Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron
-the Fortune Teller
-
primarily works with text to explore the various architectures of “selfhood” and the belief systems that shape us. As part of an expanded writing practice, Stoney often works collaboratively and incorporates sound, photography, and projected images into performances and installations.
Stoney studied at the University of Oxford, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her first solo exhibition was in 2021 at Vienna’s Kevin Space, Indebtedness: Die Haftung der Geschenknehmenden (Indebtedness: The Liability of the Gift Taker). Text, photography, sculpture, and sound were used to look at nostalgia, critical historicity, and attempts to reinstate alternative models of self-perception for the present and future. As an exercise in non-linear storytelling, as well as vernacular idioms and idiosyncrasies, it explored subjective, inter-generational, and gendered historiography, with works ranging from black-and-white images of her hometown of Scunthorpe to books grounded in feminist, anti-capitalist, and de-colonial thinking tucked into tiny beds. The exhibition’s title winked at Stoney’s interest in playing with words, the double meaning of indebtedness as interdependencies that are both culturally and economically rooted—both the culture of debt that feeds class immobility, particularly in the UK, and an intersectional self-reflection of being part of a diaspora, as well as inherited family traumas that are both deeply personal but also intergenerationally and historically ingrained.
Stoney was the recipient of the Broken Dimanche Press Writing Prize in 2020 and they will publish her debut novel in the coming year.
