“I like collecting things; a conversation with a stranger, an old man’s tattoo or a secret written on a scrap of paper. This exchange and involvement with an audience is often central to the production of my work.”
Serena Korda’s work is impelled by a detective-like inquiry of forgotten histories. Since 2004, she has been making public works that engage with communities. Audiences participate in an event or performance that intervenes in the conventions of more accepted institutions such as a library, a lecture theatre, a puppet theatre, pub, social-club or tattoo parlour. She is drawn to restructuring the order and importance of social histories, highlighting the left-out or abandoned bits. Through performance, print and film, she works these stories back into the fabric of the everyday, telling them through the magic of the makeshift and handmade.
Serena Korda’s The Library of Secrets was made for the Whitstable Biennale 2008 and subsequently shown at the New Art Gallery Walsall and Camden Arts Centre. Korda was awarded the 2009 Deutsche Bank Award for her Royal College of Art MA show. In March 2010, she performed in GO PUBLIC, an initiative at Tate Britain. Her contribution was based around a series of talks and discussions inspired by Luke Howard, the Namer of Clouds. Also in 2010, she undertook a residency at Villa Paula, Klenova in the Czech Republic, as recipient of the Start Point Prize. While there she developed Decosa Tradition, Stockholm Kiefer/Pin which later took the form of a dance performance at Korda's residency at the Camden Arts Centre; as well as There's a Strange Wind Blowing, a puppet performance housed in a 1940s kitchen cabinet that becomes a Wunderkammer of surprise and illusion.
Serena Korda recently completed a major commission for the Wellcome Trust. Her project Laid to Rest, was part of the Dirt – The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life exhibition. Korda asked the public to donate household dust which she mixed with clay to produce 1,000 handmade bricks, each one carrying an inscription. In September they were taken in a procession through the streets of London and ceremoniously buried, returning the bricks to the earth from which they came. Korda choreographed a dance piece for the mythical Brick-Keepers and filmed it in Crossness Pumping Station, Bazalgette’s once glorious ‘Cathedral to Waste’.
In May 2011, Korda was one of the four artists in Folk Variations commissioned by Radar for Loughborough University exploring how folk traditons are created and established. Korda choreographed a performance involving 16 dancers, a procession and a brass-band with a finale at Loughborough's Carillon Tower. In August she collaborated on another performance piece for Turner Contemporary.
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