Organised in collaboration with Import Projects founders Anja Henckel and Nadim Samman, aqnb editor Jean Kay and ViC founder Caroline Heron will be presenting some of the inspiration behind their ongoing video editorial partnershipwith a selection of films that also address the theme ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’.
The event at Import Projects, starting at 8pm on Friday, will address said William Gibson quote with a selection of artist interviews commissioned by aqnb and ViC, as well as some artists’ video works interrogating the formats and infrastructures of the internet and how these affect distribution and flows of information.
All the Things by Harrison is published by London gallery and publisher, Arcadia Missa, and Black’s Dark Pool Party is published by Arcadia Missa and Dominica.
At the event, the two writers will perform excerpts from their books alongside readings by Jackie Wang, Derica Shields and Jasmine Gibson whose work ‘Drapetomania’ (2015) can be downloaded here.
The event promises wine in little plastic cups and a sense of wellbeing.
See the FB event pagefor more details and for a short description of both books.**
Sarah M Harrison, ‘All the Things’ (2016). Courtesy Sarah M Harrison and Arcadia Missa.
Andrea Crespo’s virocrypsis at New York’s Swiss Instituteconsists of a threshold. It appears as part of an installation at the Hans Schärer: Madonnas and Erotic Watercolors / Andrea Crespo exhibition, running November 17 to December 20 (Schärer’s exhibition runs until February), and later emerges in conversation with Hannah Black on November 18. Crespo’s works introduce what the event description calls “conjoined characters named Cynthia and Celinde”, guiding the viewer to a dark room, in which a short film loops. Clinicality, and how the sociality of neurodivergence is shaped by it, permeates the work: one portrait of Cynthia/Celinde, on display before one enters the film, lists their “patient(s) history”. The film itself employs imagery that is functional and mechanical, featuring a recurrent “clinical white line” that was also part of ‘Polymorphoses (epilogue)‘ (2015). The inclusion of computer fans and drops of water, loading screens and clips of cellular division, conflates the physical and the digital, the visceral with the technological, in a manner which both references post-technical identity politics and speaks to the medicalization of the body.
Andrea Crespo, ‘virocrypsis’ (2015). Install view. Super Weird Rin – Singing Animation by jim830928. Courtesy Swiss Institute, New York.
Etymologically, ‘viro’ derives from ‘viral’, and crypsis, in ecology, refers to the “ability of organism to avoid observation or detection by other organisms”. The ‘avoidance’ of crypsis can be used to frame the epistemological aspect of the work, primarily through its rejection of pathology as identity, and conflation of the infrastructural with the personal. Cynthia/Celinde’s assertion of their self -to quote the dialogue of the film, “It’s just us”, “Our perseverating embrace” -is at once singular and infectious, infinite.
The ‘perseverating’ of Cynthia/Celinde connotes multiplicity, within the self and within the user-generated, subcultural databases (e.g. DeviantArt) from which Crespo derives content. In conversation with Black, she speaks of avatars in these communities as “figurations they find for themselves” for lack of representation. These “subdivisions of the self” accordingly function to reimagine marginalized bodies as tenable in ways they are institutionally deemed untenable, as in sexuality. Eroticism in virocrypsis reappropriates clinical language (e.g. “ceaselessly stimulating”) to demonstrate how bodies alienated by or excluded from what is normalized as sex seek out other forms of tactility. It echoes the artists Camille Holvoet and Thanh My Diep, both of whom, as Jayinee Basu writes for Broadly, “challenge the longstanding public perception [that] people with disabilities are… asexual.” Diep’s work, specifically, is reminiscent of Crespo’s; the video ‘Nature of Pleasure’ (2013) shows two silhouettes merging to kiss, then overlapping, suggesting a desire for wholeness, communion, and (re)union.
Andrea Crespo, ‘patient(s) history’ (2015). Detail. Courtesy Swiss Institute, New York.
