Abstract Cabinet

at DRAF, Camden

Abstract Cabinet is a project created with Nicolas Deshayes, Adham Faramawy, Anthea Hamilton, Celia Hempton, George Henry Longly and Prem Sahib.

Abstract Cabinet brings together six London-based artists who in the past few years have been actively operating together through exchange, discussion and sometimes collaboration. For the first time these artists are exhibited together to investigate whether a dynamic relationship could be a potential movement. Without attempting to historicise the group, the exhibition asks if art movements are still relevant? And if so, how might an art institution react to one?

The format of the cabinet, despite its apparent obsolescence, opens up a range of possibilities, and allows the artists to freely transform the exhibition space into a studio and a paradoxical living room with daybeds that are used as plinths, mood board, curtains, candles and hooks.

George Henry Longly has created the daybeds especially for this project.

Prem Sahib on Adham Faramawy

My most intimate experience of Adham’s work occurred at my desktop when I downloaded his piece Total Flex 2 from Legion-tv.com and found myself enjoying the company of a naked man exercising on my screen. Occasionally this man would disappear, only to resurface again, surprising me with his metallic presence. At other times we’d play more directly; once, I grabbed him and put him in a Beyoncé video. I sent a screenshot to Adham, as did many other cohabiters of this work, and eventually he became viral.

The ubiquity of this downloadable man, his continued endurance and exertion through exercise, became increasingly emotive the longer I spent with him. He had the capacity to blend and exist within different interfaces. This made me wonder how long he would last. Would he outlive the ‘updates’, or someday exist as a newer version — perhaps older and performing different moves?

I found the energy with which he pursued his programmed task (in the here and now of the screen), synonymous with Adham’s work. There is a distinct and unashamed directness about Adham’s handling of the ‘current’ and its implicated technologies. I personally like how the work avoids being self-conscious about this and instead utilises nowness both as position and material.

Adham Faramawy on Anthea Hamilton

I recently read Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s comment that art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and unreal. He was talking about Kabuki actors, suggesting that they should favour the imitation of real characters over fictitious ones. This connection between representation, the image, and ‘the real thing’ is key to how I approach Anthea’s works.

Often I’ve felt that, in engaging with Anthea’s installations, I’m being asked to deal with an idiosyncratic system of material choices and image associations. A sculpture comprised of a cut-out of a muscular, young Karl Largerfeld and a small pile of dried beans can be placed in the gallery in such a way that the object flattens, merging with the other assemblages in the room. The installation becomes a tableau. There have been times when this moment is like a ‘magic eye’ print and the installation shimmers between physical presence and allegorical representation.

Anthea Hamilton on Nicolas Deshayes

18 May 2013

Dear Nicolas,

Of the group I know you a little less than the others. With Adham, I could discuss working together on Shama Khanna’s Flatness programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival last month (I’ve known him the longest). Had I to do this with Prem, we could discuss growing up in the ethnic ghettos of Greater London, or Disco (I could try and keep up at least). With George — I’m not sure, something about Paris and residencies. With Celia, that she comes from the same place as where some of my older sisters live, the current and future brilliance of Alex Padfield (and shared territory we never mention: using sexualised imagery of men in our work and being women in a gay world — too reductive…)

But with you, I know the work first and look to what you do formally and professionally, and it makes me have to (obviously too personally and literally) respond to say that the surface your works simulate remind me of the yoghurts my father ate when he was very sick. The cold rich dairy of Greek yoghurt, with synthetic strawberry compote at the bottom, a foil peel-off lid and a teaspoon — bed-bound appreciation.

After this show, I’m sure we’ll have much chattier stuff to share. As I finish now, I remember a rich woman with a full-length fur coat at your and George’s Vanille show at Valentin in Paris last January; you tried it on. Looked good.

George Henry Longly on Celia Hempton

Touche Éclat is the original must-have for a radiant, flawless face. Capture 8 hours of sleep with the click of a pen. With a few strategic strokes of this award-winning complexion highlighter – dark circles, fine lines and signs of fatigue virtually disappear. Powered by the radiance-boosting Luminocaptide Complex, skin is instantly illuminated, so you look rested and refreshed — even if you’ve been up for hours. Sleek and sophisticated, it discretely slips into a makeup bag for quick touch-ups anytime. It’s the only beauty essential no woman should ever be without. New Shades: 2.5 Luminous Vanilla, 3.5 Luminous Almond, 4.5 Luminous Sand, 5.5 Luminous Praline, 7 Luminous Mocha.

Celia Hempton on Prem Sahib

When I first met Prem’s work, I responded to formal and surface characteristics, seduced by its immaculate and contained precision. Then, as I got to know him, I began to learn so much more about a way of making art that is alien to mine. I am very impulsive; I look, and then I do — and think usually at the same split second. But Prem’s meticulous attention to detail and his relentless analysing of things before he does them (as well as during and after) typifies his work and approach — deliberating for what seems like days and weeks over minute changes in colour and form. I think this makes the work fizz or feel full of something that is about to come out but doesn’t, a tension and electric static charge, like when you are in the presence of someone you want to have sex with and they want to with you, but you can’t because circumstances in that moment prevent you from it.

The work appears stand-offish to me to begin with, but then it reveals itself eventually. Sometimes slowly and sensually, sometimes aggressively. Objects are poised perfectly — a black glass neon shape near the ceiling positioned behind and above you, something you might not notice straightaway but which you catch sight of as you leave a room; or the hard, white-and-black, upright protrusions from the wall that, though architectural, designed, and frozen-seeming, have such a human and tactile presence, glowing and breathing from behind. Incidentally, I have always found repression to be sexy. I think it’s something to do with the idea of an impending explosion of what has been built up.