Drawing a Blank seen and told by Octavia Bürgel

Texts and images: Octavia Bürgel

Initiated by Ben Broome in 2016, the traveling exhibition series called Drawing a Blank (DRABL) closed its sixth installment in London at the end of February 2022. A product of the community surrounding them, Drawing A Blank exhibitions offer a platform for young artists at varying points in their careers. Broome’s curatorial practice is a self-referential one: artists who participated in past exhibitions are invited back to show their work alongside that of newcomers to his community. In this way, Broome ensures that his network is constantly in flux – a gesture that he considers a gift to each individual artist, who he hopes will call on their exhibition-mates for future collaboration outside the gallery walls. The 2022 roster was comprised of artists Tucker Vander Wyden, Sara Sadik, Rhea Dillon (DRABL 5), Pablo Jomaron (DRABL 5), Leon Xu, Jesus Hilario Reyes, Ines Di Folco (DRABL 5), Gala Prudent (DRABL 4), Ebun Sodipo, Daniel Mebarek, Christelle Oyiri, Aspen Kincaid (DRABL 4) and Alonso Leon Velarde.
The ethos of Broome’s exhibitions has always been to empower a diverse youth-led demographic with the tools and confidence needed to demystify the white cube. In past editions, this intention may have been somewhat clouded – Broome’s penchant for seeking out inhospitable environments (abandoned car parks, derelict homes and factories) ensured that his friends and peers never actually had to step intothe kind of space that his exhibitions so vociferously encourage them to disrupt. This time around, Broome flipped the script – the venue at 14 Wharf Road., London, N17RW is located just below Victoria Miro’s blue chip gallery and is the former location of the not-for-profit gallery, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art. A true subversion of the preciousness ascribed to white-walled exhibition spaces, Broome rented an enormous – roughly 10-foot-high – sound system for opening night, which occupied the two furthest corners of the ground-floor space. “This is my installation,” he cracks, gesturing to the two towering speakers as he walks me through the space the day before the opening.
Amidst the chatter and the reunions; the swirl of excitement and anticipation of the opening on February 17th, Obongjayar, Christelle Oyiri, Lewis Ofman (DRABL 5), and Chassol (DRABL 5), individually took the stage to mount performances ranging the spoken word to contemporary funk-synthesizer music. By the end of the show’s run on February 28th, 2022, the gallery itself had been transformed again and again. The setting for a beautiful community dinner where Babeheaven frontwoman Nancy Anderson spearheaded a menu for over 60 guests on February 20th became a dark, thrilling concert hall during Slauson Malone’s performance for Cello, Guitar and LEDs on February 23rd; a playroom for invented games following Fly Anakin and George Riley’s performances on February 25th, and finally, an independent cinema for the screening of the Kahlil Joseph and Sampha film Process (2017) on February 26th and 27th. With each iteration, Drawing a Blank’s intention becomes clearer: the mixture of established artists and musicians is the allure that draws visitors in – though what they will discover inside is up to the curiosity of the individual.

these bonds are the scattered drumline, syncopated circumstance that reunites us in rhythm, is tenderness, a kiss at the edge of the mouth, the furthest edge of the mouth, snail saliva glistening, pleasure traced parentheticals blooming at the crease, birthing a new kind of material: lyric. croaking, voices cracked from the drought, the silence following our last affair, we raise our heads toward something we hope is infinite, hands upstretched, hoarse jubilance like a magic ribbon winds around our stems, chokes the grand room in a pink puff, the scent stains the tips of our collective fingertips, the stink of curiosity, swell of the lungs as we sharp inhale: it’sssssssss a balloon? a cocoon, a cradle? at any rate we are warm here, warming each other. a shiver ripples through this mass, limbs sway in the breeze, this underworld, underbelly, feels more right than the slashed and tattered canvas abandoned elsewhere. the old states are porous, too porous. belonging to nobody, no body, we plant our flag where latex gums the gaps, a lung, lung muscle, flexing. and it really is so fly. bring your best, your very best form, for the others, jealous, will inscribe you in stone, will write us in forbidden terms: haunt this endeavor. interwoven, i want to exclaim, exclaim between giggles and gasps for air, i know that hand but it isn’t mine, though i remember that none of this declaration is necessary, necessity is only the feeling of feeling us, in forces far greater than the plural sum, totalizing whole pumping as the heart does blood, into itself, any strays so longing for communion. and so we swell, lung muscle, tide luminous against the shoreline, pleasure parentheses bracketing the perimeter, our dreams bubbling up from within the cauldron, mentos gum experiment exploding brown effervescence everywhere, contaminated with sweetness and love spells, blotches blooming on our collective memory as photographs succumbing to time. we are as old as we’ll never be. sorry you missed it but you’ll find us again, teeth chattering, lung muscle. i’ll only move when you do.