Opening Reception: Thurs 4 May, 6.30–9pm

Curators’ tour and talk with artist André Guedes: Fri 5 May, 12pm 

Finissage with Laure Prouvost’s ‘Wantee’: Sat 29 Jul

The 10^th edition of DRAF Curators’ Series presents Greater than the Sum, an exhibition by Kunsthalle Lissabon, a small contemporary art space in Lisbon.

It presents works by artists André Guedes, Diogo Evangelista, Mounira Al Solh, Céline Condorelli & Amalia Pica, Jonathas de Andrade and Laure Prouvost.

Greater than the Sum is a pan-European collaboration departing from Kunsthalle Lissabon’s original and dynamic curatorial approach; which places ‘radical hospitality’ – defined as sociability, solidarity and generosity – at the core of the institution.

The exhibition revisits some of the close collaborations with artists that have shaped their programme. The six installations present ideas of friendship, community and playfulness, and many are themselves products of collaborations.

The exhibition opens with an installation by Turner Prize winning French artist Laure Prouvost. A table set with hand-made ceramics invites viewers to join Prouvost’s surreal, fantastical afternoon tea. This intimate domestic encounter is rendered in Prouvost’s characteristic naïf aesthetic and surreal humour.

Portuguese artist Diogo Evangelista presents a playful pastoral installation of cut-out figures taken from vintage Nudist magazines, which dance and play musical instruments in front of a giant lunar eclipse. No Future in That Place, 2012, was first presented in Lisbon at Parkour gallery, and points to the artist’s interest in utopian counter-cultures that emphasise communality, union and joy.

André Guedes’ installation Nova Árgea, 2012, refers to the history of the 1974 agricultural co-operative ‘A Comunal’. Founded by urban intellectuals in the Portuguese village Árgea, the movement aimed to use revolutionary socialist principals of exchange to create a “cultural dynamism” among the rural proletatiat. Guedes’ work tells through slides and voice-over the story of a fictional contemporary co-operative inspired by the movement.

A new collaboration by artists Céline Condorelli and Amalia Pica invites viewers to scale a ‘ladder’ work by the former – The Double And The Half (to Avery Gordon), 2014, – in order to closely examine three drawings by the latter – Joy in paperwork #148, 156 & 158, 2016. Pica’s series Joy in paperwork uses bureaucratic stamps in different European languages (‘Vertraulich’, ‘Enviado’, ‘PAID’ etc) to create exuberant graphic compositions on paper. Like much of Pica’s work, it playfully questions structures of communication and translation. Condorelli’s ongoing research into friendship and collaboration has been at the centre of her practice for over a decade. Like many of her works, this architectural installation is dedicated to a personal friend, in this instance American sociologist Avery Gordon, with whom she published an extended conversation about friendship The Company She Keeps, 2013.

Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade presents 2 em 1 (‘2 in 1’), 2010, a wall-based work illustrating through a multiple photographs and drawings how to convert two single beds into one double. The prosaic, pragmatic tone of the ‘manual’ humorously contrasts with the inferred symbol of romantic or erotic union.

Lebanese artist Mounira Al Solh’s five-channel video installation shows five scenes of friends or family drinking together. Performed by the artist’s own friends, the situations reveal moments of intimacy, aggression and physical interaction, which become increasingly intense as the protagonists become increasingly inebriated.

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ABOUT

DRAF Curators’ Series supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based projects, considering the curator as an author. Following Arcadia Missa in 2016, this is the second invitation in the series to a space rather than an individual curator. Over the last decade, previous guest curators have included Cylena Simonds (UK), Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Mihnea Mircan (Romania), Mathieu Copeland (UK), Simone Menegoi & Chris Sharp (Italy and US), Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico), Vivian Ziherl (Australia) & Natasha Ginwala (India), Christine Eyene (France/Cameroon) and Arcadia Missa (London).

The Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Greater than the Sum is supported by Gulbenkian Foundation and the Camões Institute.

Kunsthalle Lissabon was founded in 2009 by Portuguese curators João Mourão (Alegrete, 1975) and Luis Silva (Lisbon, 1978). Kunsthalle Lissabon presents an original and dynamic programme in Lisbon, according to three principles: i) an ideological proximity to what has been defined as institutional critique and also to the later concept of new institutionalism; ii) a DIY ethics and aesthetics, caused by the current economic climate and that allows for fluidity, agility and speed of action and, most of all, for autonomy and independence from a more commercial approach; iii) a practice of close collaboration with artists. It has presented projects by artists including Céline Condorelli, Jacopo Miliani, Jonathas de Andrade, Patrizio di Massimo, Mariana Castillo Debal, Amalia Pica, Pilvi Takala and Ahmet Ogut.

