Hoówen – curated by Living Land Collective
8-9 Dover Street London W1S 4LF
PV: Thursday, 10th October 2024
Kindly supported by Tanqueray No. TEN
Open: 11th October – 1st November 2024
Tuesday to Friday, 10-6pm
Saturday, 10-5 pm
Sunday (13th October only), 10-5 pm
Please join us for our Dover Street debut of “Hoówen”. Living Land Collective and Hypha Studios present an exhibition of 7 international Indigenous and Diasporic artists who are fighting to restore an Indigenous worldview. Living Land Collective provides insight into the realities of post-colonial identities that have been harmed by genocide, occupation, language and culture loss, child theft, environmental destruction, displacement and assimilation.
Living Land Collective is currently comprised of artists; Claudia Ramirez Julio, Hayett Belarbi McCarthy, Henri Affandi, Laura Ní Fhlaibhín, MARIA, Michael James Fox & Tyler Eash.
The London based artist group was formed to foster discourse between occupied and displaced peoples of the world. The artists use their respective practices to reclaim buried discourses pertaining to post-colonial identities that have been forcefully displaced or assimilated by an occupation of “nations” that sought their erasure. Whilst the members all engage in art as a liberatory action to reclaim and embolden their ancestral identities, the artists represent Land from different corners of the world. Their practices speak to their respective causes and struggles for visibility, and make reference to both ancestral wisdom and a longing for what was taken.
“Hoówen”, a word surviving the Selk’nam Genocide of “Tierra del Fuego”, is the name for the natural forces and spirits that undergo metamorphosis to become humans and nature to restore harmony. As the 7 artists bring forward powerful acts of colonial defiance and liberatory visions of Indigenous Futurity in response to loss, confusion, and grief, “Hoówen”, was the word gifted to define the intentionality of Living Land Collective’s first project.
Comprising of painting, sculpture, film, photography and installation, “Hoówen” is a collective act of world rebuilding that claims a sovereign territory in West London’s Dover Street. The artists, who bridge opposing worldviews within their lives and bodies, seek to initiate healing between these states of being. Through a collective sharing of global Diasporic and Indigenous strife and a meshing of our surviving ancestral wisdom, “Hoówen” proclaims Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples of the world as united and aligned for the protection of the Earth and all her children.
Artists
Claudia Ramirez Julio
Henri Affandi
Hayett Belarbi McCarthy
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
MARIA
Michael James Fox
Tyler Eash
Featured Artworks
Tyler Eash
18min
Tyler Eash
Oil, acrylic, pigment, and car paint on cowhide, cotton gauze, and wood stretcher, with willow, abalone and digger pine nut beads
Claudia Ramirez Julio
300H x 240W x 240D (cm)
Soft sculpture installation, natural fibres; alpaca,
bamboo and cotton, seeds, hand and digital
embroidery, crochet, hand-woven, digital print,
sound and video projection.
Hayett Belarbi-McCarthy
62 x 52 cm
Digital print on calico, wood, foam
Henri Affandi
Chinese Lesson, 2023
White emulsion on black and white wall
1 hour 50 minutes
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Stainless steel bar, stainless steel wheel, vomit bag gifted to Laura at Kings hospital endometriosis unit, willow shoots, water, uv grow light, Laura’s sharps container, beeswax from Wexford, cable ties
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Laura’s micro lance, beeswax heart
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Bronze cast fungus, twin engine oil bottles, stainless steel chain, stainless steel carabiners, stainless steel sheet, carbon, wood ash, digitally embroidered poem on pile of incontinence bed-pads
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín
Cast bronze marl spirits, stainless steel chain, stainless steel carabiners
MARIA
PLA 3D Print, brass laser cut stars, foraged wood, wall paint, jute rope
MARIA
33 cm blade length
Plaster, rose petals, kaneleon
Michael James Fox
Photographic print , plastic bag, clamps, PVC pipe
Claudia Ramírez Julio
Mask series, cotton, silk, cardboard, and hand embroidery
50 x 43 x 43 cm
artist bios
Claudia Ramírez Julio (b. Chile, 1973). She is a London-based visual artist, storyteller, poet, performer, and educator. Born in the Atacama Desert during the tumultuous Chilean military coup, she carries the rich traditions of her Diaguita and Mapuche ancestors and a deep connection with the Selk’nam people. Her artistic practice is a beautiful tapestry that intertwines her Indigenous heritage with contemporary perspectives. She creates artwork that sheds light on hidden social, Indigenous, and cultural identity stories that have been manipulated and ignored. Claudia has a research-orientated practice and explores the possibilities of visual storytelling using performance, sound, oral language, moving images, and textiles. These elements interact to construct narratives that reclaim and celebrate Indigenous stories and experiences.
