Aspirus 09

Aspirus 09 Residency: 17 February - 13 March 2014
Participating artists: Irene Reiserer (Italy), Sharibanu Abdulaziz (Azerbaijan)
Live/Work 02 Residency: 17 February  - 16 June 2014
Participating artist: Sumit Sarkar (UK)

Irene Reiserer

Shahribanu Abdulaziz

Sumit Sarkar

Despite her traditional film education, Irene Reiserer is intrigued by everything experimental. Within her film making practice she works with atmospheres, poetic dialogues, surrealistic soundscapes and associative editing.

During her residency, she set out on a journey, hoping to find precious things tucked away in corners, which one only notices if one is in a state of meditating on how things are transformed by our gaze. Public space nowadays is often discussed for its surveillance. Streets and squares have become places of discomfort and vulnerability. People do not linger any more.  They do not contemplate the environment they inhabit, but seek to exit it as quickly as possible. Reiserer, determined to turn away from that negative perspective, searched for an alternative beauty, tapping into different city rhythms, finding parallel coexisting time zones. She looked for images charged with contrasts between motion and stillness, noise and silence. She explored urban space, used or neglected, and as she looked she began to see patterns and colours, making forms and compositions that intrigued her.
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The resulting works capture hidden spaces, discarded objects, oil and dirt on water, damp pungent undersides of bridges, and transform the very concept of the nature of these by presenting them as compositions of light, shade, colour and texture. Through abstracting elements from the environment and removing them to an alternative context, they become overwhelmed with meanings, allowing us to contemplate them as individual entities.

Painter Shahribanu Abdulaziz is interested in the interrelation of the environment with our internal world, our personal vision, and our emotional response. She is observes and notes signs and symbols in the environment, and the behaviour of the inhabitants, the laughter, smiling, crying, and the aura people emit. Sometimes she interprets her observations in light, joyful colours, but often these colours are dark and somber. Abdulaziz believes this is caused by people not paying attention to the world around them. They cannot interpret the symbols and signs in their lives, and never become unified with the portrayal of these in art. Through her work she would like to show the world in simple beautiful form, in which her positive message is easily interpreted.

Abdulaziz’s residency project started with a study the culture of Manchester, getting to know the local residents, and familiarising herself with the rituals, and urban legends of the city. She started on a series of sketches capturing the essence of what she was witnessing as simple clear images, symbols. These sketches evolved gradually to be final works of acrylic on paper. Abdulaziz believes that describing something as a symbol has a great significance and it is important to be very careful what these express. She excludes all insignificant elements, and retains the clean lines, colours, light, and shadow of the elemental world.

The work of Sumit Sarkar is hard to define in any conventional sense. Primarily because his references are so diverse, and because he is involved in projects that range from set design to digital printing to drawing, from small scale to huge. However, one thing each work has in common is a dynamic energy which rushes through each piece in a tidal wave of ideas and production.

His influences are multitudinous, but some overriding elements can be identified since they crop up many times, albeit interpreted in different forms on each occasion. Indian symbols and culture, Hinduism are mixed with gaming imagery, street art and graffiti in a cacophony of form which, rather than creating confusion and muddling the themes, results in a fresh look at the world, and indicates a contemporary belief system. This can be regarded as a utopian ideal of the multi-cultural environment, in which the rules and strictures of society have been dispensed with and re-created in a more workable format.