A new film commission by Judith Hopf together with a series of sculptural works, made specifically for the exhibition. This exhibition was the artist’s first solo show in a UK public gallery.

Hopf’s work focuses on how our social environments shape us, influence us, and by extension thereby exclude us from ourselves. Hopf uses a wide variety of techniques such as sculpture, installation, film and performance, often engaging subjects and materials that can be found in the immediate environment.

In her installations for Documenta 13 a series of masks were formed from computer packaging and drinking glasses balanced to create a precarious bamboo forest. Such an approach can be thought of in connection to Bricolage, revealing a socio-political order latent in ready-to-hand materials.

For her presentation at Studio Voltaire, Hopf’s new film work draws upon references to silent cinema and feminist film material from the suffragette era. A tented environment to house the film is accompanied by a series of sculptural works taking the form of a ‘flock’ of concrete sheep.

Following on from her commission for Frieze Film, Some Ends of Things (2011) depicting an egg-person wandering around the hallways of a modernist building, Hopf’s new work takes the architecture of a modernist home as its context. In this new work Hopf recreates a narrative from the suffragette film Le Bateau de Léontine (1911) in which a girl is shown in the rebellious act of flooding her family home, sailing a toy boat in the floodwater apparently oblivious to the resulting chaos around her. The pleasure taken in this rebellious action reinstates the power of the individual to open a gap in social hierarchy. In Hopf’s work contrasting elements of a pristine modernist architecture and the free-flowing, anarchic force of water merge in the space of the film. Staging her work in a domestic environment Hopf powerfully conveys how emancipatory possibilities of desire and action may be pent up, waiting to brim over in the most everyday scenarios.

This exhibition is a part of Not Our Class, Studio Voltaire’s programme of commissions and education projects that through research and practice take the work of Jo Spence as a starting point for investigating the legacy and potentials of her work in relation to contemporary culture and life.