Open House 2023

10–11 November

Join us for Open House: A two-day programme of open studios, screenings, workshops, DJs and special events.

All events are free. All welcome.

Friday 10 November 2023

Open Studios, throughout the building | 4–7 pm

Our community of on-site artists and cultural tenants are opening their studios to the public. Contributors include:

Art Law Studio, ActionSpace, Immanuel Adelowo, Veeda Ahmed, Bamidele Awoyemi, Ain Bailey, Linda Bell, Henry Bradley, Babajide Brian, Lubna Chowdhary, Kaye Donachie, Juliette Ezaoui, Ben Gomes, Pete Gomes, Holly Graham, Nicky Harris, Anthea Hamilton, James Heath, Hsi-Nong Huang, Steph Huang, Yasmine Anlan Huang, Nnena Kalu, Pardip Kapil, Rene Matić, Alicia Reyes Mcnamara, Ana Milenkovic, Maz Murray, Sola Olulode, Beatrix Pang, Chandrakant Patel, Will Pham, Emily Pope, Shamica Ruddock, Lasmin Salmon, Meera Shakti Osborne, Nick Smith, Robin Smith, Kwaga Sillingi, Bolanle Tajudeen (Black Blossoms), Markus Vater, Adia Wahid, Claudia Williams, and Ossie Williams.

Drop-in, no booking required

Artists’ Film Showreel, Event Studio | 4–7 pm

A screening programme of film and moving image work by our onsite community of artists, on display in the Events Studio.

Drop-in, no booking required

In House: Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid, Project Studio | 4–7 pm

An exhibition of work by studio artists Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid as part of our ongoing In House programme. In House is a series of duo exhibitions organised by and for Studio Voltaire’s community of studio artists and cultural tenants. The programme seeks to create a dialogue between two artists, finding points of convergence and collaboration between their practices.

In this exhibition, Awoyemi and Wahid explore the use of pattern in each of their practices. A stroke of a line. An intersection of two paths. A collection or rhythm of different markers to convey common thoughts, beliefs, knowledge and rituals. Our everyday life is littered with symbols, characters and motifs that work together to communicate and speak to us in different ways - from algorithms and languages, to visual systems in our wayfinding and even clothing - speaking to our own inherited influences and cultures.

Considering pattern as a means of creating dialogue by responding, reflecting and overlapping to create new different intensities and repeated forms, the artists collaboratively consider the cartographic and ritualistic nature of patterns, and their ability to replace words and imbue meanings visually.

Drop-in, no booking required.

Live music and DJ sets by the skins and Acolytes curated by Solomon Garçon, Café and Bar | 7–10 pm

Join us for an evening of music, drinks and dancing with sets from the skins and Acolytes. This night of music mixes live performance with experimental electronics, curated by current exhibition artist Solomon Garçon.

  • the skins is a Tamil artist based in London. the skins has performed at venues including IKLECTIK, Institute of Contemporary Art London, Spanners Club, Montez Press Radio and on NTS Live. the skins’ LP never cursed is out on vinyl via @boomkatonline.
  • Acolytes is a producer of Noise music with references to Glitch, Industrial, Dancehall, Grime and Techno. He has previous releases on Haunter and Alter and a forthcoming release on Wain Records.

The event is free but booking is essential.

  1. Book here

Saturday 11 November 2023, 10am-5pm

Open Studios, throughout the building | 10 am–5 pm

Our community of on-site artists and cultural tenants are opening their studios to the public. Contributors include:

Art Law Studio, ActionSpace, Immanuel Adelowo, Veeda Ahmed, Bamidele Awoyemi, Ain Bailey, Linda Bell, Henry Bradley, Babajide Brian, Lubna Chowdhary, Kaye Donachie, Juliette Ezaoui, Ben Gomes, Pete Gomes, Holly Graham, Nicky Harris, Anthea Hamilton, James Heath, Hsi-Nong Huang, Steph Huang, Yasmine Anlan Huang, Nnena Kalu, Pardip Kapil, Rene Matić, Alicia Reyes Mcnamara, Ana Milenkovic, Maz Murray, Sola Olulode, Beatrix Pang, Chandrakant Patel, Will Pham, Emily Pope, Shamica Ruddock, Lasmin Salmon, Meera Shakti Osborne, Nick Smith, Robin Smith, Kwaga Sillingi, Bolanle Tajudeen (Black Blossoms), Markus Vater, Adia Wahid, Claudia Williams, and Ossie Williams.

Drop-in, no booking required

In House: Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid, Project Studio | 10 am–5 pm

Join us for an exhibition of work by studio artists Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid as part of our ongoing In House programme. In House is a series of duo exhibitions organised by and for Studio Voltaire’s community of studio artists and cultural tenants. The programme seeks to create a dialogue between two artists, finding points of convergence and collaboration between their practices.

