The double screening will show two recent works by New York-based artist Rose: A Minute Ago (8’43’’) gives a rhythmic juxtaposition of a calm sunny day interrupted by a violent storm, while Palisades in Palisades (9’27’’) uses a trompe-l’œil editing technique to a girl standing on the banks of the Hudson river to various moments throughout history.
Along with Rose’s works, the screening will show Zett’s most recent work, This Unwieldy Object, in which “the animated dinosaurs of blockbuster cinema meet the petrified ghosts of colonial history”. The films will be followed by a conversation with the artists.
Inspired by recent exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, the Goethe-Institut in London is putting on a study evening titled An Evening on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on March 19.
Organised by curators Lucia Pietroiusti and Rebecca Lewin, it brings together a collection of writers, artists, filmmakers, and researchers to explore “global infrastructure” and the mobility and movement of people, of things, and of information across international terrain.
Amongst the participants are anthropological researcher Alice Elliot and international law researcher as well as a lecture and performance by artist Rachel Pimm. There’ll be a conversation with architect and writer Keller Easterlingandwriter and curator Ben Vickers, as well as a screening of artist Lance Wakeling‘s 2011 film, A Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable.
“The ceiling’s fallen down here”, says Emma Siemens-Adolphe while clearing up a small pile of fallen debris at the corner of the floor at Jupiter Woods’Genuine Articles. I’m warned it’s not part of the exhibition on entry but, regardless of it being an incidental, I think it kind of is. As one of the best of many good things orbiting the opulent centre of Frieze London 2014 in mid-October, it’s an indication of the glaring economic inequalities between spaces that sometimes, but not always, become a fairly accurate gauge of how good a gallery’s going to be. The Barnie Page-curated show is in the two-storey space in a largely industrial suburb of South Bermondsey and shows reproductions of other works, including a bin full of crushed cans, cheap souvenirs and an A4 print of a meteor. They’re copies of copies that interrogate ideas of authorship and appropriation through co-authored and appropriated objects. One gets the sense that if it weren’t for the cash poor context of its organisers – not mentioning that as the root of DIY digital culture – it’s an idea that would have never existed.
That might be a bit of an obvious observation: Life presents a thing, the artist reflects in kind. But in a week that thrusts both the struggling and the stupidly wealthy into a shared timezone, it’s hopeful at best, interesting at least, to see what can come of the resulting interactions. There’s the boutique branding display of ‘urban’ street wear at Dean Blunt’s New Paintings, where a life lived in the rapidly gentrifying area of Hackney extends to the body commodified; stretched denim becomes the canvas for an art object for sale at Space gallery. Up near the heart of the CBD in Mayfair, Project Native Informant presents the off-site edition of Shanzhai Biennial‘s Frieze ‘Live’ installation, Shanzhai Biennial No. 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace. It’s a less lurid display of luxury real estate advertising with a house-shaped key floating above a mirror in its own vitrine, as well as glass doors and a wall-length image reproduction of the pool one stands to inherit for an easy £32,000,000.
Shanzhai Biennial No. 3: 100 Hamilton Terrace (2014) @ Project Native Informant. Install view. Courtesy the gallery.
The collective of artists and collaborators involved in the final product literally inhabit the Frieze-emulating branding and flipped Deutsche Bank logos decorating images of bodies presenting a lifestyle in a light box. Except these bodies reveal more about the exploitative foundations of said lifestyle by drawing parallels between power centres and systems, across time and place, suspended in poolside poses taken from China’s Rent Collection Courtyard. That’s the garden of life-sized Socialist Realist sculptures depicting feudal oppression (and eventual revolt) inside the estate once owned by a pre-Revolution property owner in Sichuan Province. A call for the oppressed to “unite to settle the blood debts with the landlords!” is concealed in the Chinese characters in a corner.
Property. Space. Time. Money. They’re concepts that are thrown into sharp relief and problematised inside and outside the official Frieze week walls as distinctions begin to blur. The video work of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin‘s Priority Innfield installations at Zabludowicz Collection takes a starkly, almost absurdly, more menacing turn in its dark labyrinth of diamond fencing, blue tiles and park benches littered with iconic red kegger cups and screening the suburban self-destruction of Trecartin’s Ohio teens in ‘Junior War’. There’s a cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ in a big green room featuring the rolling credits from old video works, while Rachel Lord‘s ‘Basic Jenny’ CGI avatar bounces on a bed. Said artist later materialises IRL at a night of performance called Burning Head Collage, curated by Total Freedom,to play Judas as part of Jesus Christ Superstar‘s ‘Blood Money/ Damned for all Time’ score, with Jesse Darling and Leslie Kulesh filling the roles of the High Priests who suggest: “think of the things you could do with that money/ choose any charity/ give to the poor”.
