FTHo

What Time is Love? is an exhibition created by six artists from Peckham based collective Intoart presented within the domestic space of Flat Time House, the studio home of artist John Latham (1921–2006). Incorporating textiles, furniture, book works, drawing, painting, sculptural garments and photography, the artworks in What Time is Love? speak in chorus about moments of connection and belonging. This group exhibition has grown from time spent by the artists at Flat Time House over two years, with the house forming a space to reflect, talk about their practice and think collectively. The monumental scale and ambition of these works is politically charged, representing at once the energy and emotional intensity of the dancer whilst confronting the marginalisation of disabled people in the history of art. The exhibition title, taken from The KLF’s 1988 electronic dance anthem What Time is Love? references a shared subject of exploration for the group: alternative histories of music and culture. Over the course of the artists’ extended research, they explored how self-identities are expressed through sound and are formed and evolve from different cultural backgrounds and sonic contexts. The works in conversation reveal deep connections and histories shared by the artists as part of Intoart which has developed as a scene in its own right over the past 25 years.

Arcade and Flat Time House are pleased to present a new exhibition with Can Altay (TR, 1975). Through drawing, sculptural propositions and the presentation of research, Altay speculates how access to water can act as a model towards a more regenerative public space. Central to this presentation is a large-scale sculptural intervention, filling Flat Time House’s rear gallery, that acts as a proposal for a rainwater-harvesting drinking fountain. At this moment where water and its processing has become a subject of prevalent political dialogue, this exhibition provokes a conversation around our environment and who cares for it.

Agata Madejska’s artwork explores the power structures inherent in language and speech. These explorations are often expressed as sound, sculpture and installation, alongside post-photographic processes. Informed by her personal history, of growing up in and migrating from post-communist Poland, Madejska has responded to the space at Flat Time House by expanding and overlaying these narratives with an exploration of the power dynamics of the domestic and intimate. The exhibition includes a series of site-specific interventions for the successive rooms of FTHo such as a padded leatherette floor, a smoke sculpture, spoken word sound piece and a large organza structure, each a specially commissioned artwork or environment. Grand Habitat Horror Vacui is the artist’s first UK institutional solo show.

With a background in photography, Madejska has increasingly pushed beyond the surface of the flat image, expanding into embedded and durational forms. This new body of work examines the parameters of value and revenue by looking at various ideologies of ownership, such as assets; natural and public resources; housing and infrastructure; the woman’s body as commodity; and the body politic at large. Through oblique critique of recent political debates, in Poland and internationally, Madejska scrutinises the structures of persuasion, be they myth or fable, propaganda or spam, gossip or speculation. For Grand Habitat Horror Vacui Madejska questions the articulation of power and how modes of address are used to assemble or disintegrate the public mood. 

Sacha Golob, Marie Hay, Johanna Malt, Hester Reeve and Mark Titmarsh with Jan Hopkins

First Hand is the culmination of a three year digital placement at Flat Time House by /origin\forward/slash\, a group of artists and philosophers working together to collaboratively produce new artwork and ideas. Group members have an array of different approaches, some specialising in making, others in writing, often meeting in the hybrid space between. They are led by artist Hester Reeve and in association with the Centre for Philosophy and Art, King’s College London, and have met since 2018 to investigate the relationships between philosophical thinking and art practice.

Preview: Friday 2 June 6–8pm, performance by Jeremiah Day at 7pm

Online talk by Civil Rights Activist JoAnne Bland: Tuesday 27 June 7pm

Flat Time House is pleased to partner with Arcade to present What Is Power? a new exhibition by Berlin based American artist Jeremiah Day. Using photography, performance, text and installation, Day investigates art’s capacity for the civic and re-examines political conflicts and resistances. His personal narrative style unfolds subjective traces to ground political thinking in tender experience.

