My computer is overheating. I need to write this text in short bursts, closing my computer every few minutes so that the fan calms down. I try turning a fan on in my room instead, but while it works to some extent, all it manages to do is recreate the sound of my laptop battling the heat—but now to my left, rather than on my lap and inside the machine. In the end, I resolve to pause each time the heat gets too high, rather than powering through with more fans whirring and reverberating the air around me in an attempt to artificially cool my environment. When I pause, I stop and listen to the cicadas outside, who collectively create a cacophony. Their sounds are similar to the fans in their persistence and texture; however, unlike the fans, they are at their loudest when the temperature suits them best.

‘THERE ARE (MANY) PARTS TO THIS’ is part of an ongoing programme at Marwan, loosely named Lying Fallow, in which Marwan invites an artist to make four presentations of their work across the space of a year. In a way, this programme is similar to pausing to allow the cicadas into work’s rhythm, rather than turning on more devices to create artificial environments that allow work to power on through. Lying Fallow is an attempt to establish modes of programming that move us towards sustainable working rhythms both for Marwan and its artists, and shapes a programme that prioritizes the aspects of running an artist-run space that we value the most. Throughout, we also invite you, our audience, to build more sustained relationships with the practices you encounter through our programme.

While this is the first time G will present her work at Marwan, our first invitation to G was in 2023, when Marwan’s Tirza gave G a key to the space as part of the work Keychains (kruisstuk, hoekkoppeling, T-stuk lang, T-stuk kort, voetplaat rond, combi T-kruisstuk, kniestuk, haak, knikkend kruisstuk). With this work, Tirza invited G, along with 7 others, to use Marwan as they desired or needed—for example, as a place to meet a friend, to shelter from the rain, take a nap, use the bathroom, or view the exhibition at their own pace or schedule. This second (third, fourth, and fifth) invitation to G somewhat extends the gesture of Tirza’s work: It is a proposition to G to present her work at Marwan four times this year in any way that her practice wants, desires, or needs, at that given time.

In previous works, G has made urns, talismans, a colouring book. She has made a flag asking, “ARE YOU OKAY?” which she ran around in public. She has dragged her butt along the top of bankers’ chairs and strings of shoes along the floor (by her mouth).She has kissed a skeleton, sung and screamed into a wall; she has celebrated her sculpture’s birthday. She has piled clothes, piled herself on top of this pile of clothes and under a pile of bodies. In her works, G brings together the people she loves: She scrawls on her mum’s face, her mum scrawls on her mum’s face, her mum’s mum scrawls on her. And when they are no longer there, she returns to the studio. For five days after her dad passed, G confronts a camera and then downs a bottle of hot sauce. In her grandmother’s garden, a banana plant smiles and frowns, emotions emerging from the shadows while wind blows through its leaves. G captures this on video, and then each time she signs off an email. The tragedy and comedy of the everyday. Back in the kitchen, G apologizes to each item in the pantry. “Im sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she says while pointing one by one to the objects that confront her.

Through play and humour, and an embrace of (self) embarrassment, G works tenderly around themes of death and grief, Britishness and identity, intertwining practices of sculpting, performing, companionship and mourning to produce a multi-faceted body of work. The objects that G’s practice collects and produces are activated in an intimate play between art and life, in which her own life experiences refine the focuses of her practice while her practice becomes the medium through which life experiences manifest. We’d like to invite you to regard G’s work acting like a fissure or disruption in the warp and weft of the day-to-day; an incision in life’s façade that opens up space for us to peer into its innards and gain a glimpse at how things work. ‘THERE ARE (MANY) PARTS TO THIS - 1' brings together a new set of sculptures by G alongside a sight-specific performance at Marwan’s space.