Four by Three
16.02 – 21.01.2023
Includes:AffandiHusbandsMartinOnyangunga–
Closed
Hours
Monday to Friday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow St
London
W1B 4DE
In 2022, Huxley-Parlour gallery were delighted to host 4×3, a charitable initiative awarding four emerging artists a fully-funded exhibition at the gallery’s project space in London’s West End.
Includes: Henri Affandi, Ella Husbands, Graham Martin, Beverley Onyangunga
While developing works for exhibition the recipients also participated in the gallery’s mentorship programme to gain assistance and advice from the gallery and its wider community of artists and supporters.
The selection, chosen by external select committee Kathleen Soriano, Péjú Oshin and Tabish Khan, focus on emerging and early-career artists who work in installation and multi-disciplinary practice and will be chosen by a selection committee, listed below. We particularly encourage submissions from under-represented and lower socio-economic backgrounds. Each recipient was granted £5000 to realise their exhibition.
Beverley Onyangunga ‘Cut’ (15 February – 14 April 2022)
Henri Affandi ‘Roots’ (30 April – 18 June 2022)
Graham Martin ‘Portals’ (24 June – 12 August 2022)
Ella Husbands ‘Undercurrent’ (25 November 2022 – 21 January 2023)
Highlights
7
Beverley Onyangunga’s exhibition uses archival photographs and sculpture to look at the systematic brutalities which occurred in 1890 Free State Congo during the reign of the Belgian King Leopold II, where it is estimated that 10 million Congolese people were killed. This period of history is widely considered to be overlooked by historians. Onyangunga uses the motif of the red hand as a symbolic reference to mutilation of the native people, whose limbs were removed if they did not meet rubber harvesting quotas.
Henri Affandi presented a mixed-media installation which will consider Britain as at once a home and a hostile environment for migrants from all over the world. Roots transformed Huxley-Parlour’s lower-floor gallery space into a root-cave using hanging, textile strips from specific global cultures. These colourful fabrics aim to reflect the British migrant community. Roots considered the importance of multiculturalism in sustaining both the British Empire and contemporary Britain by utilising the concept of roots as both subterranean and foundational. The installation incorporates an audio element, with hanging headphones that play recordings of Affandi’s subjects speaking on their heritage, and experiences of belonging in London. Exploring themes of migration, identity, and belonging, Roots comments on British Foreign policy through recourse to material, lived experience.
Graham Martin’s exhibition considers queer space and time through the specific lens of cruising. Portals uses paintings, ceramics, and decommissioned historical objects as works which explore cruising as an autoethnographic methodology, and a mode of resistance. Portals was accompanied by an ‘In Conversation’ between Graham Martin and art historian Fiona Anderson. Written in response to a conversation which took place in early May 2022, the text discusses cruising as methodology and its limitations, the problem of critical distance/scholarly objectivity, and accessing the queer histories of objects as what Elizabeth Freeman calls ‘undetonated energy from past revolutions’.
Ella Husbands’ site-specific, mixed media installation explores disrupted, distorted, and fragmented sensory perception, deriving from the artist’s own experience living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Husbands transformed Huxley-Parlour’s downstairs exhibition space into an immersive sensory environment, combining wall hung works, geometric sculpture, and two projected videos, which explore the artist’s own experiences with altered perception. Husbands uses the aesthetic qualities of water as a metaphor for anxiety: both as an emotional salve and an agitator. Undercurrent emulates alternating preceptory environments, whilst speaking to the perpetual presence of Chronic Fatigue. Viewers were invited to consider their own heightened senses whilst inhabiting the installation. Husbands’ wall hung works continue to explore contrasting states of being through conflict and reconciliation.