A longform collaboration between the artist-filmmaker Tereza Stehlikova and artist-poet SJ Fowler takes shape in an exhibition of experimental documentary, found sculpture and abstract writing. Exploring, recording and revealing the environs of industrial West London, this exhibition creates a temporary shrine to overlooked corners, pathways and ley lines of an area of London soon to face major redevelopment. Taking in vistas and flotsam from across Wormwood Scrubs, Kensal Green Cemetery, the Grand Union Canal and beyond, this fusion of artistic methods, centred around a feature length film previously screened at Whitechapel Gallery, aims to offer an aperture into the lived in, urbane and often unseen beauty of a part of London soon to change.
The exhibition of part of an ongoing collaboration between Stehlikova and Fowler, begun in 2015, which aims to document the disappearing. So far the endeavour has created multiple films, new performances, events, publications and a month long exhibition as part of an extended residency with the Dissenter's Chapel at Kensal Green Cemetery in 2017.
The artists
SJ Fowler is a writer, poet and artist who lives in London. His work has been commissioned by Tate Modern, BBC Radio 3, Somerset House, Tate Britain, London Sinfonietta, Southbank Centre, National Centre for Writing, National Poetry Library, Science Museum and Liverpool Biennial amongst others. As of 2021, he has published ten collections of poetry, five of artworks, six of collaborative poetry plus volumes of selected essays and selected collaborations. He was part of the first ever Hub residency at Wellcome Collection and he is associate artist at Rich Mix. His visual art has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, V&A, Hardy Tree Gallery, Jerwood Space and Mile End Art Pavilion, with installations at Kielder Forest and Tate St Ives. He is lecturer in Creative Writing and English Literature at Kingston University and is a Salzburg Global Fellow. He is the director of Writers' Centre Kingston and European Poetry Festival.
Tereza Stehlikova is a London based Czech artist who works across media, primarily in video and performance. She holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, where she researched tactile language of cinema. She is currently engaged in a cross-disciplinary research, investigating how moving image can be used to communicate embodied experience. Tereza is a senior lecturer in still and moving image theory and practice, at the University of Westminster, London. Her work has been shown at a variety of film and art festivals around the world (including JihlavaInternational Documentary Film Festival in 2017 and Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, 2019, as well as in Tokyo, Montreal, Helsinki, Iceland, China etc. Tereza has also recently launched a new online, sensory focused arts/ philosophy/ science magazine TT journal.