I recently completed a year long programme with Conditions, led by Matthew-Noel Tod, under the mentorship of Conditions Associate and Vienna-based artist, James Lewis.

During part of this time, I took the brave decision to destroy previous works — principally all the works I made out of clear packing tape and clear pvc film (spanning works from 2020 -2023), in an attempt to return the material back to its origins. Over the period of several months, the dismantling of works resulted in an ongoing series of works called ‘4.8038206872’, with each part of this small series holding an additional title in brackets, denoting the stages to this protracted project — (incision); (inversion); (residue); and (damage). The significant function to the project became, not only the erasure of certain works from my oeuvre, but the erasure of the presence of a body from these works (as much as a body was needed to implement these motions), allowed for the invisible actions and enactments that a body carries out, to become the principle element in the creation of these pieces. What emerged is a kind of indexical casting of these invisible gestures, which is explained further in each of the stages below.

The long number ‘4.8038206872’ used, makes reference to the statistical data attached to the quantity of clear packing tape and clear pvc used — in this case expressed in miles, contributing to the making of the previous works (that included sculpture, choreographic objects and installations for performances - which now only exist as documentation). The series is perpetual and ongoing, much like its long number — a pattern of digits that repeats infinitely; repeating again and again in the making, all of which symbolises the undoing and redoing of a continuum, requiring further clear packing tape to be added and used, increasing the milage, where the title’s numerical display potentially and continually changes, arriving at it’s current (and uncertain) position of ‘4.8038206872’.

Only a very small amount of the previous works remain, purporting to the potential increase of the current mileage being used as this project’s title. Who can say whether the remainder will be converted and added to this series? It only seems fitting to the whole premise of the project to continue.

The following documentation, maps these works accounted journey and metamorphosis as they took place in this project as part of the development of my practice. The works that were destroyed to make this series, can be found in the gallery of works on this site.

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4.8038206872 (incision)

Appointing a Stanley knife and its numerous blades seemed the best possible incising instrument to aid the cutting, splicing and dissecting of each clear tape object in the first stages of returning this 'object-material' back to its origin. The unexpected was revealed in the clear tape’s adhesive becoming congealed and stuck to the surface of each blade, where the tape has imparted, leaving traces of its own demise.

This act has in itself served to become another arm to this series, creating what can only be described as an 'aftermath' in the wake of the numerous hours of cutting and trimming the clear tape objects to fit the 211 spools dimensions. This added an extra layer of the indexical and haptical relationship to material, as a proposition for the counterparts in this small series, transforming these consumable products to oscillate into something less neutral, or material, but into objects.

Photographic documentation of 4.8038206872 (incision), 12 knife blades, clear tape and tape adhesive, pvc film residue, cardboard dust, hair, skin, fibres. Dimensions: 5.5cm x 2cm and 6cm x 5cm (including blade and  residual matter)

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4.8038206872 (inversion)

Destroying any body of work, is something an artist hesitates in contemplating. In this instance, it is a crucial part to making this small series, which involved dismantling recent works created from clear tape and PVC film - both sculptural and choreographic in nature, to be cut up and reassembled in an act of returning this ‘object-material’ to its origin, or at least a semblance - ending up as a simulacra of sorts. The title alludes to the statistical data gathered from the various works created as a means (and curiosity), to summon up its currency in the form of measure and quantity.

Together with its counterpart, ‘4.8038206872 (residue)’, both share the stages of making and un-making. These works, once created from clear tape, no longer exist, and are now ‘hidden in plain sight’ as new arrangements of themselves. Their new forms mimic reels of film, holding a provenance of indexical, haptic gestures amassed in their making, performing and display, are presented as their own imagined footage to a moving image.

Documentation. 4.8038206872 (inversion). Studio installation and detail views; clear tape and pvc film, dust, hair, skin, fibres, cardboard spools, perspex cases. Dimensions: 41cm x 41cm x 72cm

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4.8038206872 (residue)

Clear tape residue accumulated from returning the material objects once constructed from clear tape back to their origin, has been collected as a mass of tape off-cuts, shards, and dust. As a byproduct in this process, this mass of off-cuts has inadvertently become a work in its own right, elevating the residue; the plastic bag acting as the skin to this body of waste. Each small layer is a host, that carries multiple elements such as dust, hair and skin particles (skin cells, fingerprints and other remains of dna) that were accrued from its original process in making the objects, as well as additional marks and imprints of other's body's through performance, interaction or touch.

This piece and its counterpart, ‘4.8038206872 (inversion)' both allude to and share connotations to celluloid film stock - its components of film being spliced and put back together, as if they were picked up off the editing suite’s floor in the stages of editing, creating an imagined film from its shards and discarded remnants. Further accumulations, such as, cardboard dust and shavings, fibres from clothing, more hair, more skin etc., extends the piece's indexical and durational journey, and are now new companions, as they mingle in different shades of transparency.

Documentation 4.8038206872 (residue). Studio installation and detail views; clear tape, pvc film, dust, hair, skin, fibres, plastic carrier bag. Dimensions: 40cm x 31cm x 26cm approx

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4.8038206872 (damage)

In this journey of inverting, incising and accumulating residue of objects made and un-made in their doing and undoing, these now ‘un-objects’ have gone through their next phase in their transformation. In much of this small series of works, the physical presence of the body is invisible and only visible in its activities and actions that the body performs — the indexical, haptic gestures are being preserved that create ways of considering the body’s relationship to the materials.

In the instance of 4.8038206872 (damage), can be viewed as a form of flaying, occurring as a result in the damaging of the painstaking process of producing the original works, the undoing of this making, and to it’s re-making, to arrive at this point of it’s un-making. Many of the original works made connotations to the skin, and where the body interacted with this second skin, to end up being flayed through the handling, touching and retouching through its constant contact with human skin and its unhuman quality of this secondary skin. Added to this mix, is the further accumulation of dust, hair, skin particles and general debris from the studio surroundings, supplements the charge of individual layers that have undergone the varying junctures in its metamorphosis and disfigurement.

Documentation, 4.8038206872 (damage). Studio installation and detail views; clear tape and pvc film strips, cardboard dust, hair, skin, fibres, perspex. Dimensions: 200cm x 56cm x 25cm approx

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About Conditions Programme

Conditions is artist-run, co-founded in 2018 by artist and educator Matthew Noel–Tod and artist and musician David Panos. The programme has been developed in collaboration with curator Sara Sassanelli since 2021. The aim is to build a long-term, sustainable, and independent environment for artists. The project proposes sharing knowledge as a resource and seeks to push aesthetic questions on the current notion and conditions of ‘contemporary art’.

Conditions is led by Matthew Noel-Tod, whose previous work in art education includes running the BA in Moving Image at the University of Brighton: a pioneering BA Programme in artists’ film and video.

