Sachiko Abe

The Velvet Purple series of works on paper.

Velvet Purple #03

"Throughout my artistic career, my primary focus has been the issue of identity, in which individuals are categorised for what they are and how they function in maintaining economic machinery. In the process of exploring my essential discomfort against such social conditions, I started the act of cutting papers." - Sachiko Abe.

Since 2004, Sachiko Abe has been performing Cut Papers throughout the world. The work has explored regimes of subjectivity and cultural impositions in a series of immersive performative and large scale sculptural works. In these acts the artist creates a surplus of material and meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy and it is this scenic space of production that invites interpretation. The works of Sachiko Abe are durational and irrational, created through repetitions that seem to be an act of eternal revenge on a blank page and the stories excluded from a simple white A4 sheet.

This biographical text sliced together between quotation marks silences the noisy debris of discourse. The work of art cuts up everything and leaves relics of significance in it’s place. With the history of performance these issues become complex, the artist creates possibilities for an audience to loose the artwork in an effort to perceive it.

Velvet Purple #10

In addition to the public performances of Cut Papers, Sachiko Abe works in solitude for many hours creating intensive drawn topographic landscapes that have the qualities of endoscopic visions, inviting the viewer to contemplate an intimate cartography created in states parallel to that of automatic drawing. An intuitive moving of the line that explores the hypnotic power of repetition and the iteration of industry.

Antti Laitinen

"It is more important to struggle for your dreams than succeed in them." -

Antti Laitinen.

For A Foundation and The Liverpool Biennial, Antti Laitinen presented a survey of key works from the last decade of his performances, including the It’s My Island trilogy, Bare Necessities, Untitled and Walk the Line, among others.

Curated by A Foundation's director, Mark Waugh, who commissioned a new performance for Touched., an ambitious project to build a vessel out of bark in the gallery at Greenland Street and sail an inaugural voyage.

Antti Laitinen takes us beyond the normal realms of the world into a new reality encapsulating an artistic vision at once both innocent and yet haunted by the knowledge of our contemporary ecological crisis.

"Antti Laitinen had set sail at 7.30am from New Brighton and was drawn across to the east bank down to the Pier Head by 9.30am before successfully negotiating the shipping lane to reach Cammell Lairds in tact, but numb with cold. He had made the raft from nothing other than curls of bark, not of Cork Oak bark as you may have expected but of Scots Pine. It was no bigger than a hearth rug !

This was a brilliantly executed ‘happening’ in an age when ‘risk assessment’ and insurance rates have killed off too many bold adventures. However, it was no Arthur Ransom lark. Antii had already navigated a similar raft across the equally busy Baltic channel between his home town Helsinki and the Hanseatic port of Tallin. On this occasion he sought expert advice from our renowned RNLI pilots and was escorted at a distance by a support vessel with a film crew on board." - The Artful Dodger

Breadman