Some Kinda Love – Andrew Gillespie, Ryan Kearney, Navi Kaur

12.10.19 - 17.11.19

Celine is excited to present Some Kinda Love, a new constellation of artworks and relationships by Andrew Gillespie. The exhibition explores his interest in attractions - to surfaces, images, objects, landscapes and people. Included in the exhibition is a text by curator Ryan Kearney and a film by Navi Kaur, both of whom work with Andrew on Recent Activity projects.

Ryan presents his current research into the history of queer spaces in Birmingham, whilst Navi presents Finding Faith in Space, a film originally shown in Recent Activity’s Nomadic Vitrine. This exhibition is part of an ongoing dialogue between artists and cities. In December, Gallery Celine will make an exhibition at Recent Activity, in Birmingham.

To realise this exhibition, Andrew has been generously supported by a Sculpture Production Award from The Pangaea Sculptors' Centre.

Passionate Acts in Virulent Times – Phyllis Christopher

28.07.19 - 22.09.19

Céline is proud to present an exhibition of work from the archive of Photographer and Photojournalist Phyllis Christopher.

Christopher’s notable contributions to the discipline are characterised in part by her role as a contributing photo-editor to the magazine, On Our Backs which ran 1984-2006. During the self-publishing boom of the 1980’s, the first Lesbian Erotica magazine published in USA was a vitally inclusive publication which stridently promoted and appealed to the lesbian experience against a backdrop of conservative hostility and predominantly anti-pornographic feminism.

Integral to cultivating the magazines distinctive style, Christopher’s wider practice as a photojournalist contributed to the architecture of On Our Backs’ aesthetic but was also indictive of broader concerns within the LGBTQ community of the US at the time. Living in San Francisco throughout the 80’s/90’s/00’s, Christopher documented a wealth of events at a key juncture in the fight to progress gay rights. Straddling the boundary between voyeur and participant, her portrait of a community asserting its’ visibility is balanced by the intimacy of her erotic work, the intensity of which shifts fluidly between the abstract and the explicit methods of image making. Operating in the studio and the street, Christopher skilfully and consistently channels a logic of duality making her archive a dynamic, artistic document of social history that possesses a rare sensitivity and complexity.

‘Passionate Acts in Virulent Times’ brings together a range of work pulled from different periods of Christopher’s career to demonstrate the consistently dualistic nature of her output and provide insight in to the intimate life of a struggle key to the construction of the modern American cultural and civic landscape. At present Christopher is working on a publication of her wider archive the visibility of which we hope will be assisted by this exhibition.

Old School New Body Toby Christian

07.04.19 - 11.05.19

Celine is proud to present Old School New Body, a new solo exhibition by Toby Christian.

Toby Christian lives and works in London. He has been awarded the inaugural Matera Residency in July 2019, and his forthcoming solo exhibition Burners opens

in September 2019 at Alessandro Albanese, Milan. Recent exhibitions and performances include Trippy Scroller, PEER, London (2018), The News, Swimming Pool, Sofia, curated by David Dale, Glasgow (2017) and Railing, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017). His forthcoming book will be published in 2020 by Koenig Books, who also published his previous books Collar (2017) and Measures (2015).

This exhibition is generously supported by Central Saint Martins.

something vague and irrational – Camara Taylor & Sulaïman Majali

12.01.19 - 08.02.19

retreat, is an ongoing collaborative endeavour between Sulaïman Majali and Camara Taylor that thinks around strategic isolation, separatist states, capacities or lack thereof. Within retreat, both are thinking and questioning the fallout and reverberations through time of ongoing catastrophe(s). Concerned with the implicit failings of research, praxis and (a lack of) practice; retreat floats amidst the outlines of absences; which become trace, gesture and evidence of that which has been expelled, or refuses to be held in the archive. Using a methodology of divergence and employing fiction as apparatus, the project reinscribes on much chartered territories, to negotiate the ramifications.

Majali and Taylor’s respective practices hold shared interests in, and desire for developing recalcitrant strategies, as a means of approaching/reproaching subject, system andpower. poetics of relation - the right to opacity - a history of misrecognitions - visibility as trap. They are working of and towards methods of refusal and withdrawal, stemming from a desire to retreat from particular ways of working and being, or making public. The works also stems from frustration, fatigue and cognitive dissonances. something vague and irrational illustrates and/or points to the feelings (as facts), frustrations and propositions that initiated collaboration.

Sulaïman Majali (b.1991) is an artist, writer and impostor.

Camara Taylor (b.1627) is an amorphous blob.