a solo exhibition from Puer Deorum
Private View: Wednesday 21st August 2024 18:00 - 20:00 with live performance at 18:30
Opening Hours: Thursday 22nd - Saturday 24th August 2024 12:30 - 18:00
Location: Nunhead Cemetery Chapel
BOOKING IS NOT ESSENTIAL
This exhibition is part of the Summer series from the FLP x Friends of Nunhead Cemetery Curatorial Program.
Feminist Lecture Program and Friends of Nunhead Cemetery are proud to present “Verses of the Love-Dead", a solo exhibition by Puer Deorum at the Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, activated by two new site specific live performance works. The curated performance and sculptural works, influenced by current global affairs, form a vigil to the martyrs we’ve lost, a zeitgeist to current time, and mortality. Symbols embedded within the collection of works interplay serving as a homage to the ongoing struggle for liberation in Palestine, the interconnected roots of genocide occurring simultaneously in countries such as Congo and Sudan, and the recent vanguard of student protests in Bangladesh which led to the fall of 15 years of fascist dictatorship.
The title of the exhibition derives from an interpretation of the ancient Persian poem Layla and Majnun originally documented in written form in the 12th century by Nizami Ganjavi. The unfurling of the tale of two devotional lovers torn apart, lamenting their love, cut short by death.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born and bred in London, Puer Deorum is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. They approach art as a mode of archiving contrived halcyons, utopian scenarios, contexts that cannot be contextualised, developing sequences of mysticism and fantastical ambience. Their work balances sentient negotiations between weight and ephemerality within the scope of mortality, weaving incantations of love and radical imagination. Creating non-linear realities with familiar, yet accentuated tropes within a polychronic experience of time and narrating surreal paracosms with harmonious references to psycho/socio political geographies, amplifying the mundanity of everyday proprioceptive and embodied feeling.
Selected sharings of their art include: Congregations, Paris (2024), San Mei Gallery, London (2023), Hugo Boss, London (2023), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023), Instrument Inventors, The Hague (2023), Blender Studios, Berlin (2022), Deptford X Supported, London (2022). Solo exhibitions include Filet Gallery, London (2023), Quench Gallery, Margate (2021).
Selected awards include the Set Studio Prize (2021) and Arts Council DYCP Grant (2023) for researching and uncovering diaspora narratives and South Asian mythology. They have been a speaker in panel discussions at Glastonbury Festival (2023), Crafts Council (2022) and given an artist talk at Tate Modern (2022). They curated and produced ELO MELO, a multi-media festival across Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Hall, London with Oitij-jo Collective (2023).
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/puer_deorum/
WEBSITE: https://www.puerdeorum.com/