Saturday 10 October, 4pm BST
Watch this event on our Youtube channel
Image: Reproduction of untitled painting by John Latham, published by Kingly Gallery, London, September 1948. Poster © MACC
In this online panel discussion, Ifeanyi Awachie, Anna Barham, and Noa Latham will expand on their contributions to the Chelsea Space exhibition John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew, and discuss John Latham’s work through the unique lenses of their own practices, exploring the exhibition’s themes of language, poetry, time, and processes of questioning and unlearning. The panel will be mediated by the exhibition curators, recent graduates of Chelsea MA Curating and Collections.
The exhibition, John Latham: Now Forget Everything You Ever Knew starts from an untitled, undated poem written by John Latham. It is a collaboration between MA Curating and Collections (Chelsea College of Arts, UAL), Chelsea Space and Flat Time House (a London landmark that was declared a Living Sculpture in 2003). The show stems from extensive research of John Latham’s archival material supervised by Flat Time House Director and Curator Gareth Bell-Jones.
Latham’s elusive text speaks to a process of unlearning, through an exploration of language that attempts to interrogate received knowledge. In correspondence with such ideas, Ifeanyi Awachie, Anna Barham and Noa Latham have been invited to respond to John Latham’s writing.
Through this methodology the exhibition considers the ways in which language contributes to the dismantling of certain received knowledge, and how the politics of forgetting might be instructive for antiracist discourse and wide-spread practices of decolonisation; to consolidate and recontextualise our histories; to embrace our intuition as Incidental Persons. Coined by Latham, the ‘Incidental Person’ is able to critically reflect from a distance and respond to social and political situations through their intuition. The curatorial approach is based on a careful consideration of the artist’s ideas and works throughout his years.