This Cruel Temple

Unit 3, Euston Tower, 286 Euston Road, NW1 3DP

PV: Thursday, 27th February 2025

Open: 28th February – 5th April 2025

The exhibiting artists will be Hannah Absalom, Hollie Palmer, Meej Douglas, Bodie Stanley, Em Doodles, and Edoardo Rito working under the collective This Cruel Temple. They’ve been collaborating on projects over the past 2 years during their MAFA at Central Saint Martins and have overlapping interests in ritual and world building.

Rito, Absalom and Palmer have wall-based work attached with screws. Absalom’s painting is to be suspended from the ceiling by butchers-hooks and chains (if suspension isn’t permitted, alternative methods can be found). Meej’s film is projected with sound through headphones. Doodles, Palmer and Stanley’s sculptures are freestanding and evolve to the site. Meej’s film would be on loop, with cinema chairs to watch the film from. Stanley’s musical sculpture can be played by audiences and creates a jarring soundtrack to the space. We have our own tools and AV equipment. Meej and Doodles’ experimental band to have multiple performances.

Their practices consist of sculpture, installation, painting, tufting, ceramics, film, and poetry. Within This Cruel Temple the collective’s works cease to be individual pieces and through an act of fictioning become one iconographic world in which the viewer walks around portals to unwelcoming yet ludic worlds. The body is absent, iconographised, or decayed within the works, but the site is activated through performance; the drone and chant of Doodles and Meej’s experimental live music,
or the shrill clanging of Stanley’s sculpture, part instrument and part barricade. Dada-ist group texts unite the work and build an abstract mythology.

Public Programme will include:
Knitted Tongues – multiple performances.
Doodles – writing and zine-making workshop
Group – cut-up writing workshop.
Palmer – punch-needling workshop, beginner-advanced.
Stanley – regularly delivers community workshops to children who live on council estates, to deliver a workshop in which he
uses recycled materials to build DIY instruments.
Meej – event screening of their film with Q+A
Group – two life drawing events – drawing from assemblage and life drawing of a Knitted Tongues performance.
Group – artist talks with collective talk and Q&A’s, one through the weekend, another a weekday evening, live streamed and
recorded for accessibility.