For further details about the Conditions Programme and a list of all the Conditions Artists and Associates for 2024 -25, follow the link below:

www.conditions.studio/conditions_artists

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Artists’ Drawings publishes drawings made by artists with a focus on how drawing can be used to develop and articulate ideas. Led by images and intentions, it combines drawings made today with others from the near and distant past.

Issue #1 explores relationships between drawing and sculpture through forty drawings, that are broadly defined, selected from current practicing artists, as well as from museum collections. Alongside these drawings are three short commissioned texts by Stu Burke, Olivia Bax and Matt Page — including an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s writing on drawing. 

Featured artists include:
Cos Ahmet, Kate Appleby, Olivia Bax, Stu Burke, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Isabelle Carr, Paul Cezanne, Ben Coleman, Simon Lee Dicker, Marcel Duchamp, Charlie Franklin, G. Tyler Honn, Laura Fitzgerald, FollowTheSun, Angel Greenham, Tim Ingleby, Mykola Kornilov, Machinic Protocols – Edouard Cabay, Katya Mora, Rachel Mortlock, Sebastian Messer, Jay Ottewell, Matt Page, Auguste Rodin, Jenni Rope, Ben Rowe, Ulrich Rückriem, Victoria Sharples, Richard Tuttle, Paul Valéry, Ruolan Zhang

“The role of drawing in my practice acts as a portal to constructing a sculptural idea, standing in for those times when material, space and capacity are simply not available. Drawings can sometimes live in my sketchbooks for years before being realised. Many lay dormant forever, remaining as evidence or documentation of an idea. I tend to work across multiple ideas at the same time, so drawings can often reside alongside text works that are not intended for them, that on these occasions provide new contexts for these drawings to contemplate”   —  Cos Ahmet.

Images: Cos Ahmet, Untitled (Drawing for a Sculpture), 2024. Documentation of a double page drawing for a sculpture not yet realised, alongside a text work, appearing in the artist's sketchbook. Graphite on paper. 29.5 cm x 21 cm; Marcel Duchamp, Sketchbook for Rotary Glass Plates, c1920. Ink on envelope Fragment, 5.1 cm x 5.1 cm. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery;  Victoria Sharples, Study for Heap, 2015. Pen on graph paper, 14 cm x12.5 cm; Full image of ‘Untitled (Drawing for a Sculpture), 2024’. Documentation of a double page drawing for a sculpture not yet realised, alongside a text work, appearing in the artist's sketchbook. Graphite on paper. 29.5 cm x 21 cm, by Cos Ahmet; Short video depicting the contents of Issue #1: Drawing Sculpture.

Artists’ Drawings Issue # 1: Drawing Sculpture is selected & edited by Matt Page.

Issue # 1: Drawing Sculpture, Summer 2025 
Printed in the UK on recycled paper 
40 pages, 14.8 × 21 cm
ISSN 2977-6864  

For further details, and to purchase a copy, visit artistsdrawings.co.uk

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Rallying under the title Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building, 17 projects will exhibit over 200 artists in 11 venues around Seyðisfjörður from 23 to 25 May 2025.

Infrastructural Futures is a durational radio broadcast, hosted by Sluice State Emergency Management Agency in partnership with LungA School & Seyðisfjörður Community Radio - a shared digital and analogue broadcasting platform located in the village of Seyðisfjörður on the east-coast of Iceland - hosted, nurtured and initiated by an open-ended international community.

Infrastructural Futures uses Vinay Gupta’s Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps as a loose structural framework.

‘These maps were originally designed to allow someone to orientate themselves around the infrastructure and they exist inside in the event of a crisis. The way it does this is by plotting the six ways to die: too hot, too cold, illness, injury, hunger, and thirst. If you’re not dying of one of these six things, then you’re going to be dying of old age. Then what it goes on to do is that it puts the individual at the centre of the map and then concentrically moving out from the individual, we move through those spaces up to the world level. And then it maps infrastructure, or the means of not dying, against those concerns.’

This framework will be crossed with a RPG style narrative to plot and structure the selected audio works. The result will be an emergency broadcast into the void. The future of the world is at stake. The public must be warned. 

As part of  Infrastructural Futures, I am presenting four audio / text works. The spoken words and sounds are an extension to the body-material worlds I create. Taking the unique language that a material transmits, these works become a mixture of material soundscapes, that mingle with the words and phrases I obsessively collect and combine, letting them rub up against each other, constructing them into type of ‘sonic material’. Some of the audio works embrace the voice alone, but speak to us of these body-material worlds.

Selected Artists / Audio:

Will Gresson + Iulia Boșcu / Disinformation / Jay Goodbrave (comm.Possible Worlds) / Corridor8 / Cos Ahmet / TMLE / Ruth Jones / There Are No Birds Here / Beth Ross / Con: temporary Quarters / Jim Ricks / Ari Kerssens / Oliver Payne + Tazelaar Stevenson / Elena Botts (unknown sound collective) / Nicola Colclough / Meitheal / Kimbal Bumstead / Ambitions Graveyard / Yarmonics / TLK (Od Arts Festival) / Geography of Colour / LungA School / Sarah Wishart

The Sluice State Emergency Management Agency transmitted the selected artists audio pieces for the duration of the expo, interdispersed with other live elements. The listening experience was available online via the Sluice website, on Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, or via the radio station on FM 107.1

Below is a recorded extract from the first of three broadcasts transmitted on 23 May 2025 from Seyðisfjörður Community Radio, Iceland, and featuring the four audio works by Cos Ahmet, starting with an introduction, press play on the audio link below:

About Sluice Seyðisfjörður Expo

The eleventh edition of Sluice’s peripatetic international expo is alighting in the far east of Iceland in the isolated town of Seyðisfjörður (population 670). Sluice Seyðisfjörður is an international expo of artist and curator-led projects each addressing the concept of world-building as a means to explore how we build worlds within our own. How these re-imagined, alternative worlds reflect back at us our dissatisfaction with the world as-is and points towards utopic/dystopic alternates. We recognise the danger of the current historical moment, and also its potential.

About Sluice

Sluice is a non-profit initiative based in the UK, led by artists and curators. Since 2011 Sluice has collaborated exclusively with other artist and curator-led projects, collectives and non-profit initiatives. We create multi-faceted events around the world, focusing on the local in a transnational context in order to examine artist-led culture.

To coincide with the Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building Expo, a special Spring / Summer 2025 Issue under the title of ‘World-Building’, accompanies the entire expo. Details available on the Sluice website. Infrastructural Futures is part of Sluice Seyðisfjörður: World-Building Expo 2025, and was developed in partnership with LungA School, and broadcast live as a radio take-over in conjuncion with Seyðisfjörður Community Radio.

sluice.info/events/seydisfjordur
seydisfjordurcommunityradio.net

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…I will be here and there — inside and outside — between walls and beneath the trees… present and absent, boundless and forbidden… foolish and resolute, formless and bodiless… I will be among you like a ghost that has lived 1000 years, yet was born only yesterday…

Ghost Art School X Independents Biennial presented a constellation of exhibitions and events under the banner of ‘The Right Map’, for the Independents Biennial held in Liverpool during 5 June to 14 September 2025. The exhibitions consisted of, Unstable Series - Holes I - IV — an ever-changing exhibition existing in various iterations, curated by Rory Macbeth, at The Stables Gallery Spaces, and Slipstream, centred on process and collaboration, curated by Phoebe Thomas, at CBS Gallery, Liverpool.

