OTOKA is a nomadic & fluid research, exhibition, residency, online platform & studio space.
Episode 3: All that is fluid melts into air
A new solo exhibition by Candice Jacobs
PV 9th March 4-7pm
10 - 26 March 2023
Open: Fri - Sat 12-8pm / Sun 12-4pm
OTOKA is currently taking over Broadway Gallery, 17 Heathcoat St, NG1 3AL from
November '22 - March '23
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With an episodic programming structure, sites become spaces for contemplation and interdisciplinary collaboration. Expanding methodologies through a symbiotic & symbolic language forged out of the ether to extract data and knowledge from the collective subconscious and attuned minds of the bodies we inhabit.
Un-attached to the necessity of needing long-term space, OTOKA responds to and reacts against the infrastructures we might feel we are embedded within, to work outside of and slide between, gaps in the system to create actions that can act as Temporary Autonomous Zones, zones of activity that act within their own rules, to provide what they need to whom they serve in new & unique ways.
OTOKA has been established by artist Candice Jacobs since returning to Nottingham during the Pandemic and becoming a mother.

EXHIBITION

Episode 3: All that is fluid melts into air

DATES:

10.3.23

-

26.3.23

LOCATION:
Broadway Gallery

Artists:

Candice Jacobs

Online:

Episode 3: All that is fluid melts into air

PV 9th March

10 - 26 March 2023

Open: Fri - Sat 12-8pm Sun 12-4pm

OTOKA takeover of Broadway Gallery, Nottingham

www.otoka.org

VIEW PRESS RELEASE

Liquidity. Free falling until caught by cyclones of time & space.  Like my mothers hand, your mothers and us, as mothers, ready to catch you if you fall.  Yet, we are falling, again and again, into the synapses of our minds which slap us round the face just when we didn't realise we needed a wake up call. A reality cheque.  Fascias convince us that we’re the only ones who really know ourselves. But who are we that appear to others as coded rhythms. Expanding bodies breed those who come after those who came before us, filled with oceans of new beginnings, unknowing of the knowledge still yet to surface, swallowed by implications of the truth into the present, the past and the future.  Don't worry, perhaps our touch will comfort in the knowledge of the nothingness as yet unresolved.  Trust me, it's not just us… images are also causing an environmental crisis.  They need all the energy that we can muster because they are the visual representation of all the worlds vitality.  What has changed is not the dimensionality of the future, but its predictability.  The other, the ether, the mother… safely and securely letting go of our anxieties and worry. I care but I am careless.   

Candice Jacobs

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Online

All that is fluid melts into air acts as a new solo exhibition by Candice Jacobs and forms Episode 3 of OTOKA's takeover of Broadway Gallery in Nottingham

The title of the exhibition comments on the book “All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity” by Marshall Berman who interprets modernisation through processes of dreaming, loving and developing, which connects to the vision of this new exhibition by Candice Jacobs.   Much like Berman, Jacobs also uses text & poetry to analyse the self-destructive nature of modernisation.

Arriving at a neural crystalline structure heavy with the burden of our worries, shining with hints of neon & glistening pools of screens that move around to track & trace the bodies & words that flow through dying exotic waters 'All that is fluid melts into air' expands on new understandings of the body through motherhood & how this connects to ideas of fluidity, liquidity & stability; the economy, the climate & the internet.  

Together with community groups of women from around the city, we have built a paper mache crystalline sculpture made of discarded tax returns and as much recycled paper we could muster connected to the economy… we have embedded our thoughts and set affirmations to let go of our anxieties by placing them directly into the sculpture so that it (instead of us) can carry the burden of our shared realities and swallow the stress, even if it's just for a split second in time.

Our conversations have been re-written & transformed into a poetic form of text that now sits within a collection of video & VR works that have been integrated into the sculpture. 

Candice Jacobs is collaborating with Framework for Practice who have supported the construction of the sculpture in the gallery.  Framework for Practice is a project that uses scaffolding as a display strategy for creative and cultural activity. They re-use the display components, and use found materials, to minimise the environmental impact of their activities.

This new work expands out from an interview Candice Jacobs had with Tess McClure, former editor of VICE New Zealand and journalist of “Dark Crystals, the brutal reality of the wellness craze” printed in the Guardian newspaper in 2019, which you can listen to as a podcast on www.thewellnessformula.guru - a website hosting Jacobs’ most recent solo show that took placeI during lock-down at Five Years Gallery in London.

“Privacy Techtonics” is funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Collaboration and Strategic Impact Fund, Queen Mary University of London 2021/2.

UPCOMING

No items found.

LIVE

Privacy Techtonics Podcast

This series of podcasts are led and facilitated by Dr. Phillipa Williams & Dr. Lipika Kamra from Queen Mary University London who are currently writing the book “Privacy Techtonics: Digital geopolitics, WhatsApp and India” - a critical take on how ‘privacy’ is designed, talked about, regulated and experienced by WhatsApp/Meta, governments and ordinary people. Excerpts from these conversations will feature alongside newly commissioned texts in a downloadable Privacy Techtonics PDF catalogue.

RESIDENCY

Every year, OTOKA takes up residence on the crystal waters of the Croatian shore where invited guests consolidate thoughts & lasting legacies from the project to become an "Act" of escapism.
Candice Jacobs set up OTOKA as a fluidly transitioning temporary autonomous support structure for her research & practice; an attempt to break out from the established modes of expectation applied to artistic practice which often tend to favour the white male over a working artist-mother. As an artist her work explores a world that exists as a mode of interrogation, drawing attention to aspects of reality that require further review and consideration, seizing and documenting behaviours that participate in spatial disturbances to create a shifting of place into angelic sphere (of exhaustion), which involves the manipulation of symbols (which are also things) and people (who are also symbolic); archetypes that supply a vocabulary for the processing of private epiphanies that shape our sense of self through contemporary capitalist frameworks, technological innovation and political modes of thought.

ABOUT

Candice Jacobs

info@otoka.org
Candice was nominated for the Jarman Award 2022, she co-founded One Thoresby Street, the New Midland Group & Moot Gallery in Nottingham; and she has exhibited across the globe at 56th Venice Biennale; FACT Liverpool; Camden Arts Centre; Artnight 2020; VITRINE; Seventeen Gallery; the Eternal Internet Brother & Sisterhood in Sri Lanka for Documenta 14; and the Material Art Fair in Mexico City amongst others. She is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins & Chelsea College of Art in London.