A group show by Dan Auluk, Sally Bailey and Sarah Fortes Mayer.

Stryx, Birmingham | Jul 1-2, 2022 (5-9pm & 1-4pm)

Fragments. Fractured remnants – separate, broken, other. Here are traces – traces suggesting something, but invariably something less than the whole. Here we are witness to this melancholy place of lost narratives and re-imagined connections; the assemblage of traces, whisper the possibility of these many stories all at once – and we wonder at what might have been…

Dan Auluk is an artist-curator & film maker interested in exploring how we communicate and interact through experimental encounters. Auluk showcases two films: the first explores themes around intimacy and disruption (Sleep, 2022), constructed entirely from still photographs; and the second (Nowhereland, 2020), a dystopian sci-fi short exploring themes of isolation and loss, stitched together from fragments of video contributions, from invited film makers. www.danauluk.com

As a sculptor, Sarah Fortes Mayer delves deeply into the processes of ageing, challenging traditional expectations of this human condition. Experimenting with a myriad of materials, Fortes Mayer works to capture the invisibleness, the ephemeral nature, and poignant inevitability of ageing. www.sarahfortesmayer.com

Sally Bailey is a painter – embedded within the interfaces and interstices existing and emerging between Painter/painting/Painting (as subject/process/object). Here the outcomes of experimentation are displayed; fragments that function as epistemic things. In a continuing process of evolving and revealing, they reflect a material moment in time, the beginnings of presencing. www.sallybailey.co.uk

Sleep (2022) explores themes around intimacy and disruption, constructed entirely from still photographs taken of my life partner during the first Covid lockdown and is a re-working of the video Sleep (2020).

Size: A1 triptych

The artwork produced is in response to a series of creative writing workshops for South Asian LGBTQ+ people where themes of Identity, minority stress and resilience were explored, in relation to lived experiences of participants. These were carried out over Zoom.

The workshops were devised by the playwright and poet Rod Dungate for Birmingham LGBT.

The artwork was produced by Dan Auluk with valuable contributions from the participants. This artwork currently displayed at Birmingham LGBT Centre.

The Film Liberation Project

The Tin Music and Arts

A dystopian experimental sci-fi short exploring themes of isolation and loss, stitched together from fragments of video contributions, from invited film makers from The Film Liberation Project, The Tin Arts in Coventry.

Contributors:

Ben Cook | Cameron Wilson | Ellie House | Sarah O Abdullahi | Sherrie Edgar | Tiurlan Sitopul | Tony Skipper

A video re-edit of documentation from a live collaborative non-verbal communication performance in 2017 screened in the Second Gallery Space - selected by Eastside Projects for their SHOW Reel.

Intervention on A5 card and through Twitter

Through November and December, Black Hole Club programmes Under Different Stars, a constellation of events with our cohort. The season includes Crit Clubs, live art installations, a residency by Kirsty Clarke that responds to and joins our activities and a day of conversations for BHC with Schüle Wampe at Nottingham Contemporary. These activities culminate in a celebration for Digbeth First Friday on 6 December.

Signs of Love, Actually was reliant on scheduled Tweets I sent out and A5 white cards for audiences to respond to as I was unable to attend Digbeth First Friday. I was hoping audiences would respond to the hashtag #BLKHLCLB through text, photography or video tweets in response to my handwritten signs on A5 cards (inspired by the film Love Actually (2003), or directly on to the blank A5 white cards.

1. Photograph activity around Digbeth.

2. Select 24 photographs.

3. Do a continuous line drawing on my ipad over these photos and then delete the photographic layer.

4. Involve the public to have a go.

5. Create a GIF file to animate.

6. Re-produce these digital drawings with blind continuous line drawings whilst projecting the gif file.

Digital continuous line drawings on iPad 2019

Drawing documentation from Summer Camp 2019 installation on Thursday 5th September, 2019 at Eastside Projects.

Videos were released on the night at 6.30pm, 7pm and 7.30pm and accessed on Twitter @danauluk

A 2-hour performance for Black Hole Members Club opening show at Vivid Projects. Recording activity with my mobile phone in my hands behind my back. Live performance screened in the space and streamed live on Periscope for audiences who were unable to attend or access the space.

Commissioned to produce a series of videos projected in and onto various buildings at The Black Country Living Museum.

Produced by Andy McKeown

Collaborative live Performance with Sally Bailey. For the PhD conference, Beyond Borders? Approaches and pathways in Arts, Design and Media Research, Birmingham City University.

“ … a messy investigation of the permeable boundaries of contemporary painting and a performative presentation exploring the work of Pauline Oliveros.Pauline Oliveros.”

Response to words read out by artist Sally Bailey.

http://pgr-studio.co.uk/beyond-borders-emily-bettison-hassan-hussain/

Performance/Intervention (3 hours)

The Lives of Others (2015) was performed at the Barber Institute at the awards ceremony for New Art West Midlands 2015. Auluk responded to the activity that took place, capturing words, snippets of conversation of others watching the performance by using a 1980’s typewriter.