Emerging from the spirit of Ghost Art School, it celebrates artists who move between margins, who learn in the cracks, and who map their own routes when none are given. Here, the map is never fixed. It is drawn in gestures, erased by time, and redrawn in conversations, defiance and in care. ‘The Right Map’ asks, not where we are going, but how we move - and who and what gets to move us.

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The Right Map: Unstable Series - Holes I - IV, curated by Rory Macbeth. The Stables Gallery.

Holes are strange. We talk about them as things, but they are ‘not-things’ — defined by what surrounds them, not what they are. They exist and don’t exist at the same time. The works here are holes literally or metaphorically. Holes as places to hide, or to hide things. Holes are portals - a way into a different world, access to the inaccessible. A view through to the other side. Dummy phones invite you to talk to people you cannot reach by ordinary phone — to talk to the mythical, the fictional, to the deceased, or the unborn. Cakes which, as people cut and ate at the opening, revealed ‘Skye-Picot 1916’ on the plates, the name of the treaty dividing up the Middle East engineered by Britain and France and that has been the foundation of all the destabilisation and war right up to the present day. The audience re-enact this act of division, and create a hole way bigger than an empty plate.

Cartoon holes on glass hover uneasily and precariously in reality, referencing possibilities of holes from Alice to wormholes via Looney Tunes and the Yellow Submarine.’MacArthur Park’ is sung in a shower, a song about loss as an overheard unseen private moment. The hayloft resonates with the dissonances that come from broken organ pipes - holes that have unplanned-for holes. Poles that serve as a way of viewing other things (through), has its apertures placed towards the floor or up high — away from the viewer, rendering their instinct to look through them, in an act of a truancy of vision. From found holes, filled holes, objects that make holes — from Ursula K Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to black holes and back again.

Ghost Art School’s logo are two eyeholes — actual holes, that can be put in anything. It is a means of looking through to something else - reversing the panopticon. Ghost Art School members have been collecting images of found holes that make up an ongoing and perpetually growing collection, adding to the strangeness of holes — Holes hold positions in our lives. Their position is not measured by a title or name, but by location and the responsibility they carry. What we learned, and the kinds of holes we found in a map that was already full of them and searching for further holes, the experience went far beyond what was expressed - more about what happens when we work together, recognising where we succeeded so that we can carry them forward, and where things did not work so we can avoid them.

Participating artists:

Alison Reid, Alma Stritt, Charli Kleeman, Chelsea Johnson, Chris Roberts, Colm Moore, Conner Browne, Cos Ahmet, Danielle Freakley, David W Hicks, Eleanor Capstick, Finn Roberts, Gary Finnegan, Gwendolin Kircali, Halyna Maystrenko-Grant, Hannah Browne, Harriet Morley, Igor Prato Luna, Jasmir Creed, Karema Munassar, Lily Patricija, Mai Sanchez, Marie-Sofie Braune, Molly Lindsay, Molly Mousdell, Phoebe Thomas, Priya Foster, Ritu Arya, Rory Macbeth, Sonic Relics, Theodora Koumbouzis, Tom Doubtfire, Tom Kelly, Valetina Passerini, Xueying Zhang

Images: Cos Ahmet, Installation and detail views of A Truancy of Vision I (diptych), 2025,  from The Right Map: Unstable Series - Holes I, curated by Rory Macbeth, The Stables Gallery Spaces, Port Sunlight Village, Wirral.

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The Right Map: SLIPSTREAM, curated by Phoebe Thomas. CBS Gallery, Liverpool.

SLIPSTREAM centres on process and collaboration. The act of creation is a fluid and mutable as water. SLIPSTREAM asks our artists to wade in the rivulets of another's practice. It asks them to trust, and to reach their hands underneath the surface, to trawl for memories, moments, and acts of making. What rises to the surface easily - and what stays lodges in the silt?

Travelling in the wake of a fluid form; taken adrift by an external force. The spaces behind, in-between, following, following, following another path. SLIPSTREAM follows a simple score: The participating artists were each asked to define their practice in 30 words or less, breaking it down into its constituent parts before handing this over, and anonymously assigned another’s definition of their practice. This ‘new’ practice would now become wholly or part of each artist’s own practice — the aim, to push each artist outside of their comfort zone and encourage experimentation, resulting in a response through exchange and approach. How would each artist interpret this? These exchanges were brought together in a group exhibition, further developed in the gallery setting. The identities were revealed to each of the artist after the experiment came to an end.

Participating artists: Cos Ahmet / Gary Finnegan / Halyna Maystrenko-Grant / Jasmir Creed / Karema Munassar

Delivered as an in-between sculpture, Cos Ahmet responds to the physicality and temporality of painting. A singular happening - a brushstroke loops in and out of the frame. 'In The Act of (Not) Painting (To Look At Things Slowly)' addresses Ahmet's given prompt, where he chooses to view this one element as an action or performance, and in this case, the act of ‘not’ painting as his riposte. 

Reduced to a slowed down gesture, the work expropriates the flow of painting, removing the visible attributes of the application of paint to a surface. The empty stretchers propped on two stacks of books mimic a painting’s momentary limbo that is somewhere between coming fresh out of the studio and moments of install that a gallery setting brings.

The reference books point to the act of making and hint at the history of art - hidden within the pages of its books, bookmarked, recording data, and writing cryptic gestures toward painting, are all at once highlighting the unseen endeavours that lurk behind the closed doors to an artists’ studio - the overall appearance presented as if a thesis on the undoing of a process.

Images: Installation views, stills and short excerpt from The Act of (Not) Painting (To Look At Things Slowly), 2025 by Cos Ahmet, part of The Right Map: Slipstream, curated by Phoebe Thomas, CBS Gallery, Liverpool.

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Ghost Art School is a growing undefined entity which was initiated by conversations with BA, MA, PhD students and graduates across Fine Art faculties at Glasgow School of Art, Slade School of Fine Art and John Moores, Liverpool School of Art & Design. The organisation and community exists to haunt art schools. The caretaker of Ghost Art School is UK-based artist and curator Rory Macbeth. A range of projects, events, exhibitions and exchanges are documented below, which include: ‘The End of Glory’; ‘The Dazzling Edge of Darkness’; and ‘Good Luck, Mysterious Stranger!’.

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The End of Glory

The exhibition, The End of Glory, was assembled by graduates and current Foundation and BA students at BHSAD. They worked remotely with Ghost Art School artists in a similar way that a medium works with a spirit. They have had to concern themselves with the translation of a message [the artwork] from a being [the artist] and manifesting it [the display] to an audience. 

