Alex Bickley Trott (Oxford Brookes) and Roland Fischer-Vousden (SET)
Oxford Brookes University and SET Centre present KAHOON I/II: DO THE TWIST, the first round of Kahoon Projects, a platform to examine working-class identity in the 21st century through contemporary art practice. Kahoon Projects consists of a series of collaborative, interdisciplinary residencies in which, for one month, two artists are paired to develop a conversation and create new work about social class. DO THE TWIST is the product of this first conversation with artists Shonagh Short and Maria de la O Garrido.
Exhibition: 10 May – 30 May 2019, Tuesday-Sunday 12-6pm Artists Public Talk & Film Screening: Tuesday 21st May, @ The Peckham Pelican, 7-9pm
During the residency, Garrido and Short have explored their experiences of the class system through abstract spatial metaphors (“up is more, down is less”) and colour (yellow as a site of resistance). As an explosion of yellow, this exhibition is envisaged as a site of resistance, confronting questions of class and mobility, capital in all its forms, and belonging. It takes the form of an immersive maze-like installation, a playful invitation to navigate a physical and conceptual realm: a metaphor for sometimes invisible social structures that include, exclude, and organise.
In a departure from more recognisable explorations of class-based issues, Do the Twist and its constituent parts explore the issue from a more abstract perspective. DO THE TWIST refers to those small, symbolic, subversive acts that chip away at the system from within, temporarily reconfiguring the terrain. The Twist is a dance, a strategy, an unexpected narrative development, a tool of emancipatory potential, an interruption, a transgression, an instruction: “let’s do the twist until we tear the house down”.
© Kahoon Projects 2021