In this exhibition, Awoyemi and Wahid explore the use of pattern in each of their practices. A stroke of a line. An intersection of two paths. A collection or rhythm of different markers to convey common thoughts, beliefs, knowledge and rituals. Our everyday life is littered with symbols, characters and motifs that work together to communicate and speak to us in different ways - from algorithms and languages, to visual systems in our wayfinding and even clothing - speaking to our own inherited influences and cultures.

Considering pattern as a means of creating dialogue by responding, reflecting and overlapping to create new different intensities and repeated forms, the artists collaboratively consider the cartographic and ritualistic nature of patterns, and their ability to replace words and imbue meanings visually.

Drop-in, no booking required.

House of Voltaire and Friends, Café and Bar | 10 am–5 pm

  • Troy Town is Aaron Angell’s ceramic studio. Opened in 2014 in East London, it is a radical and psychedelic workshop for artists. For this special presentation at Open House, Troy Town will present a new series of iga-yaki-style wood-fired hanaire and chawan coming out of a recent anagama firing, along with green oribe works fired at Troy Town itself. These new ceramics will be available for sale with 50% of the proceeds supporting Troy Town’s pioneering artist programme.
  • La Grotta Ices specialises in hand-made seasonal plant and real dairy ice creams. For Open House, the South London based company will be serving a fabulous selection of ice creams and confections to enjoy onsite or take away.
  • Montez Press was formed in 2012, and envisaged as the third iteration of the spirit of Lola Montez (Lola, Maria, Mario). For Open House, Montez will sell commissioned and published experimental work by artists, writers and thinkers with a focus on queer and intersectional feminist practices through the lens of artists’ writing. Montez Press are committed to curiosity, questioning established methods and systems, and engaging in open conversation and dialogue. Their methods are deeply collaborative. They seek to support unexpected creators, including those who may not receive institutional support due to social and economic systemic prejudices. They commit to a rigorous editorial process in our effort to produce work that takes risks and surprises and challenges the reader.
  • Designer James Shaw will present a series of works, direct from his studio. Shaw’s creations are made from recycled HDPE plastic, foregrounding the beauty and excitement of the waste material.
  • House of Voltaire is offering 10% off all limited edition prints and specially-commissioned homewares, clothing and accessories by artists and designers of local and world notoriety for Open House. All purchases support our charity’s world-renowned artistic and public programmes.

Open Studio Library with Beatrix Pang, Studio 16 | 10 am–1 pm

Current artist-in-residence, Beatrix Pang is hosting a personal library of zines, artists' books and various printed matters collected as part of their ongoing research into queer publishing and visual culture, with a focus in and around the region of East, Southeast and South Asia.

Pang is the inaugural recipient of Studio Voltaire and LOEWE FOUNDATION’s year-long international residency as part of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award. Pang is using their residency to expand their self-publishing practice and produce a series of zines and workshops in collaboration with Studio Voltaire’s studio community and audiences.

Drop-in, no booking required.

Printmaking with Sadie St. Hilare, Event Studio | 10.30 am–12 pm

Join artist Sadie St. Hilaire for a printmaking workshop responding to our neighbourhood of Clapham. Test out different DIY printmaking techniques like mono-printing, stamp making, and collage to create your very own zine that tell stories of the places we know. This event is free and is suitable for children, young people, families and adults of all ages.

The event is free but booking is essential. If you are under 16 you must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.

  1. Book here

Curator-led Tour of Studio Voltaire, Throughout the building | 12–1 pm

Join Nicola Wright (Curator, Exhibitions) and Maggie Matić (Curator, Studios & Residencies) for a tour of Studio Voltaire’s building, studios and facilities and our current exhibitions, Solomon Garçon: ARMS and In House: Bamidele Awoyemi and Adia Wahid.

Drop-in, no booking required.

Artists’ Film Showreel, Events Studio | 1–5 pm

A screening programme of film and moving image work by our onsite community of artists, on display in the Events Studio.

Drop-in, no booking required

Anthea Hamilton book signing and in conversation with Nicola Wright (Curator, Exhibitions, Studio Voltaire), Café | 2–3 pm

Mash Up – works from 1999 to 2022 is the first comprehensive monographic publication dedicated to the work of London-based artist Anthea Hamilton. The book is co-published by M HKA and Triangle and follows the artist's eponymous survey exhibition held at M HKA in 2022.

For over two decades, Anthea Hamilton has developed a complex practice which spans sculpture, installation, film and performance. Her work is characterised by devotional creativity, positivity, flexibility, unexpected research trajectories, highly visual aesthetics, cross-cultural interests, interdisciplinary modes of production and collaborative dynamics.

Using the ‘mashup’ as her method, she filters and assesses elements culled from the present and recent past of fashion, art, food, nature, design, architecture and pop culture. Her practice relies on a strong belief – in cohabitation, complexity and, by extension, imagination – that posits the ambiguity of the artworks as a means to constantly challenge our perceived realities.

This book presents the full scope of Hamilton’s artistic production and gives prominence to the artist’s creative and independent spirit. It opens with a mashup of images featuring textures, details, patterns and collages weaving their way into and out of the work.