Communion carries a theological connotation, which virocrypsis realizes as the embodied and the disembodied. One of the last scenes of the film discusses the ‘penance’ of Cynthia/Celinde in compelling people to emulate their communion with one another. I interpret the line “we’ve always been around” to allude to the Platonic Androgyne, written of in Plato’s Symposium as follows: “the two parts of man… each desiring his other half, came together and throwing their arms around one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one”. The incorporation of archetypal references suggests that Cynthia/Celinde’s ‘reprogramming’, estranged as it may seem, taps into something timeless. I see this as the principal connection between Crespo and Schärer’s work, namely his Madonnas: the infinite ideations of the figure, depicted as formless or ambiguous -even androgynous -in a way that emulates classical iconography yet abstracts from it, focused to the point of obsession, devotion.
And yet the overarching, private ‘avoidance’ of which this is part cannot -and, perhaps, should not -succeed. Black begins her discussion with the etymology of ‘sister’ as “one’s own woman”, reinterpreted for virocrypsis as “the shared impossibility of never being given a body in the first place”. Crespo’s film observes that we are “automatically mirror[ing] certain forms”, in ways that both oppress us and compel us to oppress. This problematizes the posturing of digital avatars as infinite or futuristic, as they often derive from unspoken historical and political contexts: Crespo and Black discussed the “teratological imaginary”, or the aestheticization of deformity, as a post-war, post-nuclear phenomenon, deriving from East Asian collective trauma. The ‘zombie’ as a symbol in US popular culture, was/is similarly decontextualized and removed from its origin in Haitian slavery. Crespo’s assessment of humanity seeking “conjoinment with machines”, in terms of transhumanist hybridity and sexuality, reminds me of sex robots -controversial bodies for how they can receive misogynistic violence, are “forms [men] want to fuck”. Black summarizes this in acknowledging that the posthumanist discourse often makes ideological proxies of technology for its perceived novelty, shifting the focus away from the persistent reality of racialized and/or gendered violence.
Andrea Crespo, virocrypsis (2015). Installation view. Courtesy Swiss Institute, New York.
Similarly, the perceived novelty of marginalized artists is proxied by artworld discourse, centering the ‘newness’ over the reality of marginalization, over the artists themselves. Crespo begins the conversation acknowledging the fact that, at the reception for her opening, the director of the Swiss Institute, Simon Castets, misgendered her. Black related her experience to Crespo’s in saying, “our presences here are [both] some kind of achievement and some kind of lie”. Her statement speaks to the fact that the art institution does not know -nor fully understand -what it is curating. Hans Schärer, the influential Swiss artist and dead white man with whom Crespo is exhibiting, likely never faced such a fundamental affront to his work and identity as an artist. We must therefore always be critical of the motives of institutional inclusion, distinguishing attempts at reparatory understanding from, to quote Crespo, the “extract[ion] of cultural capital from vulnerable bodies”.**
Artist-writer Hannah Black is coming to Oberlin, Ohio’s Storage for a presentation of her new work in the form of a reading called Alphabet on April 28.
Black is joining the event series once known as Don’t Unplug Me and now transitionally as No Disclaimer, which focuses on the work of young and emerging female identifying and trans artists. Having worked as a writer for some time, and joining The New Inquiry as contributing editor, Black will be showcasing her work orally, with a reading.
The artist’s previous work, both visual and written — including essays like ‘You Are Too Much’ and ‘K in Love’— draws on the autobiographical as much as it does the theoretical, blending pop with philosophy and drawing on communism, feminism, and black radical thought.
Some of us, who either were too young or too unfazed to remember the last total solar eclipse, expected the earth to get completely dark while the moon passed between us and the sun. Rather than complete blackout, we noticed a slight change in directness of the sun’s rays. For the evening of performances and readings on at Berlin’s Flutgraben e.V. on March 22, the organisers of After the Eclipse, Ebba Fransén Waldhör and Imri Kahn, perhaps dedicated the evening in this artist-run space to the astrological event, not in terms of the sublime, but rather as an ordinary moment of interference.
