Daphne by Francesco Chiaro

A record of a year through affection

2013

Contents Adeena Mey: Stephen Prina Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet

Emma Ines Panza: CurandiKatz The Pacifist Library

Davide Savorani: Richard Mosse The Enclave

Pio Abad: Adrian Wong Wun Dun

Veronica Valentini: Beatriz Preciado A Brief Introduction

Marina Doritis: Sharon Hayes Ricerche: Three

Nicoletta Lambertucci: Enrico Baj Diane de Poitiers

Elea Himmelsbach: Merce Cunningham Walkaround Time

Eleanor Ivory Weber: Soda_ Jerk Dark Matter series

Sophie Risner: Laure Provost Wantee

David Ferrando: Naheed Raza / Ed Atkins Frozen in Time / Warm, Warm Spring Mouths

Catherine Borra: Lindsay Seers Entangled 2 (Theatre II)

Adeena Mey Stephen Prina Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet

Image. Stephen Prina, Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet, 232 of 556, Berthe Morisot à l’Eventail, 1874, Private Collection, Paris (2012). Left panel: mixed media (61 x 50 cm); right panel: mixed media (66 x 83 cm). © Courtesy: the artist and Maureen Paley, London.

As part of Here We Go: A Changing Group Show, an exhibition celebrating its 25th anniversary, Karsten Schubert gallery exhibited Los Angelesbased artist Stephen Prina’s Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet (1988-ongoing). The work on display is actually part of a larger series, composed of abstract paintings. Namely, they operate by abstracting – in the form of monochromatic watercolours – the 556 reproductions found in Manet’s catalogue raisonné, and by reproducing the exact size and format of the originals. On this specific occasion, Exquisite Corpse was integrated in the show in a section called “Index”, devoted to works preoccupied with “the impulse to catalogue and record”. In Prina’s case this is epitomized twice, for each of his paintings is hung with a print of a graphic grid that acts as a visual map of the whole series, an index of sorts, which situates each of the reproduced pieces – according to their format - within the whole of Manet’s oeuvre. This strategy enables the viewer to navigate the French painter’s corpus according to the material qualities of each of his artworks, extracting them from the realm of representation

8 1. Quoted in Pedro de Llano, « Displacement and Translation in the Work of Stephen Prina », http://www.afterall.org/online/displacement.and. translation.in.the.work.of.stephen.prina#cite3378, accessed 26.01.2014.

to inscribe them within that of visuality as such, and to emphasise their “artifactuality”. Moreover, by doing so, this gesture serves to interrogate the contexts and conditions of circulation of the modernist painter’s production. As Prina has himself commented: « A lot of people have tried to see in my drawings the image of a Manet painting. That’s not a concern of mine. It’s not image to image that I’m interested in, but labour to labour »1. Prina’s work usually takes as its starting point a pre-existing work, very often gleaned from the history of modernism, unfolding – to use an approximate commonplace – a strategy of appropriation, associated with different waves of post-conceptualist practices. As the art historian Nuit Banai puts it, Prina “conceives of Manet, and by extension, modernism, as a conceptual template that makes possible endless permutations, which are not necessarily based on visual likeness” 2 . By using appropriation, Prina is not merely interested in quoting or re-contextualising an artwork. In fact, his thorough historical research into Modernism and the way he recasts the pieces he uses , affect both the way we read the originals and

9 2. Nuit Banai, « Stephen Prina : Mutating Modernism », Art Papers, September-October, 2008, 23.

the present conditions of his own productions. Moreover, it points at the relationship of the contemporary to modernity in that the latter becomes a condition for the contemporaneity of the work, rather than a static element borrowed and integrated. In this sense, the temporal relationship of Prina’s work to modernity is posited on an horizontal axis rather than a vertical one. I was asked to write about a work that “really affected” me or that I “really liked”. In the present case, the kind of appreciation I engage with seem to be more on the side of “percept” than of “affect”, to borrow from Deleuze’s terminology. However, I do “really like” and am truly “affected” by my encounter with Exquisite Corpse, an encounter whose duration went beyond the time I spent in the gallery. This situation of encountering a work is indeed also one of reconstruction, of an articulation between the being-there in the white cube, with its fluid temporality and the relatively free mobility it offers, and the time spent thinking, researching, reading and finally writing about it, at my desk. Two modalities of engaging with a work under its different iterations (its actual

10 3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman : Reflections on Time, Stanford, Stanford Universiy Press, 1988, p. 101.

manifestation in the gallery space, and reproduced in catalogues variably circulating on gallery websites and art blogs), through which “aesthetic pleasure” and epistemophilia constantly interact and become difficultly distinguishable. A process which is not without reminding us of this passage by Jean-François Lyotard: “The artist attempts combinations allowing the event. The art-lover does not experience a simple pleasure, or derive some ethical benefit from his contact with art, but expects an intensification of his conceptual and emotional capacity, an ambivalent enjoyment. Intensity is associated with an ontological dislocation,” 3 a dislocation – providing much jouissance –certainly attained with Prina.

Emma Ines Panza

CurandiKatz The Pacifist Library

Image. CurandiKatz, Activities of Daily Living: A Labour of Love. IISH Amsterdam (2013). © Courtesy: the artists.

