curated by A- - -Z
XY Gallery, Olomouc Czech Republic, December 2024 - January 2025
Jeanie Crystal, Zein Majali & Emily Pope
Heart beats fast
I want to walk with you
Words don’t come easily
You’re my only reason
It took so long
You became the light on the dark side of me
I know you are just brighter than the moon
What can make me feel this way?
Go to the ends of the Earth for you
everyone around me
Thinks that I’m going crazy, maybe, maybe
I’ll jump up to the sky and talk to the stars about you
Could it be I’m suffering
Because I’ll never give in?
I wanna know when you’re gonna come
You make me feel
Shining through
Even when I lose I’m winning
You make me feel
You're stuck in my head
I just can't sleep
I'm in too deep.
‘Cause I give you all of me
Tell me I don’t seem myself
Couldn’t I blame something else?
Heaven is a place on earth with you
I got your name tattooed in an arrow heart.
You make me feel
(A—Z mashup of love pop song lyrics)
For this special PAF 2024 edition, PAF team invited A—Z to curate XY Gallery
Presenting three artists: Jeanie Crystal, Zein Majali and Emily Pope and focusing on their moving image pieces, this exhibition relates to the theme of diaries and self narratives. You Make Me Feel is a chunk of emotions, a bundle of affects, a note to your future self…
Jeanie Crystal will present a new music video piece with her band Jeanie and The White Boys, while Zein Majali’s short part AI generated videos orientates our focus towards everyone’s obsession with social media and its toxic nature with desinformation, to then encounter Emily Pope’s work on being an artist in the UK and reflecting on illusions and delusions of the political climate and the importance of a chosen family.
Jeanie Crystal
Jeanie Crystal is an artist, performer, musician and DJ – she co-funded Faboo.TV, Harpies and is part of the band: Jeanie and The White Boys.
Zein Majali
Zein Majali is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist based in London. Formerly an engineer and data analyst, she turned to the arts out of an urgency to archive and examine the accelerated cultural shifts in the Arab world. While her work touches on a post-colonial and globalised Middle East, her primary area of interest is the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community. Her practice includes moving image, sound, performance, AI and sculpture.
Emily Pope
Emily Pope is a multidisciplinary artist and writer living and working in London. She is interested in series making, and has been making The Sitcom Show, a failed sitcom recording life under austerity measures in the UK, since 2016. Her research focuses on: a history of experimental broadcast media, humour and satire, intersectional feminism, dyke subjectivities, political rhetoric and class politics.
Solo and group presentations include: Ginny on Frederick, Sundy; London, Wysing Arts Centre, The Box Museum; Plymouth, V.O Curations; London, Peak Gallery; London, Paradise Works; Manchester and The White Pube Residency. Her writing has been published by Elephant Magazine, Sticky Fingers Publishing, Lesley Magazine, Low Theory, The Freud Museum, Bookworks, Arcadia Missa, Montez Press and Autoitalia.
Pope was selected as an awardee of the 2023-25 LOEWE FOUNDATION / Studio Voltaire Award.