Trade Roots Art Exhibtion - 20.03.14 – 20.04.14

Trade Roots is an art exhibition featuring the works of 3 notable Artist; Faig Ahmed, Phoebe Boswell and Dawit Abebe. It looks to explore the ways in which cultures meld, adapt, and fuse together, through charcoal drawings, paintings and textile works. The artists examine the impact of new technologies, the deconstruction and reconstruction of tradition, and the evolution of ritual – and how these all blend with various cultural influencers to create new, unique, vibrant forms.

Date: Thursday 20th March to Sunday 20th April 2014

Location: Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery , 533 Old York Road, SW18 1TG London, United Kingdom

Time: Thursday 20th March 18.00 - 21.00 (GMT) | Opening Hours 11:00 - 18:00 (GMT)

Ticket: FREE

The work of Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe examines belief systems, the search for knowledge, privacy, alienation, and materiality. Above all, he is interested in the impact of technology on human behaviour, as well as the impact of these technologies on the environment. “In rural places, such as Ethiopia, Madagascar, or Kenya, people use technology as a sign of wealth, such as owning a television. They adapt fast to new technologies, and their behaviour changes fast too.”

For Azerbaijan-born Faig Ahmed, it is the artistic qualities of Azeri traditional carpets that he explores, dissembling their conventional structure to randomly rearrange the resulting components into sculptural forms. The neat geometry of an Oriental design is thrown into disarray – colours either become a muddle of static, or appear to bleed off the rug, pushing to shoot out of its edges. “The carpet is an icon of Eastern tradition,” he explains. “It is canonical and has visual boundaries – my art is directed towards transforming these boundaries beyond any recognition. These carpets were more than simply visual patterns, they held a certain language and told stories. This tradition has fallen by the wayside, and in deconstructing and reconstructing them, in a way, I am creating new stories.”

The series of large charcoal drawings that Phoebe Boswell has created for the exhibition has been inspired by the Maulidi ya Homu of Zanzibar. A Sufi tradition of rhythmic chanting with origins in the Middle East, it was brought to East Africa through the region’s trade routes. This form of Maulidi now only exists in the Zanzibar Archipelago. While the chants were originally prayers to the Prophet, it has since become a cultural, rather than a religious, appropriation, its rhythmic movements echoing the waves and sailboats of the East African coast