From a distance they fabricated, realised and curated artworks for artists of Ghost Art School (none of whom were present). This began to develop important skills in exhibition production. From sourcing materials to communicating and collaborating with artists internationally; installing and hanging artwork to formulating curatorial decisions; having strict instructions to total freedom; fabricating new pieces, to giving the exhibition a title.

In the exhibition, the artist Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan collaborated on creating a performance video called ‘ Pull The Other One’ (2024). The origins for ‘Pull The Other One’,stem from an idiom or saying, that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase in question. In the case of the duo’s work however, this saying retains the phrase's literal meaning - what the phrase translates as. As a consequence, the short film shows two figures literally being pulled by the other around a large space on an office chair

Dressed head to toe in white coverall’s and masks, the protagonists are anonymised from identifying particular details, together with being pulled, has turned this phrase into absurd actions.

Preserving this anonymity, forces these figures to be viewed more as objects, and references the ‘Theatre of The Absurd’, where the figures play out this strange tableaux of meaningless actions - its repetitive nature, pays homage to works such as ‘Quad’ by Samuel Beckett, and reiterates the Theatre’s ideas surrounding existentialism, expressing what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose.

Participating Ghost Art School artists:

Cos Ahmet / Ritu Arya / Leo Bailie / Hannah Browne / Henry Burns / Anna Candlin / Jasmir Creed / Jess Crowe / Tom Doubtfire / Jon Edgley / Gary Finnegan / Lucia Lernyei / Halyna Maystrenko-Grant / Theodora McClellan / Robert McCormack / Jordan McCrae / Zander Mckenzie / Ursi McIlwain / Matthew Merrick / Molly Mousedell / Karema Munassar / Rose Reekie / Karin Ruggaber / Liam Scully / Anna Shankie / Yolanda Sneddon

With thanks to the mediums at BHSAD:

Yarik Antipin / Renata Basyrova / Yana Besova / Sonya Fatina / Mila Gerasimova / Ruslana Kuksova / Katya Makunina, Nastya Nikiforova / Alena Povetkina / Olya Samokhina / Nadia Satkova / Nadya Vasilieva / Maria Vaulina / Polina Vazhenina / Anjelika Vertkova / Valeria Voevodina / Martha Voronina / Vasilisa Yachanova / Sonya Yun

Images: Installation and detail views of ‘Pull The Other One’, excerpt of single channel film, 03:45 mins, performers, rope, chair, white coverall suits, masks — a collaborative video work by Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan featured in The End Glory, co-curated by Rory Macbeth & Doug Bowen, blip blip blip Gallery, Winzavod Contemporary Centre for Art, Moscow, Russia.

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The Dazzling Edge of Darkness

Aiming to be a speculative and unfolding process, adopting the idea of a sculpture park, and involved taking over laboratories, the library, gardens, grounds and parts of the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory building temporarily as sites for a series of sculptural interventions and experiments.

Within this format, the exhibition makes reference to aspects of public art, exhibition making and how things translate into external, natural or landscaped environments. The exhibition aimed to open up an imaginary space and is working with the limitations of time to experiment with exhibition making, sculpture and the environment. All works appeared and disappeared within one day. 

The show’s title —The Dazzling Edge of Darkness —is a direct quote taken from UCL MSSL’s press release for Euclid, a European Space Agency mission whose massive optical camera was built by an international team led by UCL researchers releasing its first full-colour images of the cosmos in 2023.

Participating artists:

Cos Ahmet / Hyee Jin Bae / Mercedes Balle / Daya Belzer / Madeleine Bender / Bella Bradford / Michael Bradshaw / Hannah Browne / Henry Burns / Natasha Burton / Anna Candlin / Gilles Conan / Jasmir Creed / Jess Crowe / Gwenllian Davenport / Tom Doubtfire / Matthew Duan / Natalya Marconini-Falconer / Gary Finnegan / Tobias Gumbrill / Gabriel Kidd / Hansol Kim / Jack Kinsman / Rory Macbeth / Mei To Man / Molly Mousdell / Karema Munassar / Signe Pook / Nicola Pozzani / Yeye Qiu, Ben Qi / Luo Qianxi / Karin Ruggaber / Susie Shiying / Eve Stotesbury / Rex Townrow / Bo Ywen / Rie Ye Zijing.

Projected onto the white spines of research journals within the library of UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, is the collaborative video work ‘Break In Presence’ (2020), by the artists Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan, screened here for the first time. This work was an experiment which then led to a number of collaborative performance videos by the duo, and is a precursor to their video work ’Transmitting’, made from three live performances filmed in different locations.

A break in presence, or BIP, is a concept that refers to a moment in a virtual reality environment where a user's awareness shifts from the virtual world to the real world, therefore, disengaging and interrupting their engagement and causing them to respond to real-world sensory input instead of the virtual. A break in presence in VR is often caused by technological glitches or environmental distractions that disrupt the user's immersion.

‘Break In Presence’ (2020), is part choreographed, part improvised — bodies and shadows intermingle displaying a sense of appearing and disappearing, becoming part of the shifting patterns, and taking on the nature of other bodies or entities. The sequence of movements and gestures within this, have been treated with an embossed filter, creating glitches and pixellation along the way, is presented as a monochromatic density that responds to, and is evocative to a particular time and space, questioning whether we are placed in reality or in a virtual world.

Projected onto the spines of research journals also refers back to science and technological advances, further enhancing the film. The work was produced during the pandemic, where its two world’s boundaries were blurred, where time became unsure, and individuals didn’t know how to behave or shift between these two parallels.

Images: Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan, Installation view and details, including a projection excerpt of 'Break In Presence’, (installation in the research library), featured in The Dazzling Edge of Darkness, curated by Rory Macbeth, UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, Dorking, Surrey, UK.

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Good Luck, Mysterious Stranger!

Good Luck, Mysterious Stranger! grew from a meeting and discussion between artists, BA MA & and PhD. students, involved with Ghost Art School and students from British High School of Art & Design Foundation in Moscow, formed an exchange project based on creating an instructed drawing. The project was based on a set of instructions that were used for their own drawings from a previous project, for the artists of Ghost Art School to re-make or reinterpret.

The students at BHSAD sent a set of text instructions for Ghost Art School participating artist to recreate one of their drawings from a previous project. Artist from the Ghost Art School would not have access to the original work until they had created and interpreted their own from the text instructions issued to them. Once all the works were created, an online seminar meeting was set up, where all the participants met for the first time to reveal the results of these instructions, to discuss and compare them to the original works.

Following this, a virtual exhibition of the works was composed in the UK & Russia, together with a small publication to accompany the exchange project. Good Luck, Mysterious Stranger! was initiated by Doug Bowen at BHSAD, Moscow and Rory MacBeth, of Ghost Art School, UK.

