About
Mourning School is an artistic study program on the notion of being in grief as the stuff of our everyday, initiated by Lucie Gottlieb and Rosa Paardenkooper.

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info@gallerinef.com


Re: Re: Re: Re:
Clementine Edwards and Ada M. Patterson


At Galleri Nef
18-23 June, 2021

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Visual description tour
Re: Re: Re: Re:
From: Clementine Edwards
To: Ada M. Patterson

The path you tread between the grey gums and the platanus is sometimes dry and sometimes soggy, always jumbled. Of course you’re in this universe, but you must stay awake to how it rocks you backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. You must tip-toe along its gravel and gumnut path, being careful to go slower with it than your grabbing instinct demands.

Mourning School warmly welcomes you to Re: Re: Re: Re: an exhibition of new work by artists Clementine Edwards and Ada M. Patterson presented at Galleri Nef. Re: Re: Re: Re: is a series of gentle missives, videos as call and response, between Ada M. Patterson from Barbados and Clementine Edwards from Naarm and then Rotterdam. In the correspondence, they speak to their shared experiences of life back home as potentially untenable, and the ways it provokes a complicated grief rooted in trans-ness, administration, climate, and the (dis)possession of land and body. Re: Re: Re: Re: makes space for a textured and emotional confrontation between their bodies and the world, riddled with desire for, and attempts at anchoring themselves in their surroundings, histories and land, yet failing to, or resisting these impulses at the same time.

With Re: Re: Re: Re: Patterson and Edwards attempt to make visible, legible and palpable the lived effects of grief. They ask, How might we trace the passage of grief from something that takes up space within our bodies towards something that makes space for our bodies and other bodies to inhabit?

Re: Re: Re: Re:
From: Ada M. Patterson
To: Clementine Edwards

Sargassum: a brown that collects or traps. I’m afraid of how slow it moves or how much it could slow me. Trying to salvage brown sargassum from a trap, to a complicated accumulating of life and death; a grief that gathers, a body that gathers, a brownness that gathers.

Re: Re: Re: Re: is a work in a constant state of unfolding. New thoughts and images are making their way into the artists’ correspondence that respond to events and feelings happening in real time. This generates a conversational rhythm as a methodology and a continuation of a friendship. Creating synergy between their respective practices, Edwards and Patterson step into each other’s pace and working process on a material level; borrowing editing techniques, frames and phrases. To a visitor, it feels as if you have entered into the middle of an ongoing conversation, the details of which may not be clear. This indeterminacy opens up a space of profound, queered possibility that disrupts existing dynamics between public and private, universal and personal, familiar and unknown. It is a space where we can recognise and honour, remember and grieve the lives, deaths and suffering of those otherwise deemed ungrievable within the context of the worlds we live in.

About the artists 
Clementine Edwards & Ada M. Patterson have been sharing conversations and collaborations on subjects such as climate crisis, plastic-as-toxic-muse, queer grief, and Blackness and whiteness since they met in 2019.

Clementine Edwards is a Rotterdam- and Naarm/Melbourne-based artist who works across sculpture, film, performance, writing and jewellery. Her ongoing research line is material kinship, which she locates in the context of climate colonialism. In 2021 Clementine publishes The Material Kinship Reader, co-edited by Kris Dittel.

Ada M. Patterson (Bridgetown, 1994) is a visual artist and writer working with masquerade, textiles, performance, video and poetry, telling stories and imagining elegies for ungrievable bodies and moments. Patterson is the 2020 NLS Kingston Curatorial & Art Writing Fellow. Upcoming exhibitions include "Art from Britain and the Caribbean" at Tate Britain, London.

Colophon
Re: Re: Re: Re: is made possible with the support of our host institution Galleri Nef, with technical support of co-founder and artist Tomas Sjögren. Film transcripts written by Clementine Edwards and Ada M. Patterson and translated by David Sriwanat with editorial support from Rupert Edwards.

The exhibition received financial support from Kulturradet and the Nordic Cultural Foundation through the Globus Opstart Grant. Re: Re: Re: Re: will be further developed by the artists at Live Works vol. 9 in 2022.

We would like to thank our upstairs neighbor Kattis for lending us tools and reminding us to take ice-cream breaks, as well as her daughter Esme for working on our exhibition sign with us. Neighborhood cat Pepsi, thank you for your moral support.

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