João Mourão and Luís Silva are also contributing editors of CURA magazine and co-editors of the ongoing book series Performing the Institution(al), addressing recent developments in institutional practice. They were the curators of ZONA MACO SUR (2015 – 2017), the solo projects section of Mexico City’s contemporary art fair, and are curating Artissima’s new section Desegni, dedicated to recent developments in drawing. João Mourão was previously Head of Contemporary Art, City of Lisbon (2010 – 2016) and Luis Silva was General Coordinator and Curator: Galeria Miguel Nabinho, Lisbon (2003 – 2009) and Rhizome Curatorial Fellow at The New Museum, New York (2008).

ARTISTS

Mounira Al Solh (b. 1978, Lebanon) grew up in Beirut during the civil war and lives currently in the Netherlands and in Lebanon. She is an artist who works with video and video installations, painting and drawing, embroidery, performative gestures and publishes with collaborators NOA magazine, that can only be read by appointment. Irony and self-reflectivity are central strategies of her work, which touches upon feminist issues and patterns of micro history, and is furthermore socially engaged, whilst it can be political and escapist all at once. Al Solh studied painting at the Lebanese University in Beirut, and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her work has been displayed at the Venice Biennial in 2015 and as part of the Lebanese Pavilion in 2007. Her solo shows include Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut; Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon; Art in General, New York; CCA, Glasgow; and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam among other places. Group shows include Documenta 14 in Athens and in Kassel; The New Museum’s Triennial, New York; Homeworks IV and V in Beirut; Haus Der Kunst, Munich; Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain; The Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai; Al Riwaq Art Space, Manama, Bahrain; Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and the 11th International Istanbul Biennial. Most recently in 2015, she has been shortlisted for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in Dubai. Al Solh is represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg.

Céline Condorelli (b. 1974, France) is a London-based artist who makes supporting structures; she is currently Professor at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti) Milan, and one of the founding directors of Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK; she was the author and editor of Support Structures published by Sternberg Press (2009).

Recent exhibitions include Gwangju Biennale; Liverpool Biennial; Sydney Biennial; Concrete Distractions, Kunsthalle Lissabon (2016); bau bau, HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy (2015); Céline Condorelli, Chisenhale Gallery, London; Positions, Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands; and the publication The Company She Keeps, with Bookworks (2014). Previous exhibitions include baubau, Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; (as curator) Puppet Show, Eastside Projects, Gävle Konstcentrum and Grundy Art Gallery (2014); Additionals, Project Art Centre, Dublin, Ireland, Things That Go Without Saying, Grazer Kunstverein, Austria; The Parliament, ‘Archive of Disobedience’, Castello di Rivoli, Italy (2013); Surrounded by the Uninhabitable, SALT Istanbul (2012).

Jonathas de Andrade (b. 1982, Brazil) lives in Recife, Brazil, and works with installations, videos and photo-researches. Recent exhibitions include 13th Sharjah Biennial; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo; Under the Same Sun, Guggenheim, New York; 11th Dakar Biennial, Senegal; 12e Biennale de Lyon, France; 2nd New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernables, New York; 12th Istanbul Biennial; 29th Bienal de São Paulo; 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil; 32 Panorama da Arte Brasileira, MAM-São Paulo; The Right to the City, Stedelijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam; Better Homes, Sculpture Center Long Island City, New York; Tropikalizmy, Gdask City Gallery, Poland; When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; The Insides are on the Outside, Casa de Vidro e SESC Pompéia, São Paulo.

Diogo Evangelista (b. 1984, Portugal) lives and works in Lisbon. With a multidisciplinary practice, his work revolves around themes of desire and transformation, exploring the animist potential that the human imagination has to appropriate concepts, images and environments.

Evangelista graduated in Fine Arts from the Lisbon University School of Fine Arts in 2008. Recent exhibitions include: Utopia/Dystopia, MAAT, Lisbon (2017); The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?), 11th Gwangju Biennale, (2016);  Hyperconnected, 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow (2016); Matter Fictions, Berardo Collection Museum , Lisbon, (2016); Magician’s Right Hand, Futura, Prague (2016); Hybridize or Disappear, Museu do Chiado – Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisbon (2015); Grotto-Heavens, CAC, Vilnius (2014); BES Revelação, Serralves Museum, Oporto, Portugal (2014).

André Guedes (b. 1971, Portugal) advances in his work a social and political critique, exploring subjects (upon researching historic and literary themes) and information (Guedes often incorporates documentation in his artwork) as his artistic media, leading to installations, performances, stage sets and urban interventions.