Participating Artists

Cos Ahmet / Hannah Browne / Anna Candlin / Jasmir Creed / Tom Doubtfire / Molly Mousdell / Kareema Munassar / Yarik Antipin / Mila Gerasimova / Alisa Maeva / Nastya Nikiforova / Olya Samokhina / Nadya Vasilieva / Angelica Vertkova / Valeria Voevodina

Images: Seminar of the exchange project and online presentation of Good Luck, Mysterious Stranger! (showing on screen, my drawing living amongst the various random pipes, materials, and objects in my studio) Photo courtesy Doug J. Bowen; Cos Ahmet, Untitled (doppelganger), 2024. Cotton bag, artificial hair from a deconstructed wig. Created from instructions set by Olya Samokhina. Photo courtesy of the artist; Olya Samokhina, Untitled, 2024. Cotton bag, artificial hair — the original work. Photo courtesy BHSAD.

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Is the future sterile? I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies. A thousand remnants small.  Like putting a lid on a display case, attaching extras couldn’t conclude the weird thing: Jesus is in my Pop-Tart. Don’t get too big for your loafers. It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; But on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

I will meet you in the meadow and it shall be as though no time has passed. When the sun beats down and I lie on the bench I can always hear them talking. There was nothing about the way the day started to suggest such a huge thing was about to happen. If I could even put a daub of paint on a piece of paper, I could call myself a painter and get on with my day. This probably won’t help.

Written in collaboration between all the artists participating in ‘We Are All Going To Die’, a request was sent out by the exhibition’s curator, Stephen Sheehan, that each artist would contribute words, whether formal or unconventional, that would then be compiled into and serve as the exhibition’s introduction and press release, as well as existing as an additional work in the exhibition. Its composition reads like a piece of prose, setting the scene and narrative for the exhibition.

‘We Are All Going To Die’, is curated by Stephen Sheehan at Existential House.

Participating artists: Cos Ahmet / Jay Chesterman / Gary Finnegan / Leo Fitzmaurice / Tim Foxon / Jeffery Knopf / Rory Macbeth / Daniel Marsh / Joe Fletcher Orr / Amy Russell / Stephen Sheehan / Luke Skiffington.

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A Life Plagued With Novelty, exhibition text by Stephen Sheehan:

When I asked the artists,  Cos Ahmet & Gary Finnegan, if they'd like to show their work for ‘We Are All Going To Die’, I also asked them to not show their work, in a sense. In response, they turned up at the gallery with two mugs. On those mugs were stills from their collaborative film. Stills from the film I asked them not to show. The reason being, that I didn't want any video works in this particular show.

I was really excited when they opened the box and produced the mugs. I felt that Cos and Gary were also happy, a bit giddy; and a fragrance of mischievous playfulness surrounded the action of making and revealing the mugs. A piece of novelty merchandise from a film. Nothing serious. A tongue in cheek moment.

But, underneath all that, I feel the mugs have a harmonious existence within the ideological and aesthetic fabric of the exhibition. I feel they are saying something. It's all indeed a novelty, until it becomes routine. I wonder if we collect items to signify our reluctance to let go and accept that such a moment is gone? Grasping, not with our hands but through objects. With each item, a jigsaw of distorted memory is constructed; an amalgamation of historical fragments consumes the now; always chasing the novelty and running from routine. Yet without realising, the chasing and the running becomes routine. And, just as the mugs are empty of liquid, the routine is empty of content.

For me, the mugs are emblematic of the conundrum of life; a life plagued with novelty yet empty of content. With that said, please don't assume one describes the mugs as such. While the mugs themselves are indeed designed to be a novelty in a sense, when observed, they become a vessel for broader consideration and questioning beyond their existence as a mug. A book that springs to mind is: The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yangai. Thank you for the mugs!

About Existential House

Existential Houseis an independent, nomadic art gallery run by the artist, writer and curator Stephen Sheehan, that aims to facilitate challenging and experimental work. Existential House was previously located at Unit 1, Woodside Business Park in Birkenhead, Wirral. However, conceptually, Sheehan abandoned that space and is experimenting with the idea of a nomadic gallery that exists and operates outside the physicality of a confined space.

While operating within the unit, we offered artists space and support to challenge and push their own ideologies and practice to broaden the context of art making and the relationship ones art has within society. Existential House not only facilitated exhibitions but accommodated the running of educational programmes and openly worked with educational institutions to broaden the conceptual landscape within the field of Art and beyond. This is something we intend to continue doing. 

All exhibitions ran for a three week period, as well as facilitating shorter exhibitions, one off performances or one day events. Existential house took a keen interest in works that explored the existential and posed questions towards the reality of existence. 

Images: Banner depicting an installation view of ‘We Are All Going To Die’, curated by Stephen Sheehan; Installation and detail views of ‘Hello Russell I + II’, in situ, and detail video stills, used for the mugs, made in collaboration during their Masters Graduate Residency at Static Complex, Liverpool.

existentialhouse.com

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Porosities: Multiple Pores for Entry,  text by Sarah Kristin Happersberger, Enzyme Magazine 

Cos Ahmet’s biome focuses on the skin, its many functions and manifold appearances. Starting from his own skin, Cos reflects on the largest human organ – an organ which embodies and protects a life system, namely the body.  While the skin has always been populated by bacteria and thus functions as a life system in itself, the pandemic is transforming it into a much-feared zone.

We are increasingly threatened by the sweat that passes through its pores and the microbes it may share. In light of the current situation, we recall the history of touch, in particular the centuries-old convention of the handshake – a tactile encounter between two human beings, expressing mutual respect and the intention of not harming each other. This very ritual is now shunned; touch is being avoided for the risk of possible contagion. By zooming into the skin, Cos points at the vulnerability of the life system that it exposes. He asks us to reflect on the consequences of touch, the meeting of one skin and another. The risk of being harmed stands next to the possibility of harming others, aggressivity next to involuntary injury. 

Yet, there is another sensation emanating from the coloured photographs, a feeling that works subtly against these negative, pandemic-led associations. The close-ups stimulate haptic viewing. As readers, we’re gently touching the surface of the tracing paper with the eyes. The offer of contact made by the work points to the emotional warmth that touching can imply. Exposing one’s skin to another signifies openness, an interest in connection and exchange with other bodies. Cos emphasises this function of the skin when bringing different skins in contact with each other. In his biome, hairy skin meets hairless skin, human skin is touched by nonhuman skin. 

When turning the pages, the reader’s skin touches another skin – the skin of the paper. Permeable to liquids of all kinds, paper is as porous as skin. It absorbs fat, dirt and colour, and it tears if not treated with care. If touched wrongly, it cuts into the skin of the reader, thus mirroring the ambivalence inherent in human skin. As a site of creative expression, Cos’s biome also demonstrates the function of skin as a carrier of inscriptions. Alongside papyrus, it was animal skin on which letters were engraved in ancient times, and in many cultures, skin is still used for mark making, whether for political, social or aesthetic purposes. 

