Gallery 31: BONDS

Gallery 31 is a new permanent exhibition space dedicated to profiling the Studios community and work developed through our residencies. With a rolling programme and a different theme each season, Gallery 31 presents a curated selection of new commissions alongside existing and in-progress works.

The opening season Bonds explores the idea of connection beyond the physical and the immediate. The works are choreographed to play with the magical qualities of certain acts of communicating: be it to another, collectively with each other, or channelling through others. What transformation can happen when we share a space, collectively tune in, connect emphatically and intergenerationally?

Multidisciplinary artist and writer Laura Grace Ford presents a new text-based work titled Charms Over Ashes (excerpt), concerned with the ideas of collective identity, spatial narratives, fugitive temporalities and fiction.

Anna Mikkola's From Simple Parts to Collective Complexity is an ant colony housed within a mixed media installation. The ants demonstrate a different kind of intelligence, organisation model and communication, looking at the wonder of nature and the brain. 

Part hallucination, part reality, Imran Perretta’s video work DESH ruminates on alienation, anxiety and contested ideas of home. Shot in a hotel room during a hartal (general strike) in Bangladesh, the film looks at isolation and identity formation in the diaspora.

Hannah Perry’s work A Nice Thought, originally part of GUSH - Perry’s solo show at Somerset House in 2018, reminds us of the impossibility of containing our emotions, and the power of their slippery and raw qualities.

Artist and composer Nick Ryan’s work in progress installation, The Gulf of Understanding (Re:cognition), taps into the magic of making sense, exploring the sound of spoken language and its relationship to matter, utilising voice recognition and natural language processing techniques. This work is connected to a new audio commission exploring language with experts in cognitive neuroscience, computer science, linguistics and anthropology. 

A new audio commission by Flora Yin-Wong, made in collaboration with visual artist Go Watanabe, examines the recall of memory in our technological age. Using hundreds of accumulated iPhone recordings, the artist forges new connections between fractured memories, alternate worlds and intangible spaces. 

Gallery 31 is generously supported by The Rothschild Foundation, and The Gulf of Understanding is supported by the Case Foundation. 

BIOGRAPHIES

Laura Grace Ford is a London based artist and writer. Drawing on cognitive mapping and the concept of dérive Ford interrogates place by mapping the psychic contours of the city, where spectral languages erupt as fictions and dreamings, a reconnection with emancipatory forces embedded in the city. 

Anna Mikkola’s work explores the ways that technology alters human subjectivity and probes the boundaries of the human, often materialising as videos and installations. 

Imran Perretta is an artist addressing biopower, marginality and the (de)construction of cultural histories. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses moving image, sound, performance and poetry.

Hannah Perry works in installation, sculpture print and video. Using a network of personal references, she continuously generates and manipulates videos, sounds, images and objects, exploring intimate memory in a hyper-technological society.  

Nick Ryan is a multi-disciplinary artist and composer exploring auditory representations of information, language, physical materiality and space through the creation of sound and multisensory installations, bespoke instruments, generative audio experiences.  

Flora Yin-Wong is a London-born, Chinese-Malaysian artist working with field recordings, dissonance, and influences from contemporary club culture.