Henri Affandi (b. 1998) is a conceptual artist of Chinese and Minahasan heritage, currently based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Affandi’s practice and research explore themes such as post-colonialism, migration, identity, and indigenous liberation, particularly in Indonesia. Utilising performance-based and contemporary elements of art-making, they seek to reclaim the art space as an act of decolonisation and resistance against late-stage capitalism.
Hayett Belarbi McCarthy is a sculptor who works with wood, textiles, resin and found objects . She is interested in drawing parallels between cultures and eras , opening discussions about history and in re-interpreting, re-imagining those in her work, in an almost fictional way. She creates an anachronistic world sometimes combining antique materials (such as the repeated 18th century French silk) with symbols nodding to her Arabo-Amazigh heritage forever oscillating between the estranged and familiar , the obsolete and the current, the clumsy and the confident . Her ,at times, humorous approach undertones a yearning for clarity in today’s “post-colonial” world . Hayett is first generation French , born to an Algerian mother and London-Irish father, this widely informs her practice, curiosity and research about diasporic cultures, geo-politics and untold histories . She graduated with an MFA at Goldsmiths University of London in 2024 with a Lisson Gallery Scholarship
Laura Ní Fhlaibhín is a visual artist from Wexford and works with sculpture, installation, writing and drawing. Laura Ní Fhlaibhín completed her MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 and her BA at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2013. She is the recipient of Goldsmiths Almacantar Bursary 2019, Arts Council of Ireland Next Generation Award 2020, Arts Council England Developing Creative Practice Award 2021 and Arts Council of Ireland Bursaries. She is a Gilbert Bayes Royal Sculpture Society Awardee 2024. Laura’s work features in the Arts Council of Ireland collection and private collections. Exhibitions include Britta Rettberg Gallery, Munich (2024), The Complex Dublin (2024) Belmacz London (2023) Palfrey London (2020). Laura will be in residence at British School of Rome, 2025.
MARIA (b, South Dakota) is a London-based high femme Latine/American writer, performer, and artist making sculptural installations, performances, video and sound that eviscerate and reassemble the intersections of chronic illness, race, and notions of community by using herself/body as a conduit and muse. She combines natural and digital materials to engineer environments that create radical bodily connections between cyber and organic networks. Through the excavation of her personal history and exploring the politicized intersections of her being, she creates installations and objects that evoke speculative realities while also speaking frankly about her lived experiences. Her materials range from working with 3D printing, video, sound, foraged organic materials, laser cut metal, wax, and combining them with materials such as earth, rose petals and gold leaf. MARIA creates installations relating to unique moments of illness, recovery, and how it is inseparable from larger experiences of racial marginalization while also being rooted in daily life. MARIA was formerly based in Columbus, OH and while there, was a member of MINT Collective. Currently she has completed her MFA with Distinction from Goldsmiths (2022) and is the 2023 recipient of the Goldsmiths Award/Acme Early Career Award, Bursary, and Residency. Her work has been shown internationally with shows i know it’s the end & I am full of beauty (2021) at Beeler Gallery at CCAD and #SpeakingThroughMasks (2020) at ABCNoRio in NYC, Kenophobic Pantomimes at Below Grand (NYC) 2023, and Oracles and Algorithms at Copperfield Gallery (2022). She also has recently opened shows in 2024 at Kupfer Projects, Goodeye Studio Residencies and Studio Chapple (solo). Her work will be seen next at the MINOR ATTRACTIONS ART FAIR through Studio/Chapple, HOÓWEN at Dover Street, SAATCHI Gallery in January and at PILOT Gallery in Riga, Latvia.