Skin, however, is never a blank sheet – it is always culturally and politically coded. Whether through colour, texture or surface structure, skin triggers assumptions about the life system that it epitomises. It speaks about race and cultural identity, religion, privilege and work. Often times, skin serves as a marker – it situates us in time and in space. Wrinkles indicate age, skin colour suggests geographic origin. Frequently, these assumptions are misguided, resulting from deeply entrenched prejudices. If we understand skin as a text, it’s probably told by an unreliable narrator. We can never be sure about the clues that it seems to give us. We don’t know where it came to life and if it has been consciously or unconsciously altered. Cos makes this uncertainty a central element of his work. In view of his biome, we are unable to picture the being that lives through and with the skin represented here. Knowing about its relation to the artist’s body, we may situate it in the Western world, and we may suppose that it’s young rather than old. But we cannot confirm that these assumptions are true.

Looking at the close-up photographs, we cannot even be certain that the skin depicted belongs to a human being. Partly covered with a silver gloss, partly consisting of flaps of skin sewn together, the images trigger questions about the boundaries between humans and nonhumans. What are the features of human skin, and where does it meet its nonhuman counterpart? How far are human and nonhuman skin entangled, defying possible distinctions from the outset? What’s the role of the artist in this context, and what does this say about the creation of life systems? On the page, we find no definite answers to these questions. Cos’s biome provides multiple pores for entry and exit, and it encompasses many layers of skin – each of them suggesting another response. Touch it, let it touch you, and you’ll surely find out more about the life system that we call skin. 

About Enzyme 2

Thinking of the periodical as part of an intellectual work of digestion, artists Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla proposed Enzyme magazine for their Liverpool Biennial commission project. Artists  Cos Ahmet,  Abbie Bradshaw and  Linda Jane James, along with curator and researcher, Sarah Kristin Happersberger, were invited to collaborate on Enzyme 2, that would become the Life Systems issue. Each worked on a biome relating to the theme of systems – bodily, environmental and social. ‘Life Systems’ became a meeting point to connect their practices, share ideas, harvest and feed. Each artist produced a section of the magazine, and translated their contribution into a two-hour online Life Systems public event under the banner of ‘Digesting Life Systems Lecture Series’.

Jorgge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. (b. 1970, Araçatuba, Brazil) is an artist and educator whose practice and research has been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written extensively on the subject; he has participated in multiple art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide.

Sarah Kristin Happersberger , (b. Heppenheim, Germany) is a researcher and curator based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Happersberger has a background in art history and specialises in time-based art, socially engaged art and collaborative practices. Happersberger was invited as a guest editor for Enzyme 2: Life Systems, a durational project by Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, with collaborating artists: Cos Ahmet, Abbie Bradshaw, Linda Jane James, Bonnie Ora Sherk and Newton Harrison, commissioned for 11th Edition Liverpool Biennial 2021: The Stomach & The Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso, 19 May - 21 June 2021.

Images: EH-pih-DER-mis by Cos Ahmet. Skin Biome, depicting human / non-human skins printed on translucent vellum. Article & publication contents photos: Bia Braz. Enzyme 2: Life Systems, made in collaboration with Jorgge Manna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, was presented at the 11th Edition of Liverpool Biennial 2021, The Stomach & The Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso.               

liverpoolbiennial.com         

jorggemennabarreto.com     

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In 2015, Performa, in collaboration with The Ray Johnson Estate, presented ‘Please Add To and Return To’. This exhibition was staged at Printed Matter in New York, and was the culmination of Performa’s 2015 mail art re-activation project celebrating the life and work of artist Ray Johnson, one of the most revered underground artists of the last half of the 20th century.

During the pandemic and first set of lockdowns in 2020, Ray Johnson’s legendary mail art project ‘Please Add To And Return To’, was once again resurrected. When the artists’s iconic templates were placed back by Performa in circulation in 2015, participants were invited to draw, collage or otherwise ‘add to’ them and ‘return’ them to Ray Johnson c/o Performa.

Five years on, this homage was further extended by the Ray Johnson Estate and Performa. Altering the project for the digital age, Performa situated the templates in monthly art publications, local newspapers, and online as PDF files, and included, ‘Please Add Hair to Cher’; ‘The Starn Twins’; ‘Andy Warhol Interview’ and ‘Ray Johnson Silhouette’. Altered templates are being accepted on a rolling basis, and are still being posted on The Ray Johnson Estate website and social media pages using the hashtag #PleaseAddTo, as a place where to follow the evolution of this project.

Background information

Ray Johnson (1927-1995) was a seminal Pop Art figure in the 1950s, an early conceptualist, and a pioneer of mail art. His preferred medium was collage, that quintessentially twentieth-century art form that reflects the increased (as the century wore on) collision of disparate visual and verbal information that bombards modern man. rayjohnsonestate.com

Performa is a multidisciplinary non-profit arts organization, founded by art historian RoseLee Goldberg in 2004, dedicated to exploring the critical role of live performance in the history of 20th-century art and to encouraging new directions in performance for the 21st century, engaging artists and audiences through experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. performa-arts.org

Printed Matter Inc. was founded in 1976, and is the world’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books and related publications. printed matter.org

Images: Cos Ahmet, ‘#PleaseAddToAndReturnTo’, 2020 - a series of contributions using Johnson’s familiar templates that were circulated by The Ray Johnson Estate & Performa, combining them with a variety of found and appropriated imagery, including resources from the artist’s own archive, as his additions. These contributions were posted online alongside a plethora of submissions, via social media channels and to the Ray Johnson Estate project’s growing archive.

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The Lost Diagrams of Walter Benjamin, edited by Helen Clarke & Dr. Sharon Kivland. This first edition was published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, London, and presented at ‘MISS READ: Berlin Art Book Fair & Festival’, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany in 2018. This publication is now in its second edition print run, and is part of the ‘Anthologies, Collections & The Conceit of the Conceptual Series — which includes anthologies, collected essays, artist's and writer's projects, at the editor's whim. Book covers are in varying attractive shades of pink.

Synopsis: In A Berlin Chronicle (c. 1930), Walter Benjamin describes his autobiography as a space to be walked (indeed, it is a labyrinth, with entrances he calls primal acquaintances). The contributors to The Lost Diagrams respond to the invitation to accompany Benjamin in reproducing the web of connections of his diagram, which, once lost (he was inconsolable), was never fully redrawn. They translate his words into maps, trees, lists, and constellations. Their diagrams, after Benjamin, are fragments, scribbles, indexes, bed covers, and body parts. Subjectivities sharpen and blur, merge and redefine, scatter and recollect. Benjamin writes:

‘I was struck by the idea of drawing a diagram of my life, and I knew at the same moment exactly how it was to be done. With a very simple question I interrogated my past life, and the answers were inscribed, as if of their own accord, on a sheet of paper that I had with me. A year or two later, when I lost this sheet, I was inconsolable. I have never since been able to restore it as it arose before me then, resembling a series of family trees. Now, however, reconstructing its outline in thought without directly reproducing it, I should rather, speak of a labyrinth. I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading to the interior. These entrances I call primal acquaintances; each of them is a graphic symbol of my acquaintance with a person whom I met, not through other people, but through neighbourhood, family relationships, school comradeship, mistaken identity, companionship on travels, or other such- hardly numerous- situations. So many primal relationships, so many entrances to the maze. But since most of them- at least those that remain in our memory -for their part open up new acquaintances, relations to new people, after some time they branch off these corridors (the male may be drawn to the right, female to the left). Whatever cross connections are finally established between these systems also depends on the inter-twinements of our path through life’.

