t h e H O L D is an exhibition by the artists’ group We Are Publication (WAP) featuring contributions from over 50 artists.

It consists of posters, a soundscape, a hand-woven carpet, and a series of live events all set within an expansive sculptural display structure occupying the gallery space.

The poster is a key production site for WAP and provides an important working-tool for collective visual and conceptual dialogue. Contributed materials are grouped and regrouped, with salient conversations between component parts gradually taking hold. At the Stanley Picker Gallery, this process of contingent reassembling is accentuated through a multiplicity of spliced and overlapped poster material.

The exhibition’s primary structure is formed from steel decking of the type commonly used for theatrical stage and exhibition design; its modular character mirrors WAP’s own combinatory approach to artistic production. Suggestive of a schematic mountain-scape, the structure grips and scales the gallery’s own vertiginous architecture, encouraging metaphoric ascents, descents and transversal movement.

Preoccupations with mountainous landscapes are further taken up by t h e H O L D’s soundscape whose indeterminate atmospheres take their cue from the secluded alpine sanatorium described by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924). Individual sonic contributions are here re-imagined as if circulating within the spaces of a remote mountain refuge, where acoustic fragments pass and mingle via a series of rest-cures, breakfasts, luncheons and dinners, eventually to disperse in slumber.

Part home-furnishing, part-collage, a custom-made hand woven rug was central to WAP’s Notes on a Carpet project between 2017-18. The carpet itself re-alights here, as well as in the form of live-stream video documentation of one of its previous manifestations.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, t h e H O L D will host a series of live events with key performances taking place on the 6 November and the 4 December.

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