It's that time of the year again where we greet lots of fresh faces, prep for the Welcome period, and showcase the latest selection of postgraduate work. Arts SU and Post-Grad Community's Postgraduate Selects exhibition is back!

It was a very competitive selection this year, with 75 applicants from across MA, MRes, MPhil, PhD and Grad Dip for only 18 available slots. Our selection panel was blown away by the incredibly high quality of all the work submitted, and found it difficult to narrow it down for their final decision. A huge well done to everyone who applied, it was all fantastic work.

The exhibition will run from Friday 15th September until Friday 20th October in the Arts SU Gallery space in London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle. It will be in collaboration with the Postgraduate Welcome Mixer, held in the Darkroom Bar on Thursday 12th October - book your ticket here.

 

The Postgraduate Selects Exhibition Autumn 2023

Curated by Sophia Nasif (LCC Officer) and Fred Kavanaugh (Post-Grad Community), with Aisling Ward (Arts SU). Installed by Josh Wright.

Olivia Burgess, MA Interaction Design

Embodied Perception

Through video, dance, and poetic storytelling, this instillation calls for the interrogation of reality. Reality is built from perception, the sensorial experience of our orientation towards different objects, people, and places. This work encourages us to question the power structures that have historically exploited the promise of scientific objectivity and disempowered the body to their own end. An invitation to uncover alternate and unmediated realities through the moving body in space.

 

Weiyi Chen, MA Textile Design

<caged>

This craftivism project critiques the pervasive cruelty towards pets in Chinese society. It explores how textile can be combined with photography and human body as an activist strategy to stir the viewer's understanding of animal rights. It uses knitting technique to blend dog hair, human hair, and metal.

 

Jessie Curry, MA Costume Design for Performance

Lucifer the Corpse Lily

In an overgrown jungle creeping far into the future, we find Lucifer – reimagined in this sci-fi interpretation of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. As an evolved parasitic corpse lily, Lucifer consumes souls to survive, relying solely on the vine-like Mephistopheles to allure them. Yet his fleshy and beast-like qualities forces us to recognise something even more disturbing in Lucifer – ourselves – and perhaps our deepest fears: might our own human nature parallel this parasitism? Is exploitation inherent to humanity, and what possibility exists to evolve beyond?

 

Dini Darmarpertiwi Dermawan, MA Publishing

YUCK! Magazine

YUCK! is a celebration of things that are considered “trashy”, low culture, or that people find off-putting. The magazine explores the reasons why people engage and take pleasure from them. The magazine aims to take a step back from these things and examine not just what we find off-putting but why we do. YUCK! plays on classic motifs of ‘bad’ and cliché design and reworks them to make them new and interesting again. The design encourages you to take a second look and put aside your judgements. The magazine takes advantage of tactility by using multiple techniques which are brought into play to encourage the audience to react and interact with the magazine whilst reading.

 

Margita Dekanyova, MA Visual Effects

Revival Trailer

We follow a young woman's mountain journey, where reality meets emotion. Cinema's visual magic, aided by VFX and animation, breathes life into emotional moments. Guided by light, she steps into the past, entering the world of Revival and Renaissance.

 

Merin Susan Elias, MA Illustration & Visual Media

Flower Vendors of Hanoi

Within this sketchbook spread, I draw inspiration from Hanoi's dynamic flower vendors, aiming to capture the rich tapestry of colors they offer. Employing a fusion of acrylic paint, color pencils, and Micron pens, I've meticulously portrayed the myriad hues in my distinctive artistic style.

 

Daniela Ghinsberg, MRes Exhibition Studies

I remember

The history of my family has been shaped by displacements. My grandmother was born in Poland and separated from her parents when the war came, never getting to grow up with her parents. I, on another instance, grew up with my mother in Brazil but chose to come to Europe to study. Looking at all of these overlaps, I juxtapose a photo of my Grandmother and Mother to reflect on the generations of women that have allowed me to be where I am.

 

Kumi Hori, MA Graphic Communication Design

Future of the content

I created three collages to express the relationship between humans and content with technology in three different times (past, present and future).

It was a collaborative project for making a zine, and I designed these visualisations. Each member read different books(Paper Knowledge, A Summary for I-N-T-E-R-F-A-C-E, and The Death of Author) and shared the summary, then merged the ideas of books for making the original zine with the title ‘Future of the content’.

