Hiscox thinks inside the box
Hiscox Art Projects presents CONTAINED, a new exhibition curated by Jemima Burrill, including work by Virginie Litzler, Lucy Orta, Katrina Palmer, Martina Schmuecker, Santiago Sierra and Jemima Burrill.

Exhibition dates:
9 May - 29 June 2007,
Hiscox Art Café, 1 Great St Helen's, London

Private view:
Tuesday 8 May 18.30 - 20.30

London, UK - Contained, a new exhibition from Hiscox Art Projects, includes the work of six international artists whose approach to making art reveals a shared preoccupation with architectural confines and the intervention of the human body within those spaces.

Santiago Sierra incarcerates people in his harsh but poetic work. Focusing on the economic and power relations of today's world, he examines concepts of identity, giving a voice to the disenfranchised. In this instance a worker's arm appears through a hole in the ceiling, piercing the system in an act of infiltration. Sierra takes the gallery setting and challenges it with the intervention of an outsider into the space.

In Katrina Palmer's work, the figure has disappeared altogether and is left as a remnant or has been absorbed into her sculptures and drawing. In Surface Event, the figure has become absorbed into a fleshy mass of plasticine, an object which then takes on the status of a sculpture.

How do we interpret the huge legs which appear from a box in Martina Schmuecker's Auszeit. Who is the woman in the box? Is she real and how does she exist there? The performance is a very controlled, and a sometimes claustrophobic, exploration of the process of the body becoming a sculpture. She will perform Auszeit three times during the exhibition. Dates for the performances are: Tuesday 8 May 18.30 - 20.30, Friday 25 May 15.00-16.00, Friday 15 June 15.00 - 16.00.

Refuge Wear by Lucy Orta is an alternative to architecture, a simple structure to house 'the other' which society has placed on the periphery. Refuge Wear was developed by Orta at the end of the Eighties during a period of economic crisis. Orta has invented attire to live in - a makeshift home to contain the homeless.

Jemima Burrill explores the home with her body. In the video At Home the body is revealed, framed and concealed by a house. Like all the work in the show she is interested in the gap that separates comfort from discomfort, articulating physical confines. Burrill's work aims to reveal predisposed boundaries of the domestic space, elevating the mundane into the significant.

Virginie Liztler's figures contort and evolve in urban spaces, finding their position against the force of the architecture in which they find themselves. The poses are held, tense, and weighty, but at the same time in flight, as if whilst contained, the bodies are about to pull free of their surroundings.

ENDS

For further information including images please contact:

Anna Cusden
Kallaway
(+44) 207 221 7883
anna.cusden@kallaway.co.uk

Notes to editors

Jemima Burrill - Curator of Contained
Jemima Burrill graduated from the Royal College of Art last year. She created events for Architecture Week whilst at college, including a series of Art and Architecture evenings - Sense in the City - for Friday Lates at the V&A. Artists and designers included Lone Star, St Etienne, Isabel Rocamora, The Clod Ensemble and Greyworld. Her work has been shown in Washington DC and Plymouth Art Gallery in January this year and she will be represented by Olivier Houg at LOOP video art festival in Barcelona this May

About Hiscox
Hiscox, headquartered in Bermuda, is a specialist insurance group listed on the London Stock Exchange. There are three main underwriting parts of the Group - Hiscox Global Markets, Hiscox UK and Europe, and Hiscox International. Hiscox Global Markets underwrites mainly internationally traded business in the London Market - generally large or complex business which needs to be shared with other insurers or needs the international licences of Lloyd's. Hiscox UK and Hiscox Europe offer a range of specialist insurance for professionals and business customers, as well as high net worth individuals. Hiscox International includes operations in Bermuda, Guernsey and the USA. Hiscox Insurance Company Ltd, Hiscox Underwriting Ltd and Hiscox Syndicates Ltd are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority.

For further information, visit www.hiscox.com

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