flat 70 is a community arts project in SE17.
We exist to support artistic, therapeutic & redistributive exchange between our existing and emerging community.
flat 70 is a community arts project in SE17.
We exist to support artistic, therapeutic & redistributive exchange between our existing and emerging community.
New Mo(nu)ments is the first solo exhibition by Nigerian-Austrian artist Cameron Ugbodu following their migration to London from Vienna.
The show features a body of photographic work produced as part of an ongoing research project. The show features a body of photographic work produced as part of an ongoing research project in collaboration with hair and makeup artist Fey Carla Adediji (@feycarlaa), who crowns each sitter with surprising and innovative sculptural forms.
Six slightly larger than life portraits take inspiration from West African sculptural traditions including; the Benin Bronzes, Akan gold weights and traditional wooden and organic material sculpture. As far as Cameron Ugbodu can remember, these busts and statuettes provided his first exposure to art thanks to a grandfather who shipped several pieces to Austria as wedding gifts from Nigeria. These sculptural traditions, Cameron Ugbodu proposes, belong in the public realm. In the wake of political uprisings that saw colonial statues torn down and truth restored to compromised histories, new monuments are ready to assume their vacant plinths. Cameron Ugbodu’s new monuments for a nu moment prefigures this new landscape as we pose the questions; which narratives, which individuals and which communities are given the right to commemoration in public spaces?
Floating in a continuous white field, six portraits contour light, hair and human form to reveal a soft Black permanence. Hair and make-up artist Fey Carla Adediji, continues their collaboration with Cameron and crowns each sitter with surprising and innovative sculptural forms. Rejecting the overrepresentation of cis white males, Cameron Ugbodu works with sitters ‘that present themselves’ from a broad range of backgrounds. The openness of the models poses, a visual language reduced to the essential and the installation of the show invites viewers from an equally broad range of backgrounds to step in and see a little of themselves in the work. Cameron Ugbodu intends to keep expanding the project and making more images of people from different cities all over the world.
Presented in collaboration with curators Senam & Anthony Badu, the work is entrusted
to flat 70, a black led community arts project currently poised within Elephant & Castles £4bn urban development. The non-profit space is itself a blank canvas and an ode to the tearing down of historic spaces and communities in SE17. While new spaces are constructed in their place, with little regard to local consensus, home will be where the art is.
This limited-edition print series is the result of British-Ghanaian photographer AZCB’s (b. 1991) residence in his native Ghana from 2018-2019. Somnambular derives from the Latin for sleepwalking and is used here to evoke the surrealism of lucid dreaming in west African humidity. The series is characterised by the poetry of DIY culture. AZCB documents a variety of impermanent spaces woven together through brief artistic, charitable and political collaborations. Pop up art-squats encounter the Volta region’s annual carnival Hogbetsoso. Crowds of dancehall fans lob missiles unbeknownst to gossiping schoolgirls under the shade of a tamarind tree. Sleepwalking through equatorial Africa, the idle observer might overlook the sites of urban and rural acupuncture carving temporary sites of easeful freedom for young Ghanaians.
flat70 shares this keen interest in temporary sites of resistance and is pleased to present a body of work from one of our co-founders as the opening exhibition for our 12 month residency on Sayer Street.
Interested in the ways seeds carry stories, her practice has focused on the cross-cultural symbolism of corn, or maíz, for it’s pertinence in the ancient Mayan civilisation where the corn crop was not only considered Mother and provider, but as the creator of humankind.
flat 70 is delighted to offer her handmade, soy wax candles for purchase in store.