Private View: Tawfik Naas and Phineas Harper

Join us for the joint private view of Chaos is a Flower, a new exhibition by Libyan artist Tawfik Naas featuring a newly commissioned body of work including sculpture, wall and installation-based artworks and Cascades, a window based exhibition of kinetic mobiles by London-based artist and designer Phineas Harper. 

Tawfik Naas’s interdisciplinary practice looks to create environments that offer alternative frameworks for understanding historical trauma, drawing on cosmological and ecological perspectives.

This exhibition in particular focuses on the troubled history of the ‘Great Manmade River’, a government-led infrastructure system initiated in the late 1980s by the then-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The Great Manmade River was designed to bring fresh water from underground fossil aquifers in the Sahara to the populous coastal regions of Libya. Often described as the world's largest irrigation project, the Great Manmade River aimed to provide water, security and agricultural development by transporting vast quantities of fossilised water that had accumulated thousands of years earlier when the Sahara had been home to a lush and temperate climate. However, the project produced a myriad of unintended consequences that caused distress and trauma to individuals and communities involved, including Naas’ own family who migrated soon thereafter.

This exhibition and its associated programme of events has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and from The Henry Moore Foundation.

Phineas Harper's exhibition Cascades will be the fifth exhibition in San Mei Gallery’s public-facing window space, home to a new commercial programming strand presenting micro-exhibitions with works available for sale by emerging contemporary artists. Phineas Harper makes delicate kinetic mobiles using a range of materials, from walnut wood to brass and acetate. Each work is created piece-by-piece through a careful balancing act mixing whimsy and instinct with intricate structural systems.

Gently dancing in the wind, each of Harper’s mobiles is unique: rotating and shimmering in their own ways. At San Mei Gallery, Harper presents a collection of different mobiles that play with the light and space of the Window Gallery, creating a joyful alchemy of colour, shadow and shape.

Drinks kindly provided by Brixton Brewery.

For further information about this event, please visit our website..