Origination
Katy and Rebecca Beinart
16 June 2011 to 5 August 2011
Origination is an ongoing collaboration between sisters and artists Katy and Rebecca Beinart. The project explores how we describe our origins, both in genealogical and environmental terms, and how relationships between people and places form our sense of identity and belonging. The work concocts mixtures of memory and history, mythology and fact, to understand how we adapt to places, and how we shape places, as we migrate.
In May 2011, the artists ran a market stall in Popes Road, Brixton Market, offering memory collection and archiving services. They exchanged Memory Preservation Salts for stories about ancestral journeys and places of origin. Through 54 conversations, the role of chance and coincidence in the shaping of destinies, lives and locations emerged strongly, reflecting Kurt Vonnegut’s comment: “all persons living and dead are purely coincidental”.
In this exhibition, new artworks take these stories and memories, and translate and classify them through a variety of instruments and methods. These transformed narratives become a collective biography of the market, made by its users, encompassing a vast array of journeys, points of origin, and fragments of history. The real and imagined relics of past lives become pieces of a new puzzle, offering the viewer the opportunity to make their own connections and associations.
Also on show are works that draw on the artists’ personal family history and stories of Jewish migration, made in response to sites in South Africa and the UK.
To find out more about Origination contact the gallery info@198.org/uk or look at the project Blog
Artist websites
www.axisweb.org/artist/katybeinart,
www.axisweb.org/artist/rebeccabeinart
Origination Events:
Panel Discussion 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
Last Fridays
Dinner Party