the harrow can excavate whatever ghosts, traditions, memories, viruses, melodies and gestures have been buried. The gallery reverts to barn; the barn disintegrates back to soil.

Installed across Wysing’s grounds, gallery and Amphis building, the exhibition includes recent film, sculptural, and video work by Gent and Stupart and sound work by Anucha and Gent.

Navigating wildly between the Arctic Circle, a river in South Birmingham, the length of the Thames, East Anglia, and Greenland, a new installation from Gent and Stupart reflects on Wysing Arts Centre’s location in rural England.  

A new sonic collage by Anucha and Gent fills the main exhibition space at Wysing. Built from field recordings and live performances conducted in and near the grounds at Wysing with new recordings of various folk songs woven into the wider tapestry.  

and then, a harrowing makes visible how narrative is produced by, and produces landscape, weaving new, intimate, unguarded, and often violent stories and spaces for land in crisis.  

and then, a harrowing is supported by Arts Council England and curated by John Eng Kiet Bloomfield. Wysing Arts Centre and the artists would like to thank William Bevan, Tom Dillon and James Holcombe for their support in realising and then, a harrowing.

Covid Safety

Our team will be wearing masks and we ask you to continue wearing masks indoors (unless you are exempt). Sanitiser points and spare masks are available around the site. Social distancing is in place and capacity to the exhibition spaces will be monitored. Toilets will be available in our buildings with antibacterial wipes and spray.

Access Information  

The outdoor grounds at Wysing are uneven and have varying surface textures, which may cause some difficulty for unaccompanied wheelchair users.

The work in Amphis is also available to view on a monitor in reception, as Amphis is not wheelchair accessible.

An audio description for the exhibition is available via headphones. A decompression room will also be available during the launch, and is signposted. Large-print handouts and maps are available from Reception. 

Accessible parking and toilets are available.

If you have other access requirements that you would like to check with us before booking, please get in touch with Ceri Littlechild, Wysing’s Head of Operations, at  
ceri.littlechild@wysingartscentre.org and we will be happy to help.

Biographies 

Kelechi Anucha is a PhD candidate in the English Literature department at Exeter University and an experimental vocalist. Kelechi’s PhD focuses on contemporary end-of-life literature and visual cultures, paying particular attention to representations of impeded, disrupted and alternate temporalities and how they reshape broader understandings of care. She is part of all-female electronic drone choir NYX and performed the role of the Orca Whale in All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, a musical retelling of the 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin by Linda Stupart and Carl Gent that premiered at the ICA summer 2019.

Carl Gent is an artist from Bexhill-on-sea, UK.

Their recent work has sought to rehistoricise and refictionalise the life of Cynethryth, eighth-century Queen of Mercia. This has involved live publishing, the building of community carnival floats, forced-feeding with pigeon-shaped cakes and the construction of wishing-well cesspits.

Carl’s collaboration with singer and researcher Kelechi Anucha looking at the passage of English folk music into church song is currently on show as a series of sculptural and sonic interventions at The Museum of English Rural Life, Reading for The Commons: Reenchanting the World.

In 2019 they collaborated with artist Linda Stupart in producing All Us Girls Have Been Dead for So Long, a feature-length musical that was commissioned by the ICA as a part of the live programme for I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Kathy Acker. The play populated the narrative structure of the 1990s video game Ecco the Dolphin with a host of other protagonists including Naomi Klein's reportage of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Margaret Cavendish's 1666 proto-scifi novel The Blazing World, Westlife's cover of "Seasons in the Sun", and Kathy Acker herself.

They have upcoming solo exhibitions at Jupiter Woods, London and Flatland Projects, Bexhill-on-sea and are publishing their first book, Felon Herb expanding on their manufacture of absinthe at KELDER PROJECTS in 2017. They were one of the recipients of Artangel's inaugural Thinking Time grant, have new writing published in Happy Hypocrite #12: Without Reduction; and At Practice #1 and have recently exhibited and performed at David Dale Gallery, Glasgow; ICA, London; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea and for Transmissions, episode 2.

Dr Linda Stupart is an artist, writer, and educator from Cape Town, South Africa. They completed their PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2016, with a project engaged in new considerations of objectification and abjection. They are currently a permanent lecturer at Birmingham City University, and have previously worked at University of Reading, London College of Communication, and Camberwell Arts College. They have also run arts education projects at Tate, South London Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, and Camden Arts Centre. Linda is interested in the possibilities for writing and making discrete grounded encounters with different kinds of bodies (of knowledge, objects, affect as well as corporeal bodies) as a way to think through less alienated ways of living and thinking together. This comes out of encounters with feminist art, postcolonial, ecological, queer, and affect theory as well as embodied and object-based critical institutional encounters. Their current work consists predominately of writing, performance, film, and sculpture, and engages with queer theory, science fiction, environmental crises, magic, language, desire, and revenge. They have recently exhibited at Lisson Gallery, Raven Row, Tate, IMT, Matt’s Gallery, and The Showroom in London; as well as Transmission in Glasgow, DISTRICT in Berlin, Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kunstraum Niederösterreich in Vienna, and Syndicate in Cologne. 

They recently produced All Us Girls Have been Dead for so Long with Carl Gent for the ICA London; a play about climate change, queer sex, and Ecco the Dolphin. They will be in residence at Wysing Arts Centre in late Summer 2021.