We are delighted to be returning to Volta this year for their Autumn show. We are presenting a two person booth featuring works by British artist Sam Burford and Finnish artist Anikó Kuikka.
Please contact the gallery for further information and tickets.
Drawing on themes that emerged during his previous show at Fiumano Clasé in 2020, London artist Sam Burford continues to explore the ideologies of ruin and representation.
Burford’s artistic practice has set at its core a focus that explores changing notions of visual representation. Past evidence of this passion can be seen in his innovative and ground breaking artworks which explore cinematic representation. These include: Portrait of The Wizard of Oz, 2013; Presence, 2008 and Structure of Thought, 2015. These works eventually led to his 2019 doctorate that explored the history of computational photorealism.
In his latest series of works, Portrait of a Nobody, Burford has sought to temper the nullifying, dehumanising impact of algorithmic machine-learning, by painstakingly reworking these statistically motivated calculations into traditional oil paintings - giving these liminal calculations a material corpus that seeks to grant these non-persons a physical provenance, the ‘future anterior of presence’ (Batchen, 1999). In these transformations into oil paint and linen, the artist forges a link to past traditions of representation, identity and power, raising questions about the essential nature of these digital doppelgängers formed of our personal data.
Some of these works show evidence of an erasure, a fluid instability, of being swept away by events, as though through the paint itself, the artist captured traces of an unmaking taking place before us.
Alongside these paintings, the gallery will be presenting a series of hitherto unseen animated video clips from the project Ruin, which originated as the artists a response to the financial crisis of 2007-2008. Each video presents a slowly collapsing structure, signifying the underlying sense of precarity and vulnerability that pervades these times.
In collaboration with the gallery, the artist has made a number of these works available as limited edition NFT’s - providing an unique opportunity for visitors to the fair to explore this contentious and emergent form of collecting digital artworks.
Anikó Kuikka's characters are often tragic, suppressed and underrepresented. Empowering and making power structures visible is important to her. How and who we are used to seeing in the spotlight shape how we see ourselves, our value and importance.
In her own words:
"I see my installations as portals to the world of the moving image. The spatial experience gets entangled with the story and is perceived through the viewer’s own body memory – which can be a powerful way to have an immersive experience. My moving image piece is never complete until it is presented in it’s own world, the installation. The space becomes something that can transport us into parallel realities of the moving image.
Reality is constructed and constantly reshaped by us, but perhaps now the change will be more drastic in less amount of time. There is a potential for a better world as people are re-evaluating their life and priorities. It is also scary as not all of the occurring events are for the better obviously including death, animal exploitation, rising acts of racism and (collapsing?) economy. When encounters and closeness with others have become a risk, it might leave a permanent trauma on how we interact with each other in the future. I am saddened by what the lockdown is doing to art when spatial experience is forbidden."
Anikó Kuikka is an artist working mainly with narrative moving image and large-scale installations. She is a graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki and the Royal Academy Schools at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Anikó has been working in HIAP’s Suomenlinna studios since October 2019, in a one-year studio space granted by The Academy of Fine Arts Foundation in collaboration with HIAP.
September 19, 2021
