6 Temmuz 2014

Pi ARTWORKS London – A House is not a Hotel – curated group exhibition of emerging UK-based artists


Steven Morgana, Patterns VI (Deaf, Abused & Blind ), 2014, Fundraising posters, 60 x 60 cm

A House Is Not A Hotel

Lisa  Slominski,  Steven  Morgana, 
Christian  Newby, 
Theodoros  Stamatogiannis,  Farniyaz Zaker

25 July – 10 September 2014

Opening: Thursday, 24 July 2014, 18:30-21:00

press  release

A House Is Not A Hotel, 25 July – 10 September,
is a curated group exhibition of emerging UK-based artists.

Itinerancy has increasingly become one of the primary characteristics that differentiate the lifestyles
of the people, particularly the young, of contemporary western societies from the lifestyles
of their predecessors. We move from city to city, rented accommodation to rented accommodation
at an ever-increasing pace. A consequence of employment becoming increasingly flexible
and precarious as well as a workforce that is more skilled and less laden with material and
maternal/paternal commitments than its precursors. It is a process that is also hastened
by a housing market in which supply and demand have slowly drifted apart from each other.
This situation is nowhere more evident than in London, a city in which the migratory flow around
and through it happens at an exhilarating pace and where the ideologically driven discourse
on how to manage the places we live in is at its most charged.


Christian Newby (click to expand)

For those that can take advantage of it, this freedom of movement opens up exciting and liberating
opportunities while for others it ebbs at the sense of security that stability and continuity can bring.
Nevertheless, for both of these groups, their relationship with the places in which they live is rapidly
changing, and is increasingly one that is defined by transience.


Farniyaz Zaker (click to expand)

The six artists included in A House Is Not A Hotel each make work that is motivated by a distinctly
different set of concerns and subject matter. Lisa Slominski plays with the palette and motifs, as well
as the patterning and repletion, of interior design. Christian Newby deploys an abstract painting
practice and its high-art connotations within the context of craft objects such as ceramics and carpets.
Fazyzer Zaker juxtaposes references to architecture and female clothing, drawing out their analogous
roles in mediating between the public and the private.  Theodoros Stamatogiannis replicates
ubiquitous architectural components such as floors, doors, and windows, in a way that perturbs their
traditional function and consequently renegotiates our relationship with them. Steven Morgana
acquires a heterogeneous array of materials from the public domain such as charity posters, detritus
from abandoned buildings, and crowd control barriers, which are transformed into structures that are
alluring and pristine while still hinting at the more complex and forlorn reality that the original objects
are props in.  Yet, within their respective practices, each artist has created work that deals with the
house/home/dwelling place and the tropes of the distinctly contemporary relationship we have with it,
creating a curatorial point of cohesion with the exhibition that has been arrived at from a set of
distinctly different directions.


Lisa Slominski (click to expand)

A House Is Not A Hotel demonstrates the commitment Pi Artworks, London has to not only exhibiting
work of its own international artists but also creating an platform for emerging UK based practitioners,
something that will continue beyond the gallery’s first year in London.

Theodoros Stamatogiannis (click to expand)

Pi ARTWORKS  London

55 Eastcastle Street London W1W 8EG

Tel:+44 207 637 8403

Pi ARTWORKS  Istanbul

İstiklal Cad. Mısır Apt 163/4 Galatasaray

Tel: +90 212 293 71 03