Ângela Ferreira and Narelle Jubelin began a dialogue about their art practices in 1992, but this will only be their second collaborative exhibition following on from their project Front of house (also with Marcos Corrales and Andrew Renton), at Parasol unit in London in 2008. Jubelin was born and grew up in Australia but now resides in Madrid; Ferreira grew up in Mozambique and South Africa and lives in Lisbon. Both their practices are informed by their post-colonial experiences. Both artists also work within a research based practice, building layered narratives where new art works build on insights discovered and developed in previous projects. The Great Divide will feature two new video works that have grown from the dialogue between Jubelin and Ferreira, two photographs by Ferreira and a suite of Jubelin’s exquisite petit points. Ferreira exhibited in the national pavilion for Portugal in the 2007 Venice Biennale. Her work was an extended consideration of French architect and designer Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, a radically modern prefabricated house designed for the French colonies in Africa. Only three were constructed, one was shipped to Nainey, Niger and two to Brazzaville, Congo and they proved unpopular with the French administrators. Recently they have been taken from Africa by western collectors, restored and one at least was sold at auction for millions. Ferreira’s sculptural and photographic work explored the nuances and ironies of this history. Her interest in the work of artists and architects and in the resonances and gaps in cultural histories is present in the two photographs she is exhibiting entitled ‘Double sided’. These document two installations by Ferreira, in 1996 she went to the Chinati Foundation in Texas, where minimalist artist Donald Judd lived and worked, and recreated the interior of South African outsider artist Helen Martins' house. In 1997 at Nieu Bethsheda in South Africa, where Helen Martins lived and worked, Ferreira created an installation based on Judd’s architectural office. Jubelin is well known for her minutely worked petit points and she will exhibit the 13 panel work A landscape is not something you look at but something you look through. This reveals a journey through both late modernist art and landscape. She plots a narrative that begins in a Melbourne Park, also spans Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and ends in the Yucatan – all sites where notable minimal or conceptual art works were made by the artists Mel Ramsden, Judd and Robert Smithson. These are interspersed by contemporary rural and urban views from Spain and Australia that resonate with her recent experience, as an expatriate artist living in Madrid. These are the finest petit points Jubelin has made in over two decades and for the first time are displayed as double-sided works. |