Head Above Water
Hamish Pearch

Pearch’s work reflects on the systems and experiences of place through objects, considering the way we exist in, and understand, the world around us. By reproducing found objects and placing them in specific spatial relations, he explores the complex links between surface, scale, reality and artifice, creating shifting situations of banality and magic.

Taking into consideration the questions surrounding Manifesta, the exhibition will use the strategies of storage and movement of objects to explore ways of visualizing time, geography and history. By collecting and sequencing these occasionally intangible entities, Pearch considers the knotty relationship between people, places, and things. Things, in particular, that are in constant flux, on the move. Marseille Fos Port is the main trade seaport of France. It is the fifth-largest cruise port in the Mediterranean, transporting 85,997,000 tons of goods in 2014. It is the perfect field to explore these strategies.

In Pearch’s work, the storage site plays host to a spectra of bodily, psychological and historical associations. A link can be made between the movement of goods at a port of the sea and the transformations that happen within a mind and body. The storage site becomes a psycho-mind-grotto, an incomplete encyclopaedic wunderkammer of cultural goods.

Pearch examines the ambiguous experience of objects and images that surround him through mixing and remaking forms, aiming to question the stability of the material world and our place within it. With this exhibition he proposes to investigate the neglected peripheries of the urbanised landscape – the bits in the cracks, behind triple fences, overseen by security cameras.We’ve all seen these places without really looking at them, yet it is the ordinariness of our world that is often the strangest, the creative potential.

The exhibition is conceived as an evolutive environment.Throughout its duration it will host performances, talks and activations by artists and curators including a screening of ‘We Are Opposite like That’ Himali Singh Soin’s latest film – in collaboration with Forma, London.

Exhibition from 28.08 until 7.11.2020, in collaboration with Sans titre (2016)

Selected by the curators of Maniesta 2020 to be part of the “Parallèles du Sud” program, Belsunce Projects presents Head Above Water, a solo show by British artist Hamish Pearch.The works will be produced specifically for the show with the help of Sans titre (2016), responding to the context of the city of Marseille and of Manifesta.

Hamish Pearch (b. 1993) lives and works in London. Pearch undertook the Post- graduate Program at the Royal Academy Schools London during the period 2016-2019 after earning his BA (Hons) at Camberwell College. He has had solo exhibitions at Soft Opening (London, 2019), Sans titre (2016) (Paris, 2018) and at Kupfer (London, 2018). Recent goup exhibitions include Go at Soft Opening (London, 2018), New Relics at Thames-side Studios (London, 2018), Premiums at Royal Academy of Arts (London, 2018), Addams Outtakes at Roaming Projects (London, 2017), Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (co-curated and exhibited in withWilliam Rees) at J Hammond Projects (London, 2018), Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Primary (Nottingham, 2015) and ICA (London, 2015). His work will be exhibited in a group show at Somerset House in 2020. He was a finalist for the XL Caitlin Prize in 2016.