Opening Friday 12 May, 6–8pm
Sunday 14 May 3pm: Artist in conversation with exhibition curators

Breath Variations is a new body of work created by Irish artist Christopher Steenson (b. 1992) for Flat Time House. Using sound, video, and transmission-based methodologies, Breath Variations will explore the materiality of time – its permanence and evanescence – and the power that attention has over its transmission and state of matter. By manipulating and extending the sonic dimensions of Flat Time House, Steenson investigates the capacity of breath as a ‘least event’ – Latham’s term for the shortest departure from a state of nothingness – to punctuate linearities of time and space.

Breath Variations is part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Projects 2023, Royal College of Art, in partnership with Flat Time House. Curated by: Cindy He, Thomas Cury, Salomé Jacques, Romy Lagesse, Napas Mangklatanakul, Ariana Martin, Liyin Wang and Hyora Yang.

A new publication accompanying a trilogy of exhibitions at Flat Time House in collaboration with the Roberts Institute of Art. Includes new commissioned text and selected contributions from:

Ifeanyi Awachie, Boyle Family, Paul Buck, Julius Heinemann, Grace Ndiritu, Damien Roach, Karenjit Sandhu, Dr Saskia Steinmann and David Thompson.

Publication launch readings by Paul Buck and Karenjit Sandhu, with films by Grace Ndiritu, and Boyle Family within a specially realised installation, Dig.

Gone Fishing is the third in an ambitious trilogy of exhibitions produced in collaboration between Flat Time House (FTHo) and the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA). Each exhibition explores a different facet of the complex network of ideas surrounding John Latham’s work in dialogue with important works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. The final part of the trilogy expands from the relationship between Latham and Boyle Family, drawing on both artists’ pioneering work in understanding sculpture as conceptual art and central participation in the cross-pollination of popular culture and the avant-garde. Significant works from both artists are presented alongside sculptures by contemporary artist Marlie Mul and a newly commissioned audio installation by Damien Roach.

Red, Green and Yellow is the second in an ambitious trilogy of exhibitions produced in a collaboration between Flat Time House (FTHo) and the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA). Each exhibition explores a different facet of the complex network of ideas and relationships surrounding John Latham’s work in dialogue with important works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Part II of the trilogy builds from Latham’s vivid spray-painted work Red, Green and Yellow (1967) which is presented alongside minimal and conceptual works by Liliane Lijn, Tim Head, Bob Law and Wolfgang Tillmans. These works all experiment with light, space and duration and resonate with Latham’s belief in reflective and intuitive modes of working. A new work has been commissioned in response to the exhibition by Berlin-based artist Julius Heinemann whohas devised a new installation specially conceived for the space.

Untitled, 1956 is the first of an ambitious trilogy of exhibitions produced in collaboration between Flat Time House (FTHo) and the Roberts Institute of Art (RIA). Each exhibition explores a different facet of the complex network of ideas and relationships surrounding John Latham’s work in dialogue with important works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection. Throughout his life, Latham was relentlessly experimental in his choice of medium, rapidly moving between materials yet always applying a rich symbolism to his use of each. This first exhibition brings together a key early piece by Latham, Untitled, 1956, with impressive works by Phyllida Barlow, Bram Bogart and Antoni Tàpies, which share with Latham an intuitive investigation into material quality, presented alongside a new commission by Grace Ndiritu.

Now forget everything you ever k-n- ew or thought or saw, and imagine there was nothing, nothing a-t all. A blank, dark nothing.

Working between text, live event, video and installation, Anna Barham uses the written and spoken word as a source and as medium. Her artwork explores how language transforms, and what subjectivities are created as it moves between different bodies and technologies over time. Her solo exhibition for Flat Time House, produced in collaboration with partner Arcade, is the culmination of five years of engagement with John Latham’s writing and with his archive.

Flat Time House presents Art Deco Zebra Crossing, a new performative exhibition by Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye in collaboration with Intoart.

Amooquaye’s practice integrates the visual, written and spoken word through print, text, image and live performance. For this project, after two years in discussion with John Latham’s poetry, writing, and the domestic space of FTHo she has brought these elements together for a new performance piece alongside a series of new paintings.

