Two recent graduates of Arts University Bournemouth (AUB)'s BA (Hons) Fine Art course will be among the 10 artists whose work will feature at Aspex Portsmouth this autumn.
The work of Prajvi Mandhani and Lynne Williams, both of whom graduated earlier in 2024, will be presented at Colony, The Platform Graduate Award 2024, a new exhibition celebrating the region's most exciting emerging artistic talent.
The exhibition serves as a pivotal platform for the artists to share their work to a wider audience while responding to important issues through their practice, with responses to colonialism threaded through each featured artwork.
Visitors can immerse themselves in a compelling collection of visually engaging and thought-provoking contemporary artworks. Featuring social documentary photography, textiles sculptures and large-scale installations, the exhibition invites audiences to think about and better understand the rationales and repercussions of contemporary coloniality.
For thousands of years, colonies have spread across civilisations, bringing chaos, corruption, civil war, violence, and the destruction of indigenous cultures. In nature, colonies like beehives and ant nests show how insects form communities to survive. This division and control of land is a shared issue in both social and insect studies. Using these two diverse perspectives, the exhibition explores the imbalance of colony formations.
Joanne Bushnell, Director of Aspex Portsmouth, says, “The Platform Graduate Award exhibitions at Aspex and our gallery partners across the South East and South West provide a critical and timely opportunity for recent graduates to step into the professional arts sector. This year, for the first time, our exhibition has been themed with ‘Colony’, used to express the interconnected interests and concerns of emerging artists today.”
Colony, The Platform Graduate Award 2024 will display at Aspex Portsmouth from 25 October 2024 until 12 January 2025.
