– uncanny < > familiar – Explorations in X-Space Maybelle Peters and Gary Stewart

Artists Maybelle Peters and Gary Stewart take us on an exploratory archival visit through X-Space – a programme of iniva digital art commissions. As artist in residence in partnership with Decolonising Arts Institute at UAL, Maybelle Peters considers how the unfamiliar can produce alternative forms of interaction.

The artist’s research during her remote residency at the Stuart Hall Library focuses on the Uncannily Familiar which examines the digital spaces operating between the familiar and unfamiliar black body in an archive. The metadata existing within the digitised information held in the archive is (re)visited, foregrounding acts of mapping processes. How do black bodies move? How are they moved by blackness?

Join us for this fruitful discussion that focuses on an analysis of black bodies in X-Space.

Watch the recording

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Biographies

Maybelle Peters is an artist and filmmaker working in film and CGI. Her practice focuses on storytelling using documentary, historical events, literature and oral narratives. She gained her BA in Animation at Farnham where she made her first commissioned film for BBC2. Her Channel 4 commissioned film, Mama Lou, has been shown extensively at animation festivals including Annecy, Ottawa and the Edinburgh Film Festival as well as broadcast television. She is the recipient of the inaugural Womxn of Colour art award and her work was shown as part of the exhibition, The Place is Here (Nottingham Contemporary and South London Gallery, 2017). Maybelle is a practice-based PhD candidate at UCA Farnham.

Gary Stewart is an artist known for his reworking of historical and scientific archives, collections and ephemera that explore social and political issues. With Trevor Mathison he is part of Dubmorphology an interdisciplinary research group who through experimental approaches to sound art, live cinema and installations explore culture, history and technology creating projects that blur the boundaries between the sonic, visual and performative. Formerly Head of Multimedia at iniva between 1995 and 2011 he is currently Artist Associate at People’s Palace Projects an arts organisation established at Queen Mary, University of London whose vision is to extend the understanding of the transformative powers of art to progress justice through individual, collective and institutional change.

Image: Joy Gregory, Blonde, 1998. Commissioned by iniva's X-Space