Stella Sideli - Grounding Practice

The first event in this series is a talk by multidisciplinary and award winning artist MYKKI BLANCO

MIKKY BLANCO is an internationally renowned musician, performing artist, and LGBTQ+ activist. His debut full-length album Mykki was released in 2016 to critical acclaim. He is also the creator behind mixtapes like Gay Dog Food, and the groundbreaking mixtape Cosmic Angel which defined the 'Queer Rap' genre. He has been the protagonist of a wide variety of other video content as well, including his latest WYPIPO short film for Dazed. The multi-faceted artist continues to crossover from the underground having toured with the likes of Bjork, Major Lazer, and Death Grips, while working with such diverse musicians as Madonna, Kanye West, Kathleen Hanna, and Woodkid. Mykki Blanco remains a creative polymath whose journey from artist and actor to seasoned musician is as exciting to watch as it is to listen to.

The second event in this series is a talk by multidisciplinary artist VICTORIA SIN, in conversation with curator TAYLOR LE MELLE

VICTORIA SIN is an artist using speculative fiction within performance, moving image, writing, and print to interrupt normative processes of desire, identification, and objectification. Drawing from close personal encounters of looking and wanting, their work presents heavily constructed fantasy narratives on the often unsettling experience of the physical within the social body.
Recent presentations include Age of You, MOCA, Toronto (2019); Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, London (2019); Meetings on Art, Venice Biennale, Venice (2019); BCE, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Art Basel, Hong Kong (2019); Park Nights, Serpentine Galleries, London (2018); Indifferent Idols, Taipei Contemporary Art Center, Taipei (2018)

TAYLOR LE MELLE is a curator and writer. Recent writing has been published in Art Monthly, Flash Art, Sad Sack (Sophia Al-Maria, Bookworks), Che si può fare (Helen Cammock, Whitechapel Books) and Gender:Space (Aimee Meredith Cox, Macmillan). As PSS, Taylor has co-published Dream Babes Zine 1 & 2 (Victoria Sin), Tongues (Rehana Zaman) and Subversive Economies (Daniella Valz Gen). Taylor is a member of artist workers' cooperative not/nowhere, and was 2019 Curator-In-Residence at Wysing Arts Centre, where they have organised an exhibition, Boundary + Gesture, opening October 2019.

The third event is a talk by multidisciplinary artist JULIANA HUXTABLE in conversation with visual artist and writer HANNAH BLACK.

Using the structures of music as mediums in her multi-media universe, JULIANA HUXTABLE is a DJ and musician singular in her approach. Where her visual art and poetry navigate the complexity of desire in a life increasingly mediated by technology, her music utilizes the sounds of technology itself to construct parallel realities to be inhabited and embodied in rhythm and harmonic tableaux. Her sets skillfully deploy the notion of sampling, and re-blogging as DJ strategies, ecstatically mixing an array of influences that frolic at the boundary of genre-intuition and experimentation. At once an assertion of freedom and an ode to the evolutionary structure of electronic music subcultures, she aspires to the sublime in what can often only be described as witchcraft behind the decks; seance from the stage.

HANNAH BLACK (b. Manchester, UK), is an artist and writer living and working between London, UK and New York, US. Hannah Black’s work brings together two different scales: both individual/psychological and collective/historical formative experiences of class, race and gender. Her videos and installations combine details of her own or other people’s lives, such as a tooth implant or a role in a musical, with historical anecdotes and minutiae. The work is driven by a preoccupation with the limits and structures of relating, and influenced by communist and black radical traditions.

Presented with the support of Goethe-Institut London as part of the Goethe-Institut x Somerset House Studios residency.