Programme
Francesca Telling: Emergency
When
Exhibition: 10 - 19 January 2025
Exhibition open daily 12-5pm
*note Saturday 11th opening hours will be 2-5pm
Where
Metroland Studios, 91 Kilburn Square, NW6 6PS
(Behind Kilburn Market)
The gallery is wheelchair accessible with step-free access. There are wheelchair accessible toilets.
A study of education, linguistics and colonialism through Malaysian, Chinese and British community histories.
Emergency is a new exhibition by artist, facilitator, learning practitioner and Metroland Cultures studio holder Francesca Telling. Through a practice rooted in archival research, Telling seeks to complicate hierarchies found in forms of historical documentation, developing an image of what is preserved or lost in the interpersonal making of diasporic histories. By examining the ways in which objects, language and stories are passed between generations and communities, Telling uncovers the gaps, silences, and continuities that shape and disfigure these narratives. Her practice interrogates how archival materials – often viewed as fixed records – interact with personal and collective memories to produce specific historical conjunctures. Through this lens, her work seeks to reveal the complexities of cultural preservation and the power of storytelling in reconstructing fragmented pasts.
Francesca often works with children and young people, facilitating workshops and dialogues within and beyond the systems that disempower them. Usually responsive to local contexts, these collaborations hope to reimagine learning environments and their authority through emotional engagement with questions of empathy, togetherness, belonging and justice. Pulling from the artist’s interest in how institutional and anti-institutional knowledge is produced between the archive, classroom, family and community; Emergency is a study of education, linguistics and colonialism from the archives of a 1950s British-Malayan teaching experiment in Kirkby, Merseyside, to the fragmented records of learning found in a family archive. Prints, projections, language and sound resurface the people and institutions produced by these histories, placing them together in dialogues across borders and time.
Composed of collages, photography, prints and analogue time-based media, the exhibition draws on the materials and aesthetic languages of educational environments. Archival materials are transposed and recontextualised into the exhibition space, including a wallpaper assembled from enlarged English-Chinese flashcards, and zoomed-in reproductions from an institutional archive, sequenced into
a looping slide projection. Sonic interventions play at regular intervals throughout the day – navigating the space like a school bell – and a new chapbook is printed to accompany the exhibition, containing speculative scripts for historical conversations, and transcribed oral history interviews with teachers.
Emergency will be on show in the Metroland Studios gallery from 10 – 19 January. The exhibition will open with a preview on the 9 January, from 6-8pm.
This exhibition is generously supported by ACAVA’s Barham Park Residency programme and Arts Council England.
About Francesca Telling
Francesca Telling is an artist, facilitator and learning practitioner interested in how institutional and anti-institutional knowledge is produced between the archive, classroom, family and community. Her practice investigates how the social histories of displaced communities are seen in objects and images – asking what it means to collect things in the context of survival and assimilation, and how this is recorded. Reconstituting archival materials in photography, print, language and time-based media, these works aim to build understanding from fragmented records tied to people and place.
As a facilitator Francesca explores structural inequalities in education, working with children and young people to reimagine learning environments and their authority. Activated by locality and group dynamics, these collaborations usually emerge through combining dialogue, mapping processes and participatory documentation.
Recent work has been defined by youth-led investigations of local histories, making creative interventions into archive collections. Through engaging racially minoritised young people in conversations across time, these projects make collective discoveries about power and change at the sites of historical knowledge generation – activating the past in the imagining of more just futures.
Francesca is part of Metroland Culture’s 2024 Peer-to-Peer cohort.
Peer-to-Peer artist programme
This exhibition platforms the work of one of Metroland Cultures’ Peer-to-Peer artists. Peer-to-Peer is a studio and associates programme supporting 10 artists, who are either based in or have a connection to Brent. They use the Metroland gallery to test new work, or as a site of further production. Learn more about Peer-to-Peer.
More on at Metroland…
Opening Event – Emergency, Francesca Telling
Join us for the launch of a new exhibition by Metroland Peer-to-Peer artist Francesca Telling. A study of education, linguistics and colonialism through educational and family archives.
Metroland Exhibitions Programme 2024/25
A look at the exhibitions coming up in our gallery.