A new group exhibition and programme of performances, talks, and discussions titled Plague of Diagrams opens at London’s ICA this week, running from August 20 to August 23.
Envisioning diagrams as “abstract machines activated through performance or thought”, Plague of Diagrams invites 27 artists to participate in the exhibition and its programme, including performances by Ami Clarke and Plastique Fantastique, as well as participation by Benedict Drew and Joey Holder, among others.
Karen Mirza is introducing her new solo exhibition, The Ectoplasm of Neoliberalism, as part of the fig-2 series with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, opening with a private view at ICA Studio tonight and running at the London space until July 12.
As the 27th exhibition in fig-2/Outset Contemporary Art Fund’s 50-exhibition programme (done in as many weeks), Mirza’s The Ectoplasm of Neoliberalism will run at the London space for the entire week, complete with a selection of events throughout, including a Kundalini yoga and gong sitting on July 9 and a discussion with the artist about her use of materials on July 12.
The Ectoplasm of Neoliberalism comes as Mirza’s first solo exhibition in two decades, focussing in on women, bodies, and sites of resistance in a merging of occult and radical politics. With everything from large-scale collages, photo-prints, video pieces created with her collaborative partner Brad Butler, and conversations with artists like Zach Blas and China Miéville, the solo show positions itself as a week of provocation around the “possibility of evoking a new stance”.
London’s ICA is showing what maybe the best film of the year as part of their screening series with Iranian vampire-western A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night on July 1 at 6:40pm.
Iranian-American writer and director Ana Lily Amirpour has created an entirely new genre with A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, described alternately as a fantasy, a horror, a western, a feminist revenge flick, and an ode to French New Wave aestheticism.
The black-and-white film is filmed in the fiction industrial Iranian town of Bad City, with sparse Persian dialogue between a Chador-cloaked vampire, an Iranian James Dean lookalike, and the assortment of otherworldly characters that haunt the ghost town, punctuated by the concentrated gazes of a nameless cat, who, Amirpour has said in interviews, is the movie’s true breakout star.
London’s NTS radio presents the sixth edition of their Parallel Visions series with Felicita and new live show WISH at the ICA on June 4.
NTS has been running Parallel Visions in collaboration with the ICA throughout 2014, with six hosts curating interdisciplinary nights of live music and performance informed by their individual tastes.
The sixth edition features an a cappella appearance by Kero Kero Bonito (London’s Sarah Gus Jamie), as well as a “micro-climates” by Lipgloss Twins (who appear, the description says, as “real-life humans at the ICA bar”) and Lil Data (who will “take over” your smartphones”).
Group participatory performance Trace Bodies is taking over London’s ICA on May 16.
The series of live performances, running as part of the Looks exhibition and curated by ICA Student Forum members Liam Crockett, Grant Bingham, Will Guy and Perry-James Sugden, examines “affective online alienation in relation to corporeality and identity production and consumption”.
Morag Keil’s video of a foot, in a gold stiletto, and calf tattooed with a shaky-hands copy of Amy Winehouse’s pin-up girl tattoo towers over the ground floor gallery at London’s ICA for the Looks group exhibition, running April 22 to June 21. Faded a little by the daylight, like a hang-over in the morning, the leg is a show of the anti-puritanical body attitude that the late-UK performer lived by. In the original, the elaborately rendered word ‘Girl’ belonged to Winehouse’s nearby ‘Daddy’s Girl’ tattoo, but on this tribute leg it’s any kind of girl: girl!, girly-girl, daddy’s girl, my girl. Keil captures the complex subjective processing of image circulation as it occurs for each individual within the politics of self-representation; the sexualisation of women, the celebration of skill and/or sex appeal on stage, the aestheticisation of feet and skin, the agency of reclaiming it all by self-branding – by both outfit and needle.
Morag Keil, ‘Untitled’ (2015). Installation view of Looks (2015). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy ICA.
Like a personal head-torch illuminating the remnants of someone’s dinner, or party, or life, this work reflects on Keil’s nearby video, ‘Untitled’ (2015), which is a stream of images from an Instagram account. Almost like advertising regurgitated, the work sees the world through the eye of an other after their obligatory and varied decisions and interpretations have been made;. where to go, what to look at, what to notice and record and how. In this context, it might mean which filter to use. The nearby towering leg doesn’t let us forget that the interpretative lens and the decisions of self-representation (through consumption and production, coagulating neatly in an Instagram account) are complicated and layered by structural and historical violence against personhood, which is processed in equally complicated terms by each of us.
