Fragile celebrates the work of 20 international artists and the dedication to empower their audience with resilience and solace.
“England’s most eccentric dresser,” performance artist and activist Daniel Lismore is making his curatorial debut with Fragile, a collective exhibition at The Bomb Factory’s Marylebone factory in support of artists who have been persecuted, displaced, exiled, or subjected to racial and gender injustice. The exhibition highlights the important responses amid global instability and will commence on the 22nd of November through 2nd of December. The exhibition is supported by Bird&Carrot, a global collective supporting emerging artists, and the Tsukanov Family Foundation, a U.K.-based charity supporting culture and the arts.
Fragile explores the innate fragility of the human condition when experiencing dehumanizing events, in coherence with the current state of the world. Lismore stresses the crucial role of art as a vehicle for coping with trauma and sufferings and the importance to host a safe space for artists to navigate their vulnerability. “In my experience, art has been the answer transforming pain into purpose and serving as a bridge to something greater. Every artist in this exhibition brings forth a piece of that transformative power,” says Lismore.
The exhibition will be hosting Nadya Tolokonnikova’s series Icons and New Dark Ages, a continuation of the artist’s decade-long fight against political oppression in Russia. Tolokonnikova is best known as the founder of feminist punk movement Pussy Riot, whose anti-Putin activism has earned her imprisonment and a place on Russia’s most wanted criminal list. The 35-year-old activist will also be performing for the exhibition, following a talk with Lismore.
At the center of the show is Oksana Mas’ Ukrainian Guernica, a 3D bas-relief revisiting Picasso’s infamous response to wartime atrocities. The 26-feet-tall volumetric reinterpretation is wrapped in the same black film used to insulate Ukrainian mass graves, evoking the horror and numbness as screams amid the war in Ukraine are being silenced by yet another news cycle. Russian-born artist Kostya Benkovich also created his sculpture Suitcase in response to the War in Ukraine. After hearing a devastating story of a lady fleeing Ukraine, leaving everything behind except for a single suitcase, Benkovich created suitcases with reinforced steel that resemble prison bars in Russia. “I had to flee Russia myself, and have to a certain extent, become an object of my own work because the suitcase is all I now have that connects me to the past,” says the artist.
Fragile will also feature the installation Ash from Chaos (Burn Punk) by Joe Corré, son of the late Dame Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, who’s known for burning £5 million worth of punk memorabilia to protest the commodification of punk culture and the British government’s indifference to the climate crisis. The ashes of Corré’s protest will be featured as part of the installation, a glass coffin that also features McLaren’s death mask.
Other featured artists include Jake Chapman, half of the Chapman Brothers duo, who notoriously defaced Francisco Goya’s work to explore the horror of war, Nicola Turner, whose sculpture En Pointe employs organic dead matter to explore humanity’s connection with the past, present, and future, and Charlotte Colbert, who created the sculpture Mastectomy to remind her audience the resilience of the body’s beauty through a fluid silhouette and taruma-filled scars.
“Together, these works create a powerful conversation, invitIng us all into a deeper shared experience in a call for empathy, resilience and a commitment to compassion,” said Lismore.
Homepage image, Jake Chapman’s Goya’s Disasters of War Etchings (series of 21 works). Image credit Jake Chapman. Inside image left, Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, courtesy of Nadya Tolokonnikova. Inside image right, Curator Daniel Lismore by Colin Douglas Gray.
