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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

In The Showroom’s Women on Aeroplanes, three artists explore the untold contributions made by black women to transnational liberation movements New work by Lungiswa Gqunta, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum and Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa addresses the ‘herstories’ of political struggles while questioning the mechanisms which erase such women from the record Co-curated by The Otolith Collective, these responses make up the London iteration of an eponymous international project which spans two years and five cities (Berlin, Lagos, Warsaw, Beyreuth and London)   Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s installation presents research into the life and political activities of Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897–1969), a pan-African activist, co-founder of Notting Hill Carnival and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) as well as founder of the Afro-Womens’ Centre in London (Ashwood Garvey’s oft-cited marriage to the radical leader Marcus Garvey is noticeably omitted from the exhibition’s overview, perhaps a wry comment on the common the practice of introducing famous woman by association to their husbands) Numerous archive folders documenting her life and work are set up across five research stations in the gallery Meticulously labelled in handwritten black ink, the folders contain newspaper clippings of Ashwood Garvey posing amongst leaders of soon-to-be independent African countries in the 1940s – including Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) – or addressing crowds in Trafalgar Square, as well as copies of her correspondence with many of the 20th century’s major black political figures (WEB Du Bois, CLR James and George Padmore amongst others) Textual interjections by the artist, including annotations scribbled onto the material and copies of correspondence with archive librarians, offer a window alongside into the painstaking process of rescuing this material from obscurity The archive addresses a clear deficit in the information commonly available on Ashwood Garvey’s remarkable life Compare her former husband’s Wikipedia entry with hers: it’s an impoverished account given the extent of her transnational enterprises, glimpsed here via Wolukau-Wanambwa’s research As a backdrop to this injustice, five brightly coloured pillars of text hang on the facing wall like banners proclaiming Ashwood Garvey’s virtues and accomplishments as the ‘most travelled’ black woman to date, a ‘great daughter’ of the

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

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Prize Entry

April 2017

Two Adventures

Ari Braverman

Prize Entry

April 2017

I. A Cosmopolitan Avenue   …where a girl pretends the whole city is dead. She is too old for...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

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September 2012

Existere: Documenting Performance Art

David Gothard

Jo Melvin

John James

Rye Dag Holmboe

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September 2012

The following conversation was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in May 2012. The event took place...

 

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