Introducing ‘All About Love’, a major new commission for Your Space Or Mine

Your Space Or Mine

Introducing ‘All About Love’, a major new commission for Your Space Or Mine

After running our landmark creative project for several years, this year, we’re excited to embark on the first major curatorial and arts commission for Your Space Or Mine – titled ‘All About Love’.

Based upon the book of the same name by cultural critic, feminist theorist and author bell hooks, the project will see artists creating works inspired by its radical new ways to think about love in politics, religion, the workplace and domestic households, as much as intimate relationships. ‘All About Love’ is curated by Zarina Rossheart.

Taking over our billboard and poster sites for weekends across five months, ‘All About Love’ is travelling to Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Brighton and Bristol. On 28-30 April, Birmingham-born Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu opened the project with Grief: A Love Letter, 2023, alongside a performative reading event at Digbeth Art Space where a programme of artists and writers joined her in reading on grief and love.

The next commission saw Glaswegian artist Jasleen Kaur taking over poster sites in her home city from 9-11 June, alongside her solo show, Alter Altar, at Tramway. Following this, ‘All About Love’ travelled to Manchester on 7-9 July, with Eve Stainton’s work displayed focusing on the adage, ‘You can take the girl out of Manchester, but you can’t take Manchester out of the girl.’ Next, the project landed on the south coast in Brighton and Hove, on 3-6 August with Turner Prize winner Helen Cammock, and then with Asmaa Jama in Bristol on 7-10 September, the closing weekend of their solo exhibition, Except this time nothing comes back from the ashes, at Spike Island. We were thrilled to then take the project to Edinburgh with Alberta Whittle, in collaboration with the National Galleries of Scotland, who’s powerful work brought ‘All About Love’ to a close.

28.04.23

Words by BUILDHOLLYWOOD

Artists:
Grace Ndiritu – Birmingham, 28-30 April
Jasleen Kaur – Glasgow, 9-11 June
Eve Stainton – Manchester, 7-9 July
Helen Cammock – Brighton, 3-6 August
Asmaa Jama – Bristol, 7-10 September
Alberta Whittle – Edinburgh, 11-17 December

Grace Ndiritu – 29-30 April, Birmingham

Inspired by a love letter written to her mother and one of her favourite artists Mike Kelley, British-Kenyan artist Grace Ndiritu’s commission for ‘All About Love’ is Grief: A Love Letter, 2023. It’s underpinned by concepts like death, motherhood, ambiguity of race, class and gender, which are also deeply embedded in bell hooks’ own writing. A tender and personal quote from the letter – ‘Wherever you are, I hope you have found peace’ – formed the basis for the posters, with visual elements drawn from her painting practice juxtaposing nature and commercial imagery.

To celebrate the launch of the project and the artist’s weekend of poster takeovers, we held a performative event in the city hosted by Ndiritu at Digbeth Art Space. A line-up of writers and artists who were born, based in, or have links with Birmingham shared raw, open, honest and moving works on the subjects of grief and love, including poetry, prose, letters and audio pieces. Alisha Samms, Annabel Pettigrew, Brenda Hickin, Fatima Diriye, Hassan Ul-Haq, Izzy McEvoy, Jaz Morrison, Jo Mason, Kalyan Largie, Lara Beaseley, Leah Hickey, Nicola Small, Samiir Saunders, and Tasneim Zyada’s contributions, along with Grace Ndiritu and Zarina Rossheart, helped to make the day possible.

Jasleen Kaur – 9-11 June, Glasgow

Paying tribute to both her personal heritage and the social heritage in her birth city of Glasgow, artist Jasleen Kaur’s commission for ‘All About Love’ is Not new, otherwise, 2023. Firmly rooted in the concepts about spiritual growth, communion, and fellowship that bell hooks articulates in All About Love, the visual elements of the artwork arrived from Kaur’s ability to repurpose imagery that circulated in her worship and home spaces growing up. In doing so, Not new, otherwise critiques how the popularity or absence of an image shapes the stories you are given.

At the Barrowlands, an image of an unnamed aunt with downcast eyes appeared as testament to female family members as part of Kaur’s political and feminist education. On Osborne Street was an image that circulated on Twitter in 2020, of Sikhs standing in solidarity with Muslims offering namaz at the yearlong Indian farmers’ protest. On Duke Street, Kaur’s work featured an early depiction of Guru Nanak and Mardana composing devotional music together, signalling to a pre-colonial Muslim-Sikh history of communal devotion – amongst other compositions specially created for each space, which you can read more about here.

