Edel Assanti's NOVA booth will conclude a landmark year for both Noémie Goudal and Lonnie Holley. In 2023, Goudal's immersive installation ANIMA has been presented at both Tate Modern (UK) and Centre Pompidou (FR). This follows 2022 solo exhibitions at Les Rencontres d'Arles, Collection Lambert, Frac Île-de-France and Musée Delacroix (all FR). Holley's 2023 solo exhibition at North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art (USA) follows his prominent inclusion in exhibitions this year at Royal Academy of Arts and Middlesbrough Institute of Art (both UK), alongside receiving a lifetime achievement award by the American Folk Art Museum (USA), where he played a headline musical performance following a sold-out Royal Academy performance in March.
Goudal's practice is underpinned by rigorous research at the intersection of ecology and anthropology. Her works result from the construction of elaborate, illusionistic installations staged within the landscape, documented using film and photography. The works on the booth are drawn from Post Atlantica, Goudal's expansive series investigating "deep time" - the history of the earth's landscapes across timescales unfathomable to the human mind. The works collage multiple competing perspectives, seeking a representation of the complex web of fragile, interdependent systems that define the present state of the natural world.
The necessity of overcoming sensory data in search of a "more-than-human" perspective is underscored by Goudal's recurrent display mechanism of steel rebar walls - a universal base construction material that remains present in our daily environment yet concealed from view.
Holley's interdisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, painting, filmmaking, performance and music. Holley's found mediums are imbued with cultural and artistic metaphor, combined into sculptures that commemorate and give narrative to places, people and events. The booth presents works exemplifying Holley's longstanding exploration of themes of ecology and ancestral memory. Like Goudal, Holley proliferates the view that understanding the ancient past is a necessary step in anticipating our collective future. The booth centres on Holley's painting, in which overlapping spectral silhouettes of faces signal ancestral presences. Using stencils and spray paint, Holley populates the lower section of the painting with outlines of plant-life and vegetation. Combined with a hallucinant rhythm and cellular geometry, the composition points towards ideas of interconnectivity across time.
Holley's sculptures, exhibited on floor-standing or wall-mounted pedestals, are invested with the symbolic power of their constituent parts. Rusted shovels and fences bear the scars of their previous use as tools to demarcate and reshape the earth, reconfigured by Holley into anonymous totems or signs. Rocks, roots, ropes, branches and wires are entwined and combined with household objects, conjuring ideas of home and interdependence, shackling natural forms to the societies we have created.