Essays by Helen Clarke, Sam Dolbear, & Christian A. Wollin.

Contributors:  Cos Ahmet, Alberto Alessi, Sam Ayres, Patrizia Bach, Martin Beutler, Riccardo Boglione, Vibe Bredahl, Pavel Buchler & Nina Chua, Emma Cheatle, cris cheek, Kirsten Cooke, Anne-Marie Creamer, Amy Cutler, Vincent Dachy, Matthew Dowell, Joanna Leah Geldard, Theresa Goessmann, Michael Hampton, Ronny Hardliz, Miranda Iossifidis, Joe Jefford, Dean Kenning, Tracy Mackenna, Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, John McDowall, Katharine Meynell, Paul O’Kane, Hephzibah Rendle-Short, Mark Riley, Katya Robin, Hattie Salisbury, Isabella Streffen, Stefan Szczelkun, George Themistokleous, Monique Ulrich, Emmanuelle Waeckerle, Matthew Wang, Julie Warburton, Alexander White, Lada Wilson, Louise K. Wilson, Mark Wingrave, Mary Yacoob.

MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE is a not-for-profit project by the artist and writer Sharon Kivland in 2015. The publications are modest yet attractive, and constitute her library, based on her purchase of a hundred ISBN numbers. In her role as The Editor, she invites authors she considers to be good readers, whom she would like to house in her library or to become her library, inhabited.

Helen Clarke is a Heritage Consortium doctoral student, supervised by both Casey Orr (Leeds Beckett University) and Dr. Sharon Kivland an artist, writer and a reader in Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University.

mabibliotheque.site/the-lost-diagrams-of-walter-benjamin

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Search for a Diagram, review text by David Briers

Described by Ian Sansom as 'a stationery obsessive', Walter Benjamin's love of fountain pens, his precious use of notebooks and scraps of paper, and his characteristically minute handwriting are far from incidental aspects of his praxis. The physical and indexical nature of his surviving archive has become as influential in recent years as the ideas embodied therein. As Susan Buck-Morss correctly says, quoted on the cover of this book: 'The capacity of Walter Benjamin's work to inspire others is extraordinary.' A new generation of artists, as Helen Clarke remarks, is preoccupied with 'the re-use and re-presentation of Benjamin's works', notably including Brian Ferneyhough's remarkable 2004 opera Shadowtime.

In his 1932 text 'Berlin Chronicle', Benjamin refers elliptically to a 'diagram of his life' that he had made with ink on paper, but which he had lost a year or two later. The diagram (if it ever existed) was never recovered, and the intimations Benjamin gave to its nature were scant: 'resembling a series of family trees' or 'a labyrinth'. Co-editor Helen Clarke made open calls and invited submissions from contributors to 'translate (Benjamin's) words into maps, trees, lists and constellations'. This book offers an edited selection of those received.

The 43 contributors of these visual translations include artists, poets, writers, bookmakers and a composer, though no further information is given other than their names. Some will be familiar to the follower of this kind of artists' printed matter, many not. There are also three illuminating prefatory essays. The 'diagrams' themselves (some refer specifically to Benjamin's life history, most don't) include street maps, constellations of words or shapes, a drawing on a used envelope, mysteriously vegetal and occultist drawings, a management training diagram, linear texts winding themselves around a rock garden and a maze, a found pricelist of office supplies and a drawing of an architectural head.

This might have been a deluxe portfolio of drawings or an exhibition. But in its chosen much smaller soft-back format, its portability, and unhierarchical nature more astutely mirror the 'fragmentary and essayistic' nature of Benjamin's later praxis, even if some contributions suffer in legibility. In her essay, Clarke touches on 'the recent resurgence of interest in the non-precious artist's book as a form ...' and, in terms of its variegated graphic content, the overall feel is very much that of the Assembling Magazines culture of the 1970s in which mail artists and others were invited to submit the same number of photocopies of a new work to a central collating and distributing editor.

For those bitten by the Benjamin bug, the allure of the mischievously misleading title of this book is irresistible. It is no wonder that the first run of the publication sold out quite rapidly. I will unselfconsciously put this publication on my bookshelves alongside works by or about Benjamin, rather than with the artists' books.

Art Monthly; London Issue 414, March 2018. David Briers is an independent writer & curator based in West Yorkshire.

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Images: Cover for ‘The Lost Diagrams Of Walter Benjamin’, edited by Helen Clarke & Sharon Kivland; Two-page spread of Cos Ahmet’s diagram contribution ‘System For A Lost Identity’ from the publication; Detail of ‘System For A Lost Identity’ (2018), drypoint etching and mono print on 330gsm Somerset Satin paper.

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About Yuck ’n Yum

Arguably one of Dundee’s most internationally recognised art zines, Yuck ‘n Yum was created in the bedroom of Andrew MacLean in 2007 to showcase the art of his friends. Andrew was later joined by a collective of other artists and zine enthusiasts, including Alexandra Ross, Ben Robinson and Alex Tobin.

In order that the fledgling zine might carve out its own identity, the team decided to invite contributors whose output was of a consistently high quality to have a crack at being cover artist for a whole year. From 2010 to 2013, zine stalwarts Paul Milne, Ross Hamilton Frew, Helen Flanagan and Cos Ahmet each designed four covers, lending that year’s editions their own distinctive style.

The free zine featured collage, photography, poetry, recipes, drawings, reviews, interviews and anything else the contributing artists could dream up. Yuck ’n Yum became a quarterly fixture of the Dundee art calendar and each issue was launched with performances by artists, DJs and musicians, and staged at various venues across Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

There has been a vibrant energy to Yuck ’n Yum since its inception. From the start, it was filled with an urge to create, and to amplify others who were creating unconventional work. The very name Yuck ‘n Yum encompasses the dualities they have searched for in their various projects. None of this would exist without the artists – close friends and mysterious strangers alike – to whom they owe the greatest of thanks. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it must only be to go ahead and force the hand of chance.

The following are the various projects that Cos Ahmet contributed to, with his output to the zine spanning from 2010 to 2013, encompassing his cover artists residency, various artists features, exhibitions and projects, starting with the most recent - Compendium (2008 - 2013) The Complete Works.

