Maria Ahmed and I were both very pleased to be part of Format’s Print Sale Market on Saturday. We took our collaborative zine, In Pursuit of an Apparition, Hands Can Miss the Object, along with examples of previous work too. It was a lovely day. We sold a few zines, saw some amazing work curated by Peggy Sue Amison in a show titled Future Tense-Living the future now, and met all sorts of artists and curators. Thanks to my mum, Evelyn Dean, for being the chauffeur for the day. (Oh yes, aged 53, I’m still getting my mother to ferry me around.) It was a long one, but definitely worth it.
There was a lot to see, so we were grateful to Maria’s partner for holding the fort while Maria and I visited the exhibitions. We were, perhaps unsurprisingly, particularly interested in Pádraig Spillane’s collaged advertising images, which he describes as “affective constructions through strategies of reassembly.” Evelyn told me the next day that she could not stop thinking about Derik Lynch’s extraordinary award-winning film, “Dipped in Black” (Marungka Tjalatjunu). In Lynch’s film, it’s impossible to escape the sense of urgency expressed in the exhibition’s call to action:
As we emerge from a global pandemic, faced with urgent issues of climate devastation and a potential new World War, our sense of what futurity means is an overwhelming conundrum. If ‘future past’ was focused on ingenuity and exploration, perhaps ‘future present’ will look to our collective histories to build a society that offers more than what has been possible up until now.
Future Tense – Living the future now
Thank you, Format Festival, for giving us the opportunity to spend some time in Derby!
You can purchase the zine or a special edition which contains several prints here.