This two-person show by Hackney-based artists Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz explores the expressive possibilities of writing, drawing, and of writing-bodies, where expression or knowledge is always tied to a question of materiality. The works dissect forms of address, the possibilities for moving and being moved, through writing, painting, video installations, and performance. How can a work hold a moment, make it tangible, knowable?

Embedded in both ephemerality and abstraction, the multi-media exhibition featuring performance, painting, sound and moving image works also addresses ideas around immediacy and energy, time and motion, light and space, what’s observable and what’s imagined, what can be grasped and what remains projection.
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Seita's video, text, and sound piece included in the exhibition touch (on) intimacy, commitment, and opacity, grappling with the difficulty of capturing feelings in writing. How do we give up the ‘safety of Abstraction’ and commit to the sayable, ‘without fear of simplification?’ ‘How can the simple be resonant with complexity?’ The included pieces also push these experiences of translation, of making-sense, into a realm of both play and meditation. Her work usually begins with reading, asking how the body can become a publishing platform, or how a performance can embody text, how we can be choreographed by language, and how we read differently with material. More broadly, she is interested in difficulty, repetition, rewriting, queer desire and kinship, how we can make new relational structures of feeling.

‘Sometimes we use language to interrogate certain ways of looking at objects and beings or ways of being in our bodies or for our bodies to be with others’
—Sophie Seita, Cloudiness (2021)

Zakiewicz’s paintings are created through live performances, in public and private spaces, and often in collaboration with artists of other disciplines. Her practice explores the physical and metaphorical relationships between the performance of drawing and sound. She asks, ‘how does sound perform in drawing? What is it to translate sound into image? Can we escape the confines of our prescribed patterns – whether our brain synapses or our muscle memory?' Her works examine conceptions of interconnectedness, isolation and the body as a carrier of data. Her cross-disciplinary processes explore methods of improvisation, the tension between failure and resolution, the balance between control and surrender and the cognitive processes that underlie our emotional relationship with art.

Work descriptions:

Sophie Seita, My Contact Aureoles, installation, 2022, birch ply panels (104x69cm), gesso, graphite, and drafting film sheets, projection, sound (6’33”). Sound recorded and mixed by Rupert Clerveaux. Projected photographs by Laura Cobb.

[full title] after the cooling, the igneous, which sets, has the potential to ignite, my contact aureoles

Sophie Seita, Cloudiness, video essay / lecture performance, 2021, HD video, 14 mins 41 seconds

Public programming accompanying the exhibition:
Family art workshop for Hackney residents / Sunday 20th February 3-4pm:
In this workshop for families, participants will explore relationships between sound, words and drawing.

Topics will include: Drawing in response to words and sounds, reading shapes on a page to make music, where materials come from, how to use them and what they do (graphite, pigments, paper, found objects, etc.)​

This is the first workshop connected to the exhibition currently on display at HOXTON 253, titled There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body. It will be led by the artist Claire Zakiewicz.

Queer writing and performance workshop for Hackney residents / Thursday 24th February 7-8pm:
In this workshop, we will take inspiration from queer, trans, and non-binary thinkers, writers, and artists, in guiding us towards a number of creative experiments, using: writing, embodiment/movement (including: sitting, standing, walking, and simple performative gestures), reading and discussion, sonic meditation.
This is the second workshop in the context of the exhibition There’s no way I can know it, the object, or the body which will be led by the artist and writer Sophie Seita.
Both workshops foreground a spirit of playfulness and exploration. Participants will be invited to experiment with ideas around spontaneity and intuition, mistakes and imperfection, habits and repetition, voice, listening, curiosity, and joy.
No background knowledge or previous experience is necessary and all are welcome.

Artists in conversation & performance / 26th February 5-6.30pm:

Sophie Seita will present a lecture performance, Reading the Rock, in response to her sound installation My Contact Aureoles (2020/2022), which is included in the show.

Following the performance Sophie Seita and Claire Zakiewicz will be in conversation with HOXTON 253 curator Zsuzsa Benke sharing insights into their respective practices and the works in the exhibition.

The exhibition and associated programme are supported by and part of HELLO AGAIN, HACKNEY, the borough's cultural reopening initiative; and the Eaton Fund.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/33714