Stewart Uoo’s floor rug coats the ground floor gallery, bridging Keil’s videos and the artist’s own dismembered mannequin sculptures, in a huge pink crust of cringe. Testimonies about the often stagnating pool of teenage hormones, social inexperience and libidinal misadventures from Cosmopolitan magazine lie underfoot like a foundation for our collective sexual (mis)maturing. Relations between men and women are rendered in terrifyingly reductive and stereotyped terms. Nearby Uoo’s photographs, collaborations with Heji Shin and picturing New York scene icon DeSe Escobar, render more complicated ideas of identity and desire. The images have the staging, glamour and vague sense of dramatic narrative that you would find in a Purple magazine editorial shoot. But they’re not a performance for the camera, rather the performance is the creating and exploring of identity. This is artifice that is deeply invested in play and provocation, when identity is a contested ground. As a counterpoint, Uoo’s two women mannequins, burnt and tortured into spectres of fashion, display their vacuity with very much inhuman glee.
Wu Tsang, ‘A day in the life of bliss’ (2014). Installation view of Looks (2015). Photo by Mark Blower. Courtesy ICA.
Juliette Bonnevïot’s series of chemically complex monochromes are surprisingly alluring, with their cum-spurt surfaces and palette of xenoestrogens. The artist seems more enthusiastic about the manipulation and ethics of materials and compounds throughout the ages – to the current day – than the expression of identity, which makes her inclusion in Looks an unexpected one. In saying that, however, the key ingredient – oestrogen – of Bonnevïot’s series, which hangs in the ICA’s upstairs gallery, makes for a dexterous tracing of the contemporary treatment of gender dysphoria. What’s most interesting in the context of Looks, perhaps, is how Bonnevïot draws attention to the chemical and medical control of identity expression.
State regulation of bodies brings to mind Chelsea Manning’s recent judicial win in a US court to access oestrogen hormone therapy in military prison. In Manning’s case these manhandled–threads intersect with state surveillance and the right to information. Wu Tsang’s work, ‘A day in the life of bliss’ (2014), featuring performer boychild as protagonist ‘Blis’, moves lithely through this terrain, where subjectivity is on the run from the law. A sci-fi plot loses its slipperiness in moments of narrative blundering but the work, like Tsang’s practice, is uniquely invested in its subject matter and politically potent. It’s a high production two-channel video installed on two angled screens facing duo panes of mirrored glass, which reflect the projections in the round. The dualities continue in the parallels between the sci-fi narrative of neo-Orwellian networked observation and the reality of current revelations about the extent of government surveillance; the parallels and overlaps of the nature of identity and identification; and the living of life in multiple modes.
In Andrea Crespo’s video work ‘Parabiosis – Neurolibidinal Induction Complex’ (2015), a plurality of selves, commonly known as dissociative identity disorder, finds a community online where alternative subjectivities and bodies coalesce in a space of digital possibility. Online these subjects, that are otherwise unrealisable or dismissed, express corporeal experience and connect by compiling and sharing testimonies and images. Drifting over a darkened satin sheet the work levitates us into a sensual and yet non-physical space where drawings of ‘Sis’, a symbiotic sister-self, give form to bodies and libidinal desires that are until that point unrealised. Sex and desire online is particularly auto-erotic and Crespo shows the blurry intimacy between self and other, and self and self.
Terms expressing the variability of human subjectivities stream past on Crespo’s hypnosis-blue screen, alongside the language of psychiatry that categorises experience through mental health prognoses. Crespo’s language modes are poetic, diagnostic and self-identifying in turn, the last as a stream of hashtags: #actuallyautistic #polygender #stimming #borderline #bipolar; a cross-hatching of dialects to expand and reduce the subject.
The subject of Looks – the post-human world in relation to gender and sexuality – is broad, and to cover it with the work of five artists is a compromise. From the medicalisation of gender to the chemical splicing of matter, the social media hall-of-mirrors to the control of subjectivities, the net was cast perhaps too wide, which risks painting complexity as style. These artists are directly, inherently and consciously working in and with a context of marketing and dissemination but to mistake their treatment of gender, sexuality and identity as a trend itself would be to throw politically urgent issues out with this season’s look-book. **
The show, curated by Laura McLean-Ferris, is complete with live performances by Essex Olivares, titled ‘Office Riddim’, beginning with the opening night and reoccurring on March 28, April 18, May 2, and on the closing night on May 17.
Columbidae takes the “administrative labour” traditionally associated with office environments as its source of inspiration. Alongside Olivares’s performances are Barbara T. Smith’s Xerox poetry sets created during her dual life as a Pasadena housewife and emerging artist in the 60s, Mélanie Matranga disorienting sceneographies, and Dena Yago’s flatbed scanner images, which she will discuss during a Culture Now talk with McLean-Ferris at the ICA on March 27.