Selected solo exhibitions include Pavilhão Branco, Lisbon (2017); Vera Cortês Gallery, Lisbon (2015); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2014); Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris (2013 and 2010); Phakt, Rennes, France (2012); The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (2009). Group exhibitions include Démocratie, Tripod, France; I’m not here. An exhibition without Francis Alys, De Appel, Amsterdam (2010); World Question Centre, Athens Biennale (2009); and The Final Cut, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005). He has also worked extensively in theatre and performing arts.

Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Argentina) lives and works in London. Her work includes sculpture, photography, installation and performance and frequently relates to her interest in communication. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the List Visual Arts Center MIT Cambridge, Massachusets, USA; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, South London Gallery, London and Guggenheim, New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include The Power Plant, Toronto and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Laure Prouvost (b. 1986, France) lives and works between Sawnsea and Molenbeck. She practices making video, sons, sounds and daughter, ob-jects and installation………………….here a long list of solo museum and institu- tions shows ……..here a long list of group shows. a line, interesting things, a coma, a line, a list of residencies and prizes. A Se- lection of solo projects including: a New Museum for Grand dad in Milano, A tearoom for grand ma in Derry, a karaoke room in Brussels, a new octopus ink vodka bar for Gregor in Rotterdam, A travel agency for an Uncle in Frankfurt, a lobby for love among the artists in the Hague and Luzern, tea bags, and wet floors.

Opening Reception: Weds 19 Apr, 7–9pm

DRAF Studio hosts a curated selection of works from Scottish art schools by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation.

New Scottish Artists presents artists graduating in 2016 from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Dundee), Edinburgh College of Art, Glasgow School of Art and Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen).

Works by Camille Bernard, Kitty Hall, Clara Hastrup, Felix Carr, Laura Gaiger, Frances Rokhlin and George Ridgway.

The exhibition also showcases the work of Camille Bernard, this year’s winner of the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary. Currently in its fourth year, the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary is an annual award for an artist exhibiting in the graduate shows of the five Scottish art schools. The winner receives £10,000 with an additional £4,000 production fee for a new work, and a year’s mentoring with independent curator Susanna Beaumont.

The judges were James Knox (Director, Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation), Vincent Honoré (Director, DRAF); Susanna Beaumont (independent curator), Sara Barker (artist) and Julie Ann Delaney (Curator, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).

The Fleming–Wyfold Bursary and exhibition New Scottish Artists are run in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.

Thanks to Cedric Fauq, Project Assistant.

Opening Reception: Thurs 19 Jan 2017, 6.30–9pm

Study #16 looks in depth at the sculpture What is Love, 2013, by New York-based Pakistani artist Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) from the David Roberts Collection. The work comprises a figure made of cork and green polystyrene and carved in the round. The head and body are painted and drawn over with acrylic paint, oil stick and lipstick. The figure is carved in shallow relief, with elongated breasts, torso, arms, fingers and legs. Drawing from diverse ancient and contemporary sources – from science-fiction to Picasso to African tribal sculpture – Bhabha’s totemic figure is universal rather than illustrative.

Additional selected works by Bhabha are presented alongside What is Love. Untitled, 2013, is a collage made at the same time as the sculpture, during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin. A skeletal head is vigorously painted on top of photograph taken by Bhabha of a local derelict site in the city. Bhabha has used this technique since 2006, absorbing different environments into her works and reworking them with her expressionless abstracted faces. A series of nine C-print photographs Untitled (2009) is similarly composed, this time using images of Bhabha’s native Karachi landscape, again drawn over with a series of anonymous monochrome heads. Finally, a second totemic sculpture from 2016 is loaned for the exhibition. Once is a slim black marble and Styrofoam pilaster body, with a crumpled clay face veiled with wire gauze.

A new text by writer Barbara Casavecchia studying What is Love is commissioned for the project.

Huma Bhabha (b. 1962, Karachi, Pakistan) lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her sculptures are made from tactile materials such as Styrofoam, air-dried clay, wire, cork and scraps of construction material. They are informed by a vast array of cultural references, from the cinematography of 1979 sci-fi classic “Stalker” to the architecture of Cambodia’s ancient temples at Angkor Wat. Her works address what Bhabha describes as the ‘eternal concerns’ found of war, colonialism, displacement and memories of home. Solo exhibitions include; Unnatural Histories at P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Centre, New York, USA (2012-2013); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, USA (2011). Recent group exhibitions include; America is Hard to See, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015); 56th International Art Exhibition – All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015); A Different Kind of Order, The ICP Triennial, International Center of Photography, New York, USA (2013); Land Marks, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA (2013); Statuesque, Nasher Sculptural Center, Dallas, Texas, USA (2011); Contemporary Galleries: 1980 – Now, MOMA, New York, USA (2011); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2008); and After-Nature, The New Museum, New York, USA (2008).