What happens when an artwork, the vehicle on which an artist relies upon, feels sick? This would make it (the artwork) feel very uncomfortable. Traditionally, a work of art aspires to somehow fix itself in the memories of a loosely-intended posterity, and for many reasons, what most often remains rather than an image, is a story. The artwork’s existence occurs through the narrator’s speech, and then opens up by word-of-mouth, among the listeners. So, if the artwork feels sick, its author could always decide to take care of it while it recovers, until it is willing to appear again. When this happens, the artwork becomes a narration… The reason why I remember this artwork so well is probably because it came to me in the form of a story. I was fascinated by how it resembled a piece of fiction, with its numerous anecdotes and recollections of a series of multifaceted characters that together composed its passionate plot. It started more or less like this: In 2009, Nathaniel and Valentina (CurandiKatz) began working on a project about the shared desire

to form a community. In particular, it investigated the very intimate ways in which people express their desire to (physically) live together. The two got in touch with many individuals interested in forming communities (they were called tribes in this context), and they started travelling in order to meet a lot of these. Among them, there was a certain Juan Figuera from Bologna, Italy (who really sounded like a chivalric figure to me). Through this man they came to meet Toma Sik, an Hungarian-Israeli anarcho-pacifist, utopian socialist, vegan, world citizen, anti-zionist, and activist. Sik was an inspiration for them, and from the moment of their first encounter they stayed in close contact. Apparently, he was a man capable of creating network systems to link people in international communities in the pre-internet days. This and others testimonies comes from many amazing characters, such as Katalin Csehek, a Hungarian naturopathic practitioner of the Aviva Method (which is an exercise sequence for women). Sik’s Tel-Aviv apartment was nicknamed “the boat”, and was a central meeting point for Israeli

radicals. There, he had a very extensive library of pacifist books, however almost no one was able to consult this library because of the constant mess his apartment was in. This small anecdote was the first inspiration for CurandiKatz, that resulted in the project The Pacifist Library. This was a mobile library made entirely of recycled materials and donated books, which was used as a platform and catalyst to initiate conversations around social change. At one point in their relationship with Sik, Valentina and Nathaniel discovered that his archive was stored at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam - where I met them. Once there, they realised that the documents had never been organized, and were still sitting in the original boxes on a pallet, on which they arrived shortly after his death in 2004. Â Since he was considered a marginal historical figure, and since the IISH is short of staff and overworked, and since the boxes were very messy and the material was in English, Hebrew and Hungarian, the staff decided to leave it as it was. So Valentina and Nathaniel offered their expertise on Sik and their free labour

for five weeks, during which they reorganised the archive. Thus began the performance of taking care of Toma Sik’s body of work, which they called A Labour of Love, drawing parallels between the daily care they delivered to their daughter, and the care for Sik’s vestiges. The Toma Sik archive is now hosted at the IISH, and is available for public consultation; it is organized according to the definitions that Sik used in order to describe himself, when approaching potential members of his commune. This is the story as I know it, and it’s about a performance of labour and care. Exactly what Sik’s work needed to reveal itself again.

Davide Savorani

Richard Mosse The Enclave

Image. Richard Mosse, The Enclave (2013). Six screen film installation, colour infrared film transferred to HD video. Filmed in Eastern Congo. © Courtesy: the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging Inc.

Pink has never been more magnetic and repellant as in The Enclave by Richard Mosse, who represented Ireland at the last Venice Biennale. The film is the outcome of a project that Mosse started in 2010 (the series of photography Infra was the first step), when he decided to face the complexity of the civil war in Congo. The Enclave is a powerful hybrid between a war documentary and a visionary film, where human amazement in front of what look like dreamy landscapes is broken by the cruelty of reality. As you know, I’m a selective spectator and my attention is not easy to capture, nor to hold. When I was in Texas and I was reading the first reports about the Biennale, I often found these pinkinfused images among articles, facebook posts and instagrams... they seemed anonymous, just catchy - purposefully pleasant images that are visually quite striking. Obviously, I hadn’t read anything about this series, apart from the captions. When I arrived in Venice, I initially snubbed the pavillion, despite the Fondaco Marcello being one of my

favourite places in the lagune. Every time I crossed Campo Santo Stefano, I paraded in front of the information panel for the show and could see that hot pink landscape... Then, one afternoon in August, or maybe it was September already, I went in. Again, I hadn’t read anything about it. Usually, that’s how I deal with the Biennale – considering the surplus of exhibitions, I prefer accidental encounters to researched ones. As I entered the Fondaco Marcello I went directly to the hall. The film absorbed me immediately, regardless of my initial reaction to the colour. At the beginning, I got lost among the screens, and then I began to move following my eye’s instinct. In the press release for The Enclave, as well as in the reviews and articles, the word “beautiful” is often used. Mosse himself uses it, but I ant relate to this concept when thinking about the film. I was not “enchanted” by this experience nor by the images. It’s very hard to find the right adjective to describe my emotional state. Suffering? Pain? Turmoil, maybe? Yes, perhaps it was “a state of profound wonder and trouble”. I still didn’t know what the work was about, but I

had gleaned the location, the Congo, from a flag. It was unnecessary to know anything more: this vision traveled directly to the point, despite the chromatic filters, despite the lack of information. Everything was on the surface, and so close and raw that it became obscene. At the same time, it upheld a mistery, a set of voids that my thoughts and gaze fell into. The Enclave has the strength of an excellent war documentary, without the need for a Charon figure to guide you, without interviews, narrators or introductions. And at the same time it is visionary, hallucinating – it felt like I could grasp the human challenge that Mosse and his collaborators embodied – which is revealed not by the naked eye but through a filter. A filter that neither protects not pacifies. The reality depicted, that situation is far from me, and I will filter that neither protects not pacifies (here, all the rhetoric relating to war images, Susan Sontag’s Regarding the pain of others, and what we recently experienced with another complex and ambiguous work, The Act of Killing). However, this distance is not fully comfortable, because The Enclave first

hits my emotions, and reaches my intellect only later - with the collection of information and details about what I have seen. I returned to see The Enclave quite a few times, and each time I found the same tension imbued within the very uncanny pink scenes. Ben Frostâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work for the soundtrack is a fundamental building block, as it completes the spectatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s physical experience, that is translated into a feeling of constant restlessness. Such disorientation is enforced by the absence of a univocal point of view - given the impossibility of capturing with one single gaze the complexity of the experience. I have an exploded world in front of me and my emotions explode as a consequence.

Pio Abad

Adrian Wong Wun Dun

Image. Adrian Wong Wun Dun (2013). © Courtesy: the artist and Absolut. Photo: Christian Hagward.

