Ad(dress) Rehearsal – Wesley

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Government Art Collection

Marlene Smith’s work often explores notions of gender and embodiment. She has said: ‘When you put a body in a piece of work, you inadvertently speak about race. When you put a Black body in a piece of work, it is racialised.’ The two works, Ad(dress) Rehearsal – Wesley and Ad(dress) Rehearsal – Golda, are records of a performance piece Ad(dress) Rehearsal from 2014, in which the artist dressed in the clothes of her late mother and father, Golda and Wesley Smith. In 2021, at a time during the pandemic when performances could not be staged, the New Art Exchange, Nottingham, commissioned Smith to create a new film version of the performance piece. The film uses the language of the home movie, stylistically capturing the solitude of lockdown, a sense of vulnerability, longing and grief. Ad(dress) Rehearsal is a celebration of the artist’s memory of her parents and being a parent herself.

Marlene Smith was born in Birmingham in 1964. A founder member of the Blk Art Group, formed in Wolverhampton in 1979, she has since worked as an artist, researcher and curator. Smith was UK Research Manager for the AHRC-funded Black Arts and Modernism (BAM) project at the University of the Arts London from 2015 to 2018, where she was also a PhD candidate researching the exhibition history of women during the Black Arts Movement. Recent group exhibitions include The More Things Change… at Wolverhampton Art Gallery in 2023, an exhibition reuniting key artists of the Blk Art Group; Portals, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, in 2021; Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers, Somerset House, London, in 2019; and The Place Is Here at Nottingham Contemporary, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and the South London Gallery in 2017, which traced the urgent conversations taking place between Black artists, writers and thinkers during the 1980s.

Places

Subjects

Materials & Techniques

Artist

Marlene Smith (1964 - )

Title

Ad(dress) Rehearsal – Wesley

Date

2014

Medium

Photograph

Dimensions

height: 24 cm; width: 30 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, March 2023, Art XUK project 2022-23

Provenance

Purchased from the artist, March 2023

GAC number

19141