If you’re reading this, it’s too late to get tickets to the “post-human, post-geographical” musical act Future Brown playing at London’s ICA on February 19. Maybe next time.
The four-person act brings together Fatima Al Qadiri – a c0-founder of the conceptual Persian Gulf-focused art project GCC and the artist behind releases on both Fade to Mind and Hyperdub – with Nguzunguzu duo Daniel Pineda and Asma Maroof and J-Cush (of the New York label Lit City Trax).
The sound is swaggy, bassy, with tight distorted beats and grimy lyrics that combine braggy rap rifts with Eastern melodies and electronic simulacrum instrumentals.
The quarterly Lunch Bytes public discussion series continues with Life: Language, taking place at London’s ICA on November 22.
Examining the effects of an increasingly inescapable digital existence, chairperson and writer Elvia Wilk brings a panel of speakers together to talk artistic practice in the digital age. With a special leaning towards the effects of digital media on the evolution of language, Life: Language explores how what is traditionally conceived as a visual domain is not only “fundamentally rooted in linguistic structures” but is also constantly interplaying image with text and vice versa.
Saturday’s panel features writer Holly Childs as well as artist David Jablonowski exploring how contemporary technologies have affected natural language, including platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and 4Chan, and the role of complex social dynamics in linguistic mutation.
London’s ICA is putting on a panel discussion titled Restaging Exhibitions: Reconsidering Art History and Exhibition Making and happening on November 15.
Taking the ICA’s revisiting of the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition as its starting point, the panel discussion explores the “complex mediation between art history and their own materiality” that restaging exhibitions entails, and the rise in such projects that has led to a restaged exhibition developing its genealogy, “becoming an object in itself”.
“Sounds like a trap. Is it a trap?” says the shifty blue iris of Sophia Al-Maria’s ‘Tsagaglalal (She Who Watches)’ (2014) video. The robotized voice carries through the speakers of a CRT TV set, on rack and rollers, powered by a battery and pulled along by two straight-faced attendants wearing sunglasses. They’re the props for a guided tour of Frieze London 2014, commissioned by the fair, inspired by John Carpenter and starting at the pavilion’s tours and catalogues desk. It’s raining outside, the tent roof is being buffeted by strong winds and everything feels futile. “Will they withstand a real rain?” Al-Maria’s words come less as a question than a warning as she interrogates the “temporary structures” of “weak shelters covered in a carpet chosen to match the drapes” that is the Frieze fair. It’s the premiere four-day event, bringing both the rich and the desperate from around the world to binge on “that great flower of our species’ effort” that some call art but Al-Maria’s omniscient eye calls commodity.
The TV and its two attendants lead their audience through a half-hour assault of the sections marked yellow, green and purple on the map in the Frieze Fair Guide. They’re the ones where each gallery’s share of the space appears to shrink according to their capital importance. Experimenter Kolkata andProject88 are there. The former features Indian art collective CAMP’s collaborative film ‘From Gulf to Gulf’ (2013), while my Nokia won’t wordpredict ‘Mumbai’ when I try to type in the origins of the latter. Around here are the Gs, Hs and Js of the ‘Focus’ of the fair, the smaller spaces with fewer viewers where the more interesting artists are. Morag Keil capitalises the letters spelling “REVENGE” painted in acrylic across cereal boxes on a shelf in the center of an otherwise sparsely furnished Real Fine Arts booth. There are stuffed toys on one side; a conch, a hot dog and a puffed oat on a mixed media mount on the other. A print of an interview with Harry Burke called ‘Can you live in art?’ is chained to a pair of chairs for children in a corner. It was originally conducted for Keil’s exhibition called L.I.B.E.R.T.Y..
Dreams.
“In a way, that’s what locations are today, different markets,” says Michael Connor, moderator of the three-day offsite discussion series centred around its thematic title, Do You Follow? Art in Circulation. The stage is set up in the industrial space of the Old Selfridges Hotel, an extension of the high-end shopping centre. The infrastructure inside is non-existent so there are port-a-potties downstairs and the salon where the complimentary beer and Smartwater flows freely is full of plants framed by the building’s concrete structure. The sense of a space catering to the bottom feeding art marked ‘post-internet’ couldn’t be better realised.
Morag Keil installation view @ Frieze London 2014. Courtesy Real Fine Arts.
