Dream & Discover
Work of the Week

3 September is Skyscraper Day – an unofficial day for celebrating feats of architectural endeavour and engineering genius around the world. Whether you think they’re eyesores or pillars of human achievement, there are more than 7,000 skyscrapers (loosely defined as buildings stretching over 490 feet in height and above) around the world today, with the tallest still being the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, completed in 2010 and standing at a staggering 2,722 feet – more than half a mile – tall.

And for as long as skyscrapers have been built – since the building boom on the American East Coast in the 1880s – artists have been fascinated by them. From Marcel Duchamp to Georgia O’Keeffe, to Mies van der Rohe and Alfred Stieglitz, artists have paid homage to skyscrapers in all mediums, and all manners.

Perhaps the most famous work of art devoted to a skyscraper is Andy Warhol’s 1964 film, Empire. The film demands eight hours and five minutes of the viewer’s time, focusing singularly on New York’s most spectacular monument, the Empire State Building. More of a painting than a film Empire is a love letter to New York, to the city’s skyline, and to the sheer ambition of mankind; all things that Warhol closely identified with.

Women have been the persistent centre of British fashion photographer Miles Aldridge’s images for more than three decades. The visionary artist has trained his lens on a fantastical cast of women, dazzling in lucid colour. But behind the seemingly perfect surfaces, his subjects – with their ominous blank expressions – suggest something psychologically fraught and complicated.

A trademark of the uncanny atmosphere Aldridge’s images conjure is this image, Venus Etcetera (after Titian). Part of a series of works reworking ideas from Italian Renaissance painters into contemporary compositions, the highly stylised portrait features an elegant female subject, the height of glamour – but something is off. It’s all in the details that subvert the idyllic image of beauty as it unravels before our eyes: the spilled sugar cubes on the table, the crossword scrawled over in blue biro, the distant stare of the subject unaware of the steaming kettle that screeches out steam beside her and the split milk on the polished red countertop. We are plunged into the mysterious world of her unknown.

It’s exactly the sort of image that has made Aldrige, 59, such a prominent figure in the fashion photography world since the 1990s. Today, his photographs belong in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum, the International Center of Photography, the Fondation Carmignac, and the Nicola Erni Collection. He has shot for publications including Vogue, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Alridge’s work currently features in the Saatchi Gallery’s Beyond Fashion exhibition, on view until 8 September.

At The Wick this week we continue to shine a light on our favourite artists of South Asian hertiage as part of the celebrations for South Asian Heritage Month. Bindi Vora is a British artist and curator based in London. Her acclaimed work Mountain of Salt was published first as a book by Perimeter Editions in 2021, and more recently was presented as part of Peckham 24, with Vora’s work Unraveling, dealing with aspects of the artist’s Kenyan-Indian heritage.

The text-based collage works that make up the staggering collection that is Mountain of Salt were a way for Vora to begin to get to grips with an overwhelming mass of information – the thick and fast slew of news that comes at us from every angle – in order to make some sort of sense of the pandemic and post-Brexit era. “I, like many others, became acutely aware of the landscape in which we were living in, where everything felt amplified,” says Vora. “Clinging to the news for updates, statistics and curves … for me it highlighted the way words and speech have a physical presence, bearing upon us and carrying weight.”

Visual material, cribbed from personal and collective archives and found imagery, and text, taken from social media and news, press conferences and protest placards, rub against each other in almost 400 pieces, drawing connections between the personal and the political, carving out the possibilites in language and their power to prompt a sea-change. Ultimately, Mountain of Salt becomes a celebration, too – of resistance and resilience in the everyday, if you know where to look for it. Sometimes the simplest statements make the biggest impact: ‘I will try to do better’, one work boldly decries.

Award-winning artist Joy Gregory revealed a glorious new public artwork at Heathrow Terminal 4’s underground station this week, a commission for Transport for London.
A Taste of Home is inspired by more than 100 asylum seekers living in temporary accommodation near the airport who Gregory met during workshops she ran. It comprises 24 works, pairing ethereal prints of plants, seeds, herbs and spices, paired with poetry – quietly querying lines by the likes of Gaza-born Khaled Abdallah and 35-year-old British-Kenyan poet Warsan Shire. It is both a timely and timeless reflection on migration and movement, on ideas of departure and return, and of how we carry a sense of home with us.

Gregory, 64, won the 8th annual Freelands Award in 2023 – a retrospective of her work will be held at the Whitechapel Gallery next year as a result. Having trained in commercial photography in the 1980s, Gregory developed a conceptual photo-based practice that experiments with a variety of digital and analogue techniques and grapples with themes related to contemporary identity, difference and displacement. She is also the editor of Shining Lights, the first critical anthology to explore the groundbreaking work of Black women photographers in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Shining Lights was published earlier this year, to great critical acclaim.

Of A Taste of Home, Gregory has said: “Culture and art is something that unites us all; it’s something we can all get behind. I think it’s important that art is in a space like this and not gallery space, which is seen as hallowed and exclusive. Everybody off the street can come and have a look at this.”

It’s South Asian Heritage Month – and The Wick is celebrating by continuing to champion the work of artists of South Asian heritage, an underrepresented but dynamic part of the arts scene in the UK.

