Interview with Maha Malluh

18/02/16

Interview: Maha Malluh

Maha Malluh (b1959) lives and works in Saudi Arabia and her art is infused with the culture that surrounds her. Her assemblages of discarded items, found in junk shops and flea markets, present objects imbued with cultural meaning and embedded histories. “My inspiration,” she says, “comes from my country, a land of contrasting images and ideas. Good art forces you to pause, to contemplate and think harder about your surroundings.”

Currently one of the 14 artists in the Saatchi Gallery’s first all-women exhibition, Champagne Life, Malluh has covered one of the gallery’s walls with an assortment of burnt aluminium cooking pots, traditionally used throughout the Arab world. The title of the series to which the work belongs – Food for Thought – Al-Muallaqat – makes reference to the pre-Islamic, sixth-century Suspended Odes or Hanging Poems, traditionally hung in Mecca.

Malluh spoke to Studio International about the potency of such objects as transmitters of cultural meaning, her views on gender, and the significance of women-only exhibitions.

Read the interview here

Interview with Virgile Ittah

22/01/16

Interview: Virgile Ittah

Once you have seen the work of the London-based French artist Virgile Ittah (b1981, Paris), it is not something you will easily forget. Her life-size, haunting wax bodies, seemingly melting or decomposing as they lay collapsed across their metal bed frames or chairs, seek not to be sculptures, but to be human beings. Their transparency gives them an eerie, uncanny quality, and yet, in their abjection lies a beauty, perhaps a result of their inherent contradictions: fragility versus solidity, warmth versus coldness, life versus death.

Currently one of the 14 women artists in the Saatchi Gallery’s first all-women exhibition, Champagne Life, Ittah spoke to Studio International about her technique, her current collaboration with her partner, Kai Yoda, and her thoughts on the status of female artists today.

Read this interview here

Interview with Aura Satz

21/01/16
Interview: Aura Satz

When she was pregnant with her daughter in 2003, the London-based artist Aura Satz (b1974, Barcelona) used her belly as the antenna for a bespoke theremin – a musical instrument that is played by proximity and hand gestures. She was already a performance artist and sculptor, but this new performance piece awakened Satz’s interest in sound and the correlation – or, more often, mismatch – between sound and vision. Since then, and increasingly through the medium of film, Satz has been exploring acoustics, vibration, sound visualisation and musical gesture. Another strand to her work focuses on gender and women’s (often unseen) contributions to technology. Many of her works combine the two, with months of research and complex backstories, which often remain largely unappreciated by her audience. 

With a retrospective drawing to a close at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and a new exhibition opening in Dallas, Satz invited Studio International to her studio to take a look at her work on screen and to hear about some of these thrilling and enthralling footnotes.

Read the interview here

Review of Champagne Life at the Saatchi Gallery

19/01/16

Champagne Life

Saatchi Gallery
13 January – 9 March 2016

Things are changing for female artists. For women generally, too, but the art world might just be the place where this first becomes visible. Although female artists are still markedly undervalued at auction, and have been described as “the bargains of our time” by Iwan Wirth (owner of leading international gallery Hauser & Wirth), 34-year-old artist Virgile Ittah suggests that this is the carry-over from last century and that, thanks to the work of their predecessors, young female artists today stand on a much more equal platform with their male counterparts.

Last year saw a series of solo retrospectives for female artists at both Tate galleries in London – Barbara Hepworth, Sonia Delaunay and Agnes Martin – and women are increasingly taking lead roles as gallery directors, curators and collectors, changing the way that contemporary art history is being written. To celebrate its 30th anniversary, the Saatchi Gallery is hosting its first all-women exhibition, showcasing the work of 14 emerging international artists. The exhibition is described not as offering “an overarching vista of female artistic practice”, but rather playing “an important role in approaching issues of the glass ceiling that applies to the art world as much as to the world at large”. Whether or not this ceiling has yet been smashed remains to be seen over the next few decades, but judging by the confidence that imbues the works on display, this generation of female artists is certainly on the up.

Read the rest of this review here

Review of Maripaz Jaramillo: Ellas at Sandra Higgin’s Art Salon

09/06/14

Maripaz Jaramillo: Ellas

Sandra Higgin’s Art Salon, Apt. 3, 46 Harcourt Terrace, London SW10 9JR

27 May – 20 June 2014

Vibrant, buzzing and sensual, Maripaz Jaramillo’s close up portraits of women in the throes of passion, dancing, laughing and being happy, are pure celebration: celebration of being women, celebration of being happy, celebration of the simple joys of life. Living and working in her native Colombia, amidst much political unrest as the elections drag on and war and peace hang in the balance, Jaramillo wants her work to represent happiness and the positive side of her country, which, according to a recent study, has one of the happiest populations in the world. “Our country is full of people dancing,” Jaramillo explains. “The politicians are killing one another, but the people don’t care. They’re just dancing. If you go to a concert, they get up in the aisles and are all dancing. They dance, they eat well, and they are happy. That’s what I take for my work.”

To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.divamag.co.uk/category/arts-entertainment/review-maripaz-jaramillo-–-ellas.aspx