Now in its tenth year, this annual group exhibition is designed to provide a dedicated platform for early-career artists based in Scotland and working in the field of contemporary art within EAF’s programme.
This year’s 2024 PLATFORM artists Alaya Ang, Edward Gwyn Jones, Tamara MacArthur and Kialy Tihngang, selected by Amal Khalaf and Eliel Jones, and Eleanor Edmondson, will respond directly to the themes of the 2024 programme, centering intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution. The exhibition takes place as part of EAF 9 – 25 August 2024 at City Art Centre.
The Artists
Alaya Ang is a multi-disciplinary artist who seeks to unravel the multiple material and symbolic fractures produced by colonialism and capitalism, bringing in their connection to Singapore, Scotland and something deep within the sea. Ang’s work for Platform 2024 is a composition looking at the breath, and the architecture of the weather defined by words and utterances, often referencing a saturated state, such as humidity and conditions of productivity and their effects on the body.
Edward Gwyn Jones is an artist working with moving image, text and printmaking. He is motivated by a desire to understand and complicate persistent social, technological, and personal histories through the reframing of seductive and latent artefacts. His work is orientated around appropriating and recreating particular artefacts that express mysterious, emotional or excessive meaning. These have included queer cinematic motifs and dialogue; obsolete communication technologies; pornographic magazines and workplace posters; reproduced ancient Greek coins; digitally degraded music videos; and intimate or ephemeral iPhone footage.
Kialy Tihngang works in sculpture, video, textiles, animation and photomontage, typically involving elaborate sets, costumes, graphics, props, and collaborations with performers and musicians. As a British-born Cameroonian, her research-based practice focuses on colonial European misrepresentation, extraction, and demonisation of West African cultural practices, but also on her own misremembering, misreading, and romanticisation of said practices, primarily by designing artefacts from reimagined histories and speculated futures. Through combining the dark humour of Nollywood with the aesthetics of retrofuturism and the visual language of Western mass media, Tihngang explores Blackness, queerness, Britishness, and the crushing structural oppressions surrounding these identities.
Tamara MacArthur uses installation and durational performance to explore longing, futility and the boundaries of intimacy. Their glittering installations are constructed for a moment of emotional intimacy between the viewer and themself. Everything is laboriously hand-made and embellished – no effort spared. But the “glittering silver” is kitchen foil – they’re fragile façades… paper-thin. Audience-participants are asked to suspend disbelief, because ‘it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me’. Repetitions of sentimental pop songs become Tamara’s lament and while singing, crying and smiling, they maintain eye contact as long as viewers hold it.
The Selection Panel
Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt and Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries. Eliel Jones is the Curator of Performance and Time-based Media at KANAL – Centre Pompidou, a new interdisciplinary museum of modern and contemporary art due to open in Brussels in 2025. Eleanor Edmonson is EAF’s curator, and will also lead on the development of the exhibition this summer with the artists.
EAF Curator, Eleanor Edmonson said, “PLATFORM24 is the 10th iteration of the award that has supported over 30 emerging artists. Supporting early career artists is essential to us – it’s a core part of our programme. This year we had so many incredible applications and the four we are showing – Alaya Ang, Edward Gwyn Jones, Kialy Tihngang and Tamara MacArthur – each have strong, and critical practices. For the first time the artists were asked to respond directly to the themes of the festival, so expect an ambitious, generative and absorbing show.”