Marianna Simnett is presenting solo exhibition Lies at New York’s Seventeen gallery, opening November 20 and running from November 23 to January 22.
The London-based artist works with film, often weaving disparate yet connected narratives together to explore the contaminated body and the visceral reality of identity. Rooted in layers and histories, there’s often a violent undertone to most of Simnett’s work; a balancing act between constraint and subversion.
Simnett first screened the new film as part of the Serpentine Miracle Marathon (2016) in October and had a solo exhibition Valves Collapse at Seventeen Gallery London earlier this year.
The Miracle Marathon is on at London’s Serpentine Galleries, as part of Frieze week in the UK capital, running October 8 to 9.
After the previous marathons Extinction (2014) and Transformation (2015), we turn our attention to something more magical. Developed with artist Sophia Al-Maria, this year’s theme looks at ritual and repetition “to consider ways in which the imaginary can not only predict, but also play a part in affecting long-term futures.” The extensive line-up brings together a number of cross-disciplinary practitioners from the fields of art, science, activism, music, literature and theology among many others.
Day 1 will take place in West London at Serpentine Sackler Gallery and will also be live video streamed here.To begin the program, Gilbert & George present ‘FUCKOSOPHY FOR ALL’followed by Al-Maria’s own ‘The Unblinding’.
The installation featured the London-based artist’s most recent video ‘Blue Roses’ (2016) —about which aqnb interviewed Simnett in 2015 while it was still in production —in one room, and a sound and light installation called ‘Faint With Light’ (2015) in another. As described by the gallery, the Valves Collapse presents “the body in states of transformation and distress, blood, surgery and fainting”, with work that stimulates the viewer’s sensations.
Marianna Simnett, ‘Blue Roses’ (2015). Installation view. Photo by Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist + Seventeen, London.
According to Seventeen, ’Blue Roses’ alternates between three main locations: a bright, sterile operating theatre; a murky blue netherworld representing the area under the skin at the back of the knee; and a parallel world, filmed in a real-life Texas laboratory, in which cockroaches are subjected to invasive experiments that hijack the insects’ nervous systems to remotely control their legs. Some of the spaces seem ‘real’ —the hospital scenes, significantly —while others resemble fairy tales, paranoid hallucinations, or cinematic interpretations of the protagonists’ traumatised consciousness.
Meanwhile, ‘Faint with Light’ is an installation work that in its pared-down intensity both simplifies and amplifies the themes and moods of Simnett’s film trilogy, where the artist repeatedly fainted by forcing herself to hyperventilate.**
