Hayden Kays on The Top Ten

Hayden is a visual artist who splices together witty wordplay with carefully chosen found photographs, often subverting the meaning of both. Not one to be tied to just one medium, Hayden also works with sculpture, drawing, and printmaking.

His new show ‘The Top Ten’ at Cob Galley Camden, is a collection of the ten most popular artworks from his successful typewriter series, and will tour around the world this summer.

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BM – Why did you decide to re-curate the typewriter series into this new show?

HK – I was getting loads of enquiries about the same works again and again in ‘The Hot One Hundred’ and not wanting to keep producing the A4 versions it seemed logical to produce larger print editions of the most popular and some of my personal favorites.

BM – Your work masks a poignant message under a veil of comedy. Why do you think this contrast is necessary to deliver your message?

HK – I don’t think it’s crucial. I just fucking love laughing. I have an extreme sense of humour; it’s virtually a disability. I find EVERYTHING funny. I wish I had control over it, I’m envious of people who can control laughter but I think they are few and far between, this is another reason I love to use humour in my work – laughter is convulsive, you don’t decide what to laugh at. You laugh, then you worry about whether or not you should have later.

BM – You identify yourself as a ‘Pop Artist’, when most pop art is vacuous. You seem to have a deeper ideology than just making money. Why do you identify with Pop Art so much?

HK – I think I’m becoming more and more of a ‘Pop Artist’ in the sense that my work is becoming more and more popular. Popularity is important to me. I want my work to be liked. Find me an artist that doesn’t and I’ll show you a liar.

BM – Do you believe in a high art/ low art distinction, and where would you place yourself?

HK – I believe it’s either Art or it isn’t Art, and unfortunately I see ‘it isn’t Art’ by far too many people that call themselves artists.

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BM – Why do you think that you often get grouped amongst the ‘street artists’, despite doing very little work outside?

HK – Because people don’t know where to put me. We are all obsessed with compartmentalising everything, everyone, it helps us attempt to understand these terrifying surroundings.

BM – As a lot of your work is humorous, does that mean that it is fun to make, or can it be stressful at times?

HK – There is a common misconception that artists are just having a great time splashing paint around a lofty studio, smoking roll-ups and shagging loads of girls. I just smoke the roll-ups.

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BM – How much of what you do is hyperbole?

HK – You can take my work however you like, just as long as you take it.

BM – Sometimes it’s hard to tell who it is you’re making fun of in your work, the subject of the piece or the viewer, or even society as a whole, is this intentional?

HK – I don’t want to make work that's instantly or easily resolved. Questions that you answer, you tend to move on and away from. I want you to keep coming back to me.

BM – A lot of your work is text and found imagery based, how do you collate your ideas. Do you sketch or is your sketchbook full of lists?

HK – I have piles and piles of sketchbooks full of ideas. I hope when I’m dead they’ll slowly all come to life as I’ll never find the time to make them all exist in my lifetime.

BM – Do you believe an artist should have to explain their work, or is it the public’s role to decipher it?

HK- I don’t think art should have to be explained. It should be simple. Ask yourself do I like this? If you do, you do, if you don’t you don’t. You shouldn’t make it much harder.

The Top Ten opens on the 2nd of April 2015 at Cob Gallery Camden | Hayden Kays​

It’s About Time : Review

“ I want people to see the artists not only as women from the Arab world, but as women who live in a global world.”

Set in the basement beneath the Rich Mix Studios, It’s About Time exhibits five women artists, all originating from the Arab world and now living in Britain. The exhibition’s premier came as part of Arab Women Artists Now, a one day festival that offers a platform to the artistic excellence of an increasing active, increasingly present subsection of British society. 

The works on display are diverse, both in terms of subject matter and medium. The first to greet the viewer is a small red screen-print of graffiti daubed by women in the notorious Khiam prison in Lebanon. It sits along from a brazen clash of greens and red, an abstract take on the Arabic symbol for love. 

The quality of the exhibition’s works is overt and as much as its cultural foundation is on-topic enough to draw in on-the-fencers, It’s About Time actively attempts to move itself away from its weighty labels. And their potential to obscure its artistic merit. 

Wander down into the spacious, white washed Lower Gallery and you will find nine pieces of work. Three are labelled and six not. There is no literature explaining the artistic origins of the pieces and little can be gleamed from the title. The thinking behind this context-less presentation, according to Zina Papageorgiou, the curator, stems from both the intended viewing experience and conceptual foundation of the exhibition.

I didn’t want to do another exhibition on Arab, female art, Zina explains as she moves across the gallery. Sometimes context is helpful when viewing art. It can colour the artwork and allow an understanding deeper than the aesthetic presentation. I think that when it comes to an exhibition with such heavy, thematic underpinning however, the context can distract from the intentions of the artist as an individual.

One of the exhibition’s individuals is Malika Squalli. Malika is an Austrian-Moroccan who has been travelling the world finding the people and locations that capture her thematic focus. A sense of questioned identity is constantly present in Malika’s washed out, grey photography. A women jumps to catch a yellow balloon, stands beneath a wandering cloud or behind the lens, looking out on a coolly brown, hilly tundra. In each the subject is either partially obscured, the result of Photoshop manipulation, or absent. 

The sense of displacement present in this work is manifest in Malika, as an emigrant turned perpetual traveller, and the exhibition in general. Walking further round the gallery and this sense of displacement comes forward in a refrain of contrasts; the crisp, geometrically displayed calligraphy of Dia Batal perched next to Ina Halabi’s multi-media exploration into the internal politics of the Druze Community; Malika’s gentle photography alongside Saadeh George’s brutal painted work. It is a testament to the deft touch of Zina that the pieces operate at once individually, standing on their own as manifestations of their artist’s identity and together, congruent parts of the show’s broader cultural label.

There is a complicated sense of identity present with these artists, Zina says, herself a Greek woman working between The Palestine Conservatoire and Britain. I want people to see the artists not only as women from the Arab world, but as women who live in a global world. Sometimes they don’t want to comment on their ethnicity. I don’t think the “us and them” dynamic is applicable anymore.

There is an underlying awareness of the cultural commonality of the pieces that comes across through the Arabic text and a shared middle-Eastern focus. But rather than this emerging as the prevailing thrust of the exhibition, through its universal themes of love, displacement and loss, It’s About Time successfully manages to distance itself from a cumbersome cultural binary able to diminish some truly excellent work. 

It’s About Time is part of the Arab Women Artists Now festival organised by Arts Canteen: a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting emerging artists from the Arab world. 

7th – 29th March 2015 | Rich Mix Lower Gallery