On Day One Martine Syms, Kari Altmann and token abstract expressionism expert Alex Bacon talk the #same-ness of networked art across aesthetics and algorithms. Takeshi Shiomitsu reads out his dense ‘Notes on Standardization’: and cites a subject position – across race, gender, class, sexuality – as shaping an experience of culture, while “our interactions are rendered within the confines of the user interface or platform”. Hence, the notion of dissidence-so-long-as-you-follow-the-rules, which is exemplified IRL when a puppy enters the building to the joy of the ICA staff but the chagrin of Selfridge’s security who force the dog and the human it’s attached to back outside.
It’s this fruitless performance of disruption that is probably best realised on Day Two during Constant Dullaart’s ‘Rave Lecture’, his ‘BRIC mix’ booming across from a concrete corner as an art audience stands around largely unmoving behind obstructive grey pillars. They’re reading the geopolitical messages that dance in lurid neon streams of colour, the laser beams “projecting chemically enhanced pleasure into your children’s future”. The sonic intensity of thumping electronica featuring languages I don’t understand generates that familiar feeling of fear and fascination that’s also at the core of Al-Maria’s “cosmic horror of reality” back at the Frieze pavilion. Tsagaglalal’s shaming gaze glitches, cuts and scrambles across fleeting interjections of images and bold white text: “EARTH LOST 50% OF WILDLIFE IN 40 YRS”. Her human flunkeys run their UV torchlights along the pavilion walls to reveal the residue of human handprints glowing alien-blue.
How diverse. How pointless. These are thoughts that linger as the tour passes through this battlefield of economic warfare – assaulted by art and artists fighting for attention. There’s the queer crosshatch of space, time and cultural signifiers in a lurid installation of Sol Calero’s “ciber café” at Laura Bartlett. PC computers propped on desks, among Hispanic food brands and gaudy gestural prints, are running on Windows XP and screening films of street parties. Men in dark blue overalls are chanting “at the rodeo I was like, this is the one” for Adam Linder’s performance art-for-hire at Silberkuppe. A line of people connected at the head by pink fabric walk past as part of James Lee Byars’ ‘Ten in a Hat’ (1968) at the exact moment that Tsagaglalal asks, “What are these weird wandering ghosts?” No joke.
“…then we went to the ICA for a little bit, then we went to see Big Ben and the London Eye…” yawns a visiting invigilator at one booth describing a week of costly cultural enrichment before I’m confronted by Nina Beier’s ‘Hot Muscle Mortality Power Pattern’ (2014) at Croy Nielsen. Keychains and dog treats, power sockets and perfume bottles are embedded in packing foam and framed behind UV security glass above a carpet scattered with organic vegetables, ordered online for Beier’s ‘Scheme’ (2014). Villa Design Group’s live auditions for a film adaptation of Jean Royère’s 1974 memoirs, ‘Arab Living and Loving as Seen by a French Interior Decorator’ at Mathew Gallery is filmed and re-mediated above the scene via a line of screens on the scaffolding. Carlos/Ishikawa offers free manicures care of Ed Fornieles over an Oscar Murrilo table flanked by Korakrit Arunanondchai’s body-paintings. ‘Affordable’ limited edition reproductions by Parker Ito, Neïl Beloufa, Ed Atkins are available for purchase at Allied Editions, while Richard Sides’ mixed-media contribution warns ‘Gamble Responsibly’.
Carlos / Ishikawa, G26 Frieze Focus, London 2014.
“There’s even a food court” is another observation of art fair infrastructure by Al-Maria’s Tsagaglalal that runs through my mind while watching a photographer take a picture of the “A to B Coffee” café. The people there are consuming across from the Corvi Mora booth, where Anne Collier’s framed C-print memo ‘Questions (Relevance)’ (2011) queries “What does all this mean?”. An answer comes in the infantilised whisper of Laure Prouvost’s narrator in ‘Paradise On Line’ (2014), played in a pink-carpeted projection room at MOT International and suggesting ‘grandpa’ is “just interested in painting bottoms and not conceptual art”.
“Did I see Beyoncé? Yeah, yeah, yeah…” an attendant groans through her phone, walking past Mike Kelley’s ‘Rewrite’ (1995) enamel on wood panel that reads “our method of exploration: polymorphous perversity” at Andrew Kreps. The thin metallic ‘clack’ of Hito Steyerl cracking a screen in her ‘STRIKE’ (2010) video is playing on loop at its entrance as it occurs to me that Beyoncé’s presence was only felt at Frieze last year through the popular icon as self-image in Jonathan Horowitz’s eponymous mirror. It’s as if now the art and the image is not only reflecting a certain reality but somehow materialising it, in the same way that Amalia Ulman problematises the distinction between the performance and the person in her social media experiment in networked self-objectification, ‘Excellences & Perfections’ (2014). Presented in a slideshow on Day Three of the Art in Circulation series, she reveals that the photos of her fake boobs were fake. The minor plastic surgery and talk with the ‘King of Collagen’ was real but the public breakdown wasn’t. Or was it?
