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Exhibition programme
Nosferasta: Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer with Oba
October 6–December 19, 2021
Gasworks presents Nosferasta, the first UK solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based filmmakers Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer. Nosferasta is a Rastafarian vampire film starring and co-written by artist and musician Oba.
Spanning 500 years of colonial destruction, human trafficking and blood sucking, this newly commissioned film reimagines Oba’s origin story. In the late 15th century, Oba is shipped as cargo from West Africa to the Caribbean, where he is seduced by the vampire Christopher Columbus, ensuring his undying allegiance to the colonial project.
Combining film forms and genre tropes, Nosferasta examines the guilt of being complicit in imperial conquest, while acknowledging the extreme difficulty of unlearning centuries of vampiric conditioning. Ultimately, the film tackles an uncomfortable question: How can you decolonise yourself, if it’s in your blood?
Adam Khalil is a filmmaker from the Ojibway tribe in Northern Michigan; Bayley Sweitzer is a filmmaker from southern Vermont. Their works have featured at Tate Modern; Walker Art Center; Whitney Biennial; Toronto Biennial; Sundance Film Festival; and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, among others. Khalil is a core contributor to the indigenous collective New Red Order. Oba is a multidisciplinary artist and chef born in Trinidad. His work has featured at Motel Gallery and Rumpelstiltskin, Brooklyn. Oba was lead singer of the avant-noise supergroup Dead Companionship alongside Zack and Adam Khalil.
Nosferasta is commissioned and produced by Gasworks, London and Spike Island, Bristol, as part of the European Cooperation project 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, co-funded by Creative Europe and the Royal College of Art. The film is also supported by Creative Capital and Cinereach.
A public programme including performances and screenings will accompany the exhibition – join our mailing list to receive updates.
Gala Porras-Kim
January 27–March 27, 2022
Gasworks presents the first UK solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim. Her work investigates the institutional frameworks that define, legitimise and preserve cultural heritage, looking at the global circulation of precolonial artefacts extracted from their original sites and stored in museum collections in the West.
Porras-Kim’s work questions the ethical principles of museum conservation while inviting the viewer to assign new meanings to artefacts displayed within institutions. Her exhibition at Gasworks examines the (after)life of sacred objects at the British Museum, thinking through ways of compromising with their otherworldly original owners.
Interrogating whether it’s possible for objects at the British Museum to still perform their original function as spiritual offerings, Porras-Kim’s exhibition unravels the many worlds colliding in these powerful artefacts, from international law to stars, cosmologies, and forces greater than us.
Gala Porras-Kim is an artist born in Bogota and based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured at the São Paulo Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Whitney Biennial; LACMA, Los Angeles; and Made in LA Biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She has received awards including Creative Capital, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She was a recent Radcliffe fellow at Harvard, and is currently artist-in-residence at The Getty.
Porras-Kim’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Gasworks, with generous support from the Henry Moore Foundation and the Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK). Research for the exhibition was developed during a residency at Delfina Foundation, supported by the Latin America and Caribbean Patrons Group.
Gasworks commissions are supported by Catherine Petitgas and Gasworks Exhibitions Supporters.
International residencies programme
Gasworks’ residencies programme offers studios to international artists for a fully-funded three-month residency to develop new work and research on site. Upcoming residents from October-December 2021 are Sarah Rose (New Zealand) and Janina Wagner (Brazil).
International residents from January-March 2022: Moira Ricci (Italy), Issay Rodriguez (Philippines) and Katy Numi Usher (Belize).
Participation programme
Funding from City Bridge Trust has enabled Gasworks Participation Artists in Residence Laima Layton and Lexy Morvaridi to continue working collaboratively with local groups in the London boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth on their project, InnerSwell. The project explores memory and sound, social documentation and the creative process, inspired by Deep Listening, a process of “listening to learn.”