Anna Zett begins the evening preparing for her performance as she prepares for a boxing match. As she wraps red wrist wraps around her fists, she repeats, “how can you have a dialogue within a monologue?” The long strands of blood red sparring fabric, and the ritualistic, methodical way they are tightly wound on to the body to allow for the sport’s skillful (yet violent) physical interaction. With a similar method, Zett overlaps the complexities in our everyday interaction between mental and physical (neurotransmitters and the nervous system), Zett draws attention to the value of this communication, persistently failing, persistently under threat by sudden knockout– or a host of diseases, malicious intent, or the unpredicted, violent interventions of applied science.
In a reading also heavily concerned with communication and its failures, Imri Kahn reads what he found in an archive in a recent trip to Jerusalem– a medieval debate between a pen and a pair of scissors over their relative superiority as instruments of writing. Which makes more meaning, that which inscribes or that which excises? Written by Shem Tov Ardutiel in Christian Spain of the mid-14th Century, the unusual rhymed narrative is an allegory from a darkening political atmosphere filled with motifs fitting the occasion of the eclipse: loss of speech, hostile surroundings, self-contradiction. The main characters battle, through dialogue, through sheer function, between preservation and evisceration of meaning and representation.
Dealing again with preservation and loss, Hannah Black’s performance is in some way a critique of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. The artist-writer remembers a year spent on both coasts of the United States, as if the space between each side is enough to separate one version of the self from another -the architecture, the weather, the history of a place can split a person between, in Black’s own words, “animal and miracle”. Through this coupling she movingly recalls a Summers day spent in the Harvard Poetry Library, the “the historic campus with generous scholarships and beautiful light”. In juxtaposing her surroundings with her real condition of eating “trash for breakfast”, she is astonished by its resplendent architecture which, as Black points out, maintains its status as one of history’s greatest constructions with an air of being “built invisibly, built by no one”. This appearance becomes the site for critique, as it’s in this library that she makes vivid the very political struggle of remembrance. In a shaft of this beautiful light, she contemplates “the knowledge, and the suppression of the knowledge”, which is redeemed only by, as Black puts it, “the knowledge of the suppression of the knowledge”.
After The Eclipse (2015). Photo by André Wunstorf.
In another take on this interplay, the opposite of the suppression of knowledge is its enhancement. This appears to be the premise under which the characters of Elvia Wilk’s novel-in-progress operate, as they seem to spend the weekend experimenting with nootropics and developing a comedown machine that facilitates both physical rejuvenation and ethical reflection. Quantifying the self is taken beyond bodily performance into the realm of ethics. Yet, as these characters retrace their intoxicated steps through a paperless trail of audio and video recordings, online banking transactions, they seemingly reach an all-too-human impasse: as they try to reach a ‘real’ doctor, an artificial intelligence-powered phone service interferes.
Also dealing with the failures of communication, in her performance Sarah M. Harrison seems to wonder, how all this failure looks to the outside world. This idiom used to be an expression referring to people at large, but (perhaps it is the eclipse) lately, the outside world seems more distant, less familiar. One of Harrison’s protagonists feels this disjuncture acutely, and brings this to a head as her main character finds notes from her sister’s tarot reading. She recites it out loud, announcing it to be the most beautiful poem she has ever read. It concludes, as the evening of performances did, with a conspicuous sense of hope: as if all this trouble with messages, memory and meaning were just a series of ordinary interferences, no match for our persistence in making sense of it all:
“…magic in little things in life little steps see the doors opening opened through account to others time to open up to others.” **
Here’s a description from the After the Eclipse participants:
…an astronomical event that comes with a list of don’ts, as an eclipse could be (all at once) a fall into obscurity, a humiliating end, the total loss of splendour, the act of one object casting another in shadow, an unreasonable obscuring of light.
…notice, the backs of your eyes have no pain receptors. Burning corneas, it takes only a few seconds. Selfie danger during a solar eclipse, eye experts warn. Those who can’t help it best have at hand rather a pinhole viewer or solar goggles, or watch its reflection on a plain white piece of office paper.
