There are several opportunities to explore the ideas of landscape, geology and materiality at Proposition over the coming months, including a special conversation with Onya McCausland and Ben Tufnell to mark the closing of The Residues, curated by Freeny Yianni of CLOSE Gallery.
blisters & bedrock
Performance-installation by Ãssia Ghendir
Saturday 7th November
3pm-4pm
Free to attend
In this performance-installation, voice is approached as a material capable of carrying histories that exceed words. The body is brought into dialogue with geological formations, minerals, and the resonances of the earth. Here, landscape is experienced not as backdrop but as collaborator and teacher.
Ãssia Ghendir is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work unfolds through voice, sound, movement and research. Rooted in deep listening, their practice explores the relationships between geology, memory, the body and collective transformation. Drawing on field recordings, experimental vocal practices and somatic methodologies, Ghendir creates immersive works that invite audiences into experiences of profound presence and vulnerability.
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Erth
Film screening of John Latham's film (1971)
With an introduction by Gareth Bell-Jones (Director/Curator of Flat Time House, the studio home of John Latham, 1921–2006)
Thursday January 7th 2027
7pm-8pm
Free to attend
The screening on 16mm of John Latham’s film from 1971 is a journey from outer space to the centre of the world, in which consciousness itself is revealed as a form of sedimented history. With distant views of the approaching Earth punctuated by black and silence, light years are compressed into a cosmic imaginary.
John Latham (1921–2006) was a pioneer of British conceptual art, who, through painting, sculpture, performances, assemblages, films, installation and extensive writings, fuelled controversy and continues to inspire. A visionary in mapping systems of knowledge, whether scientific or religious, he developed his own philosophy of time, known as ‘Event Structure.’ In this doctrine he proposed that the most basic component of reality is not the particle, as implied by physics, but the ‘least event,’ or the shortest departure from the state of nothing.
The entire universe is to be viewed as a system of events in time, rather than objects in space. Thus, for Latham all artworks were considered events and were activated as such through diverse processes ranging from spraying, chewing, shredding or spitting to simply declaring. For instance, his seminal ‘skoob’ happened in 1966, while Latham was teaching at St Martins School of Art. Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg’s recently published art history opus, Art and Culture, from the school’s library, and invited his students to join him in a ritualistic ceremony: the chewing and spitting out of select pages of the book. Latham decanted the vestiges into a phial, doused it in acid and yeast, and fermented it for a year, then returning the liquid he described as ‘Essence of Greenberg’ to the school. The Spit and Chew event poked at Greenberg’s emphasis on space and form, which was contradictory to Latham’s focus on the function of time in art, and cemented itself as a key example of conceptual art. The resulting artwork: Art and Culture (1966-69) is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Whether in his early spray paintings and One-Second Drawings, to the book reliefs he created in the 1960s, the roller paintings of the 1970s and the late glass towers works which incorporated bits of all theorems, John Latham maintained steadfast devotion to exploring the most complex cosmological ideas and questioning the traditional notions and structures of art, science and philosophy.
Courtesy of John Latham, Flat time House and LUX.
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Onya McCausland and Ben Tufnell in conversation
Finissage of The Residues
Saturday January 16th 2027
3pm-4pm
Free to attend
To mark the finissage of The Residues, artist Onya McCausland, known for a pioneering practice that transforms pigments drawn from post-industrial and mining landscapes into rich, dense, material colour, joins writer and curator Ben Tufnell for a conversation exploring the ideas carried within the exhibition. Tufnell has written widely on art's relationship to land, including the book Land Art, bringing a longstanding engagement with geology, colour and place to this discussion of McCausland's work.
Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He was previously a curator at Tate Britain, Director of Exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, and then Director of Parafin, a contemporary art gallery in London. He has curated more than 100 exhibitions, working with artists as varied as Richard Long, James Rosenquist, Nancy Holt, Giuseppe Penone, Cai Guo Qiang, Rina Bannerjee, Adrian Ghenie and Flora Yukhnovich. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art, in particular on artforms that engage with ideas of landscape and nature. A collection of essays and interviews, In Land: Writings Around Land Art and Its Legacies was published by Zero Books in 2019. He is also a writer of fiction. His debut novel, The North Shore, was published by Fleet (Little, Brown) in 2023. His second novel, Paradise, was published by Influx Press in February 2026.
All events are free to attend.
The Residues is on view at Proposition, Bethnal Green, until 16 January 2027.
We hope you’ll join us for one of these events.