Rachel Lord, Jesse Darling & Leslie Kulesh at Burning Head Collage @ Zabludowicz Collection (2014). Courtesy the artists.
Allegedly Lord does just that with her fee from an institution funded by a fortune built on SOLTAM Systems. But that’s not before flinging an iPhone at Darling mid-performance, citing microphone interference as the motive in an email: “As an indigo, I am highly sensitive to electro-magnetic radiation”. I don’t see the event myself but hear about it repeatedly, procuring this slightly abstract explanation from Lord herself:
“The physical repulsion/separation I felt from the people watching because of their phones allowed me to channel the torment of a 1970s Bible-era Judas in a very real way. My intention was to demonstrate how peoples’ perceptions of a politically charged environment create a politically charged environment. The by-product was that in my attempt to break the 4th wall, I encountered the 5th.”
I’m just wondering, ‘if Rachel Lord is the traitor, and Darling and Kulesh her conspirators, then who’s Jesus?’ I don’t think anyone is .
“If love hurts and work makes you suffer, I think we should reconsider”, says the voiceover ofMaja Cule‘s ‘Do What You Love’ (2014) video for her Facing the Same Direction exhibition at Arcadia Missa. Launched along with an indiegogo campaign aiming to raise $80,000 so its subject – writer and illustrator Anna Kachiyan – could “pursue independent interests in projects”, the installation, with its wall-print of a deskchair and video projection of ‘DWYL’, brings the office into the art space and wonders whether there’s a difference. The POLYMYTH x Miss Information exhibition at Auto Italia doesn’t even question the apparent oxymoron of the term “creative practitioner” by inviting working designers, including Metahaven, Pablo Jones Soler, April Greiman and Pinar&Viola, to take over the art gallery space. The shift in context shifts the works’ resonance, whether it’s the impressive clarity of scale in the Metahaven x Holly Herndon music video collaboration, ‘Home‘ – viewed through a large LED screen rather than YouTube – or Jones’ CGI product design painstakingly rematerialised as physical object.
“This is your future”, announces the Auto Italia press release, while Serpentine galleries’ intensive two-day Extinction Marathon questions whether that future is a desirable one. Inspired by the announcement that half of the world’s wildlife was lost to human ‘progress’ in the past 40 years, posters and UV brochures by David Rudnick and Raf Rennie appear at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, along with an installation by Katja Novitskova of her famous stock animal cutouts set to the backdrop of alien planets as an example of the accelerating and“never-ending relationship of image into object”. Extinction Marathon companion site EXTINCT.LYstreams the presentations while writer Huw Lemmey summarises them live on a blog. Kari Altmann, UBERMORGEN, Alex Mackin Dolan and Emily Jones contribute online commissions to the site with its header of a redesigned extinction symbol by Marathon co-curator Ben Vickers, with Kei Kreutler and Lizzie Homersham. It’s the same one that flashes across the Third Line booth wall at the end of Sophia Al-Maria‘s devastating tour of Frieze Art Fair proper. In a continuation of its theme of catastrophic endings, Al-Maria presents‘Whale Fall’ (2014) as it narrates yet another pending extinction of a species through a largely blank blue screen. Jack Halberstam’s polemical ‘The Homosexual Says Yes to Sterility’ appeals to a humanism less concerned with individualism, reproduction and self-preservation at all costs, instead calling on an end to the human itself (“No Future”).
Anna Zett on the other hand imagines a Jurassic Age where humans are yet to exist at all, with a premiere screening of the artist’s This Unwieldy Objectfilm-essay and its companion ‘DINOSAUR GIF’ (2014) video lecture, exploring the ultimately destructive mythology of a young US superpower that’s embedded in the fossils of pre-historic dinosaurs and the film culture to follow. Trevor Paglen envisions the end of the Athropocene era as he contemplates the eternal cosmic debris of communications satellites and their potential for sharing human history with a species of the future in ‘From Fibre-Optic Beings to Fossils in the Sky’. It’s a foresight that looks further than the 10 years Ed Atkins is allocated in carrying out his decade-long epilogue to Extinction Marathon in the www.80072745.netonline commission. He’ll send personalised email correspondence to mailing list subscribers via email, which is probably the most resilient form of communication in an ever-evolving technological landscape. But perhaps the artist knows he doesn’t need to look that far ahead anyway, when you consider his inaugural email subject line: “U R G E N T”.
