St James’s
London SE14 6AD
United Kingdom
Hadi Fallahpisheh: As Free As Birds
August 13–September 18, 2022
Goldsmiths CCA presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Europe by Hadi Fallahpisheh. Working across painting, photography, ceramics, sculpture, performance and installation, Fallahpisheh weaves a narrative that is part-allegory, part-fable. A recurring cast of a human, a mouse, a cat and a dog form a quasi-family unit that at times feels nostalgic and domestic, but often veers toward entrapment and violence, prompting questions around belonging, conflict and anxiety.
Taking place across all four of the CCA’s upper galleries, the exhibition centres on ideas around freedom—its symbolisms, protections and contingencies. Life-size cages interrupt the exhibition experience, separating viewers from Fallahpisheh’s paintings, photographic works and ceramics, and suggesting that freedom is always a contradictory position that relies on the captive or unprotected status of others. Recurring stuffed animals, often in various states of distress, query how nostalgia can warp the boundaries between memory and imagination.
A new, choreographed performance entitled House Animals will take place within the exhibition during the opening and closing. Fallahpisheh’s cat, mouse, and dog characters will be embodied by dancers, with gentle reference to Merce Cunningham.
We are very grateful to Andrew Kreps Gallery, Efremidis, and Rodeo for their generous support towards the show.
Trevor Mathison: From Signal to Decay: Volume 1
August 13–September 18, 2022
Goldsmiths CCA presents a solo exhibition of work by composer, artist and sound designer Trevor Mathison. From Signal to Decay: Volume 1 is his first solo exhibition in a UK institution and comprises an ambitious sound installation, a presentation of drawings, video, and live performance.
In the months leading up to this exhibition, Mathison has undertaken a sonic investigation of the CCA building, producing numerous recordings using an Ambisonic microphone. These samples are periodically played back in the first basement gallery, reverberating with the architecture and providing a constant signal with which the sound pieces in other gallery spaces can converse and collide. Mathison’s sound installation plays the building back to itself, using its open and porous layout as an opportunity to mix different sounds into a multi-layered composition.
The graphic and collage-based work featured in this exhibition extends across 40 years, from the early 1980s to 2022. His diagrams or scores are sometimes preparatory and sometimes for imaginary sound pieces, bringing together different concerns and ideas into complex compositions. Alongside these pieces are drawings for sound installations, and various works in video. This exhibition will offer a new perspective on Mathison’s ground-breaking sonic practice and his changing ideas about sound composition and installation.
Closing the exhibition, there will be a vinyl release of Mathison’s music with purge.xxx, the second event in this ongoing research project, titled From Signal to Decay: Volume 2.
Curated by Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom and Oliver Fuke.
We are very grateful to The Elephant Trust for their generous support towards the show.
Cinzia Ruggeri: Cinzia says...
October 8, 2022–15 January, 2023
Cinzia says... is the first major retrospective of artist and fashion designer Cinzia Ruggeri (1942–2019), a unique figure of Italian postmodernism who moved freely across artistic disciplines. Her life and versatile practice were driven by a desire to redefine the form and function of elements of everyday life. From clothing and accessories to furniture and lighting—and in sculptural installations often including these objects—Ruggeri created worlds that were continually imaginative, provocative, elegant and unpredictable. Consistently boundary-pushing, her objects sat somewhere between performance and architecture, always questioning how the body might inhabit space.
This exhibition is a co-production between MACRO, Rome, and Goldsmiths CCA.
Episode 9: Ebun Sodipo
November 18, 2022–15 January, 2023
Through an expanded exhibition and public programme of newly commissioned work, Ebun Sodipo will intervene in Black feminist historiography through installation, sound and text. Her work will consider the Atlantic and the sea in relation to Black trans womanhood and history, and will also question how both present and future notions of Blackness can be shifted by Black trans historical presence.
