Kika is aN artist, WRITER and book publisher based in London.
Their artistic practice involves THE INTERROGATION OF INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE fantasIES AND playing with ideaS of pleasure aND unease.
Currently enrolled on the Turps Painting Programme 2023/24, Kika has been exhibiting work since October 2022. They are former Director of the nonfiction publisher Zed Books and Founder of Blue Parlour, a creative network and curatorial project sharing the work of artists exploring sexuality through their practice. They have an MA in Gender and Sexuality (Birkbeck, UL, 2008) and a BA in Graphic Design (Camberwell College of Art, UAL, 2007).
Kika is fascinated with binary relationships, by how much they feature in our understanding of the world and by how they are used to construct meaning. They are especially interested in the relationships between fantasy and reality, the visual and the verbal, taboo and the ordinary, pleasure and unease, feminine and masculine, feeling and knowing, fiction and nonfiction, naivety and cynicism, dominance and submission, thought and flesh.
Kika’s relationship to paint is fluid and evolving. In their nude portraits (2021-2023) they employ a painterly style, one that celebrates oil paint’s visceral, somatic and erotic qualities - in this aspect of their practice paint is an extension of their embodiment, like a substance the body might excrete.
In their vignette paintings (2022-2023), their use of paint is much more precise and controlled, as is the process that produces the picture. Although this might sound mechanical by comparison, Kika rejects the idea that this is a colder or more impersonal process, instead they see their vignette paintings as a form of power play and fantasy: power in controlling a medium and the fantasy of controlling the parameters of a viewer’s experience. These orally and anally fixated paintings play with a narrow set of constraints, inviting the viewer to submit to nuance and innuendo and the tension that painting and play create.
In their newest work (2024) they explore a more fluid relationship with paint, experimenting with the idea that they are an extension of it, rather than visa-versa. This growing body of work is informed by research into ideas of recognition, salience and knowing and the role of desire within them.
Kika often takes flesh as their subject, perceiving it as an overlay to another's reality and an imagined border of the Self. They attempt to delineate and traverse these borders and boundaries through their practice which they see as an investigation into the semiotics of desire and an acknowledgement of the transformative potential of pleasure and unease, in looking. Through their practice, Kika attempts to broaden the concept of erotic spectacle beyond the male gaze - and its opposite, the female gaze - towards an alternative version of pleasure in looking, and in being.
Kika believes that desire kick-starts personal and social change. Their work imagines queerness beyond individualised, liberal notions of identity and orientation, instead seeing it as a collective potentiality of emancipatory desire, play and passion.
BIOGRAPHY
Currently enrolled on the Turps Painting Programme 2023/2024, Kika has been exhibiting work since October 2022. Kika’s work was first shown in the We are what we see exhibition alongside internationally established artists including Floria Sigismondi, Sandro Kopp and Apollonia Saintclair, a show organised by Glimpses of Art Agency during Frieze 2022. Kika’s work sold on the opening night and a handful of their paintings already hang in private collections in the UK, the Netherlands and Japan.
Previously, Kika served as Editorial and Creative Director of the non-fiction publishing house, Zed Books, from 2010 to 2020. Zed Books housed the works of notable writers including Eleanor Roosevelt, Nawal El Saadawi, Assata Shakur, Maggie Nelson, Fidel Castro and Yanis Varoufakis, among others. Under their Direction the press became the world’s largest co-operative book publisher, making political interventions in queer, feminist, postcolonial and critical race theory amongst other subjects.
Kika holds an MA in Gender, Sexuality, Politics and Culture, from Birkbeck College, University of London. They also have a BA Hons in Graphic Design from Camberwell College of Art and have studied business administration at London School of Economics (LSE).
shows, publications, prizes
Selected exhibitions, talks and publications:
2024
05/24 - Short listed, Waverton Art Prize 2024
05/24 - Mixtape 7, online group show, Cultivate Gallery
05/24 - Turps Painting School Spring Show, Thameside Gallery, London
02/24 - Love, dir. Gaspar Noé, Post-screening talk ‘Looking at sex and making art’ for La Fomo, Whirled Cinema, London
2023
12/23 - Polly-morphous Perverse, or Polly Pocket is obviously a femme top, Exhibition text and publication for Hush Lil Baby by Shea Myles, 16 Nicholson St Gallery, Glasgow, supported by The Henry Moore Foundation
09/23 - Enrolled Turps Painting School 2023/24
06/23 - Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize, Long listed, Ruth Borchard Collection
06/23 - Assembly House Biennial Summer Show, juried group exhibition, Assembly House Trust, Norwich
04/23 - Spring Show, group show, Folkestone Art Gallery, Folkestone
02/23 - Interview with the Artist, online, Florence Contemporary
2022
12/22 - Nowadays, online exhibition, Florence Contemporary
10/22 - We are what we see, group show, Glimpses of Art Agency at 347 Old Street
Follow Kika and their work on Instagram.