Anna Zett, ‘DINOSAUR GIF’ (2014) video lecture gif. Courtesy the artist.
Jesse Darling, Federico Campagna and Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi discuss communication via a spoken language that’s changing with the written online, as Darling proposes a ‘Yolar’ verb for the root acronym of YOLO while suggesting not everyone perceives the world through sight and sound. Marguerite Humeau‘s Cleopatra, on the other hand, is granted a subjectivity beyond her historical objectification via a synthesised voice for the ‘Cleopatra “That Goddess”‘ (2014) music video at the Marathon, while Aleksandra Domanović‘s job applicants are not so lucky at Sunday Art Fair. The artist’s readymade ‘Disney Letter’ (2014) at the Glasgow International booth is dated “June 7, 1938” and kindly informs “Miss Mary V Ford” that “women don’t do any of the creative work”.
Ceaselessly referred to as the “indie” art fair by major media during Frieze, booths from High Art, Seventeen, The Apartmentand Lüttgenmeijerpresent at the Ambika P3 event, among a Laura Aldridge installation of string, soda cans and prints at Studio Voltaire. Florian Auer‘s digital prints of fibreglass and resin t-shirts – body-free but frozen into the shape of a torso – are hung on a wall at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in one corner. Sandy Brown‘s presentation of an installation from Jean-Michel Wicker and two wall hangings from Aude Pariset are in another. The latter’s inverted whitewash of lurid inkjet prints revealed within the white tiles on ‘Rehabilitated Scribble (blue swallowtail / Vyal one)’ (2012), echoes the similarly noxious, though oddly alluring sterility of Amalia Ulman‘s The Destruction of Experiencesolo exhibition at Evelyn Yard. There’s a collector at the gallery just off Oxford Street discussing the price for a piece of her performed and embodied Facebook timeline, under a clock circled with self-portraits inspired by Frida Kahlo. It reminds me of one of Matthew Higgs‘ framed prints hanging at the White Columns booth back at Sunday Art Fair. All it says is, “You get what you pay for”. **
Amalia Ulman, The Destruction of Experience (2014). Courtesy the artist and Evelyn Yard, London.
This comes as the ninth edition of its annual Marathon series, which invites filmmakers, writers, theorists, artists, scientists, musicians and choreographers to talk extinction through discussions, screenings and performances spread out across the weekend.
Saturday will start with a series of introductions by gallery directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, as well as the series’ organizer, Gustav Metzger, followed by Cornelia Parker‘s Howl: A Tirade and Marguerite Humeau‘s Cleopatra ‘That Goddess’ Recital, along with contributions from over 20 others.
Sunday brings a morning premiere of Sandy McLeod’s Seeds of Time as well as a reading of W.S. Merwin by Ed Atkins, Katja Novitskova with Neverending Story: Patterns of Survival and Expansion Curves, Sophia Al-Maria with Whale Fall and Benedict Drew with NOT HAPPY, along with a whole slew of other events.
As Frieze is never so much about the art fair itself but the influx of artists and projects surrounding the international event – this year running in London October 15 to 18 – here are our recommendations for the week’s offsite and fringe occassions, including events and exhibitions opening and opened:
“There was no attachment on that email,” a woman says straight-faced, wearing an open sports jacket with leggings and a bra underneath at the Serpentine Pavilion. She’s reading from a script as though everything is normal while others writhe in a clump of limbs at her feet, through her legs. There’s bodily chaos rolling and contorting around her, no one is dressed for the occasion (is there one?), the music is getting deafeningly loud, but she sticks to the script: regurgitating pre-set, coded lines about emails between heartfelt overshares. How do you make a connection? I’m wondering as I watch her. A few minutes earlier, in a heated duologue with a lover, she was screaming at him to “fuckin’ hit [her].” Then, she was begging for contact. Now, she stands in an island of arms and legs representing a culture of networks, that touch her but don’t talk back; in either case, where’s the attachment? What does it take?
Hannah Perry, Horoscopes (Déjà Vu) (2014) @ Serpentine Pavilion. Photo by Lewis Ronald.