Eve Stainton – 7–9 July, Manchester

For ‘All About Love’ in Manchester, we commissioned artist Eve Stainton (who was born and raised in the city) to create work that would see them exhibiting on home turf for the first time ever. Stainton’s work took inspiration from the adage that, ‘You can take the girl out of Manchester, but you can’t take the Manchester out of the girl’ – wanting audiences to consider the phrase’s capacity for politically contradicting sentiments depending on who is saying it to someone and how. Stainton said, ‘I’ve heard this phrase many times in my family, when I’ve worn some kind of clashing style of tracksuit with a pair of smart leather shoes, or said “going shop” instead of “going to the shop”… It’s a loving acknowledgement of solidarity and belonging: they’ve clocked something of a cultural aesthetic within the fabric of Manchester manifesting in the person. It can also be derogatory, usually related to class.’

Stainton’s artwork, You can take the ___ out of ___, 2023, was about the artist’s love for and connection with the city they grew up in, acknowledging the traces from that experience that permeate their practice today. To celebrate the work’s weekend-long display, Stainton led a walking tour of a handful of the sites, reaffirming its intrinsic bond with the city streets it occupied.

Stainton started the work by welding the title sentence onto long, flat steel bars. In the final artwork, the artist has replaced the subject and location of its central phrase with underscores, inviting the viewer to fill the spaces with their own language, pronoun, city, or idea. The words appear on top of a vibrantly collaged landscape that incorporates imagery from Stainton’s revered performance work, their body, and movement. As part of the commission, Stainton also presented the film You can take the ___ weld, 2023, acting as a digital accompaniment to the poster artworks. The film shows the initial welding process with flickers of the final billboard imagery obscuring the visuals at intermittent intervals. You can watch the film in full and read more about Stainton’s work here.

Helen Cammock – 3–6 August, Brighton

Originally planned to coincide with a major outdoor commission for the recently closed Brighton Centre for Contemporary Art, Turner Prize winner Helen Cammock’s ‘All About Love’ commission the deepest crease in the fold of stone and the sweet taste of salt, 2023 emerged in Brighton and Hove during this year’s Pride weekend. Using bold blocks of colour and fragments of poetry, the work invited passers-by to stop and contemplate the value of art, asking how they see and feel the world around them. Cammock has been a resident of Brighton since 1989, and her commission is both an ode to the spirit of the city – hedonistic and rebellious but also supportive and caring, always brimming with possibility – and a rallying cry to its community and institutions to nurture contemporary visual arts and fight to preserve it as a vibrant habitat of ideas.

To launch the project, we brought together cross-generational voices from Brighton’s art scene and beyond to facilitate a timely and vital panel discussion at Phoenix Art Space. Moderated by The Art Newspaper’s Anny Shaw, Helen Cammock was joined by director of Brighton Centre for Contemporary Art Ben Roberts, executive director of Phoenix Art Space Lucy Day and Project Ours artist Liz Rose to explore the place of art and creativity in society, and how we might counter the current narrative and perception of its value.

Asmaa Jama – 7–10 September, Bristol

Somali-born, Bristol-based artist and poet Asmaa Jama’s ‘All About Love’ commission Except this time nothing returns from the ashes, 2023 landed in Bristol in September.

Jama’s powerful portraits looked out at passers-by from billboard and poster sites across the city, challenging the gaze of the spectator. Jama’s original film, made in collaboration with Gouled Ahmed and commissioned by Spike Island, was shot in Addis Ababa and combines poetry and music to explore how national canons are constructed and can be corrupted. Building on themes explored in the film, Jama’s ‘All About Love’ commission Except this time nothing returns from the ashes, 2023 is a selection of photographic stills captioned with fragments of text. Featuring scenes where characters face the camera, the work pays homage to self-portraiture and explores how communities can take ownership of their own image to resist colonialism and erasure, choosing how they want to be remembered.

Asmaa Jama also presented a public outdoor reading from Except this time nothing returns from the ashes at West Street on the weekend of their commission, joined by guest collaborator okcandice, a writer, artist-curator and musician based between Birmingham and Berlin. The performances were followed by an artist-led walk around multiple nearby billboard sites.

Alberta Whittle – 11–17 December, Edinburgh

Scottish Barbadian artist Alberta Whittle’s powerful work Invest in Love, 2023, brought ‘All About Love’ to a close in Edinburgh, in partnership with the National Galleries of Scotland.

As our final commissioned artist in the series, Whittle’s works took over our billboard and advertising spaces all over the Scottish capital, acting as both a direct call to action and as a reminder to audiences to bring love into their every day. Based on an original series of watercolours, the artworks were inscribed in hand-painted script with tender encouragements such as ‘Invest in Love’, ‘Fill your heart with hope’ and ‘Step lightly’, as well as more defiant calls to ‘Raise the alarm’ and ‘Create dangerously’. About the project, Whittle says:

“I return to bell hooks time and time again. She reminds us to centre love in how we move through the world and to replenish ourselves in our active learning with others. Living in the catastrophe of racial and cultural violence, we need to hold onto love with all our hearts. Invest in love.”