Longtime followers of Bermondsey Project Space will be aware of its dedication to showcasing groundbreaking photographic works. This season, BPS is pleased to present two exhibitions centred around photographs.
I’M MIGRANT
An Exhibition by Yamam Nabeel
18 – 29 April 2023
Afifa ALEIBY, Ghani ALANI, Nabeel YASIN, Dia AL-AZZAWI, Faisal LAIBI SAHI
Yamam Nabeel pieces together his heritage through interviews, portraits and conversations with these giants of Iraqi and Arab art and culture.
A uniquely personal multimedia project, Yamam Nabeel’s photographic and short-film portraits of these artists are presented alongside selected works and photographs from the artist’s own archives. The exhibition balances the immense cultural worth of the artists’ crafts, from traditional calligraphy to abstract painting, with the warm human centre of their shared life stories.
I’m Migrant is part of a larger project of photography and written word, focusing on the lives of immigrant and exiled artists, poets and writers from the Arab world and their contribution to western culture.
THOMAS WIDERBERG
SILENT LANDSCAPES
2 – 13 May 2023
The work of photographer Thomas Widerberg (1964-) is concerned with silence and loneliness. Not the negative loneliness of isolation and abandonment, but a positive, self-chosen freedom of being alone.
Throughout his career, Thomas has made repeated journeys to some of the world’s most remote areas, from the remote Svalbard archipelago in his native Norway, to Patagonia at the southern-most point of South America. He documents shadows playing on bare mountains, the Northern Lights reflected in white snow, the last traces of humanity vanishing under the weight of dense sky. Through these landscapes, the feeling of loneliness, and for Thomas a happiness, becomes manifest.
Although Thomas has worked primarily as a photographer for almost 40 years, he is also a trained composer and musician. His compositions have a ‘cosmic’ atmosphere, setting an otherworldly tone within the exhibition space to mirror the celestial feel of his imagery.
Silent Landscape is Thomas’s first solo exhibition of photography in London, presenting over a decade of work. Thomas has exhibited across Norway after holding his first exhibition on Svalbard in 1996, and most recently showed work with Gallery Lofoten. Previously he has composed music and directed a visual play about the Northern Lights for the Lillehammer Olympics in 1994, staged numerous shows alongside his brother, the sculptor Nicolaus Widerberg, and father, the painter Frans Widerberg, and exhibited across Germany, Italy, Malaysia and Indonesia. Thomas lives and works in Oslo.