The publication features commissioned texts by Milovan Farronato, Anthea Hamilton and Anne-Claire Schmitz, and essays by Linsey Young and Taylor Le Melle.

The event is free but booking is essential.

  1. Book here

QRL lexicon x Pidgin: Queer language battle zine workshop (with Beatrix Pang, Chung Yu-Ting and Wenxi Liao), Artists’ Kitchen | 2.30–4.30 pm

Artist in residence Beatrix Pang (they/them, Hong Kong) is hosting a zine-making workshop to explore multiple languages around queer lexicon and its context through a language battle exercise.

A lexicon is a person's vocabulary, language or branch of knowledge. The words being used, circulated and invented by queer people are evidence of their lives, communication and recognition of each other, archiving queer threads from past to present.

This workshop is in collaboration with Yu-Ting Chung (she/her, Taiwan) and Wenxi Liao (he/him, Mainland China), builds upon Pang’s project Queer Reads Lexicon with Queer Reads Library exploring queerness in the context of local languages, inspired by Chung's artwork “Calligraphy Battle” as a form to assemble a multilingual lexicon asking how queer people in diverse geographic regions, have started their own dialects and queer language.

This workshop is open to LGBTQIA+ and multiracial people aged 16 and over, or are interested in languages and how queer language travels.

Workshop materials will be provided. Please feel free to bring your own textual and visual materials.

The event is free but booking is essential.

  1. Book here

House of Voltaire and Friends: Lou Stoppard in conversation with Mary Stephenson, Café | 3.30–4.30 pm

Writer and curator Lou Stoppard will be in conversation with artist Mary Stephenson.

Stephenson is a London-based artist known for her atmospheric paintings exploring interior and exterior landscapes, which evoke varying psychological states and draw viewers into humorous, complex and surreal scenes

The pair will discuss recent works, in which human presence is hinted at through the abandonment of domestic objects, and Stephenson’s nuanced explorations of relationships, consumption and of the human desire to fit in and belong.

The event is free but booking is required.

  1. Book here

  1. Bamidele Awoyemi has an ambition to engage with stories. Those which make our spaces. Those inscribed within our objects. Those which speak to our habits, rituals, and everyday experiences. His Yoruba descent, while being born and based in South London, drives his interests—drawn to how tools and techniques of storytelling can provoke richer insights and infer new meaning. Through his passion for engaging with the overlaps in different cultures and values, Bamidele has been fortunate to collaborate with different groups, specialists, and communities in the projects he does; playfully shifting between mediums and disciplines to interrogate, speculate, provoke and subvert.

  2. Adia Wahid (b. 1971 Karachi) lives and works in London. Her drawings and paintings can be described as diagrams doubled over other diagrams, in search of yet another level of diagram that never quite knows which time it is in. Time and cultural syntax are spliced together, but in ways that leave gaps or striations. The brain is strange in the way it is able to process and create reality. Something is not there and then it is: a drawing might mediate such a passage between absence and presence. This corresponds to the process of recording and erasing.

  3. Solomon Garçon (b. 1991, London) lives and works in London. In 2022, Garçon's debut solo exhibition SNITCH was presented at Rose Easton, London. His work has been presented internationally at Galerie Buchholz (Fasanenstr. 31 space, 2023), and performed at Kunstverein München (2022), FOAM, Amsterdam (2022), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), Kampnagel, Hamburg, Café Oto, London (2020) and the South London Gallery, London (2019). In 2021, he was an inaugural recipient of the LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.

  4. Beatrix Pang 彭倩幗 (they/them/他, b. Hong Kong)’s early practice revolved around still/moving images, performance and printed medium. After completing education in art photography and fundamental design in Hong Kong and Scandinavia, Pang founded Small Tune Press in 2011, with focus on artists’ books and zines publishing in Hong Kong. Later on, Pang co-founded ZINE COOP, a platform to promote Hong Kong zine culture in 2017, and founded Queer Reads Library in 2018, a mobile library carrying independently published queer materials in creating space for queer inclusivity and visibility in Hong Kong and Asian diaspora communities.

  5. Chung Yu-Ting (she/her, Taiwan) is a filmmaker and artist based in London. Her works range from fiction films to multimedia artworks, with a current interest in Riso print, language and translation. With a background in Fine Art and an MA in Digital Direction at Royal College, she is also a scriptwriter and producer of the international feature film Mask and was shortlisted for the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion 2020.

  6. Wenxi Liao (he/him, China Mainland) is a multidisciplinary designer and curator currently based in London. His curatorial practice sits within the intersection of art, design and media critique, with a specific interest in the notions of mediation and remediation in a variety of contexts. Previously based in Shanghai, he has worked on or contributed to various exhibitions in mainland China, including the 9th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture and the 13th Shanghai Biennale. He graduated with an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and a BE Industrial Design from Tongji University, Shanghai.

Solomon Garçon
ARMS

Exhibition

Unearthed Collective:
Where can we be heard?

Exhibition

Studio Voltaire
1A Nelsons Row
London SW4 7JR


Open Wednesday–Sunday, 10 am–5 pm.

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