The Lives of Others is a response to Auluk’s anxiety around his anxieties of his degenerating eye sight in relation to his Diabetes condition and in part inspired by Ulrich Muhe’s performance as a Stasi secret policeman in the film of the same name set in the former German Democratic Republic, 1984. Muhe’s character Captain Gerd Wiesler is engaged in the surveillance of the suspected anti-communist activity of a playwright and his partner, recording his voyeuristic findings on a typewriter. Similarly, Auluk will be sitting still, visually impaired (with his spectacles that he uses to block out light after routine diabetic scans of his eyes) and typing what he hears and experiences – a disrupted narrative of sorts - in an attempt to capture the space between what is private and public and the ethical conflict of this, replaying the sound of the typewriting back in to the space.

Single channel video

A short scene re-working the film ‘Women in Love (1969) to Phyllis Nelson’s track - Move Closer (1985).

Film Open 2015, ICA, Eastside Projects, Transmission, Castlefield Gallery, S1. (Selected by Steven Cairns)

Medium: Framed letter.

Scrunched up rejection letter from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2010 for their, The West Midlands Open 2010. Presented in a restored discarded frame and submitted to, The West Midlands Open 2014.

Review from BMAG by Phil Mellanby

Medium: Steel Grey, Liquorice Black, Marshmallow Pink (Household Vinyl Matt Emulsion), Clear Quick Drying Gloss Varnish, Calvin Klein Eternity Aftershave (100ml); applied directly on to gallery wall. (Size: 6m x 3m)

“I encounter millions of bodies in my life; of these millions, I may desire some hundreds; but of these hundreds, I love only one.” – Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments

“As a starting point the artwork on display emerged from conversations, first and foremost with myself and then in discussion with others. This led to early research to develop a deeper enquiry and through writing and planning I begin to articulate my ideas further which manifest as a physical, unseen performance. However, the remainder and residue present one possible outcome.

But all the promises we make... is a semi-confessional layered text-based work occupying the background wall at ARTicle Gallery in The School Of Art, Birmingham. The work is informed by my personal relationship with my lover since starting my MA in Fine Art studies in 2012.

The final outcome behaves both as a remainder and residue of a physically repeated painting performance over a period of 4 weeks. The work is reductive and subtractive, both in the action performed and the final visual aesthetic.

Essentially, the work operates as a series of painted text promises that I have made, not made, broken, adapted or kept and inviting a questioning of the validity of such definitive speeches or statements we make to one another. Surely, a promise takes on a life of its own until it becomes unspoken and absorbed into the very fabric of who we are; metaphorically represented here as a false MDF gallery wall, which has a finite lifeline of its own, informed by exhibition histories of the past, present and potential futures.

As a final action or gesture, the remainder and residue will be painted over with the standard brilliant white vinyl matt emulsion, returning the false wall back to its original default position, giving the artwork an enduring quality by physical disappearance. The artwork itself has no economic value but conversely is valuable in the experience shared and the conversations generated, more specifically between my lover and myself.

The artwork is truly activated when I stand with my lover and he unlocks the meaning with a final gesture of a public kiss to say “yes”.

As part of Loud and Live at Selfridges

Friday 2nd October – Lower Ground Floor – 1 – 7pm

7 Disorderly Dramas

curated by Mona Casey with Sonya Russell-Saunders

Tadas Stalyga & Matt Springer with Andy Ingamelis, Robert Foster, David Poole, Paul Newman and David Miller, Dan Auluk and Frederick Hubble

https://monacasey.com/portfolio/article-off-site/

Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L ‘Avventura (1960), where the lead actress disappears part way through the film never to be seen again Dan Auluk produces Dorothy (2013) which exaggerates this subtraction by removing Judy Garland from the entirety of his favourite childhood film The Wizard Of Oz (1939). When working with feature films, Auluk is interested in manipulating the formal qualities of the cinematic readymade to disrupt, dismantle and reconfigure narrative to reveal an alternative re-imagination or working of the original.

40 ARTISTS / 30 FRAMES / 3 MONTHS

in 32 venues across Birmingham.

FRAME_birmingham was an Arts Council funded, mac birmingham & Own Art supported project by Elly Clarke that saw unique and very small edition artworks by local and international artists installed into a variety of businesses across the city as a means of bringing art to new audiences, new audiences to art and new contexts in which art can be shown. It was also about provoking and stimulating conversations about and around the artworks, by a variety of people in a variety of different places. Launching on 16th November 2012, the frames remained in place for three months, with work changing within them when sold. The projectframe.net website mirrored what was on display in the city and hosted further information about each work. All work was also for sale, up to a maximum selling price of £750.

Read specially commissioned essay by Anna Canby Monk, published in the FRAME_guide and later on in This is Tomorrow here.

http://ellyclarke.com/index.php?/clarkegallery/framebirmingham/

Medium: Installation, sound, text and video.

Auluk responds to the feature film Milk (2008) and the story of the titular Harvey Milk, an American activist who fought for gay rights and became California’s first openly gay elected official.

Artists Anne Guest and Steve Reinke kindly allowed me to use their videos within the exhibition.

https://anneguest.co.uk/

http://www.myrectumisnotagrave.com

Works Gallery

Two person show with Nita Newman

Steadycam 1 (2010) - Supermarket Trolley, camcorder.