Hannah Perry’s Horoscopes (Déjà Vu), tells its story in the same collage-driven, jump-cut style as her films – of the frustrating overflow of feelings that make relationships, online and off, so difficult to navigate. The fluidity of the costumes and mood speaks to multiple social situations colliding at once in an awkward montage; its language is movement, music, monologues, dialogues, screams and sighs delivered from various points around the Pavilion’s circular, egg-like space. The characters – a shifting cast of scorned and never-quite-fulfilled lovers – chew over motif-laden lines (written by Perry and edited by poet Sam Riviere) that fracture easily into Facebook and Twitter updates . They’re occasionally even read from phones. Obsessed with how they appear and anxious about the gap between image and emotion, the cast yell at various points, “What does that make you look like?” and mumble unconvincingly, “just keeping it together, you know.” None of these people know exactly what they look like, and no one has it together. Even the girl who tangos solo for the stare of a man admits, “I’m sorry my feed hasn’t been that interesting lately”, backed by a teasing drumbeat. She’s just trying desperately to hold his gaze.
Sparse sonic moments like Giles King-Ashong’s drum solo ebb and flow amid moments of explosion and catharsis. There are scenes ominously soundtracked by Lucy Railton’s lone cello, scenes that feel classical in their presentation; a linear movement through a couple’s tiff, then things begin to unravel. Where the actors wouldn’t say certain things, couldn’t commit their real feelings to either their physical or online movements, the music’s electronic contortions – helmed by Mica Levi – exposes the erratic flow of frustration and lust. “Ooh, ooh,” deadpans an awkward, over-loud sample, as a couple is trapped in an endless loop of sex up against a wall. Later, Tracy Chapman’s warped a capella of ‘Behind the Wall’ sings of the screaming heard from another house, blasting nightmarishly through dialogue as a speaker recalls lying in bed and listening to the song with an ex. Memories make themselves felt where they aren’t wanted, like a song from a past life being tweeted into your timeline and fucking up your day.
Hannah Perry, Horoscopes (Déjà Vu) (2014) @ Serpentine Pavilion. Photo by Lewis Ronald.
The choreography, overseen by Holly Blakey, also mirrors this rupturing of boundaries and the aggressive splintering of unarticulated feeling: bodies move through the audience and against each other, leaping into open arms and closing around one another like fists. In sequences where all the performers dance in synchronicity, the impact is overwhelming. They twist themselves into the same awkward angles and throw themselves at the same floorboards. They feel the same, look the same, move the same, all while standing apart. At the climax, the quiet frustration becomes too much to hold inside the dancers’ tight routines, and that too-muchness spills out into the surroundings uncontrollably; one climbs a support beam to the ceiling, another cackles while spraying the audience with water. There is no longer the observed and the observer, only a surge of madness that fills the room. And just as quickly as it starts, it’s over: end task, force quit, move on. **
London’s Serpentine Galleries continues its Park Nights 2014 programme with Forget Amnesia on August 22 at 8pm.
Featuring the work of British artists Haroon Mirzaand Mark Fell and that of Korean artist Okkyung Lee, the event will be “an evening of light and sound synthesis”, taking inspiration from the Pavilion’s unique acoustic and spatial environs, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić, and transforming it through acoustic and spatial installations.
The sold-out evening performance comes as part of the Park Nights 2014 programme – an annual line-up of live art, music, poetry, literature, film and performance that recently featured an exhibition by Ed Atkins – and also as part of Fiorucci Art Trust‘s Italian festival Forget Amnesia, curated by Mirza and Milovan Farronato.
Ed Atkins is a multimedia artist whose primary means of expression is high-definition 3D animation. His strange, psychedelic and almost psychotic eponymous solo exhibition at the Serpentine uses a CGI avatar, ‘Dave’, as a performing protagonist who appears across multiple screens across the gallery. Dave, or dismembered parts of his body, is/are scattered throughout the show: a surprisingly bloodless head dropping down stairs, a piece of a torso mounted MDF board accompanied by poetry, a drunk resting on a table with a glass of booze and never-ending cigarette in hand – Dave is everywhere. His naked body appears with scrawled black marks that verge between poorly made tattoos and reminder notes. Dave is a bald, at times menacing, extreme drinker who revels in his own gratuitous self-effacing dialogue. His story is not narrated; his dialogue is without reason. He is an abstract fantastical character intent on creating a submersing and chaotic environment without any clear purpose.
Currently hosting the largest UK exhibition to date of work by Atkins, the Serpentine hosted a poetry reading by the artist at Smiljan Radi pavilion on July 11th complement the solo show, integrating sounds, drinks and props found in the his animated videos.