When I was thinking about the best shows I’ve seen the past year, a few exhibitions immediately sprung to mind: Danh Vo’s Vietnamese church at the Venice Biennale, Pratchaya Phinthong’s Broken Hill Man at Chisenhale and Simon Dybbroe Moller at Laura Bartlett. But, perhaps, nothing has stayed with me longer than Adrian Wong’s Wun Dun. This may have to do with the fact that I stayed in it longer than any exhibition I’ve been to in 2013 – Wun Dun was a bar cum installation commissioned for the inaugural Art Basel Hong Kong in May. The artist refers to the Taoist concept of Wun Dun as “the nebulous state of the primordial universe before the celestial and terrestrial realms were demarcated” and, after stumbling into it at the start of the two weeks I spent installing my show at Osage Gallery, I found refuge in that nebulous state every evening from then on. Hidden in the intimate basement of Hong Kong’s Fringe Club, Wun Dun was a curios hybrid of Wong Kar Wai’s Hong Kong and the red room in Twin Peaks minus the ominous dwarf. I take as much pleasure elaborately enumerating the installation’s elements now as I did in my initial encounter.

1. An operatic lounge singer, reminiscent of Suzy Wong, resplendent in a golden cheongsam. 2. Her mysterious, hirsute, animatronic, drums and double bass playing backing duo. 3. A wall of neon aquariums, full of flesh coloured frogs with cannibalistic tendencies and dark blue fish resembling shrimp sized sharks. 4. And a choice between duck fat infused Absolut cocktails garnished with single stalks of pak choi or Oolong tea and egg white martinis. It may seem odd to single out a bar over the other fantastic exhibitions I’ve seen – an art fair bar at that – but having spent a significant part of 2013 travelling and working between London, Hong Kong and Manila, the surreal, jarring of cultural elements in Wong’s installation are perhaps the closest visual approximation I can make of my experiences this year - incoherent, familiar, alienating, sumptuous, absurd, hard to digest and even cannibalistic, in the Oswaldo de Andrade sense of the word.

Veronica Valentini

Beatriz Preciado A Brief Introduction

Image. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo & Daphne (1622-1625). Photo: Francesco Chiaro.

The first time I heard about Beatriz Preciado was in 2009, whilst I was living in France. I wasn’t very excited by her books (Testo Junkie, 2008 and Countersexual Manifesto, 2002), probably because my interests at the time were not permeable enough to these theories. After a few years, I returned to them and, most importantly, I had the chance of meeting their author. It happened over a year ago, when I started the course at PEI – the Independent Study Programme organised by MACBA in Barcellona, where Beatriz is both scientific director and professor. PEI is inspired by the Whitney Independent Programme in New York – with a curriculum at the crossroads between museum and university – aiming to develop a critical reflection on artistic practices that relate art to human sciences, and to social, political and institutional intervention. It was Beatriz herself who inaugurated the accademic year with a shocking, revolutionary, exciting and revealing seminar (Tecnologías del Género. Aproximaciones a la biopolítica desde el feminismo y la teoría queer) about the history of sexuality. She laced biology with art history,

medical studies with Michel Foucault, passing by the Tahitian revolution and New York ballrooms, up to Judith Butler and Donna Haraway – in order to shape a clear, analytical and crude argument that explains how sexual identities as we know them (male, female, homosexual, transexual etc.) are mere political fictions. With or without testosterone injections, Beatriz is pure adrenalin – alternating lectures in bobo parisian universities, with post-porn workshops at alternative spaces in suburban squats. She prefers dildos to genetic surgery because she already experienced one of these supposedly ‘normalising’ operations as a child, when she underwent a correction for a grave malformation of her jaw. Beatriz is a disciple of Jaques Derrida - she is a philosopher, writer, activist and recently she has also engaged in curating (she is a member of the scientific board of MACBA in Barcellona). She unites theory and practice, and is a professional agitator beyond her academic posts – spaces she anyhow reaches with some difficulty, given a certain hostility of the official academic world towards queer theory – for which Countersexual Manifesto

(2002) is an inconfutable reference. The queer movement questions the relationship between masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, the hyerarchical relationship between whites and non-whites, in the light of a multitude of somatic and morphological formations, transcending the normative binarism. Queer theory belongs to subaltern bodies â&#x20AC;&#x201C; bodies that are considered inferior by the colonial and disciplinary discourse of modernity â&#x20AC;&#x201C; bodies considered as anomalies from certain medical perspectives invented in the 20th century. Beatriz is interested in the origins of queer theory â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that arose from a small group of americans who appropriated the word at the end of the 80s (emancipating it from its derogative connotation), defining it as a space for criticality and political action. This reflection forms the base for a miriad of educational activities Beatriz promotes (the PEI, a series of seminars at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the post-porn workshops and some cinematic experiments together with her partner Virginie Despentes, a french writer and director). She works with artists, activists and academics to

transcend the division between fields: if politics is an area for collective invention, and the racial, gender and sexual power dynamics are to be changed, then another set of relations needs to be imagined for change to be enacted.

Marina Doritis

Sharon Hayes Ricerche: Three

Image. Sharon Hayes, Ricerche: Three (2013). HD video-still. © Courtesy: the filmaker and Tanya Leighton Gallery. Pictured: Jasmine Brown with (behind her Lto R) Aderike Ajao, Jessica Ortiz and Laakan McHardy.

