Mar 2015 09

Gary Hill

Sarah Maple

Lee Weinberg

Jasvinder Sanghera

Paul Robinson


Gary hill

Gary Hill – an American artist lives and works in Seattle, Washington, often viewed as one of the foundational artists in video art, passionate about women and their beauty. Art historian Lynne Cooke summarizes:

“A pioneer in his embrace of the then novel medium of video, Hill distinguished himself through a radical approach that both literally and conceptually deconstructed it. Single channel works were soon followed by installations in which video screens were unhoused, suspended, multiplied, miniaturized, or otherwise manipulated.

On other occasions, video tubes mysteriously projected unframed images in dark fields or from oscillating beacons panning an empty room, text and figure swivelled in anamorphic distortion. No artist of Hill’s generation probed this medium with such invasive scrutiny, and none deployed it with such protean irreverence. And when his restless curiosity led him to computer based technologies and virtual space in the early Nineties, few of his peers proved so avid or dedicated in exploiting this uncharted terrain for art making.

Since he rarely deployed technology as a tool in service to an exploration of the visual world, questions of representation have played a relatively minor role in his work: typically, he treats mediums as sites and enablers of languages both verbal and visual. Surveying with hindsight what now amounts to more than three decades of his activity, it’s striking how far his path has veered from his peers’ and not least because it betrays so few allegiances to histories of representation.

Sarah Maple - Jury at Passion For Freedom 2014

Sarah Maple – the best of the new young British artists’ lives in her native Sussex, feminist and activist

Beverley Knowles summarizes:
“Sarah Maple’s artwork is unfailingly bold and brave, not for the coy or faint of heart. These unflinching, occasionally even controversial, investigations into what it is to be a woman and a Muslim in 21st century Britain are made joyful by her own very personal brand of boisterous, tongue-in-cheek humour.

This is not sensationalism for sensationalism’s sake, but rather a heart felt urge by a twenty-seven-year old artist of great sincerity and talent, for the viewer to look again, and this time with a more questioning eye, at traditionally accepted notions of identity, gender, culture and religion.”

Lee Weinberg Photo PFF

Lee Weinbergis an independent curator and academic working between London, UK and Haifa, Israel. She recently submitted her PHD thesis (Goldsmiths, University of London) on the topic of Curating the Immaterial and the role of the curator in contemporary culture.

Before embarking on an independent and academic career, Lee worked as assistant
curator and curator at the Haifa Museum of Art, and as an educational project
manager in the Haifa Museums’ education department (2004-2011). In these
capacities, Lee initiated and pursued projects that aimed at opening up the space of
the museum to a diverse set of audiences, raising the awareness to the possibility of
using the museum as a communal space for meeting and experimenting with various
forms of dialogue. Lee had since engaged in various independent projects at the
Boston-Haifa Connection (2008), Arbyte Gallery (2012), BL_NK (2014) and Haifa’s
urban space (2008-ongoing, in collaboration with curator Yeala Hazut).
In her projects Lee is interested in using curatorial frameworks as platforms for the
generation of inter-cultural and inter-disciplinary exchange. Her projects aim at
providing opportunities for experimenting with the production of the social sphere.
Her interests in the relationship between curating and the social sphere led Lee to
work with digital and new-media that shed light over the the internet as a liminal
abstract space that is both public and private. Together with artist and programmer
Dr Eleanor Dare, she is developing the Visual Art Interpretation and Navigation
System (VAINS), a repository, search and recommendation tool for digital online art
practices.
She is currently working with Hackney Council, Haifa Municipality and Beit Hagefen
Arab-Jewish Cultural Centre on establishing an artists’ residency and exchange
programme, based on the twinning agreement between Haifa and Hackney. The
residency’s programme is dedicated to community-based and socially engaged art
projects and seeks to create a platform for expressive dialogues and the research of
urban and communal spaces as a site for meaningful inter-cultural encounters. Lee
has been living in London for the past 5 years, teaching at Goldsmiths, University of
East London, JW3 and other alternative educational frameworks. Her articles and
reviews have been published in various magazines and peer-reviewed journals.

Jasvinder-Sanghera-campai
Jasvinder Sanghera is an outspoken campaigner and advocate for the rights
of those experiencing forced marriages and honour based abuse.
She is the founder of Karma Nirvana established in her front room 1993.
Karma Nirvana is now a national and international charity that has been
instrumental in developing several refuge centres across the United Kingdom
serve as safe-housing for South Asian men and women fleeing forced marriages.

When faced with the prospect of a forced marriage herself, she ran away from home,
and she tells her story in her true story in Shame, published by Hodder and Stoughton
and those of other British victims in her second book, Daughters of Shame.
Both books have been translated into various languages including Japanese, Polish, Spanish.

Jasvinder had been awarded several awards in recognition for her contribution
in the field of forced marriages and honour based violence including:

The Woman of the Year Award 2007
Pride of Britain Award 2009
Global Punjabi Society Award 2012
Cosmopolitan Wonder Woman Award 2010
Inspirational Woman of the Year Award 2008
Asian Woman Achievement Award 2007
Ambassador for Peace Award 2008

Jasvinder has been listed as one of the Guardian’s 100 most Inspirational Women in the World

Paul Robinson

Paul Carter Robinson is founding partner and CEO Artlyst – a comprehensive international what’s on guide for art events, exhibitions, fairs and auctions. This free interactive publishing forum for art related news, reviews and articles is open to all registered users and membership is free.
From the punk rock background of a successful arts entrepreneur, through synchronistic meetings on street corners to the focused determination to stay the course, Paul is now a photo/journalist/editor of NUJ (National Union Of Journalists) He writes and curates emerging contemporary Art and Design.