Karl Holmqvist, Mason Leaver-Yap, Claire Potter and Jacob Wren commissions announced

CCA is pleased to announce that Mason Leaver-Yap, Claire Potter, Karl Holmqvist and Jacob Wren have been commissioned to contribute texts for ‘No Title’, CCA’s ongoing public project with Sarah Pierce. ‘No Title’ is centred around Pierce’s interest in dementia, taking a creative and critical approach to ‘the community of dementia’ that departs from the typical artistic approaches of the therapeutic or diagnostic. The project continues the artist’s ongoing interests in narrative, collective memory, and constructions of community.

The text will be structured according to the ‘protocols’ that people with dementia call upon: withdrawal, insistence, repetition, confabulation.

Artist Biographies

Karl Holmqvist is an artist living and working in Berlin. The main focus of his artistic practice is on language and includes writing in the form of artist’s books, in videos and room size installations as well as in spoken word performances. His writing is mostly made up of quotations from a variety of sources rearranged in the form of a type of written collage dealing with repetition, double meaning and memory function. Recent one-person exhibitions include Kunstverein Braunschweig (with Klara Liden), Power Station, Dallas and Camden Arts Centre, London (all 2016). He has participated in the Venice Biennial in 2003 and 2011, and Performa, New York in 2005, 2007 and 2013.

Mason Leaver-Yap works with artists to produce publications, exhibitions, and events. Recent projects include work with Uri Aran, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Andrea Büttner, Hanne Darboven, Lucy McKenzie and Atelier EB, Charlotte Prodger, James Richards, and Leslie Thornton. They are Bentson Moving Image Scholar at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

Claire Potter is an artist writer from Merseyside working with live, published and recorded texts, installation and performance. Claire’s work addresses modes of speaking and reading to bring considerations of affect, narratology, and methods of articulation to the attention of audiences. Recent and forthcoming works include performance film Cast Metal Nut, White Rainbow, London, 2016; visual essay Lads of Aran, in Bodies that Remain: Essays on the writer’s body, Punctum Books, New York/London, 2017; performance CHAVSCUMBOSS, Everyman, Liverpool, and Bank Street Arts, Sheffield, 2016; and the visual essay Lads Rites, in Oxford Artist Research journal, University of Oxford, 2017.

Jacob Wren makes literature, collaborative performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, Polyamorous Love Song (a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2014) and Rich and Poor. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. International collaborations include: a stage adaptation of the Wolfgang Koeppen novel Der Tod in Rom (Sophiensaele, Berlin), An Anthology of Optimism (co-created with Pieter De Buysser / Campo, Ghent), Big Brother Where Art Thou? (a project entirely on Facebook co-created with Lene Berg / OFFTA) and No Double Life For The Wicked (co-created with Tori Kudo / The Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan.) He travels internationally with alarming frequency and frequently writes about contemporary art.