Res. London 2018

Curated by Lucy A. Sames, Sarah Jury and Helen Kaplinsky

Alembic was a programme of three intergenerational duo exhibitions, a publication, events and online commission. It brings together new commissions by Annabelle Craven-Jones, Elizabeth Mputu, Ayesha Tan Jones and Maggie Roberts, developed in connection to cyberfeminist materials from the media art library of curator Kathy Rae Huffman. These new commissions were exhibited alongside significant historical works by artists Faith Wilding and Shu Lea Cheang brought to the UK for the first time, forming a scope of works spanning from 1969 to the contemporary. Alembic celebrated the shared affinity across these generations, where the continual critique and transformation of the political biases of networked communication is practiced through multiple feminisms and strategies of queering technology.

Unfolding how the materiality of the body (recognising agency and affect beyond the human) becomes a site for digital and alchemical transmutation, Alembic took its name from a form of alchemical beaker. The process of distilling chemicals between two beakers connected by a tube, mirrors the pipelines of digital communication technology, where transmission of data constitutes an abstraction. Considering the body as alchemical vessel, it contains the processes of mutation: virus, hacking, healing and encoding. Mythologies emerge through these processes of alterity, as part of a greater cosmological and ecological network of co-dependencies.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England