East, London
Arlene Wandera
3 Bodies
HousingHousing is pleased to present Arlene Wandera’s 3 Bodies. 3 Bodies features work drawn from three distinct series from Arlene Wandera, weaving them together into a narrative and allowing them the space and conversation with which to interact and compound each other. The first body of work, Nothing to Declare, explores process—deliberate, calculated, sometimes accidental. It speaks of balance, of the “color” black, and documents the human condition as a series of actions. It invites the viewer to meditate on this, eliciting landscapes and portraits as through memory, and speaks of the artist’s home village in Kenya. It pays tribute to Black avant-garde artists whilst utilizing traditional Japanese techniques in order to build its intense visual symbolism. The second, On the Ladder, is an activated sculpture consisting of figures and found objects collected from Venice, London, and Johannesburg. The first iteration (2017), documented below for reference, was presented at the Kenya Pavilion for the Venice Biennale and was inspired by the artist’s personal and emotional associations with textual fragments from James Baldwin’s novel ‘Another Country’, through which she was particularly interested in creating balance within a tension-fuelled environment from different angles: physical, emotional, and conceptual. In order to magnify this notion, she worked with pieces that were made and sourced from different regions in order to explore how they negotiated and reckoned with the space and resources they found themselves within. The 2018 adaptation of this, which we are exhibiting, maintains the intended representative integrity but rests on breeze blocks and thus moves freely, physically exploring the space it occupies. The third, This kind of show is made by squeezing, borrows its title from a line within a Gertrude Stein poem. Wandera, inspired by Stein’s experimental use of language, investigates the obscured ideas that lie within objects, in this case, books, sussing their hidden iterations out of themselves and creating an opportunity to venture into unwalked paths of interpretation—ones that reveal a horizon. In doing so, she re-orients the way we grapple with the historical, cultural, and emotional connections we experience through everyday interactions with these objects. Arlene Wandera (b. 1981, Kenya) moved to the UK with her family before her teens. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and is one half of the collaborative duo Duck & Rabbit Projects. Arlene’s work has been shown both nationally and internationally including at Venice Biennale, Tiwani Gallery, Goodman Gallery, Dak’Art Biennale, and 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair. Wandera is based in London. Her practice frequently begins with the process, pushing the physical boundaries of material and objects to the edge of resistance and then surrender. Arlene’s work is also prompted by occupying the space between two cultures, focusing on nostalgia, conflict, harmony, social interaction, and double meaning. Often using common and overlooked items that imprint on our daily lives, Arlene reworks, confounds, and teases out unorthodox, alternative, and sometimes playful outcomes that exist as objects, experiences, performances, still or moving images. Arlene has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most notably, she represented Kenya at the 57th Venice Biennale and participated in the 13th and 11th in Dak’Art Biennial where she was selected as one of ten artists to watch.