Rafik Greiss, Ser Serpas

Rafik Greiss is an Irish-born Egyptian artist who moves between sculpture, moving-image, collage, and photography. With a keen eye for movement and vulnerability, Greiss uses the camera to preserve ephemeral points of contact, capturing sublime vistas from a moving train, footprints in the snow, or moments of intimacy between clubbers and lovers. Texture and surface are key components the artist plays with, producing glossy inkjets on Japanese paper alongside aluminium steel surfaces or structures in the gallery space. These installations evoke simultaneous feelings of dislocation and communion, as his figures are physically separated from these urban signifiers, whilst the frame provides a sense of kinship for his subjects. Drawing from a broad range of influences such as Greek mythology, fashion photography and landscape painting, there’s a distinct poetic sensibility to Greiss’s work. Cinematic in tone, traces of Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Wolfgang Tillmans can be found in his portfolio. //// Ser Serpas’s practice exists at the blurred intersection of art, poetry and activism. Whether creating sculptures from debris found on the street, working with a hoard of fabric gifted by her friends, making an exhibition out of objects she found at the exhibition site, drawing in public spaces, or writing on train rides, Serpas makes work that complicates the notion of materiality amidst the late-capitalist condition. Created in private, intimate, seemingly improvised moments, the works are never fully -visible to her audiences. The artist’s exhibitions are composed of assemblages of discarded and mistreated objects turned corporeal, becoming what the artist calls ‘assisted readymades’. Subverting Duchamp’s readymades and Rauschenberg’s Combines – the male-dominated history of sculpture – Serpas returns the objects to the streets after her exhibitions, allowing them to revert to their original state and provokes playful questions about the value of the space inside a museum, as opposed to the outside. An activist since high -school, the artist speaks up about structural inequalities, and provides support through facilitated workshops, community aid and artistic inspiration.