2022 Window Project: 10th Anniversary Edition
Gazelli Art House celebrates a decade of the Window Project with their most ambitious installation to date.
2022’s iteration of the Window Project will see the much anticipated art-world event burst beyond the gallery’s boundaries to encompass the entire building’s facade. In celebration of their anniversary, Gazelli Art House’s commitment to supporting emerging artists will be quadrupled, presenting not one, but four winners. Visitors can expect radical artworks investigating emotional exchanges, interlacing genres, and pressing environmental concerns.
From a selection of outstanding entries, the winners — Lulu Wang (RCA), Yeonsu Ju (UCL), Mila Morelli (RCA), and Sophie Rogers (UCL) — were selected by Jo Baxendale (Senior Policy Officer, Visual Arts and Public Realm for the GLA Culture and Creative Industries Unit), Roland Cowan (Partner at Roland Cowan Architects), Mark Dale (Founder & Creative Director of W1 Curates), Tim Sayer (MBE, Former BBC Radio 4 News writer and art collector), and Katie Thomas (Associate Director of the New West End - Bond Street & Mayfair).
Taking over the the Gallery windows on the first floor, Lulu Wang’s LOVE in the House is an exploration of the intimacies of love and its myriad configurations. Movement is here harnessed as both conceptual approach and act, as Wang surveys emotional journeys in painterly tracing and physical movement. Emphasising the theatricality of the window as setting, Wang will harness the dual perspectives to present an electrifying live performance on opening night. Inspired by currents of Yin and Yang, myths of the Chinese love god, and the artist’s childhood games of tug of war, Wang looks to archive the transience of emotion. The artists offers: “Each body leaves its unique two-dimensional signature, which translates from its three-dimensional form, creating an undiscovered narrative captured in the moment. Therefore, traces become a map which leads the storyline of my performances”.
On the windows above, Mila Morelli’s Inveterate Dreamers plays with preexisting artistic forms to explore rhetorics of childhood imagery. Employing wearable sculpture, Morelli’s work presents five figures with faces disguised by colourful mushroom headwear, standing in a vast desert. Morelli attests the work “challenges the normative boundaries between conventional cartoon animation and contemporary fine art with elements of play, improvisation, and chance, used to create a choreography and courtship between the cartoon and the physiological”.
The third floor features figurative studies from Yeonsu Ju, set against a vibrant, painterly backdrop. Varying tonal temperatures and depth of colour application intermingle to create a surreal dinner scene. Of the work, Ju comments: “I portray dinner scenes as if I bring sacrifices to an altar. I see feelings as edible, and I cook and serve them in the form of food in painting”.
Both the fourth and fifth floors are taken over by Sophie Rogers, presenting images from her Arts Council funded video game developed in collaboration with Lucy Wheeler, 3 Minutes to Midnight. Referencing the 2007 reading on the Doomsday Clock (a metaphorical countdown until global catastrophe) once climate change was introduced as a factor, the work’s namesake informs its aesthetics. Rogers says: “The game inhabits this temporality, the time of impending apocalypse, a time in fairytales associated with the breaking of a spell and a time that relates to our age commonly referred to as the Anthropocene; a time of great urgency and consequence”.