Sharon Hayes’ Ricerche: Three (2013) is 38 minute film which was commissioned for the 55th edition of Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace. The artist based her work on Pier Paolo’s Pasolini’s vérité film Comizi d’amore (1965), a feature length documentary about sex, sexuality and gender in post-war Italy. Pasolini travels across different Italian regions, from the beaches of Tuscany to the playgrounds of Sicily, with a microphone in his hand interviewing different groups of people. What prevails in this survey, irrespective of class, education, age or gender, are the conservative views conditioned by the sociopolitical constructs of the time. Often alluded to, yet never directly broached, is the subject of homosexuality, at the time considered a disease rather than an identity or simply a sexual orientation. The most subversive group to be approached are local Sicilian prostitutes who are asked to talk about the Merlin act - a law which had recently abolished brothels. For her Venice Biennale commission, Sharon Hayes adopts a similar observational filmic strategy, interviewing a group of 35 female students who are studying at one of the last remaining all-women

universities in the US. We see the artist with her microphone in the middle of a group of students, huddling together on campus. Although Ricerche: Three is in many ways different from Comizi d’amore, both works attempt to present a social reality through a set of questions related to sex: “Is sex important to you?”, “Do you think marriage solves sexual problems?“ and “What does sexual freedom mean to you?” are some of the questions she asks. Hayes targets a very different demographic to that of Pasolini’s film, perhaps one could even say it is the missing group from Comizi d’amore. Through a dialogue instigated by question and answer, she presents a community which is conversely progressive and yet conservative. As the camera moves from left to right, following the flow of the conversation amongst the group, different students enter the shot whilst the artist remains static. One can instantly identify the stereotypes that we may attribute to such environments (i.e. a hot-bed of lesbian activity) yet it would be incorrect to inflame such outdated preconceptions and fantasies around an all-women’s university. Nonetheless, what stands out is that such environments feel necessary and important

for transitioning female to male students, and other gender queers. The group confirms that their educational context is a safe place for such conversations to happen and develop. The film presents us with an overtly liberal understanding of gender, sex and sexuality, and whilst not all students agree with each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s views, these conversations appear to be happening on a daily basis. What is remarkable about the work is the point at which the conversations depart from their predetermined gendered structure to then broaden the discussion to talk about race, identity and culture. One student, towards the end of the film, claims that, because she studies at a female only university, there is more to her identity than just being a woman. She admits that the community which she has chosen to live in is a cultural and social bubble; nonetheless, she explains, she still faces similar problems as those in the larger world. This text merely touches upon the reasons as to why this work is one of my favourites for 2013, however I do hope to have presented some ideas which explain why I found them worth sharing.

Nicoletta Lambertucci Enrico Baj Diane de Poitiers

Image. Enrico Baj Diane de Poitiers (1966). Acrilics, collage and mixed media on fabric (92 x 73 cm). Photo: Nicoletta Lambertucci.

Diane de Poitiers & Other Women She wasn’t just the prettiest; a mysterious aura of elegance and sophistication surrounded her. A portrait of a woman, a French courtier born on 3 September 1499, Diane de Poitiers has been portrayed by Enrico Baj in his series Dame, all made in the 1960s. In 1571, miniaturist François Clouet made a very famous painting of a naked Diane having a bath and, in 1549, sculptor Jean Goujon could not resist her either, and designed a statue where she was represented as the goddess Diana. In the assemblage made by Baj, a bit more than 400 years later, the patterned wallpaper in warm pink and beige fashiones the setting, a backdrop from which the voluptuous yet intimidating figure can move forward. A favourite of Henry II of France, Diane de Poitiers wears a trimmed fringe, full skirt, and has tassels and brocade in her hair. I saw this portrait and I thought she would have loved it: the primitive symbolism of a powerful king’s mistress. She used to say that the drinkable gold she was habitually taking since she was 17, was so bitter

that it was not only surely making her younger, but also stronger. Some people wrote she died because of it. Others were just surprised to find such a high level of gold in her hair even after centuries. It’s a pity that her elegant marble tomb was opened during the French Revolution – she must have strongly resented being thrown into a mass grave. I believe she agrees with Baj on the importance of decoration and the decorative elements as powerful tools to access unorthodox virility. The head in particular, that in Baj’s portrait is so big but not central in the configuration, hints to the intelligence necessary to manage and lead the court’s secret plans. On the other hand, the central part of the composition is very thin, almost empty, with a white hole surrounded by a string and two tassels joined together. Political affairs are all about good equilibrium and fake modesty! Repudiation of conformity – both in artistic and in political realms – was Baj’s guidance throughout his lifetime, but I guess portraying Diane de Poitiers required a different composition.

The representation that Baj has made of Diane de Poitiers is figuratively less simple than most of the other works from this series. It has at least five radiant points, in addition to one central black string that divides the work almost in the middle. The elegance and the equilibrium of the work are given by the proportion among those elements: it looks like Baj is creating a path along the figure that one could follow without having to start a new line, like in those games you have. Interestingly, after this series of female portraits, Baj started a series of puppets: the enactment of a three-dimensional totem that had a previous, but totally autonomous influence on these assemblages. Before leaving the room I looked back at Diane de Poitiers from the corner, and I felt the coexisting ambivalence between the pride of an old epoch and the lack of scruples that you need to have if you want to represent that very power today: the power of that image is in the contemporary use of the medium, but ultimately it is a portrait of a woman, the most classical artwork ever made.

Elea Himmelsbach

Merce Cunningham Walkaround Time

Image. Merce Cunnungham, Walkaround Time. Performed at The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Jhons, Barbica Art Gallery, 2013. © Courtesy: Barbica Art gallery. Photo: Felix Clay.

This is the real-time story of a white square, of about 10sqm. It plays a defining part in the exhibition The Bride and the Bachelor, and is situated in the middle of the ground floor at the Barbican, London. It is visible from three sides but displays its most coherent interface from above, when people look down at it from the balcony. This square, even though passive, refuses to play a forthright role. In fact, the square refuses to play the part of a static display element, and takes on a life of its own. During my visit this square expands and retracts, and its identity is continually renovated by the phases of activity and ideas that will be played out in it. At first I move around, then I came to a standstill and my eyes meet Jasper Johns’ Walkaround Time (1968), which is made of seven inflatable transparent cubes, standing and floating in the air, each decorated with a single visual element taken from Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-23). Then I discover in close proximity the replica of the Large Glass itself and my mind turns towards the narrative that instigated this piece. Apparently, it was during an after-dinner conversation between

