The Salamander Devours its Tail Twice launching at Gallery 46

By Various Artists

Show Runs: Sunday 18 November – Wednesday 5 December 2018

Venue:  Gallery 46, Ashfield Street, London, E1 2AJ

An upcoming event organised by Londonewcastle is  The Salamander Devours its Tail Twice (17 November - 5 December 2018), an international group exhibition at East London’s Gallery 46 that brings together 26 established and emerging artists who will explore what it means to be human.

Curated by New York-based artist Ashley Middleton, the showcase will feature a diverse collection of works across a variety of mediums including sculpture, installation, performance, video, photography, painting and print. 

The Sweet Stench of Sulfur, 2018 by Michelle Gevint 

Londonewcastle has created developments in London for the design-conscious for the past three decades. Their core belief is to bring outstanding architecture to mixed-use developments, delivering the highest quality buildings, public realms and cultural destinations.

From left to right: Spinning Wheel, 2018 by Kawita Vatanajyankur and A Bigger Splash, 2018 by Alexander Glass

Gallery 46, housed in a pair of renovated Georgian houses in the grounds of Whitechapel Hospital and set over 3 floors and 8 rooms, is a kaleidoscopic addition to Whitechapel’s burgeoning gallery scene and its artistic heart, the nearby Whitechapel Gallery.

Shallow Leaning, 2018 by Aaron Hegert 

Photos from Gallery 46.

The Salamander Devours its Tail Twice  will feature work from the following artists: Yambe Tam, Adeline de Monseignat, Chantal Powell, Thomas Kuijpers, Katie Ellen Fields, Alice Irwin, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Thomas Adam, Saskia Fischer, Michelle Gevint, Sarah Howe, Jan Dams, Alexander Glass, Stewart Hardie, Andrew Hart, Aaron Hegert, Stuart Jones, Dominic Till, Victor Seaward, Ashley Middleton, Brett Wallace, Luca Bosani, Patrick Gallagher, Ella Belenky, Seungwon Jung, and Chris Klapper. 

The title The Salamander Devours its Tail Twice is taken from a passage in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), the award-winning dystopian novel by American author Ray Bradbury. The story explores a futuristic society where books have been prohibited and specialist ‘firemen’ have been instructed to burn all physical literature. Written during the McCarthy era, Bradbury was said to have used the novel to express his own fears of book burning in the United States at the time.

The passage refers to the conceived annihilation of a cultural system, and served as a curatorial guide to selecting artists for the show. The artists participating in this exhibition were selected for their curiosity and understanding of the world through their sensed experiences, each artist oscillating between self-understanding and cultural expectation. Located somewhere in the middle, they create an extension of themselves, a mirror from which they may better understand their position in the present, relation to the past, and anxieties around the future.

For this show, Curator Ashley Middleton examined her personal experience of living between two locations, London and New York, and all the objects, relations and comforts acquired and lost along the way. This fractured style of living forced Ashley to confront the exchange  between the two lives she was living, encouraging her to become more mindful about her place in the moment, instead of focusing on what the moment should bring to her.