COMMUNION

What does communion look and feel like in the 21st century? To answer this question, Bold Tendencies commissioned new work by international contemporary artists  Saelia Aparicio, Adam Farah-Saad, Olu Ogunnaike, Yoko Ono and Martin Parr.

For Aparicio, Farah-Saad and Ogunnaike, this represented the first significant public commission of their work – and has since been cited by each of them as a major step-change in the platform they command as an emerging artist and their ambition for future projects.

Together, the artists examined overlapping histories of belonging, public space, decay and renewal – from the relationship between the body, architecture and ‘invasive’ species of flora to heartfelt meditations on coming-of-age intimacy and love, through to the medium of wood as a repository for both personal and collective memory.

Exploring how the ways in which we come together – and often fail to do so – is central to understanding the emergencies we live in today. As part of programme, Bold Tendencies organised ‘Ask the Artist’ creative learning sessions with Aparicio, Farah-Saad, Ogunnaike and Parr, creating an intimate space for critical thinking, community and exchange.

COMMUNION ran from 17 May to 14 September 2024 at Bold Tendencies, London. Find out more at boldtendencies.com.

Saelia Aparicio
Les Fleurs du Mal, 2024

Les Fleurs Du Mal is composed of five larger-than-life steel sculptures that present a fictional cast of future ecological beings. Aparicio draws on the visual language of the ‘folly’, ornamental buildings conceived in 18th century Britain purely for decorative beauty.

Highly colourful and embellished with Aparicio’s signature illustrations, these humorous and irreverent posthuman characters – inspired by the surrealism of comic books and cartoons – combine various species of invasive flora with unblushing feminine bodies.

Les Fleurs Du Mal presents the human body, architecture and the natural world entwined in an endless dance of mutual kinship; a thorny yet playful allegory for contemporary environmentalism, migration and cultural difference.

Adam Farah-Saad
One Sweet Day, 2024

One Sweet Day speaks to the contrasting roles of public space in facilitating moments of individual and collective grief, commemoration and desire.

Taking the form of a circular park enclosure, the installation centres around a decorative water fountain designed to emulate those found in London’s Battersea Park. Originally constructed in 1951 as part of a new ‘Pleasure Gardens’ for the Festival of Britain, today these fountains are known not only for their spectacular and nostalgic beauty, but also as a popular cruising spot.

For Farah-Saad, this location has a further, personal resonance: a place he spent time in with his late friend Paul-Joseph Winter. One Sweet Day is a memorial to Paul, but equally a celebration of love and intimacy and public space, featuring elements of park design interlaced with motifs of queer desire.

Olu Ogunnaike
Bad Manors, 2024

Bad Manors is a monumental structure that pays homage to one of the foundational forms of human gathering and communion throughout history, the table.

A powerful symbol of assembly from domestic to civic or political settings, here the table makes a direct statement on the need for greater levels of community, exchange and diplomacy in society.

Set against an ever-changing London skyline, the six panels of Bad Manors were moulded from second-hand hoardings sourced from Peckham’s Reclamation & Salvage Yard – boards once used on construction sites within a square mile of the rooftop, they now reside in a newly reconfigured state. These solemn and enduring relics speak to a process of uprooting, migration, transformation and renewal endemic to city life.

Yoko Ono
AIR TALK, 1973

AIR TALK is a lyrical and imaginative example of Yoko Ono’s now iconic instructional artworks, first brought together in the 1964 publication, Grapefruit.

Acclaimed as a monument of 1960s conceptual art, the collection includes more than 200 text-based ‘event scores’ that replace the physical work of art with an invitation to unlock the mind and actively engage in the creative process. Often subverting logic, common sense and rationality, Ono’s instructions range from whimsical and nonchalant to anarchic, fantastical and solemn.

The piece is less a formal instruction than a poetic daydream, encouraging readers to contemplate the essential qualities that bring us together: our capacity for empathy and solidarity, our inherent and shared connection with the natural world, and the ineffable qualities of collective human spirit.

Martin Parr
Sorrento, Italy, 2014

A popular tourist destination in Southern Italy overlooking the Bay of Naples, Sorrento combines Parr’s fascination with beaches with the glitzy, mass-marketed world of European tourism. He has stated, “It is my favourite beach in the world to photograph.”

Sorrento, Italy is a calm, intimate photograph that captures a mosaic of bathers surrounded by colourful towels, beach toys, flip-flops and swimwear – a wide-angle view made possible by Parr’s use of a telephoto lens.

Centred on the heart-warming embrace of a young couple, this humble, moving scene celebrates how we come together across the world in a rich social and visual patchwork, connected by a commonplace desire to seek for personal paradise.