…everyone else, let’s add to the list. Avoid the ordinary: sleeping, sitting on the toilet, eating, putting your hands into your pockets or onto another– as these comings and goings may leave one only more vulnerable…
The exhibition is envisioned as a re-materialisation of the idea of a gay bar as a politically queer space, an idea that stemmed from and with their joint 2014 project @Gaybar. Much like their project, the show envisages “a fantasy gay bar through reimagining queer iconography, history and writing that spans geological, political and temporal locations”.
Following an unmistakable trend – maybe better to use the word pattern or even a collective consciousnesses-like shift in thematics – of body politics in the emerging art scene, Body Anxiety brings together a group of diverse artists umbrella-ed perhaps only in their examination of “gendered embodiment, performance and self-representation on the internet”.
Participating in the exhibition are 20 artists whom have made a practice out of “female-empowering artworks”, including Hannah Black, Ann Hirsch, Georges Jacotey, Randon Rosenbohm, and Faith Holland. Though the link to the site is still password-protected, the site should be open to the public once it goes live, and all the works will be available for viewing.
The night will feature free-flowing tequila, special readings by Hannah Black, Aimee Heinemann and Jesse Darling, as well as a screening of Anderson and Hasting’s new film.
The event focuses on “the body as an object and a brand”, exploring its representation within the public realm and within contemporary visual culture, and how they, in turn, affect one’s relationship with his/her own body as it continues to be “disciplined by technological mediation on screen”.
Bunny Rogers‘ voice is unmistakable. Often described as flat or monotone, it is also sublimely expressive. At the opening of her solo exhibition, Columbine Library, at Société in July, Bunny launched Cunny Vol 1, an archive of the poetry she published on her Tumblr, Cunny Poem from 2012-2014. Downstairs from the exhibition space, in a grimy, empty flat, Bunny read from Cunny as if her words bore an unbearable weight. They visibly dragged her down so that by the end of each poem she seems to have to scoop herself back up before beginning the next. She reminds me of a character from a Dame Darcy comic book. Following the reading Joseph Beers performed Bunny’s favourite Elliott Smith song. The atmosphere was drenched in ennui; the acoustic strumming, the sticky floor, the black and purple stripes. It was like being in 1999 without nostalgia, as if for the first time.
Almost two months later, the show is still open, Bunny has returned from New York with a series of multiples (her “merchandise”) and she is launching the Columbine Library artist’s book. A collaboration between herself, artist-writer Hannah Black, animator Elliot Spence, designer Guillaume Mojon and editor John Beeson, it is a picture book cloaked in purple camouflage posing as a school exercise book. Inside it is poetry, sad, intelligent and brutal.
Bunny Rogers, Columbine Library, published by Société. Courtesy the gallery.
Illustrated with a computer generated ‘photo’ series by Spence documenting the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, which Bunny’s show borrows as its ‘backdrop’, the images are slick and clean. Liquid pooling on cafeteria tiles is purple and grey, not red, it could be spilled fruit juice. The omission of gore, damaged humans, has the effect of off-screen violence. Rendered invisible it is felt rather than seen.
The subjects of Columbine Library and its opening ‘Unusuble Chair’ poem are inanimate. Utilitarian household objects, often chairs, often stood alone as disused usables, feature repeatedly in Bunny’s work. By turning them into art, by making them beautiful, Bunny renders these ordinarily expendable objects indispensable. She offers them value but not use. With her text, Hannah allows the Columbine chairs to speak, she gives them desires, she traces their convoluted agency. “They lie on their backs for the first time and hold their limbs to the ceiling … set free into uselessness, they will become…trash.” They’re offered meaning.
When I first saw Bunny Rogers’ ‘SELF PORTRAIT (MOURNING MOP)‘ (2013), I thought immediately of a scene from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in which two of the fairy godmothers have a wand fight over the colour of Beauty’s debutante dress. An oblique, perhaps unintentional, but important reference, Hannah writes, “The old world is blue and real and imaginary, and the new world is pink and real and imaginary. At the corners they melt into each other, but the word love is fatally contaminated by violence.” At the climax of the magical, fairy godmother tussle, the dress is left ruined, stained pink and blue.