Merce Cunnigham, Marcel Duchamp and Jaspers Johns that this piece was born, with the intention to visualise the ‘delay’ in Duchamp’s Large Glass. Johns created the stage set and costumes, David Behrman contributed the music “…for nearly one hour…” and Cunningham created the choreography Walkaround Time, a piece which he claimed to be inspired by his fascination with computers and technology. All these elements met for the first time on stage in Buffalo in 1968, where they were performed as parallel events. I remember a snapshot of Marcel Duchamp from the same evening this piece was premiered, showing the artist on stage after the end of the performance. At the moment, I only see the set design, the rest is but a film playing in my mind. In fact, Johns’ set design, which originally intruded into the performers’ space, is here neatly placed in one corner – the white square is still empty. Then my eyes dart into the opposite direction falling onto Robert Rauschenberg set design Express. Again my mind is tempted to retreat in a referential loop, where Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) takes

centre. Naturally, I discover this piece in direct proximity. For a moment I fail to notice John Cageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s presence. Only when my attention turns towards the piano, I lift the curtain of my tunnel perception and allow his music to take presence, played by invisible hands. It takes a while before I also register the other noises: footsteps that jump, run, pause and resume again â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I later learn that this is an intervention by Philippe Parreno, who documented the footstep of dancers from the Merce Cunnigham Company. The white virginity of the square breaks. Dancers warm up and start to execute complicated phrases. They interact, retreat, jump and curl. By now, I have made my way up to the balcony and I lean over the balustrade to follow their performance. The open white square leaves them completely exposed and the choreography enfolds in complete independence from Cageâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s compositions and also from the set props, which in this display have moved into the background. It suddenly strikes me that the fragile bodies of the dancers are not only visually exposed, an

impression that is heightened by the contrasting heavy architecture of the Barbican, but that the independence and isolation expressed in these movements communicate an epitome of the modern expression and search for individuality. At the same instance I discover that this idea is strangely contrasted by the presence and animated impulse they carry within this exhibition. Quite literally, what I witness on this white square is a walk around time. The white square loses its innocence and I start to contemplate it as a curatorial device, enabling the audience to frame the experience of the exhibition. Its role is central to show the historical connection between the artists. However, it is also the place where subjective experience can enfold. This animated impulse is contrasted by the modern experience expressed in the choreography. It is as if this square is home to a time travel machine, which shows modern and contemporary desires: that for individuality and that for present-ness. As this scenario suggests, the story of the white square is not a single one and does not fulfil the expectations of housing a single artwork or

intention. In effect, it breaks down and gives room to different voices that all carry on occupying its expanse, shaping it, neglecting it, twisting it. It is the place where different associations, interpretations and references meet.

Eleanor Ivory Weber Soda_ Jerk Dark Matter series

Image. Soda_ Jerk, After the Rainbow (2012). 2-channel digital video, 11:56 minutes. © Courtesy: the artists.

The temporality of memory is anything but linear, nor is it a clean loop. We recreate a scene again, each time we hold it in our mind. Conjuring things forth, pushing them under, mixing up and making assumptions. Drenched in emotional energy and the need for sensory, bodily revitalization, these images are at once magical and cruel – reminding simultaneously what’s there and what lacks, plus something interstitial. And your own face? What has time and memory done to it? Can you ‘see’ yourself 10 years ago, younger, can you predict the routes gravity will take in evolving your face into ‘old age’? Do you fear them or invite them? What does time – and memory – have to do with that? Is it time that makes your face change, or is it perception? Is the mirror a lens, a telescope, a portal, or a video player? Is the duty of memory to verify the past or create it? Two-person art collective Soda_ Jerk’s ongoing series of video installations, entitled Dark Matter, so far comprises three works: ‘The Phoenix Portal’ (2005), ‘After the Rainbow’ (2009) and ‘The Time

that Remains’ (2012). The videos collapse the timelives of particular (deceased) Hollywood celebrities – River Phoenix, Judy Garland, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis – by using selected excerpts from their own filmographies to confront the stars with themselves in various stages of their (movie) lives. Soda_ Jerk’s exhaustive research and meticulous editing technique allow near-seamless and thereby hauntingly ‘realistic’ portrayals of these superstars in unconventional dramatic interactions with their older~younger cinematic selves. Though all the footage comes from A-grade Hollywood films, in Soda_ Jerk’s works there are always glitches: the fabric of the film pixelates, the shadows don’t match up, soundstage elements don’t correlate, standard continuity such as costume, hair, props, is disturbed. Moreover, the videos are sequenced to play on continuous loop, conceived in such a way as to circumvent any clear ‘beginning’ or ‘end’ structure. This facilitates a supreme sense of fatedness, not only of these specific lives but also, by extension, of those watching. Still, the characters never flinch – how could they? Or, if they do, it’s because the

actors’ reactions transcend their inherent predetermination. The fact frames have been recombined and retro-activated by way of Soda_ Jerk’s montage and reversal techniques is secondary to the sentiment produced. It’s only scripted emotion, enforced feeling, to the extent that one assumes the linear, headlong advance through time (until the moment of inevitable denouement/ death) that Hollywood drama upholds. This is also why we are encouraged to pity~despise~be repulsed by the ‘aging’ (female) star. There is only one direction, one perspective, and memories can lose their vital relativity when reified in celluloid. Doubt is forbidden, so the horror of selfconfrontation proliferates. The videos with Garland, Crawford and Davis have a profound sense of melancholy, inevitability, repetition – the return of the repressed. They present such blatant examples of the unquestioned marriage between female celebrity, beauty, youth and then the subsequent, supposedly inescapable (inevitable?) loss of them. Even the glorious aren’t spared by Time, or excused from memory. The

violence of what it would mean to be confronted with yourself – in person – is played out on screen. In ‘The Time that Remains’ Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are granted a screen each in the 2-channel installation. As one goes through a nightmarish conflict with her aged/aging self , meeting various perturbing incarnations, the other lightly sleeps, a ticking clock positioned beside her. Then this second awakes to live out her scene again, as the other returns to bed (again). It’s a continuous loop of still sleep and flicker nightmare, exchanged between the two leading ladies. In one scene, a young Crawford is shocked when a grayed version of herself appears and commences dialogue: ‘twenty years, that’s a hell of a long time. I’ve changed, haven’t I?’ All that the nervous younger can reply, staring wide-eyed and wringing her hands: ‘It’s quite alright’. Then, the elder: ‘I’d do anything in the world for you, you must know that; but I can’t go back twenty years.’ And as the older woman fades ghostlike out of the scene, Crawford calls after her desperately, ‘oh no,

