For the past five years, the Delfina Foundation has been facilitating cultural exchange with the greater Middle East and North Africa from its headquarters in London. With a newly acquired town house next door, for which a promising design has been done by the London-based Studio Octopi and Shahira Fahmy Architects of Cairo, the foundation is set to become the largest international residency space in London, offering residencies for artists, curators and writers. Before construction starts, the new site will house a series of installations by the Toronto-based Iranian artist Abbas Akhavan, which were produced during a 10-week residency.
Akhavan’s previous work has explored relationships between domesticity and trauma, where homes reveal the emotional scars of their owners. In “Study for a Garden,” Akhavan turns his attention outside and presents horticultural design and gardening as a territorial act, where the gardener takes on the role of decorator and aggressor. “Gardening is a discriminatory act,” he says, “where the gardener decides what lives and what dies.” Here the garden is presented as “a guarded space, an enclosure, a compound,” where plants are invasive and water a threat. Leylandii hedges — a common sight across Britain — create barriers blocking paths through the exhibition, while in an upstairs room, rogue water sprinklers also dictate visitors’ movement. The building seems to encourage growth, with a floral carpet growing ivy and a dirt table apparently ready for germination.
The Mayfair gallery Marlborough Fine Art is also in expansion mode, with the opening of Marlborough Contemporary, which is overseen by Prof. Andrew Renton, the former director of curating at Goldsmiths College. In Marlborough Contemporary’s inaugural exhibition, the Lisbon-based artist Angela Ferreira explores two artificial landscapes as social and critical space. “Stone Free” makes connections between the Cullinan Diamond Mine, the source of one of the largest diamonds found in South Africa, with the more modest Chislehurst Caves in southeast London, a network of mines and tunnels that served as a venue for rock bands in the 1960s. Jimi Hendrix performed in the Chislehurst Caves; one of his songs lends the show its title. “Hendrix represents a certain freedom … and an unexplored sense of liberty,” Ferreira explains.
From photographic research, Ferreira represents the two excavated landscapes as sculptural forms (“They represent in a positive way the monumentality of the holes,” she says) and drawings inspired by the graphic qualities of level lines. By juxtaposing and establishing links between these politically charged sites, and creating links between African-American identity and economies in London and South Africa, Ferreira invites visitors to “think with me through these two histories and how they cross.”