Illustration from Bunny Rogers’ Columbine Library by Elliot Spence. Courtesy Guillaume Mojon.
To quote Wangechi Mutu, “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male”. This statement resonates throughout Bunny’s body of work, and significantly in this exhibition of which she has described her choice of subject matter to Harry Burke as “research into social absorption of the Columbine Massacre registered as a complex puzzle necessitating subjective assembly”. Hannah reiterates this sentiment as devastating poetry, “They all look basically the same – only the marks of use differentiate them… The marks of use and boredom.” In the story of White America, is the Columbine Massacre a fairytale, yet?
At the book launch, Hannah Black is reading. We return to the same abandoned flat underneath Société, but this time we file into a front room. Here the walls are bright, the floorboards look fresh, it is Sunday afternoon and the sun is out. Hannah’s words spin you off to other places, but you are in no doubt that you are with her in the room, hearing her words. She reads with a rare ease of presence, engaged in the present. This afternoon it is unmistakably 2014.
Writing this review, I am keenly aware of my desire to reference Hannah and Bunny not only as artists, but also as bodies. I recall a point that Elvia Wilk made at a recent Goldrausch Talk Series, ‘The Thing with Images’, that, at least anecdotally, when one searches for a woman artist online the query will almost always return pages of links to images of the artist herself, whereas an image search of a male artist’s name will show up pictures of his work. One only needs a basic feminist analysis to understand how being seen primarily as an image/body is one site at which women (not exclusively) are vulnerable to oppression and exploitation. That being consumed as a representation of physicality is a process of the body being denied its viscera.
Hannah Black @ Columbine Library artist’s book launch, Societe. Courtesy the gallery.
The smooth, blemish-free underside of a round table with lanky metal limbs, spreads across centrefold, captured in image as if it were being watched from lying position on the cafeteria floor. On the following page, Hannah’s text, “now in the pause between worlds … this frozen time / living in an aftermath”, feels like the eye of a storm; a long waiting that stretches across the limbo time-space of the rest of Columbine Library. In the aftermath of what has been, there grows speculation of what is yet to come. Is there something eschatological about this current moment of feminism?
There are countless contemporary and historical examples of women artists whose works succeed in connecting representations of the body to the lived experience of its fleshliness, and by flesh I mean everything from the pink and green coil of an intestine to the electrical collectivity of intellect. Hannah and Bunny are two good examples of the diverse engagement of artists, ubiquitous in this regard. Their collaboration is brilliant and fleshy. There is something transcendental about it – almost divine – it embodies “the ecstasy of becoming trash.” **
When artist and curator Mat Jenner describes the distribution and viewing of art online as a “loss of the body, in some ways,” his choice of words has a particular resonance in the space of Stoke Newington’s Project/Number. In the presence of his Foam exhibition, after all, the body (both yours and the body of work that makes up the dubplate archive at the room’s centre) is crucial. It’s dependent on participants entering the space, picking out a record and playing it; it’s entirely grounded in physicality.
The records in the archive include contributions from artists as varied as Hannah Black, Yuri Pattison and Christopher Kulendran Thomas& Amnesia Scanner, and range from experimental soundscapes and heavy metal, to spoken word poetry and a Drake cover. In practice, this endows the recordings with an unpredictability and tension that makes them the volatile epicentre of the otherwise sparse room. Jenner talks of them as “colouring” the space; each person who walks into the gallery and plucks out a record has the potential to drastically alter their surroundings.
This Friday, July 4, Foam opens at Hackney’s AND/OR gallery, where you can see (and hear) it until August 2. Watch our interview with Mat Jenner for more on the unpredictability of the Foam experience, the process behind the artists selected to contribute, the use of records (and of the space itself) as form and the re-gaining of art’s lost body. **