“Bodies are suitcases for a consciousness”, announces Ulman, paraphrasing infamous body-modification pioneer Genesis P-Orridge, “but who is this suitcase by?” In the case of the artist it’s one by the networked patriarchal gaze. Fellow panellist Derica Shields suggests an alternative model of authorship of the body for black women, reanimating themselves as cyborgs in 1990s music videos to create a “sense of control but also invulnerability”. Perhaps, it’s a way of achieving what Hannah Black’s polymorphous narrator can only aspire to while plummeting towards the earth’s core to the warped and slowed tune of Whitney Houston in ‘Fall’ (2014) screened before the panel begins: “At 13,000 feet, I finally discover my own language”.
The search for language appears part of a perpetual capital exchange as pamphlets from Deutsche Bank encourage “#artmagyourself”; urging art viewers to “post a selfie with the artwork you love and win a terrific prize!” whether it’s next to one of Cerith Wyn Evans’ chandeliers or Heman Chong’s red vinyl text of ‘The Forer Effect’ (2008) that cold reads, “Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic”. They’re as unrealistically aspirational as Shanzhai Biennial’s ‘Live’ installation at the art fair entrance. There they re-imagine their work as real estate in the Frieze brand-emulating sale of a £32,000,000 “Ultra Prime Residential” property in a room coloured rich-people-red with a contact email on the wall for “qualified buyers” only. Merlin Carpenter’s consciously crude painting of a middle-aged couple grinning in the golden glow of a stock sunset suggests ‘Price on Request’ at dépendance. Cory Arcangel’s Lakes series of flatscreen animations advances from ‘Diddy/Lakes’ (2013) at the team gallery inc. booth in 2013 to the bigger Lisson Gallery. The ripples under ‘Miley Cyrus’ and ‘Dinner’ is powered by modems and hanging above the milieu of rainbow-coloured carpeting and Joyce Pensato’s huge black and familiar Disney head in ‘Mickey for Micky’ (2014).
The fabric of fantasy tears at one point when a cleaner walks past me in the Frieze pavilion’s ‘Main’ section. She’s sweeping the space in front of Fiona Banner’s huge dark image of graphite on paper shouting “THE HORROR! THE HORROR!” in ‘The Greatest Film Never Made (Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead)’ (2012). It’s an IRL occurrence that has a similar effect as Monira Al-Qadiri’s mediation in her ‘Soap’ (2014) video. Screened at Art in Circulation and featuring popular Gulf soap operas based in worlds of affluence, Al Qadiri reimagines these shows that forever forget the labour behind the wealth by transposing the ‘help’ into existing episodes. A vase is smashed in a fit of passion. The maid bends down and cleans it.
Shanzhai Biennial No. 5 installation view @ Frieze London 2014. Courtesy the artists and Project Native Informant.
‘But what’s the plan?’ one wonders as Christoper KulendranThomas explains his accelerated drive to bringing Sri Lankan artists into a post-fordist economy, whether they like it or not. The artist argues for an integration into the spread of malignant markets on the back of branded sportswear: “I was thinking that what failure for me would look like in this work, is probably what success would look like for a lot of artists”. Though I’m not so convinced there’s that much of a distinction as I try to list every artist and booth who made it into Frieze worth mentioning: Simon Thompson at Cabinet London, Jack Lavender and Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Lisa Holzer and Philip Timischl at Emanuel Layr,Hannah Weinberger’s ‘Frieze Sounds’ work, Société, Loretta Fahrenholz… There’s more but this whole piece has turned into an exercise in Search Engine Optimisation for ‘good art in a bad world’ while really just drowning in its own impotence as part of the fabric of collective failure.
