Saturday 25 March 19:00 - 23:00

Reference Point
2 Arundel Street
London
WC2R 3DA

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Book Launch & Talk | XXX: Aziz + Cucher 1992 – 2022

Performing & Visual Arts

Gazelli Art House is pleased to invite you to Aziz + Cucher's Book Launch & Talk.

2022 marks the 30th anniversary of the artists’ collaboration, and to celebrate this milestone La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) and Gazelli Art House are pleased to present XXX: Aziz + Cucher 1992—2022. Covering the artists’ entire career, this monograph will include 130 full-colour reproductions of the work that the artists have created together since 1992. Essays by independent curator Agustin Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D’Souza will be featured, along with a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Join us to celebrate their book launch with a talk and afterparty at Reference Point in London UK. The talk invites Aziz + Cucher to a conversation with Martin Barnes (Curator of Photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum). Doors open at 7 PM, and talk starts at 7:30 PM (GMT) sharp.

About Aziz + Cucher

Anthony Aziz (B. 1961, USA) and Sammy Cucher (B. 1958, Peru) have worked together as artistic duo Aziz + Cucher since 1992. Experimenting across a variety of media including digital imaging, sculpture, animation, and video installation, their work is marked by a distinctive concern for technology’s impact on the body and society.

Regarded as innovators in the field of post-photography, Aziz + Cucher have long held a cross disciplinary conversation between the painterly and photographic. Not only were earlier series, such as Dystopia (1994-95), based on the conventions of portraiture established in the Renaissance, but their production involved a kind of electronic painting where pigment and paint were replaced by pixels and data. The dynamic relationship between these two mediums tipped decisively towards the painterly in later series, such as Synaptic Bliss (2004-2013) and Scenapse (2007-2013) where colour and line became key expressive elements.

More recent series have encompassed ideas of collective consciousness, political and social unrest, and the effects of technological mediation. Fascinated by the pictorial storytelling and exacting craftsmanship of classical weaving, Aziz + Cucher’s tapestry series Some People Tapestry Cycle (2014-17) looks to evoke the senselessness and futility of these ongoing conflicts and the anxiety of the historical moment we all inhabit.

Aziz + Cucher have been exhibited globally, notably at the 46th Venice Biennale, with works held in museum collections including: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The New School Art Collection, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Based in Brooklyn, the artists are members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design (New York) and are recipients of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in both 2017 and 2022.

About Martin Barnes

Martin Barnes is Senior Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) London which he joined in 1995. Previously, he worked for the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and studied at the University of Leicester and the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Since 1997 he has worked on the Photography Gallery at the V&A, which draws exhibitions from the Museum’s national collection of the art of photography. He has also curated numerous UK touring exhibitions, including Aspects of Architecture; Where Are We; Questions of Landscape and Something That I’ll Never Really See; Contemporary Photography from the V&A and was the V&A curator for the exhibitions: Diane Arbus Revelations (2005-6); Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour (2006); Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography (2010) and co-curator of Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography (2011).

His publications include Benjamin Brecknell Turner. Rural England through a Victorian Lens, (V&A Publications, 2001); Illumine. Photographs by Garry Fabian Miller. A Retrospective (Merrell, 2005); Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour (V&A / Merrell, 2006) and Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography ( V&A / Merrell, 2010).

He was editor of Talking Photography, a catalogue of the audio and visual collections of the British Library National Sound Archive, where he is an interviewer for the Oral History of British Photography project. He has written articles and essays on various contemporary photographers for publications and journals including Aperture and Portfolio, entries for The Folio Society Book of the 100 Greatest Photographs (2006) and the Encyclopaedia of Nineteenth Century Photography (2007) and contributed to international exhibition catalogues on the role of photography in the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts Movements.

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