Arusha Gallery & Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury Present 'Ancient Deities'

Curators Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury and Agnieszka Prendota, Creative Director of Arusha Gallery have called upon eighteen selected artists to invoke and create an ancient deity. The chosen deity from each artist as reflected in new artworks (painting, sculpture, sound and installation) will be presented in a new group exhibition at Arusha Gallery, Ancient Deities from 10th September - 18th October 2020.

Presented physically in the Edinburgh gallery, and online via a curated viewing room, Ancient Deities seeks to reawaken a host of awe inspiring and mystical entities, bringing them back to the forefront of people's consciousness. Gods and demons are omnipresent in our consciousness, deeply rooted in various mythologies, reinterpreted in mainstream media, films and TV programs abound with reincarnations of the old gods. The show explores what happens when we bring together a melting pot of artistic responses, assisting in this unpredicted time to help channel a reimagining of a world, reawakening the past, responding to the present, and reconceptualising the future.

Ancient Deities seeks inspiration from an old and largely reinterpreted and reimagined world order. Following in the footsteps of other artists who are heralded in today's contemporary art world as pioneers and visionaries.

Rhiannon Rebecca Salisbury said: "I wanted to invite a group of artists whose work excites and inspires me to come together and invoke a whole world of otherness, apart from the seen reality around us. Calling upon or selecting an Ancient Deity to make an artwork from is an entirely subjective process. Whether your belief in the Deity is literal, or you resonate with the ideas they form has come to symbolise, each artist's choice and research reveals something about their current position and standing in today's world.

What is it about the chosen God or Goddess, Demon or Spirit that captivates the imagination of the individual, and how will that be expressed creatively? My desire is that the exhibition can offer us visions to access or think about other modes of being, new pathways that are drawn from ancient wisdom, embodied in ideas that predate our current mass belief systems and structures. I hope that the spirit and experience of this show will connect, reconnect, or amplify, the awe-inspiring sense of the unknown which is abundant outside of our normative daily grind."

Agnieszka Prendota, Creative Director at Arusha Gallery said: "I think it is infinitely interesting to see, which deities resonate with this group of artists, how the concepts develop and fall into individual understanding. In the same way as the retelling of myths or in the adopting existing deities by different religions; it serves to illustrate a wider scope for aligned thought. Choosing a deity speaks to so many aspects of ones being, and at its core is devoid of ideology but rather has a scope of voicing and acknowledging the aspects of existence which one yearns to draw and expand within their own practice of art and life more generally.

Artists in the show have such a wide-ranging approach to their work. It is so important to offer an open-minded platform for their work and voices in Scotland and I am pleased to be able to work with Rhiannon, this time in a curatorial capacity on such an exciting project."

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