Alexa Chow
Alexa Chow is a researcher, curator and writer based in London. Her research centres on the spatial politics of the environments we live in, investigating the relationships between communities, architecture, geography and history in both the anthropological place and transitionary places created by modernity. Her curatorial practice is informed by site-specific practices and experiments with the dynamics of situating art projects outside the white cube to unconventional spaces such as parks, pubs, unoccupied offices and more.
Her dissertation “Reperforming the Performance”, examines the curation of performances and its representations. Responding to how institutions are actively collecting, exhibiting and re-exhibiting live art, Alexa analyses the different ways the performance can be re-enacted through its mediatised documentation and its live re-enactment. Instead of creating a facsimile that would only objectify the art form, she proposes that the reperformance should be approached as living grounds for creative re-turns to find, foreground and produce. Thus positioning each reperformance as an active platform that holds power to question, challenge and perform the now.
In partnership with Southwark Park Galleries, her graduate project “For Us, to Share” explores ideas of home via food, spice and the in-between space of translation with students from the Bosco Centre in Rotherhithe. The group, all of whom currently call Southwark home includes refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and other local residents came together to share stories, recipes and food. Working with artist Saima Rasheed and multidisciplinary collective, mother tongues, the group explored local history archives, painted with herbs and spices and translated their recipes of home through multiple forms of media to create a visual recipe book. The book is now in the collection of the British Library, Canada Water Library, Camberwell Library and Southwark Archives, .
Alexa also expands her curatorial practice into the space of writing and translation. Her writings are published in “ARC: Proxyerotics (2021)” and “M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art”. Collaborating with Narrative Studio, she has worked on various writing and Chinese to English translation projects, focusing on the topics of contemporary art, history, sustainability, technology and fashion.
The movement of people from one area or country to another is an experience that we are all connected to, knowingly or not – whether through our own journeys, through those of others, prevention of movement or from afar. Migration has been common place throughout human history and has led individuals to consider and re-examine their identities - like we have done as a group of international curators who are currently situated in the same city. These experiences became central in developing the project, For us, to share. The students from the Bosco Centre, artists, and curators collaborated together to explore their own experiences of migration through a dynamic, creative process drawing upon food, recipes, spices and stories.
Over four workshops, students from the Bosco Centre engaged with historical archives from Southwark, painted with spice and translated their own recipes from home through multiple forms of media to produce a visual recipe book. The group, all of whom currently call Southwark home, includes refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and other local residents. Home, in this case holds different iterations, previously across the globe with many students having travelled from different parts of the world - currently Southwark.
A recipe book emerged from the workshop process, using food as the medium and a platform to foster relationships, common ground, and further understanding of one another. A source of shared knowledge beyond language.
This project was conceived and delivered at a moment when migration and community displacement was on the rise with policies demeaning those who travel to the UK for a better life becoming ever more severe. Situated in and responding to current global affairs, For us, to share sought to celebrate the many similarities and differences found in culture, memory and language. Ultimately, the group's lived experience is a microcosm of what is happening on a global scale.
The group worked with artist Saima Rasheed, whose practice uses historical techniques in a modern way. In her paintings she looks at themes of belonging being a migrant woman of colour. They also worked with mother tongues, a collective who host translation parties that explore themes of language and identity.
Guided by the artists, the group worked with materials such as spices and herbs to bring a sense of ‘home’ to life, via food and painting. Through connecting with the local history archives from John Harvard Library; they were able to recognise that a feeling of belonging can emerge from anywhere. The memory of their own food or their favourite meals became the translation. Transcending language barriers, everybody was able to communicate through their own recipes and visuals. Reclaiming the stickiness of communication through acts of painting, collaging, eating and drawing.
The recipe book created has been published and is now part of the collection of the British Library, Camberwell Library, Canada Water Library and the Southwark Archives.
For Monument’s Sake disassembles the monumental into patchworks. Interpreting patchwork as fragments in action, patches at work, For Monument's Sake is a collaborative work that reworks public monuments and sculptures such as Watt's Chapel in Compton, Little Albert and Physical Strength in Hyde Park into textile creations to claim new readings and affect.
For Monument’s Sake consists of a sculpture, sculpture garments and a durational performance which animates the core of For Monument’s Sake.
Initiated by Franziska Windolf, the project is created together in parts with Alexa Chow (garments), Amelia Cullen (intervention), Sofia Sanchez (intervention) and Leonid Hrytsak (intervention, images).
This is a digital adaptation of the work. The physical body will be presented at the graduate show in Battersea campus in which the group will perform and interact with the audience. Further details and images of the project will be updated on https://assembliesofimaginatives.com/