 

Xingxin Hu, MA Fine Art: Painting

Double Life

I am captivated by intimate moments in movies that resonate deeply with my innermost experiences. By juxtaposing these moments with my personal history, I reconstruct them to create my own narrative.

Through my painting practice, I delve into the enigmatic gray areas of the human psyche, exploring themes of suspicious desires, vulnerability, intricate complexities, and inherent uncertainties. This exploration is a deeply introspective process that allows me to examine myself while also encompassing the broader spectrum of humanity.

 

Muchen Li, MA Fine Art: Photography

Ether

The basic elements constitute and physicalise me, the soul comes from the Ether and infuses the physicalist me. The elements exist beyond time and space and retain memories and experiences, meeting humanity through different forms. At the end of humanity's demise on Earth, the body remains forever on Earth as part of the original elements. Spiritual bodies, on the other hand, either reincarnate and return to Earth in a new way or become interstellar seeds and return to the cosmos as part of the Ether. The basic elements descend everywhere on the earth in no set form, the "I" exists and dies, and becomes different formations floating in the cosmos. The products of their existence and union are more like the soil that nourishes the soul and serves it to better return to the Ether. All this, as it is called, happens without sequence. As Ana Mendieta says, "my art is the way I reestablish the bonds that unite me to the Universe. It is a return to the maternal source. It is a return to the maternal source." Through images I want to discuss the collision between the basic elements, how they give birth to nature and life, and how life and soul return to the universe.

 

Muqing Liang, MA Visual Effects

Vintage Phone

The creation idea of my old phone is that it not only has a steampunk-style gear mechanism but also has a very modern midsole hollow design. It retains the classics and also has an extremely avant-garde design.

 

Rui Liu, MA Fine Art

fading away

Memory is like quicksand, but we can do nothing about it. The memory of the city begins to become transparent and fuzzy.

 

Yang Liu, PhD Researcher

Secret Detective

This is my series of photography that explores, or detects the secret pheromones dispersing in the premedical soup of everyday life. As an international student who travels away from home to land in an alien sociocultural compound, I always feel that I have a lot of love to the variety of situations I find myself in. Some people are friendly, some mean. Plants are different, pigeons and seagulls tactical. Everything holds a myth that pushes me to quitting comprehending everything. I thus concentrate in detecting the existence of secrets rather than unveil any of them. These secrets are hypersemiotics, from which I wish not to reproduce representations, but only enunciate their very being as the community we can call love - hidden, silent, distributed.

 

Victoria Mazeris, Timna Krenn and Catalina Diaconescu, MA Performance & Theatre Making

Hunger: Let Them Eat

A performance piece about women, endurance and a ravenous appetite for more. It is about the hunger for life, for love, for irreverence, for the expansion of our horizons and a hunger to take up space and to live unforgivingly.

 

Olivia Pistun, MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography

Untitled

This work looks at the relationship between two men, a boxer and his coach, in the hours leading up to the title fight as well as during the brief minutes of respite between rounds in the ring. It looks for the tenderness in times of tension between two men who, upon first impression, might not be expected to relate to one another in such a manner.

 

Samriddhi Tiwari, MA Design (Jewellery)

Sculptured Weave

An amalgamation of traditional techniques and contemporary forms.

Sculptured Weave explores the Bamboo craft of India, its cultural identity, exquisite patterns and techniques and reinvents this tradition in an attempt to bring a piece of traditional India into contemporary sculptural form. The collection is designed as a tangible memory and reflection of Indian heritage and creativity that seeks to celebrate the ideals and significance of traditional approaches and their potential for fusion with modern technology.

In line with sustainability, the collection incorporates eco-friendly materials, ethical production and involves traditional bamboo and cane hand-making skills of the artisans with modern manufacturing methods to create a contrast and present jewellery that is architectural, structured, with a softer organic feel to it.

 

Chao Wang, PhD Researcher

By the Thames No.2

This image belongs to a practice-based research questioning the technological production and perceptive role that urban images play in urbanites’ negotiation between submission to, and re-definition of their 21st-Century urban milieu of London and Shenzhen.

 

Richard Wood, MA Photojournalism & Documentary Photography (Online)

Male voice choir

Two members of the Cardiff Arms Park, Male Voice Choir hold an impromptu performance at the Pen and Wig pub after a concert in the city.