'Bitch Magic' features Renate Bertlmann, Ayla Dmyterko, Permindar Kaur, Rebecca Parkin, Tai Shani, Penny Slinger, Georgina Starr, Unyimeabasi Udoh and the artist duo Cullinan Richards.
-
-
Bitch Magic brings together a cross-generational group of women and non-binary artists who align with 'the feminine' and whose work offers radical feminist perspectives through themes associated with folklore, the magical or the esoteric. Recent interpretations of a resurgence of magical thought in historical and contemporary art practices position these tendencies as an escapist projection, or withdrawal from present realities. While offering perhaps an insight, such readings flatten out the diversities of positions around art practices engaging with magical thinking. Bitch Magic explores links between ‘the feminine’ and magic, which I believe can lead to novel and more inclusive directions for feminist discourses. Far from being restricted to the binary structure of sexual difference in which the term originates, ‘the feminine’ here becomes a conceptual tool subject to a magical transmutation of meaning.
This materialises in an unfixed approach to both form and language, a critique sharpened by humour, celebrations of fluid and hybrid subject positions, desire, and the ecstatic uncanny. While using the idiom of magic, the works in Bitch Magic offer positions where ‘the feminine’ might be enacted at the service of feminist and queer theory.
-
Magic is also tragically associated with forms of historical repression, particularly against women and those not identifying with white and patriarchal heteronormativity. In her Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici talks extensively about the correlations between capitalism, gender and the weaponisation of witchcraft in the 15th century. The witch-hunts in Europe and later in colonial North America specifically targeted individuals based on the categories of race, class and gender. Signal works in the exhibition touch upon these historical conjunctures, while also generating a healing response to traumas they have produced.
-
-
-
REBECCA PARKIN
Rebecca Parkin’s mermaids and hybrid creatures stand as eroticised tropes of the demonic feminine while also alluding to a symbology associated with fluidity and water. In This Sex Which Is Not One (1985) and Marine Lover (1991), Irigaray specifically addresses the metaphor of fluids and its link to the feminine. In Medusa, Parkin draws from both marine metaphors and the myth the female monster associated with voracious maternal power–the hair covers her monstrous mouth, symbolically hinting at the presence of the “Vagina Dentata”, a folk myth of toothed female genitalia. -
-
Permindar Kaur
Black Curtain, 2015Permindar Kaur’s Black Curtain, 2015 conjures up the magical within the more known terrain of the domestic space. Her black ‘teddies’ climb across the fabric support. Mysterious and disturbing, these beings conjure uncanny and contrasting feelings of both domestic comfort and an ominous threat. Engaging with Freudian notions of the unheimlich (i.e. the uncanny, but literally ‘the unhomely’), Kaur’s work operates at the intersection of identity and gender conjuring intimations of a return of the repressed. What generally resides behind the curtain is here brought forward. -
-
Unyimeabasi Udoh
Alms, 2022Jesmonite and glass beads
Approx. 9 x 20 x 9 cm -
Georgina Starr
I am the Medium, 2010The spirit world is evoked in the work of Georgina Starr. In Starr’s vinyl record and multisensory audio installation I am the Medium, 2010 fragmented voices and sounds recorded during seances with psychic mediums are drawn from the spirit world and captured within 250 locked grooves. Viewers are invited to play the record and place the stylus where they wish, activating a discrete message. In Starr’s installation, the visitors find themselves inside a darkened room. While unable to see the terrestrial world, they gain access to another realm through the engagement of listening and touch. Communing with what is other to them, they become the medium.
-
-
-
CULLINAN RICHARDS
Cullinan Richards’ works in 'Bitch Magic' comprise multiple objects including painting, installation as well as a performance. These works revisit and subvert Francisco Goya’s 1798 painting The Bewitched Man (also known as The Devil's Lamp). The two groups of paintings by Cullinan Richards–Bewitched, 2021 and Black Paintings, 2020–refer to a state of mind verging on the possessed, where the two artists explore the collapse of form into abstraction. In the installation titled Upright chandelier in two sections with their shadow, 2024 melted wax from candles has dripped onto the slotted angle profiles–remnants of an unfixed temporality in which a bewitched state approaches its climax.
-
-
Cullinan Richards
Bewitched (pink and black), 2021Oil and acrylic on canvas, steel frame
52 x 42 cm
20 1/2 x 16 1/2 in -
Cullinan Richards
PAI BLACK PAINTINGS, 2020Oil and acrylic on canvas
62 x 78 cm
24 1/2 x 30 3/4 in
-
-
-
Cullinan Richards
Silver Painting (woman), 2020-2021Oil and acrylic on linen
155 x 125 cm
61 x 49 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards
Upright Chandelier in two sections with their shadow, 2024Metal profiles, candles
184 x 62 x 100 cm (approx)
-
-
Included in the online exhibition accompanying ‘Bitch Magic’ is a suite of 22 unique works on paper by Cullinan Richards specifically designed for the presentation. These unique works in ink on card explore the duo’s frequent motifs: humorous figures resembling witches, pots of paint, mirrors and candles are some examples.
"This special set of 22 cards comes out of the on-going daily practice of drawing tiny mise-en-scènes that relate to our life as artists. They are intended to be little memory sketches or some sort of ephemeral private note - to be saved on the mantelpiece without a fixed meaning, appearing as an intriguing aside. We’d like these 22 cards to be offered as a little treat, like a beautiful lipstick or a fancy cake 💋"–Cullinan Richards
-
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (0), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (1), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (10), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (11), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (12), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (13), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (14), 2024Ink on egraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (15), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (16), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (17), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (18), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (19), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (2), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (20), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (22), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (3), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (4), 2024Ink on card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in -
Cullinan Richards22 Cards for Bitch Magic (5), 2024Ink on engraved card11 x 8 cm
4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in
-
-
AYLA DMYTERKO
Ayla Dymterko’s series of paintings titled ‘Sun-Based Materialism’ draws from Ukrainian folklore and vernacular tales. The paintings combine visual fragments from a myriad of sources–ranging from personal photographs to archival images culled from online–which collapse past and present and referential practices of divination and matriarchal ancient civilizations. Her works explore a moment where the gendered split between culture and nature had not yet been imposed. They propose not only a return but a reclamation of that produced in a feminine context and culture that has been usurped by others.
-
-
Ayla Dmyterko
Sun-based Materialism 3 "Red Scry at Night, Painters Delight", 2023Oil on linen with found wooden bread tray
80.5 x 54.5 cm
31 3/4 x 21 1/2 in -
Ayla Dmyterko
Sun-based Materialism 1 "Dichroic Glass, Dithyrambic Sun", 2023Oil on linen with found wooden bread tray
80.5 x 54.5 cm
31 3/4 x 21 1/2 in -
Ayla Dmyterko
Sun-based Materialism 2 "No Plien Air", 2023Oil on linen with found wooden bread tray
80.5 x 54.5 cm
31 3/4 x 21 1/2 in
-