Castlefield Gallery’s latest exhibition explores memories and identity through image, objects and bodies

Castlefield Gallery’s latest exhibition invites Matthew Bamber and Ivy Kalungi to explore how images, objects and bodies hold memories of both personal and social histories.

Opening to the public on Sun 25 Sep, and running through until Sun 16 Oct, the exhibition will include large-scale sculptural works interacting with the gallery’s unique architecture alongside video work and digital collages.

Kalungi employs an assortment of techniques and materials to create her sculptures, these combinations reflecting the personal and psychological triggers held within cultural identity. The duality of Kalungi’s Ugandan and Irish heritage informs how she experiences the diasporic condition.

A new video work being developed for the exhibition will feature everyday scenes filmed in beauty salons in Kalungi’s hometown of Belfast. These salons are one of the most secure, safe spaces for black women to beautify themselves and form a community to discuss politics, culture and the role of black women in society.  Through this work Kalungi wants to communicate this experience and the themes that are rarely shared outside of this safe space.

Bamber explores our image-saturated world and his own consumption of imagery. His practice incorporates collage, photography, video, drawing and installation, and is influenced by baroque and still-life painting. He constructs assemblages, using photography, personal and public archives and found images taken from the internet, which are re-photographed and digitally manipulated.

His work focuses on sexuality, particularly, queer domesticities but also images of violence, drawn from points of intersection between LGBTQIA+ histories and his own memories and personal experiences.

A major new work, The Unswept Floor, is a large-scale floor piece which pays homage to The Asarotos Oikos Mosaic which now resides at the Vatican in Rome. Centred around the theme of excessiveness and greed, this piece exists as a reminder of humanity’s precarious historical position, at an environmental and cultural tipping point. Bamber will also be showcasing a selection of new collage works.

For more information, visit the Castlefield Gallery website.