Central to the presentation is a stage set comprised of a velvet dressing screen and silk wall hangings that act as a backdrop for the performance of a poem written and performed by Amooquaye and presented here as a short film. The works are made with the domestic scale of Flat Time House in mind. To perform the poem, she has designed a bespoke printed silk dress featuring hand drawn motifs that reference recurring themes in the text. Completed in 2021, the performance builds on previous performances 'The Vocal Project' at Peer, London (2018), and ‘Dress Poems’ at Museum Texture Kortrijk, Belgium (2017) exploring the intersections of writing, scenography and performance.

Pavel Büchler, Eva Kot’átková, John Latham & Sarah Lucas with musical composition by John Cage

Curated by David Thorp

‘The status of art has become uncertain. At least, it is ambiguous. No one can say with assurance what a work of art is—or, more important, what is not a work of art. Where an art object is still present it is what I have called an anxious object: It does not know whether it is a masterpiece or junk.’ [1]

–Harold Rosenberg

 ANTS AND GRASSHOPPERS: reflections on the anxious object examines whether or not art can have the capacity to subvert, and indeed, create anxiety. Does the art object have that potential? Or is any anxiety that abounds rather an indication of its maker’s existential state? This exhibition queries whether the ‘psychophysical sculpture’ that is Flat Time House could be an example of an anxious object. Alongside the newly restored book sculpture that transects the façade of the building, is presented the work of three contemporary artists, and a musical composition by John Cage, for each of whom in different ways this condition is evident.

[1] Harold Rosenberg. On the De-Defininition of Art, University of Chicago Press,1983. p12

Flat Time House re-opens with a selection of works by John Latham that reflect on a period of action, political critique and protest untaken by the artist in the mid to late 1980s. Using archival material and artworks from the John Latham Archive and the John Latham Foundation collection we can consider his sometimes audacious intent, with the knowledge of outcomes, at times ineffectual or unnoticed.

Opening 29 January 6–8.30pm with a reading from William Blake's Jerusalem by poet Chris McCabe.

With contributions from Keith Jarrett, Chris McCabe, Niall McDevitt, Robert Montgomery, Karen Sandhu, Iain Sinclair and Tamar Yoseloff 

Curated by Chris McCabe in partnership with Flat Time House and Magnus Rena of the Sir Denis Mahon Foundation

This exhibition gives a unique opportunity to view Blake’s work in the domestic environment of Latham’s home – the ‘living sculpture’ of Flat Time House and embodiment of Latham’s worldview. The show is also an opportunity to bring Blake back to Peckham, at a site close to the Rye where, as a young boy, he had his vision of "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

Offer for Sale is an exhibition that looks at John Latham’s conceptual understanding of art and economics shaped by his involvement in the Artist Placement Group. Central to the exhibition is a reconstruction of the previously lost seminal work Offer for Sale (1974).

Offer for Sale is a radical proposal, a financial report detailing the activities of the Artist Placement Group and presented to the Arts Council on the occasion of the 1971–72 Hayward Gallery exhibition inn7o – Art & Economics. It was then represented for exhibition as a display structure at The Gallery, London in 1974 with the support of the then artist-directors, Nicholas Wegner and Vaughan Grylls.

Using original archival documents and artworks, this exhibition contextualises this artwork within Latham’s understanding of economics including exposition on the alternative to pound sterling ‘unit of attention’ Latham designated as ‘delta’ (Δ).

Athanasios Argianas, John Baldessari, Julius Heinemann, John Latham & Rachel Reupke

Preview: Friday 30 August 4pm

Exhibtion open: Tuesday – Saturday 1–7pm

lítost

Vlkova 23, Žižkov, Prague, Czech Republic

an action

distress over parliament
to mark the occasion of its assent to acts of official censorship, conversion and contempt of truth, the bearing of false witness and assassination by stealth under cover of Royal Charter…

will take place during Sunday, 1st May, 1983

lítost gallery is hosting Flat Time House as part of Friend of a Friend, a collaborative series of exhibitions and public programmes by 21 galleries across 9 Prague spaces. Flat Time House will be presenting documentation of John Latham's rarely acknowledged 1983 happening Distress Over Parliament alongside work by four other contemporary artists.