Saturday 19 November 2011

Entropy and fluidity in Afghanistan

William Cobbing and Carlos Noronha Feio

Date: Wednesday 7th December 2011, 2-4pm
Venue: Green Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Millbank


William Cobbing, Bamiyan Mirror, 2009

William Cobbing completed his PhD by Practice at Middlesex University in 2010. He is a Senior Lecturer in BA Fine Art: Sculpture at Wimbledon and is supervising a CCW PhD.

Starting from a sculptural sensibility, Cobbing’s art encompasses video, installation and performance. People are often depicted in fusion with their architectural surroundings, as extensions of the plumbing, or buried under layers of clay or concrete from which they absurdly struggle to extricate themselves. Human limbs appear trapped in buildings, suggesting a process of entropy through which their materiality is dispersed, the boundaries between the body and the landscape are blurred and meaning is disrupted. Cobbing will present Bamiyan Mirror, a recent series of photographs of the destroyed Buddha niches in Afghanistan, their ghostly shadows reflected in a mirror. The series will be exhibited in Scope: New Photographic Practices at Beijing University, November 2011.


Carlos Noronha Feio The End (Birth and Fertility, Good News), 2008

Carlos Noronha Feio is in the first year of a full-time PhD by Practice at the RCA. His practice includes actions, performance, video, drawing, painting, photography and installation as research into cultural, local and global identity. He frequently adopts culturally significant images, locations and symbols as a form of creative interference with meaning, demonstrating the almost arbitrary nature in which cultural significance may be adopted or interpreted. Improvisation, repetition and conflicting juxtapositions are used to explore issues of communicating with otherness and the inherent fluidity of meaning. Noronha Feio will present A A and Away, a series of rugs he has been producing for the last five years that create bridges between Afghan war rugs and traditional rugs from Portugal. Illustrating perceptions of difference between the cultures of two politically and geographically disparate places, the rugs call attention to the two countries’ common past.


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