Michael James Fox (b. Colombia) is a New-York raised and London based photographer and moving image artist who works with analog conceptual photography and custom image processing techniques. Through exploring dissociation as a form of abstraction and protection, his gentle, immersive aesthetic evolves from a deep interest in color and concern with how materiality can contain, separate or preserve. Inspired by painting and with abstraction at the heart of his practice, Fox’s works transform the functional and quotidian into something intangible, intimate and dreamlike. His photographs take on a sculptural physicality that both documents and reimagines the objects that preoccupy him, constantly exploring how the abstract obfuscates and reveals.
Tyler Eash (1988, Turtle Island/USA), is a Maidu & Modoc 2 Spirit artist, poet, and performer. As a queer artist of both Indigenous American and Irish descent, their work engages the medium of identity as the last frontier of true sovereignty. In their practice, the body and its ancestral history presents both a document and an avatar to represent the desires of a post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-gender self; becoming an interface between their Indigenous world view and the colonial realms of “high culture”. Eash explores this frontier in a post-disciplinary fashion; using painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, film, music, poetry and performance as a means to reclaim space, history, and an identity that has been endangered by the California Genocide and the colonial invention of the “California Dream”. With recent exhibitions curated by Danielle Seewalker (Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe) and Angelica Trimble-Yanu (Oglála Lakȟóta Sioux Nation of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation) and with a commission from Māori/Samoan Seer, Janelle Murphy, descendant of Dame Whina Cooper, “Mother of the Nation” of Aotearoa (NZ), Eash’s practiceserves as a bridge between colonial and colonised Peoples. Tyler Eash holds a Masters in Fine Arts with Distinction from Goldsmiths University of London, 2019. Tyler Eash works between London, UK, and the forests of the Maidu in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Tyler Eash is represented in the UK by Nicoletti Contemporary.
Selected solo exhibitions include: All the World’s Horses, NıCOLETTı, London, UK, 2023; Channel 1, Further, San Francisco, Ca, USA, 2022; Marysville, Oh Holy Land, Four Fourteen Gallery, Marysville, Ca, USA, 2022; Lilies in the Headlights (with Roxman Gatt) curated by Giulia Menegale, London, UK, 2021; Loreum, NICOLETTI, London, UK, 2020; and Mountain, B. Dewitt Gallery, curated by Camille Brechignac, London, UK, 2019.
Selected group exhibitions and performances: Forthcoming: Sea Inside, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, UK, 2025; Exodus, curated by Janelle Murphy, Auckland, Aotearoa, NZ, 2025; Duo with Anthony Baussy, Sherbert Green, London, UK (2025). Re-Discovering Native America: Stories in Motion with The Red Road Project, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, Ca, USA, 2024; Channel, Centre D’Arte Contemporain de Nîmes, Nîmes Triennial, Nîmes, FR; Drück nur auf die Klinke, Jägerschere, Niederer- Fläming, DE, 2022; La forme de l’eau, Galerie Joseph, Paris, FR, 2022; MacArthur Park, curated by Will Ballantyne-Reid, Cromwell Place, London, UK, 2022, Sun Kissed, NÉVÉ, Los Angeles, Ca, USA, 2022; Holding, Ceremony, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, Ca, USA, 2022.
contact information
Email: [email protected]
Socials: @tylereash @foxy_azucar @hayett.belarbi.mccarthy @light.dot @michael__j__fox @henri.affandi @lauranifhlaibhin
Website: tylereash.com