please don’t …’, but a trail of bodiless footsteps is all that is heard. One could be forgiven for thinking Soda_ Jerk’s project is effectively merciless, yet the duo pushes for emotions that are much deeper, carefully drawing them out of the viewer so to establish empathy rather than pity. The artists offer an alternative way of reading a (cinematic) life-span, as well as for thinking time and memory. Crawford, Davis and Garland become the subjects of a particular kind of séance where, thanks to posthumous digital editing techniques, they are made to face themselves full tenor, with that which had already been written into their biographies simply by playing them. The line between character and actress becomes irrelevant. Yet, this horror or shock is only such because of the externally imposed, let’s call it Hollywood-style, assumption that memories are real, that the person you ‘were’ could ever be retrieved point-blank – that you could ever know who s/he was in the first place. Soda_ Jerk grant these actresses the dignity of seeing themselves as multiple, as more than simply the linear narrative Hollywood assigned them.

Vitality is produced through acknowledging that the true horror is in the denial of memory and its constructs, allowing it to consume us in the pointless pursuit of a presumably lost past perfect or a one-directional future. Soda_ Jerk raise the doubly dead to prove a point with empathy – the inherent death of being filmed and recorded folds into the reality of these actors’ lives and actual deaths, to create something new and generative. In ‘After the Rainbow’, Dorothy opens the would-be door to Oz – her house having just landed from a tornado storm – only to find her aged self, singing alone in a dark room. Typical Garland vocals spill out. Round, ascending, fullbodied – though decidedly lowered by years of abuse, slightly raspy and full of pathos: The night is bitter, the stars have lost their glitter The winds grow colder, suddenly you’re older The road gets rougher, it’s lonelier and tougher The dreams you’ve dreamed have all gone astray

And Dorothy just cries and cries, she stands at the doorway to her future and quivers – a bodily knowledge that she is witness to a memory, all while she’s creating her own. What can the viewer do but weep with her? It’s an acknowledgment of the lives, faces and reveries, those gone and to come (back?), that may one day torment, but which may equally bring joy, if they haven’t already. After all, the older Garland’s song holds not just pathos, but strength and wisdom, and inevitability – the essence of life lived and remembered. Thus the haunting is not solely for what is lost, but also, as Soda_ Jerk so deftly, subtly, humbly transmit, the necessity of thinking time differently. How could Garland project this wrenching emotion through song if she had never experienced it, felt it? Despite the sad lyrics, the star’s small smirk betrays her own bodily joy for the experience of singing – she embodies (muscle) memory brought forth to the now, not just reprised but relived. So of course she can’t help but smile as she hits that last note, ‘astray’, soaring.

Sophie Risner

Laure Prouvost Wantee

Image. Laure Prouvost, Wantee (2013). Installation view of Schwitters in Britain, Tate Britain, London. © Courtesy: the artist and MOTINTERNATIONAL London & Brussels.

A love letter to a work unseen critic: This tale of friendship was possibly the saddest of them all, sadder than that film featuring Claude Rains and that other one who’s name I always keep on forgetting, or inevitably get wrong. I don’t think I truly managed to walk away without feeling a sense of isolation and despair, maybe I felt lonely and destructive at the same time which is always bad as I had hoped that those kind of feelings wouldn’t hold me hostage anymore. I guess I have to start from the beginning because it’s always helpful - when I start love letters from the middle or the end I often end up accidentally breaking up with someone when really I meant to confess my undying love for them and of course visa versa. This frail story was beyond threadbare, it was cryptic and haunted with the unfamiliar. How had I been so blind to the narrative - was I living a fiction or had I really encountered some family tomb of enlightenment which cast spirals of light which played with the surfaces and made my mind sore and dry and hungry, no not hungry. I was in need of a drink, something to parch and

quench my thirst. editor: Hello, stop being so romantic - it’s not fitting of you or in anyway helpful for the reader of this, we discussed this before in our break out session, we discussed how love doesn’t exist and you came up with the line “love is a myth” and the group clapped and I patted you on the back. You’re not thirsty, you’re just having a manic episode of nostalgia. c: I was there and felt his presence, inside the Merz Barn, I’d been there before and touched the cold stone and felt his presence, I think I’d cried…. e: You are sure you cried, or do you believe that this might be another created emotional response, you need to concentrate on getting the main theme across and not spread yourself too thin, remember last year when you were going around the houses to describe one memory and how I’d cut down your texts by great swathes, there were red marks all over the transcript, huge weals of corrections. c: But I’d been in the Merz Barn and felt his presence. Did I ask for a drink before, I mean your colleague said I could have one when I came in last time, will he bring me one like last time?

Maybe coffee, no coffee wont do it’ll dehydrate me, maybe water this time. e: ‘His’ presence? In the session at the beginning of the month you’d claimed it was a her, that the presence in the Merz Barn was actually more female, OK - so maybe this isn’t a story about gender or about those kinds of binary differences. We need to get to the core of the issue here if we’re to move this on any further, I have a deadline and I’m keen to find a conclusion in the mess because that is exactly what it seems to be - a ‘mess’. A uncertain and sticky, chaos - the table is strewn with mess and the walls are covered in mess, it’s not right that someone of your standing has created so much mess. c: Trapped (said in a whisper)! e: Sorry? I didn’t get that, I mean I didn’t hear what you said - can you repeat it. c: It’s fine. I don’t want to say it again. e: No come on, I said last time that if you talk so quietly I wont hear you - we can’t get confused here or have any miscommunication - we need to be reading and writing from the same page if we’re to continue any form of professional