Atkin’s vividly animated avatar performs and harmonises throughout ‘Ribbons’ (2014),a three channel video piece that forms the core of the exhibition. Part of the allure of the workis that it’s impossible to place. ‘Ribbons’ is part music video, part horror story, part sound poetry, and totally over the top. In some ways Atkins is updating several of the curatorial coordinates mapped by Mathew Barney in his Cremaster Cycle series – through autobiography, fantastical alternate realities, the use of screens as sculptural interventions, and most notably by displaying components of the film in the form of props through out the gallery – but for the most part Atkins is creating his own haunting metaverse where the visitor is forced to come face to face with the artist’s digital surrogate.
The video channels that make up ‘Ribbons’ and their accompanying speakers are configured in an intriguing way. Standing at different parts of the show you can view different screens at once or hear different harmonies from different angles. Watching Dave’s mouth is mesmerising and he (Atkins provides the voice and animation), can sing surprisingly well, belting out Henry Purcell’s ‘Tis women makes us love’ (1865), Randy Newman’s ‘I Think it’s Going to Rain Today’ (1968) and songs from Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ (1727). The effect is eerie, and the mixture of tunes is both comedic and melodramatic.
For all its randomness there are times in which Atkins succeeds in harbouring a unique focus towards the materials he’s digitising. Poured blood, piss and vodka have a globular hyper-defined appearance that is complemented by sounds that are clearer then the glass they land in. Broken glass sounds sharper than if it were on fragmented across pavement. These noises add to the overall ambiance of the show, they serve as an integral facet to Dave’s dialogue: hyper-realistic found-object sound poetry. There is a lack of perceptible clarity in Atkins’ output, as is the case with Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch’s installations or Ian Cheng’s free-floating balls of assembled 3D matter. This however is a draw, Atkins produces psychedelic immersive digital environments that are striking in their immediacy, not art-historically rooted works.
Atkin’s video practice is complemented by his tact as a writer. He recently concluded his sojourn as artist in residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, and his Serpentine Park Nights event on July 11 featured a poetry reading where the artist voiced several stanzas from the exhibition on repeat. For the completion of the performance, half of the attendees (who were in on the act) harmonised with the artist, providing a surround sound ending to the drink-fueled evening. This emulated the effect achieved by the surround sound in the gallery – not to mention the glasses were the same ones animated in ‘Ribbons’. Much like the secondary semantics of the exhibition, it was the feeling of being in the space that counted. **
Serpentine galleries is hosting an exhibition of artist Ed Atkins‘ work, running at London space from June 11 to August 25.
As one of the most prominent artists of his generation, Ed Atkins’ work often takes the form of High Definition video and text, subverting the conventions of both literature and moving images, as is the case with his recent and multi-screen video project, Ribbons, which will celebrate its UK premiere at at the gallery.
As the gallery adapts to suit the sub-horror atmosphere of Ribbons, its walls will become submerged in syncopated sounds, bodies, and spaces that explore the ambivalent relationships between reality and its virtual form.
There will also be an introduction to the exhibition, led by curator Lucia Pietroiusti, on June 21.
With the concept of the ‘digital native’ being such a contentious issue, perhaps spambot ‘AGNES’ –the first ever digital commission from the Serpentine and curator of digital Ben Vickers –is its truest incarnation.
Apparently born in ’98 and ‘living and working’ at the Gallery website, AGNES’ disembodied hands and voice leads her viewer through a personalised tour of a WWW dystopia, that can lead anywhere from a wikipedia page on sleep deprivation to a video narrative from the perspective of a sentient, English-speaking chicken.
International, multi-platform research project 89plus is calling for submissions from practitioners working across the fields of art, culture, science and technology, born in or after 1989, to be involved in Serpentine galleries’ annual Marathon series, as part of this year’s Frieze Art Fair in October.
Co-founded by Simon Castets and Hans Ulrich Obrist, 89plus is conceived as a mapping of the generation of the aforementioned year, identifying it, not only as an emerging voice in the world, but a significant one considering it makes up almost half the world’s population. Born in the post-Cold War period, at the genesis of the web availability and the orbit of the first global positioning system satellite, these 24-year-olds have got a big legacy to live up to and 89plus is helping them do it. Submissions are welcome all year but the deadline for 2013 projects close on July 30.
In his native Lithuania Jonas Mekas is known most widely for his poetry but he’s also a filmmaker and an artist. It’s with this in mind that his latest exhibition at Serpentine galleries salutes the honesty and beauty of his famous prose, without straying into sentimentality.
Jonas Mekas, Installation View. Image courtesy of Serpentine galleries.
