Anna Baumgart’s film project was created for the exhibition at the Art Centre in Falstad, Norway – location of a German concentration camp during the Second World War. Mostly Russians, Serbs and Poles were detained there. Baumgart’s film merges the style of a documentary, para-theatrical staging and a record of Hellinger’s Constellations. The video Fresh Cherries pertains primarily to the phenomenon of stigmatisation and hierarchisation of the victims of the Second World War, which shapes the image of the war in the eyes of the younger generation. The tabooisation of prostitution at concentration camps as forced labour is based primarily on the common conviction concerning the “voluntary” character of the choice of women recruited to Sonderbau (the camp public house, also known as “puff”). In the post-war discourse, discrimination of women forced to become prostitutes was common and consisted in depriving them of the victim status. The suffering of those women did not come to an end the moment the camp was liberated – in many cases they were completely “eradicated” from common consciousness. From a broader perspective, Baumgart’s work also pertains to the phenomenon of trauma and ways of dealing with it. Go here to read more See the video on the Warsaw's Museum of modern art website
Saad Qureshi’s practice draws on the ineffability of lived experience: the processes by which we interpret objects and landscapes, and how memory itself processes them over time.
His sculptures give form to the ideas or stories by which we give meaning to human existence.
Qureshi lives and works in London and Oxford. He received his BA in Fine Art from Oxford Brookes University in 2007 and an MFA in Painting from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2010.
Recent solo exhibitions include Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi; Aicon Gallery, New York; and Gazelli Art House, London. Group exhibitions include the Aga Khan Centre Gallery, London; I’Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen; Drawing Room, London; and White Project Gallery, Paris.
Winner of The Frieze and The OWO Sculpture Prize, Convocation is on view at Raffles London at The OWO. Also in 2023, Saad Qureshi was commissioned to realise a permanent Organ Donor Memorial for the Royal London Hospital at Whitechapel. He has had public commissions at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford and Victoria, London and his work has been acquired by public collections including the Dipti Mathur Collection, California; The Farjam Foundation Collection, Dubai; the UNESCO Creative Cities Collection, Beijing; The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; the Bagri Foundation, London; and the Almarkhiya Gallery, Qatar as well as British and international private collections.
Qureshi was shortlisted for the 2021 SkyArts LANDMARKS public art commission. He has received four ACE awards; the Celeste Prize, Rome; the Royal Society of British Sculptors bursary award; the Red Mansion Foundation Prize; and he was shortlisted for the Lecturis Award, Amsterdam.
Saad Qureshi is a Trustee of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
He features in Thames & Hudson’s 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow.
“One of our most pensive and poetic artists.”
Laura Cumming, The Observer
“Qureshi has created his own uncanny world of apparently ‘real’ things that confound the apparent logics of time, space, scale and material. Through his great technical virtuosity… he presents us with his own special world of unconstrained imaginative potential and invites us to participate on our own terms.”
Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford University
Contemporary Art Society Friday Dispatch
Listen to a podcast between Saad Qureshi and Bob Chaundy
Saad Qureshi profile in Colossal Magazine
Saad Qureshi in conversation with David Pearce and Isabel de Vasconcellos
Saad Qureshi in conversation with James Putnam, Ishrat Kanga, and Emily Andrews