Formerly an award-winning photojournalist, Kalpesh Lathigra’s series A Democratic Portrait began after a United Nations assignment in 2013 to document the Za’atari, a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. “Back then, I was beginning to question how I take pictures, what images of refugees mean, and how they are used and read.” Lathigra told the British Journal of Photography. “Documenting hard news was my job, but I had no control over the usage, and it was an issue for me that images could be used as propaganda. As photographers, our subjectivity is critical and realising this eventually pulled me away from photojournalism.“

A Democratic Portrait saw Lathigra shift away from photojournalism towards the fertile space in between documentary and fiction, working with both found and staged images. A Democratic Portrait is shot with a Polaroid Passport Camera and Fuji FP 100C film (which is no longer made) and comprises more than 50 passport photographs of major cultural figures, celebrities, and politicians, as well as refugees, friends, family and people from marginalized communities. It unfolds an arresting story about portrait photography’s relationship with power,
London-based Lathigra is currently a Senior Lecturer at the London College of Communication and continues to create editorial and commercial work alongside his artistic projects.

The Art & Environment Prize is a new annual award organised by Maison Guerlain and Lee Ufan Arles, launched in 2023. The inaugural recipient of the prize is French artist, Djabril Boukhenaïssi, who is supported with a residency and exhibition — selected by Lee Ufan alongside a jury of experts from 381 entries.

Boukhenaïssi is a painter and engraver influenced by French and German philosophy and literature, (the artist also holds a degree in philosophy) whose delicate works draw on personal sketches of his past experiences. Boukhenaïssi spent eight weeks in the ancient city of Arles creating new works for the Art & Environment Prize exhibition at the Lee Ufans foundation — paintings and prints inspired by ‘nightfall’ and representations of the night, a recurrent theme in the artist’s work.

This oil and pastel work, Saint Blaise, is inspired by the church of the same name in Arles, a building with history dating back to the 12th century and possibly earlier, originally as a conventual chapel for the abbey of Saint Cesaire. With swathes of violence to represent the night, this evocative and hazy representation evokes the depths of a dream.
The artist’s first solo exhibition at Mariane Ibrahim gallery, Chicago, will take place in autumn next year.

The South African photographer Tshepiso Mazibuko belongs to the ‘born free’ generation, South Africans born after apartheid, with the hopes and promises of a more equal society. The reality for many Black South Africans, however, is still extremely difficult in a society riddled with inequalities and injustice.

Mazibuko trained in photography at the Market Photo Workshop, the institution set up by David Goldblatt that has since produced many of the country’s leading international names in the medium of photography. It was there that Mazibuko found her voice and decided she needed to document her own reality, as she saw it – her series of photographs titled ‘Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe’, a proverb meaning ‘to believe in something that will never happen’, focuses on young black people, ‘born frees’ who like her live in the township of Thokoza, around thirty kilometres from Johannesburg – whose meaning in English is ‘place of peace’. Thokoza historically was established as a black township for labourers, with poor living conditions persisting to today. In the lead up to the 1994 elections, Mazibuko saw violent clashes.

Mazibuko deals with life in the township today, as it appears to her and her generation. Despite the obvious and suggested hardships in her photographs, the faces of children and young people she portrays are determined and proud. They persevere because no matter their circumstances, there is still a sense of hope and change that may yet make good on the born free promise.

Last week, Tshepiso Mazibuko was named the winner of the 2024 Madame Figaro Photo Prize and is the recipient of the Louis Roederer Foundation 2024 Discovery People’s Choice Award. Her series Ho tshepa ntshepedi ya bontshepe (To Believe in something that will never happen) is on view at the Louis Roederer Foundation 2024 Discovery Award exhibition, curated by Audrey Illouz, at Les Recontres D’Arles (until September 29, 2024).

You can almost smell the ocean breeze in Beatriz Milhazes’s captivating abstract paintings burst with intense colour and bold geometric patterns. The Brazilian artist’s inspiration for both of these elements is found in her hometown Rio de Janiero: the luscious tropical scenes of the Tijuca rainforest, just a stone’s throw from the artist’s studio; the bustling promenade along the city’s beaches; Baroque and architecture, Catholic iconography – all part of the rich and complex fabric of her homeland’s culture.

Milhazes refers to her style as “chromatic free geometry.” Her large-scale canvases were an important part of a Brazilian movement known as Geração 80, who pushed towards a visceral kind of abstract painting, a sharp move away from the heavily conceptual language of artists who defined Brazil’s art scene in the 1970s. In that exciting milieu, Milhazes brought the approach of collage to painting, and by the end of the 1980s she had come up with her signature ‘monotransfer’ method, painting her own motifs onto plastic sheets that are then transposed onto the canvas.

The resulting multi-layered canvases often stretch to several metres in size – the metallic and fluorescent pigments and illusory patterns seem to vibrate and have a magnetic force. It’s no wonder Milhazes has become such a sought-after figure, with a four-decade survey currently underway at Tate St Ives, until 29 September 2024. Overlooking the same ocean that Milhazes is inspired by, it’s a perfect setting for paintings that are the quintessence of the feeling of freedom and summer.

As we continue to honour contemporary queer artists through Pride Month and beyond at The Wick, we look to the woven, whittled and welded sculptures of Ugandan artist Leila Babirye. Babirye was forced to flee her home country in 2015 after her sexuality was revealed in a local newspaper. The Ugandan Parliament had since passed the Anti-Homosexuality Act in March 2023, criminalizing consensual same-sex conduct with penalties of up to life imprisonment, and the death penalty for those convicted of “aggravated homosexuality,” which includes repeated same sex acts. LGBTQI people face widespread, endemic violence and discrimination. In 2018, Babirye was granted asylum in the US.

In her adopted home of New York, Babirye collects discarded items from the streets, transforming these unwanted items into defiant objects of beauty. Traditional African masks, hand carved in wood or cast in clay, are incorporated into her sculptures too, representing the diverse community she lives among – such as this vibrant piece constructed of glazed ceramic, wood, wax, bicycle tubes and found objects, nailed together into a totem that appears both strong and fragile.

Describing her process, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general.”