Translucent Intersections

Everything is interconnected

From the stardust in the cosmos hurtling through our atmosphere to the microbiome living in your gut, eventually, everything converges with absolutely everything.

Eight London artists, inspired by the idea of interconnectedness, bring their work together in Translucent Intersections, a multi-media exhibition with diverse subjects covering the body and the land, nature and artificiality, time, and re-presentation. It takes place at APT Gallery in Deptford, London from November 13 to November 30.

This is not a show with a singular theme. The further we peel ourselves away from siloed, singularly layered identifiers the more we can appreciate the complexity of our bonds to one another and the world around us.

With this sentiment, Translucent Intersections has been co-curated and organised; interrelations between the artists’ works have unfolded through dialogue over time. This group of artists is inter-generational and inter-national. Alberto Romano, Anta Germane, Geoff Titley, Héloïse Bergman, Joanna Penso, Matthew Stock, Miraj Ahmed and Robyn Litchfield work in a range of media including film, installation, performance, sculpture, photography, printing and painting.

Ruminating on how the body and the land we inhabit are intrinsically linked, artworks within the show look to investigate our environmental relationships, highlight the impact of travel on our bodies and challenge ideas of ownership/entitlement. Alberto Romano’s portraits of Palermo city residents highlight the connection to land and its history through their life stories, whilst Robyn Litchfield’s hypnotic paintings allude to a nostalgia for a time before man had ravished pristine landscapes, blurring the boundaries between reality, longing and imagination.

Joanna Penso’s film & sound installation registers a sensorial clash in flight between the view of the gods gazing out at dreamy clouds casting shadows on the land below and the sound of the internal mayhem happening within the body as we squeeze ourselves into tiny seats, vibrations from the plane engine ricocheting through bones.

Through the deconstruction of photography processes, artists presenting within Translucent Intersections are also exploring how representation and re-presentation can alter our notions of time and context. Anta Germane traverses time and space through mark making with light, holding long-exposures that can only be experienced through the process of photography. Héloïse Bergman propagates and grows specific plants, with which she creates ephemeral portraits of her community, which embody  the fleeting and fragile condition of human life.

Matthew Stock presents a live performance challenging the politics of touring shows where context is constantly switching; does the artwork lose its sentiment over time without curatorial care?

The tussle between what is 'Natural’ Vs ‘Artificial’ is a conversation which has permeated through society with every new technology that has surfaced. Geoff Titley explores re-presentation of our relationship with fragile ecologies through layers of translation; taking scans of organic matter, transforming them into 3D prints, transfixed in their decomposition, frozen in time. Miraj Ahmed also works through layers of translation with his paintings, playing a game of exquisite corpse with Artificial Intelligence, taking it in turns to add to the work.

This collaboration with artificial intelligence runs through the curation of the show, with artists asking chatGPT to find a glossary of connections between the works on show in addition to those identified through the artists’ dialogue. Exhibition texts generated by AI processes are also on offer as an alternative to this human-generated version you’re reading now. What does it mean to co-curate with machine intelligence? Who might AI curate a show for, when artworks are made for and by humans with physical forms?