relationship, if I’m to help you to produce and create work, to create any more work and to write. If I’m honest I’ve never seen you like this. c: Trapped. e: Trapped?! c: Yes, trapped - it’s the word I said before, the word you missed, the word I whispered. I feel trapped and uncertain and suffocated, I’m unable to breathe, I’m literally dying, the air is being sucked from me every second and I’m trapped and I’m trapped and unable to move because I’m physically trapped. e: You mean mentally? c: And physically, trapped and unable to move and unable to breathe and suffocated and thirsty and, and - I can feel my heart beat raising and raising and my breath becoming shallow - my eyes are darkening and the room, it’s been moving away from me every second that I live I feel my life drain from me, I don’t know if this is dying or some sort of realisation, or just being stuck or being stuck and unable to move or worse just plain simple death. e: You’re not dying you’re having an intense experience, something that maybe you’ve never had

before because you didn’t, or maybe weren’t ready to discuss it with me. You weren’t ready to write down these lines that I have in front of me now, I am confused though when you say physically trapped. c: The hole I built the place I moved to which has this hole that I have fallen into. e: Did you fall or were you pushed? c: I wasn’t pushed, I’d felt this hole in me for years and needed to make it present, I wasn’t pushed because I knew that I wanted to go into the hole, maybe I wasn’t ready to go into it when I did or, I don’t know. Maybe I went on my own accord and chose to go because deep down I wanted to disappear into the world and never be found again because I felt that was the best way to write this story. e: Are you in the hole now? c: Yes. e: We need to address the lack of syntax in your work, your chronology isn’t correct, it’s off-kilter and needs re-arranging. c: Because… e: You claim to be in the Merz Barn and yet in

the tunnel at the same time. I fear that the reader can’t and wont trust you, we’ll have to move some paragraphs around to make sense of this, how about you claim to be in the tunnel FIRST then you can write a line about coming out of the tunnel hey! You could come out of the tunnel from the other side and maybe find another Merz Barn? Or do you want to be in the Merz Barn then slip into the tunnel? c: It’s because I’m in both. e: That’s impossible, you mean like a flashback? Or maybe it could be a hindsight thing? c: I’m in both the Merz Barn and the tunnel physically and mentally, I’ve suffocated in both because of the surroundings - they’ve suffocated me because I was thirsty, maybe they did it by suffocation or by drowning, or maybe I just slipped into the tunnel and died - or maybe the Merz Barn took me by accident, maybe I just gave up being someone that had to create all of this for you all the time. E: So you don’t want to be a writer anymore? C: That’s our time up for today I’m afraid.

David Ferrando Naheed Raza / Ed Atkins Frozen in Time / Warm, Warm Spring Mouths

Image. Naheed Raza, Frozen in Time (2013). Still from video. HD video, 50 minutes, colour, stereo. © Courtesy: the artist.

Early in 2013, I was lucky enough to catch the last hours of this show, on a Sunday morning in February. Being familiar with both Naheed Raza’s and Ed Atkins’ previous works, I was excited and prepared to watch two interesting video pieces; what I hadn’t anticipated – probably biased by the fact of the exhibition being the output of a video contest, the first edition of the Jerwood / Film and Video Umbrella Award – was that the interplay between the two would make such a coherent, rich and evocative exhibition. Had I seen them separately, I would surely have regarded them as two remarkable works. But juxtaposed, they reacted to each other, exhaling an intensely poignant, dense yet diaphanous atmosphere, which stayed with me for days. Both Frozen in Time (Naheed Reza, 2013) and Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (Ed Atkins, 2013) deal rather straightforwardly with death. More specifically, we could say they deal with the relation of death and technology. In different ways, both videos inquire into how we, perishable human beings, try to overcome our precarious dependence from our bodily vessels; clinging to a hope as legitimate as it is vain: the possibility that

the unfathomable well of scientific knowledge could, perhaps, modify the end of our common script, extending our existence beyond the temporal limits of our organisms. This is explicitly the topic of Razaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s piece, which differs from her previous works at many levels. The older pieces, shorter and essentially formal, focus on processes of material transformation (a spider web extracted from its violently immobilized originator and woven on a loom; the sand dunes of a desert in Dubai hypnotically morphed by the wind) and their relation with the film medium, in a post-structural fashion. Frozen in Time is a feature length, formally sober documentary, composed mostly by interviews with members of the human collective surrounding a cryogenics clinic, somewhere in California. In a shockingly open hearted, informative and wellintentioned way, these individuals share with us the reasons why they have decided to join the club of those who refuse to accept the unambiguous fact that we only live once (its most famous member to date remains Walt Disney). Instead, they opt for the softer perspective of leaving a window open to the possibility of a second chance: according to their

will, their bodies will be frozen in the last instants of their vanishing lives, in the hope for an uncertain future in which scientific progress might allow for their re-animation. Descriptive, cold shots – no pun intended – of the ice-steaming steel containers and sophisticated (time)machinery, which preserve the hopeful corpses from the Californian heat, follow medical accounts of the cryogenic process and its existential implications by the doctors in charge. The most memorable scenes for me, however, are those in which some of the ice-lollies-to-be candidly expose the reason for their decision: «My life is so amazing I can’t get enough of it!» or «This technology should be accessible to everyone!». I love life and can take their point; especially if you can afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on such an unlikely endeavour, why would you wanna leave the party… But the horror I felt towards these peaceful couples of senior Californians, my degree of alienation from those able to talk about the possibility of their own immortality without acknowledging the slightest hint of narcissism implicit on such desire, and their

