Swansea-based art gallery, Glynn Vivian and Artes Mundi present Aurora Trinity Collective’s new installation, Ncheta, a collective cultural and personal remembering, on display from October 20, 2023 to January 21, 2024.
Ncheta explores themes of remembrance, language and the personal and cultural importance of textiles. The work is one of the outcomes of a two-year project in collaboration with Artes Mundi, Aurora Trinity Collective and the Trinity Centre, co-produced by Ogechi Dimeke and Helen Clifford. This project has been made possible through support by National Lottery/Arts Council Wales ‘Connect and Flourish’.
Aurora Trinity Collective hold weekly creative sessions in Cardiff that are a safe held space for women, including trans women, non-binary people and intersex people. Alongside this, they have a collaborative practice through which they create their own work. Many artists in the collective have lived experience as refugees and those seeking asylum in Wales, resulting in their work reflecting a rich and active engagement in cultural creativity. The work of the Collective often considers personal narratives, traditions and knowledges.
Ncheta incorporates textiles, photography and multi-channel audio, its multi-sensory nature reflecting the way the group work with one another; whilst not everyone shares the same language they create spaces for one another, finding rhythms of making together.
On display is a 50 metre textile work with multi-channel audio, developed through conversations with Nasia Sarwar Skuse and Lauren Clifford-Keane, featuring the voices of members of the collective. Alongside this are a series of photographs taken on Penarth beach, documenting a performative action improvised with Amak Mahmoodian and choreographed in collaboration with June Campbell Davies.
During their time on the beach, the Collective used the fabric work to define space and explore their bodies’ connections to the landscape, the large-scale textile hand dyed in pinks, yellows and oranges, and used in this context as a marker or wordless banner.