“Is this an art fair or a mall?” barks Al-Maria’s electronic mouthpiece in my mind as I wander by Carsten Höller’s ‘Gartenkinder’ playground at Gagosian and Salon 94’s acid-yellow curation of Snoopy animation and largescale emoticons causing retinal burn at ‘The Smile Museum’. This is definitely Al-Maria’s “maze of particleboard walls built to bare a heavy product”. More succinctly, it’s Hannah Black’s “shiny surface of a world of shit”, as read from a poem performed during the Art in Circulation #3 talk, before speculating that “hopefully we are the last, or among the last generations of a collapsing empire”. Because when Monira Al-Qadiri says the purpose of the “over-the-top, luxurious, crazy, dystopian image” of the GCC art collective is to mirror the reality that “our governments have somehow become corporations”, it’s easy to assume that it also goes the other way. Along with the sense of being trapped in a violent cycle, circulated by the structures that exacerbate pre-existing socio-economic prejudice while hurtling us towards environmental collapse, one can’t help but agree when Tsagaglalal concludes, “this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye”. **
Established by Amsterdam-based curator Melanie Bühler in 2011, Lunch Bytes has become a international discussion series of sorts, exploring the role of the internet in creative practices first with an ‘American Edition’ in Washington DC and Miami and moving across Europe throughout 2014 to culminate with a symposium in Berlin next year. It’s no coincidence that, as a programme concerned with “the increasing ubiquity of digital technologies in the art world”, the role of networked connectivity in effecting this restriction on free and autonomous areas, both online and offline, should be of central concern in London.
The ‘commons’, after all, is an Anglo Saxon term for scrub and arable land jointly owned by all village members, divorced from social status. Throughout the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, such areas of collective ownership were increasingly privatised, spreading to industry and welfare housing through 80s Thatcherism, then to creative production and the art industries in a post-Fordist 21st-century economy.
Stephan Dillemuth, ‘Coal By Any Other Name’ (2000). American Fine Arts Museum. Courtesy the artist and Lunch Bytes.
Citing an early experiment in creating space independent of capital markets, Dillemuth describes his ‘Frisenewall 120’ (1990 – 94), a storefront organised with fellow artist Josef Strau and located in Cologne’s central gallery district. It was meant to serve multiple functions, alternately operating as a video and newspaper archive, a gallery, a meeting point. Outfitted with a reading room and couch, it functioned as a place of social and intellectual exchange, aiming to offer a temporary supplement to the existing gallery system in the German city – a kind of situational intervention within a milieu increasingly constrained by market considerations. Citing the imminent eviction of London’s Lima Zulu project space, Dillemuth was sceptical about whether such an area is now possible in the capital.
‘Recent Work by Artists’ (2014) is another example of a gallery space aiming to operate outside of market control. Commissioned by Auto Italia, it was a collaborative project, including Tcharfas, Tim Ivision, George Mustakas and Rachel Pimm, located in King’s Cross, which then moved to Can Filipe Artes Visuales in Barcelona. For the duration of the exhibition, the space became a site of artistic production itself, investigating “how artists’ workspaces might function today”. Providing the basic amenities necessary for work, the exhibition became a space in which to reimagine the material conditions of artistic labour. Made up to look like an office space, with pot plants, a photocopier and water-dispenser, the installation revealed the cognitive production of such work, and demonstrated just how much places of leisure, consumption and production are becoming blurred.
Julia Tcharfas, Tim Ivison, Rachel Pimm, and George Moustakas, ‘Recent Work By Artists’ (2013). Commissioned by Auto Italia. Courtesy the artist.
As privatisation and a lack of funding means experimental not-for-profits are being squeezed out and replaced by commercial upstarts grounded in physical space, so too are online activities subject to commercial and political constraints. Market forces, the swirl of capitalism and overarching political agendas all encroach on the possibility of the free and emerging public space. And yet innovative agencies trying to forge an existence outside the capital-driven art market need a common space free of economic constraints; without this the possibility of non market-enclosed art that remains free for all becomes increasingly endangered.
But perhaps there’s hope in an example by van der Velden, where he argues the fame of a Japanese anime meme of former Ukrainian chief prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya could have been due to state intervention. Explaining the difficulty of creating popular memes, he describes how the Russian government hires people to post comments on international press about its politics in order to influence public opinion, begging the question: how can this approach be re-appropriated by the public? **
The exhibition, derived from a quote by Marcel Duchamp, underlines the potential disruptiveness of an otherwise traditional art form in the hands of those said to be ‘practicing without a license’, a phrase used to describe Wool’s work at Guggenheim talk.
When I speak to Sophia Al-Maria, I haven’t read Virgin with a Memory yet. It’s the companion text to the London-based artist’s solo exhibition of the same name –opening at Manchester’s Cornerhouse on September 5 –and one so evocative and unsettling that I suspect the interview might have gone differently if I had. “Something delicious and fresh about the violence”, says the sentence fragment about an unnamed film set in Belfast (“blown up”) in a note dated March 10, 2014. It’s nestled among the collection of emails, diary entries and fictional narrative; headshots, script excerpts and kit lists, making up Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-in and could just as easily be applied to its content:
“So let’s spend today thinking of ingenious ways to hide and dispose of bodies and discuss tomorrow
See you tomorrow
Producer One”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
“For some reason I keep being dragged back to these subjects”, Al-Maria chuckles, between sighs and over the phone from her hotel room in Manchester. She seems exhausted, and not just because I’ve caught her in the middle of the Virgin with a Memory install but she’s on the line to talk about a feature-length film she’d spent the last two-and-a-half years working on, only for it to essentially come to nothing. “This show is not a eulogy but a way of displaying all the supplementary materials that went into working on the production”, she tells me about the collection of pseudo-documentary footage and video installations built from the remains of Beretta. It’s a film that would have been a rape-revenge thriller set in Egypt and inspired by Abel Ferrara’s cult-classic Ms. 45, where mute and man-hating prey becomes predator on a killing spree after one too many abuses.