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Compendium (2008 - 2013)

The long awaited ‘Compendium’, was edited by Morgan Cahn, Ben Robinson and Alex Tobin, and supported by GENERATORprojects, Hannah MacLure Centre, University of Abertay, Dundee, and SOIL Gallery, in Seattle, US. In 2018, on Yuck 'n Yum’s 10th anniversary, ‘Compendium’ celebrated the magazine’s various contributors and cover artists, launching its exhibition and publication launch simultaneously at SOIL Gallery in Seattle, WA (US) and GENERATORprojects in Dundee, Scotland (UK) via a live stream.

Described as Scotland’s soi-disant premier art zines, Yuck ‘n Yum, was published quarterly from 2008 to 2013, and prided itself for championing established and emerging artists through its pages. For the first time ever, every issue has been collected and compiled into one 600+ page volume.

The complete zine is faithfully presented in its original A5 paperback format. Also included are some extras, in the form of the very first lo-fi issues of the zine, some special editions, and some new words from the people we have worked with over the years. Within ‘Compendium’, there is every high, the every low, and every part of  Yuck and Yum of those halcyon days, in glorious high-definition black and white.

Yuck ‘n Yum was faithfully nurtured and produced by the excellent YnY Collective in the shape of: Andrew Maclean, Gayle Meikle, Ben Robinson, Alexandra Ross, Alex Tobin, Becca Clark & Morgan Cahn.

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Cover Artist Residency

The cover artist of 2013, and for what was to be the final four issues of Yuck ʻn Yum, was the ‘then’ London-based, now Liverpool-based artist, Cos Ahmet. The four covers created by Cos were all collaged treatments of the figure, each cut up, manipulated and sutured in a variety of media, each disarming and all ravishingly beautiful.

Consistent throughout these covers was a treatment of the body as raw material to be built upon and rearranged into new configurations every time, a process described by Cos as ‘mending and re-imagining the unknown through figure, form and self’.  Whether the body was scrambled into geometric abstraction, as on the Spring 2013 cover, or dissolved into multiple identities in the amorphous cluster of Winter 2013, the covers all seemed to communicate a desire to overcome separation and communicate across obstructions.

For anyone familiar with his practice, the four covers had a strong consistency that made each one instantly recognisable as a Cos Ahmet artwork. He described his task to me as follows: ‘It seemed apparent to me, that I needed to treat this like a ‘final gathering’ of zines, presented with a visual continuity, generating a cohesive end’. 

Also present in these cover images was an intriguing use of materials. Each one seemed variously made up of photographs, computer graphics or fragments of sculpture: The four covers varied, but had an ʻever-presenceʼ of the appropriated or found image, printed and collaged assembled papers, with one issue adorning a hand fabricated treatment, worn like a mask. This variety of textures, when applied to Cosʼs fixation on the human form, resulted in a ʻbox setʼ of covers in a state of perpetual visual flux.

Cos Ahmet’s works not only graced the covers of the final four issues, but were also produced into large posters for one of the zine’s launches, creating an exhibition called ‘Cover Versions’ at The Arches in Glasgow. The images included in the exhibition was made up of the other cover designs that Cos submitted for the Yuck ’n Yum team to consider for the Summer 2013 issue cover. Feeling conflicted, the team decided that for the launch, an exhibition would be staged to showcase all the designs that they liked, along with the cover design they felt fit the mood of that Summer and the issue.

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Artists’ Books at DCA

In celebration of Book Week Scotland the Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) presented a display of books, published ephemera and zines all made by artists. The display drew upon works from a number of sources including work from the Centre for Artists’ Books which is based in the Visual Research Centre in the building. This collection has been built up over many years and comprises books made by artists as part of their practice, rather than books about artists.

Alongside these works the display included rare examples of the landmark ‘multimedia magazine in a box' Aspen featuring work by Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan and Dan Graham kindly lent to Dundee Contemporary Arts by Heart Fine Art, Edinburgh. There was also a focus on the Dundee quarterly art zine Yuck’n Yum and the unveiling of new books from DCA’s recent exhibitions programme by Ruth Ewan and Torsten Lauschmann.

Constructing a room installation including a wall collage and a vitrine of their zines to date, the exhibition became a component of Yuck 'n Yum's broader efforts to promote artists' books as a medium for artistic expression beyond the traditional book format. Staying true to the monochrome aesthetic, the magazine was included in Artists’ Books: Book Week Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts, where the collective curated a room to include a selection of their contributors, including Cos Ahmet’s various artist features made between 2010 - 2012, before being appointed as their final Cover Artist in Residence the following year.

Yuck ‘n Yum’s zines accompanied other stellar publications and artists including, Andy Warhol, Thomas Hirschhorn, David Shrigley, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Marshall McLuhan, Edwin Morgan, Don Graham, Raymond Pettibon, Pavel Buchler, Phyllis Johnson, as well as fanzines and other smaller zine publications by Cake, Chicks On Speed and Fucked-Up & Photocopied, showcasing the instant art  and anarchic, anti-graphic design of punk, concrete poetry, and social commentary of contemporary work from private presses, served up with a pinch of irony, with a side helping of self-deprecation.

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Roofraiser - Special Edition Zine

Various events were hosted by the Yuck ’n Yum team – as well as producing a quarterly art zine in a strict monochrome aesthetic – their other projects included special editions such as Cabin:Codex, Inards, and Roofraiser.

Roofraiser was produced in conjunction with Ten Tracks Record X Forest, selecting the work of ten artists to promote the Roofraiser set of concerts and music events. Ten specially curated works of art were printed and posted around the city of Edinburgh.

For Roofraiser’s month of live music, with additional gigs in The Caves and The Store in Edinburgh, the artists selected works were made into posters, flyers, even used on Ten Tracks business cards, as well as providing downloadable cards that served as vouchers to access the 120 tracks of music available from Ten Tracks. At the events, the artists works each had the spot light, being projected at every Roofraiser event and venue. For the artists’ themselves, they each received their very own copies of the special limited edition zines that Yuck ’n Yum produced for the music event, producing 500 in total.

Roofraiser Selected Artists:

Cos Ahmet / Chris Alto Dobson / Steven Fraser / Mike Inglis / Fraser MacDonald / Julie Mailley / Ewan Manson / Paul Milne / Jinny Reading / Sarah Wilmott.

About Forest X Ten Tracks

Forest is one of Edinburgh’s last remaining independent art centres, and became an award-winning Fringe venue - notably for The Forest Fringe. The volunteer-run charity operated their art gallery space ‘Total Kunst’, a theatre, performance and rehearsal spaces, a darkroom, a publishing house, a swap shop, a record label, a hairdresser, and a thriving vegetarian cafe.

Ten Tracks is a unique and innovative record label for the marketing and retail of music, which responds to online music listening culture in a way that has not been achieved by the major music industries back in the mid 2010s, and offered a platform for emerging artists in the thriving music community of Scotland’s central belt.

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