Talk, talk, that's all you can do

Open from 14 December
Private view Thursday, 15 December, 6-8pm

waterside contemporary is pleased to present Talk, talk, that's al you can do, with Mounira Al Solh, Oreet Ashery, Iván Argote, Nick Hornby, Núria Güell, Nicoline van Harskamp, and Marianna Christofides.

The Multilingual Parrot is a character in a series of anecdotes and semi-fictions I Want to Be a Party by Mounira Al Solh. The valuable bird, conversant in no fever than seven languages, was put up for sale by the artist's uncle in 1958, to help the family survive through the tensions which rocked Lebanon in the 1950s and '60s. Al Solh uses a collection of paraphernalia - heirlooms, cars, musical instruments - to gather subjective memories of a familial histories and the intertwined political events.

Al Solh's work, using video, painting, embroidery and performative gestures, brings together biography and history: the individual's experience becomes a key to speculating on wider social realities. An inherent tension plays itself out with humour, visible vulnerability, and self-knowing irony - an approach which allows the artist to take on complex and delicate issues such as nationalism or gender, putting herself, her friends and family directly on the line.


Oreet Ashery's 12-episode video series Revisiting Genesis mixes fictional dialogues and real-life interviews with people who have life limiting conditions. It explores digital and and emerging technologies of dying, social networks, care, and feminist reincarnations of women artists. The films follow two nurses who assist people preparing for death in creating their posthumous digital legacy. The slideshows they create become a tool for reflection on cultural and social loss, friendships and memory as identity.

Unorthodox, multi-layered and eclectic, Ashery’s expansive body of work confronts ideological, social and gender constructions within the fabric of personal and broader contemporary realities. Ashery mines counter-culture aesthetics and traverses photography, video, mass-produced and unique artefacts, text, commissioned music, and performance.

To tell the History of Humanity, Iván Argote invited members of his family to collaborate on a script for a Super 8mm home film. They proposed that History consists of eight chapters, among them ‘The Emergence of Homo Sapiens’, ‘Love and Hate’, ‘Colonization and Post-Colonization’, and ‘Uncertain Future’, which the as actors they allegorise through games and gestures in a public park.




Spanning film, sculpture, and public action, Argote’s work encounters evolving social attitudes and norms as societies face daily challenges in historical, economic, political and moral realities. Making recourse to the history of his native Colombia and his own family, with disobedience a part of everyday culture, Argote links our contemporary realities with those of earlier generations. Argote is a proponent of the communicative role of artistic practice, and with irreverent humour and tactility, he exposes the subjectivity of prevailing norms, and creates the space for emotive and bodily participation in the way these are shaped.

Nick Hornby’s Masks point to a fabled meeting of 1907 between Matisse and Picasso in which a collection of African masks inspired the invention of Cubism only weeks later. This story encapsulates the familiar grand narratives of art history: the myth of genius, inspiration, otherness, but also reflects on the necessary subtleties and gaps between them. Hornby replicates these broad strokes with precision and control: starting with a Matisse gouache, he manipulates the inherited form to arrive at a plausible back-story.

Hornby’s work is the physical meeting of historical critique and digital technology; behind hand-crafted sculptures of marble, resin or bronze are computer-generated models, expanding shapes, silhouettes and shadows into manife