As a fan of Al-Maria’s work and writing, I’d read her memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, watched her videos, and seen the work of eight-strong collective the GCC. I followed her blog and more writing on Gulf Futurism across articles in Dazed and Art After the Internet. None of it could prepare me for this:
“I could barely shut the refrigerator door. I had to put his head in the freezer. In the end I used the electric carving knife to get through the tangle of bone at his back. If I had a machete it would have been easier.”
The body above is not just human but ‘tomcat’, or ‘pig’, depending on which simile you choose to describe the men Beretta’s heroine, Sueda, murders as revenge for their part in making her life a living hell. Scattered in fragments across its Virgin with a Memory novelisation, the film-that-would-be is a product of Al-Maria’s own experience as a student in Cairo, set to the backdrop of the 2011 Arab Spring. “Beretta is not only the story of a mute, repressed woman pushed to extremes by her environment,” Al-Maria writes in an excerpt of explanatory notes as part of the book, “but it is the story of a people, raped and degraded by their government, culminating in revolt.”
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
I remember you writing in The Girl Who Fell To Earth about your experience of Egypt, where you were basically assaulted.
Sophia Al-Maria: Many times. That was one example.
Because the country has become known for being one of the worst countries in the Arab world to be a woman?
SA-M: Well, in the same way that Mumbai is famous for what has been going on there with mob attacks. Certainly, it’s become aggravated by the general chaos of post-2011. In the past I’ve been involved with and continue to support activist groups [in Egypt] trying, from the ground up, to help combat this problem of harassment on the streets. The real issue is that, within living memory, if a man was caught harassing a woman in the street in Cairo, the people who witnessed it would grab him and shave his head so that he would be publicly humiliated.
That just doesn’t happen anymore. Everyone sort of acquiesces to the general anger and aggression of frustrated men. I think that it doesn’t matter with regards to culture, as much as a mixture of over-population and repression. If London was as crowded as Egypt is, I suspect that there would be much more public harassment on the street.
You talk about the film in past-tense, is it not going to go ahead?
SA-M: The film will go ahead but in a different form. We got funding and were waylaid by legal issues at the very last minute, which are hilarious because the financiers wanted something called ‘right of title’. Abel Ferrara, who made the original Ms. 45, was very into the project and was very supportive but then it turned out that the original porn company who produced Ms. 45 had disappeared and Warner Brothers had bought the rights. Then it turned into this kafka-esque farce of trying to get the rights to this movie.
Plus the writer of the film, Nicholas St John has become a monk and moved on top of a mountain somewhere in France, disavowed everything he’s ever done and refuses to sign anything. So in the end we were stuck because somebody somewhere along the line stuck his foot in his mouth and said we should get the rights to this movie so that we can say it’s the ‘Egyptian Ms 45’ which was a huge mistake.
So I’m rewriting it, basically. I’m hopefully going to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab this January and restaging it elsewhere, not in Cairo, and trying to get it back on its legs in a new form. It’s a universal story. I just wanted to set it in Egypt because that is the root of my interest in the subject matter and my experience. But I think there are many other places in the world where this is equally relevant.
In the blurb for Virgin with a Memory, it says a Beretta actress was arrested?
SA-M: Yes. Not the main actress but the second lead who’s the heart of the film. She’s the reason that a lot of the events go down. I wanted there to be a sort of sisterly friendship that causes the revenge, not just what happens to the main character. The main character is raped and is unable to speak to anyone about it because it’s a cop and she internalises all this fear and anxiety –what to do with the body and all these things –until her best friend is compromised and she then goes in and saves her from a sort of bunga bunga party situation, which she has found herself in.
