Anna Barham

Independent international art fair GRANPALAZZO 2016 is on in at Zagarolo’s Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, running May 28 to 29.

Now in its second year running, the fair is showing 28 artists represented by 28 galleries in the Italian town, situated outside of a major city centre and the global art circuit. Rather than presenting booths, artists from Belgium, Canada, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Mexico, Peru, Switzerland and the United States will show their work in dialogue with the  17th century Borghese palace to, as the press release states, “create a succession of poetic visions, styles, research”.

Some artists worth a mention include Anna Barham, Brian Kokoska, Piotr Łakomy, Daniele Milvio, Hamish Fulton and Maryam Jafri, represented by Arcade, Valentin, Antoine Levi, Hester, Espaivisor and Laveronica, respectively.

The weekend programme will also feature a range of live initiatives including performances, educational workshops and a bookshop, as well as a special project by Gabriele De Santis and a presentation of GIFs from smART – polo per l’arte‘s Stop and Go exhibition including Lorna Mills and Carla Gannis, among others.

See the GRANPALAZZO website for details.**

Header image: Brian Kokoska, PoisonIV (2015). Installation view. Photo by Sylvie Chan Liat. Installation view. Courtesy Galerie Valentin, Paris.

Artist Anna Barham opens a new solo show called Liquid Liquid that will be running at Stockholm’s Galerie Nordenhake from January 15 to February 21.

Liquid Liquid comes as Barham’s second show for the Swedish gallery, and, as hinted to in the exhibition’s name, she uses it to elaborate on her interest in “the mutability of language and semantics” through two video works – ‘Liquid Consonant’ (2012) and ‘Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike)’ (2013) – and a suite of holographic prints.

Where ‘Liquid Consonant’ draws on Plato’s Socratic dialogues in Cratylus to create a digitally animated head ‘speaking’ sounds, ‘Double Screen (not quite tonight jellylike)’ comes together as a 2-channel showing a sequence of images that move from one screen to another. Barnham’s holographic suite, which accompanies the video works, is made of UV prints on holographic paper whose images and their title puns “cross reference each other, drawing out similarities and associations between camouflage and display, modes of material information and communication”.

See the exhibition page for details. **

Southbank Centre is hosting a live production reading group by Anna Barham titled I Feel Love at Hayward Gallery in London on August 14, 7pm.

Lifting lyrics from Donna Summer’s classic hit by the same name, the live production reading group transforms the words through repeated readings and speech-to-text software, playing on the performative aspects of the voice and exploring the human-computer interactions of love.

The effect, which echos childhood games like broken telephone, is that of “an endless chain of subtly displaced meanings and altered utterances” that disrupt our experience of popular culture. Barham’s explanation of I Feel Love is particularly poignant and deserved of duplication:

“The work disrupts our experience of a shared fragment of popular culture and explores the productive slippage between performance and meaning, spoken and written language, human and computer interaction in a live situation. Ultimately, it articulates and disrupts our highly mediated experience of love and the complexities of communicating what we feel and feeling what we communicate.”

Check out Barham’s event trailer on Vimeo and visit the I Feel Love event page for details. **