total disregard for issues as, erm, overpopulation?, supposed for me one of the strongest and more eyeopening filmic experiences of the year. In the adjacent projection room, Atkins’ Warm, Warm Spring Mouths – whose sound spilled onto Naheed’s, sometimes with surprisingly evocative results – continued his work with CGI and Poseranimated characters, whose first sample had been We Dead Talk Love (2012), shown at the Chisenhale a few months earlier. Here, the star is a disturbingly stereotypical good-looking male avatar, a kind of polished and post-adolescent Kurt Russell – John Carpenter’s era. He has, though, almost supernaturally long hair, and permanently wears his iPod earphones while talking to us – two awkward reminders which seem to imply: 1) that he hasn’t had a haircut for many, many years, decades even – probably since that remote moment in time when, mysteriously, he fell captive of the abyssal, digital trench from which he now, uncorrupted and eternally post-adolescent, delivers his very literary, evocative and melancholic monologue. And 2) that, beyond the façade of his digital, fleshy bodily appearance, there is something

unknown – unknowable – susceptible to be moved by the uncertain music springing from a hidden mp3 player. Or maybe not. The images are skilful and strikingly beautiful, the experience of watching and listening is, as it usually happens with Atkins’ work, sensually intense and gratifying. The HD surface and 5.1 sound become some kind of amniotic fluid at times, and at other times a thin metal bar hitting your forehead. And it is great. Especially because of the uncomfortable counterbalance this offers to the rational acceptance that the character we are listening to, and the liquid element that seems to surround him, are nothing but pure data, processed esoterically by a small, dead piece of hardware. And thus, when that digital handsome man talks about an icebreaker called the Dispassion, or doubts about the legitimacy of applying the term ‘coronary’ to the physical condition of an avatar; or when he goes on to repeat once again Gilbert Sorrentino’s verses which serve as leitmotif of the piece, you really feel the weight of time, of our limited human time and not the uncannily unlimited – and probably vacuous – temporality of the avatar, slipping

through your fingers: I don’t want to hear on the radio about the weather on the weekend. Talk about that. Once upon a time a couple of people were alive who were friends of mine. The weathers, the weathers they lived in! Christ, the sun on those Saturdays. … On my way out, I looked briefly at Naheed’s projection. The last two verses, from Ed’s piece, resonated over an image of sunburnt photographic portraits hung on the wall of a Californian clinic – probably belonging to those now frozen, waiting for a New Dawn. And that very moment made up for the struggle I too often experience when approaching less cared-for works that make it into exhibitions at an embyonic stage – eroding the precarious credibility of the London scene.

Catherine Borra Entangled 2 (Theatre II) Lindsay Seers

Image. Lindsay Seers, Nowhere Less Now2 (2013). Detail from a postcard of the work. Dual video installation. © Courtesy: the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

I met Elea close to Tower Bridge so we could walk by the river to Limehouse, and join the canal that goes up towards the gallery. She’d booked the viewing for us, we arrived late enough to be on time for the screening that was running on lazy weekend time. The assistant in the front room at Matt’s Gallery handed us some headphones, as we entered a very narrow viewing room with two chairs roughly one meter apart. In front of each chair was a round window looking onto the projection room, that was a larger space lined with red velvet curtains, like in old theaters. Two spherical screens hung in mid air, one in front of either window. From my chair, I could see perfectly the screen in front of me, and if I craned my neck, I could see part of my friend’s screen. Because the viewing room was so narrow, I couldn’t see Elea unless I turned a full 90 degrees on my chair, and anyhow we couldn’t really talk because of the sound from the headphones, and it was dark. The work ran for about half an hour: it started with black and white footage of women cross-dressing as mariners - evoking a kind of old-fashioned queer cabaret, of the intimate sort. The images sometimes

ran parallelly on both screens, and sometimes split - with no precise narrative. Then, the screens started becoming truly three-dimensional, with projections of rotating beach balls, for example – the images merging with the physicallity of teir support. It was when they became gigantic, abstract eyeballs that the piece moved forwards for me. Through the round window, a pupil larger than my whole body was scrutinizing me, while the other eye was doing the same with my friend. This big animal took in who knows what kind of image. In the same way, I too was only watching part of its supposed face - only part of the installation. The unexpected transformation of the work into this sudden animated presence, sucked us out of the flat viewing experience we were allowing for, and released us into space! I think I straightened my back, as I started brewing the uncanny feeling that the ‘work’ might start approaching us from behind... In the end, nothing paranormal happened - the stratagem was scale, that reshapd and physically explained the dynamics of vision and

assimilation of the visual: a) Neither Elea nor myself could take in the whole work: effectively, each of us was operating as one single eye, and only together could we make up for one person - our brain being something located somewhere in between us; b) those huge eyeballs were also too close to take us in individually: adding up our images, this theoretical creature would make a synthesis of us two, and perceive a third, previously inexistent entity. We started pondering about this sum-of-us, too. A three-dimensional perception of the world is made by adding the two-dimensional images that each eye registers, and because each eye takes an image from a slightly different perspective when they are superimposed in the back of the brain they create stereoscopic vision, in the same way as old landscape stereoscopes do, and in the same way that two music amplifiers, positioned at an appropriate distance, create stereo sound. In essence, perception of the third dimension

(which is really useful given that we live in space) is the result of the difference of two (or more) perspectives, that manage to approximately locate you within space. Birds and frogs call out their location constantly to locate themselves in context with the other animals of their group, similarly to the way in which radars scan. Humans do a lot of talking. Though it might be far-fecthed, the installation in question suggests that maybe our own species operates in the same way as animals. Through our complex system of language we are actually bouncing signals off each other to constantly reassess our physical and intellectual geography. The installation acknowledged the individual as a mere perceptual organ, while theoretical organisation happens in the abstract â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;space-in-betweenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; people, a kind of external, yetustudied, meta-brain. No wonder even the most clever neurologists are unable to piece together beginnings and ends of the boundaries between psyche and biology. This sequence of thoughts was nothing new, only a story retold - but there is something about telling stories differently. It adds details, or depth.

Colophon

contributors

Pio Abad Catherine Borra Marina Doritis David Ferrando Elea Himmelsbach Nicoletta Lambertucci Adeena Mey Emma Ines Panza Sophie Risner Davide Savorani Veronica Valentini Eleanor Ivory Weber

editor

Catherine Borra

design

woodoostudio.com

publishing

La Grande Fuite