So the actress, who was incredible and blew everyone away in the audition, was unfortunately put in jail. She’s in for a year, which will be up, I think, next spring. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, accused of smuggling drugs and used as a scapegoat because she was very popular on television at the time. One of the videos that’s in the show [‘Class A’ (2014)] is a sort of love-letter to her. It’s using her audition tapes with footage of an interview she gave where the woman interviewing her is this sort of evil Nicole Kidman type who is being so cruel to her and asking her questions to try to sort of throw her off. There’s these really aggressive bits and then these fractured images of her audition tapes mixed in with it.
I watched the two year-old promotional video for Beretta on vimeo.
SA-M: Yeah. That was done before we got the producers involved; it was just me with a thirty-page version of the script. I’d been in Cairo with a friend and shot some of that stuff with a Nokia, and some random evening cut it together. It had a bit of the vibe of what I wanted and there’s going to be a companion piece shown at Manchester, which was done without my knowledge by the producer.
He took some rushes that we had shot in Cairo and then made this thing to try to convince financiers; he had done a little shoot with the actress on his own and everything, which I found… he really had gone behind my back as the director. So I’m displaying that as well, as a sort of example of the power dynamic between producers and directors these days, which is shifting more and more to the producers, as money gets more and more difficult to raise.
That’s interesting because if you think about that in conjunction with your involvement in the Whose Gaze Is It Anyway? exhibition, when a producer –who I’m assuming is a man –shoots with the woman lead without your knowledge…
SA-M: Yeah, and saying it was a surprise [laughs]. I was working on a new draft of the script. I met up with him after I’d finished and he said, ‘I have a surprise for you!’ and he shows me this ‘taster’ for the financiers. He’d shot this stuff with her and used a Kanye West song underneath. It was a bit of a creative rape moment where, ‘you’ve just taken this thing out of my head, put your own spin on it and then shown it to the people who are supposed to be giving us money. And this is completely not what I want’. It has the actress putting the gun in her garter belt. It was all very, sort of like ‘gaze-y’. I think he worked very hard to get the project where it is, or where it was, and he got a little carried away at that moment. I think in retrospect he understands that [laughs].
Kanye West is an interesting choice.
SA-M: Yeah it’s funny, of all people.
You also mentioned the relationship between directors and producers is shifting as it becomes harder to raise money, that’s pretty much a universal theme when it comes to economic and social stratification.
SA-M: Yeah, things are polarising and its this, sort of, drift. It’s the one per cent and 99 per cent. It’s the corporation and the individual. It’s all of those things. I think these little titles like ‘producer’, or ‘curator’ or whatever will eventually become irrelevant when it becomes ‘studio’ and ‘content’ [laughs]. It’s interesting; things like television, for example, where the director’s role has been massively downsized and now it’s writers who are the show runners. Writers rooms are far more in control and directors shuffle in and out as workmen, or tradespeople on shows. Things are really changing, I think. This is a totally random sidenote…
No, I think it’s all relevant. Like you say, writers are running the show. Even when you think about how history is written, you have a specific set of people who have the privilege of writing it.
SA-M: Yeah absolutely. People link that shift in power to the writer’s strike a few years ago in the US, which then led to things like The Sopranos and these big showpiece series’. And, of course, that’s all about the strike, and about the collective, right? Writer’s finally putting their foot down and taking power but I don’t know what the moral of that story is.
Sophia Al-Maria, The Watchers No. 1 – 5 (2014). Five-channel digital video (silent). Courtesy and copyright the artist.
When you think about it, the outcome is Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos. They’re all pretty macho.
SA-M: Yeah, and actually the one’s that are overtly trying to subvert that are often really unsuccessful, like The United States of Tara or… there’s one recently with Laura Dern…
Enlightened.
SA-M: Yeah, yeah. I mean, these ones, you hear about them and stuff but they’re not like Game of Thrones or True Detective –which I am so pissed off about, it’s not H.P. Lovecraft, fuck-off everyone. It’s just macho. It uses women as props in the shows… there is much to be torn back because, again, writers’ rooms, as with most things, are still male-dominated. I guess you have your Lena Dunhams but they’re tokenised.
I read an interesting observation that in art, it’s an industry that’s so low-paid and it seems to be woman-dominated, at least on an administrative level.
SA-M: [laughs] Yeah. Hey, there can only be one explanation and that’s money. If you follow the money, you’ll get your answers. Always. **
The London-based online community radio station – on-air (or online) since April 2011 – celebrates the Spring /Summer 15 showcase with a special soundscape from FKA Twigs, visuals from artist Daniel Swan (who has done most of the artwork for the PC Music record label), as well as performances by Palmistry and NTS DJ Endgame.
This comes as the third Parallel Visions interdisciplinary event done in a collaboration with NTS Radio aiming to use the ICA Theatre space as a new cultural platform to celebrate some of London’s visual and musical artists.