DRAF Studies are a series of focused case-studies of works from the David Roberts Collection. Each presentation centres on a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery with a printed booklet. The commissioned writer studies the work in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Michael Simpson, Yto Barrada, Sterling Ruby, Ida Applebroog, Andreas Slominski, Etel Adnan, Phillip Guston, Fiona Banner and Rosemarie Trockel.

Opening Reception: Thurs 19 Jan 2017, 6.30–9pm

Artist’s talk – Abbas Akhavan in conversation with Georgina Mercer: Fri 20 Jan, 4pm

variations on a garden is a solo exhibition by Iranian-Canadian artist Abbas Akhavan (b. 1977, Tehran, Iran) in DRAF Studio. The sculptural installation Study for a Monument (2013–15) presents a series of bronze plants laid out on white cotton bed sheets. These are the forms of Iris barnumea and Campanula acutiloba, among many others, native species from the area in and around the rivers Tigris and Euphrates in present day Iraq. This area is where the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon are presumed to have been built; in the same area in the 1990s the salt marshes were destroyed by Saddam Hussein in his campaign against the Marsh Arabs, and subsequently ravaged by the Iraq wars. Working with the ‘Flora of Iraq’ archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London and living plants from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, Akhavan has enlarged the plant species to human scale. They have been sculpted into plasticine, cast into wax, encased within plaster, melted, cast into bronze and, then, charred. They are presented as a forensic experiment or funerary monument on the gallery floor.

Also on display are the video installation Ghost (2013), excerpted youtube footage of American soldiers returning home to surprise their families which repeatedly fades to white, and the photograph and after and after (2003/8). The domestic sphere has been an ongoing area of research for Akhavan, and recent works have looked at the garden, the backyard and other domesticated landscapes. The garden often operates as a symbolic territory in the division between the commons and the proprietorial, between one nation and another.

Texts by Francisco-Fernando Granados and Georgina Jackson accompany the exhibition.

Abbas Akhavan. variations on a garden was originally commissioned by MercerUnion, Toronto and curated by Georgina Jackson (on display 12 Sept – 31 Oct 2015). At DRAF, the exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré (Chief Curator) and Sandra Pusterhofer (Curator).

Thanks to the Abraaj Group Art Prize and the Family Servais Collection for the loans of Study for a Monument (2013–15).

Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Canada House Trust.

Abbas Akhavan (b. 1977, Tehran, Iran) has had solo exhibitions in spaces such as Delfina Foundation, London; Mercer Union, a centre for contemporary art, Toronto; and FLORA, Bogota. He has participated in group exhibitions at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Beirut Art Centre, Beirut; the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Wellcome Collection, London. He is the recipient of Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), The Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), the Sobey Art Award (2015), and the Fellbach Triennial Award (2016). In the coming year Akhavan has solo shows at Villa Stuck in Munich, Protocinema in Istanbul, and the Power Plant in Toronto. He is the artist-in-residence at the Alexander Calder Foundation in France from January until April 2017.

Opening Reception: Thurs 19 Jan, 6.30–9pm

Artist’s Talk – Charles Avery in conversation with Oliver Basciano: Sat 11 Mar, 4pm – watch again here.

Study #15 looks in depth at the work of British artist Charles Avery (b. 1973, Oban, UK). The exhibition centres on a large pencil and ink drawing made in 2010 from the David Roberts Collection. The Ninth Resort depicts a dock scene from ‘The Island’, the epic fiction to which Avery has devoted his practice since 2004. In the dusk gloom beneath a high dark horizon, the small boat ‘Subsistance’ returns with its haul of ninth, the local eels central to Island diet, culture and economy. Barefooted boys fish off the quay and long-nosed kepews, indigenous Island scavengers, clamber over the corrugated roofs of a packing shed and a popular rustic café, The Ninth Resort.

This exhibition opens with the Hunter, an explorer protagonist whose arrival on its shores introduces the viewer to the Island, and whose discovery of its landscapes, population and customs guides our own. The next room looks at the Duculi, several gods, a tragic creature whose two canine bodies are fused at the neck in a blind eternal struggle. The centre of the exhibition addresses the city: both the metropolitan Place de la Révolution at the heart of the capital Onomatopoeia, lined with geometric monuments and bustling crowds of cyclists; and the more dingy industrial margins including The Ninth Resort. A bronze bust crowned by a tall structural hat introduces the philosopher inhabitants of the Island, whose Dooks wear elaborate headwear signalling their adherence to one of many philosophical sub-schools.

The final room collates materials selected by the artist to make visible his broad studio practice, including furniture, designed wallpaper, books, maquettes, sketches and texts.

The Island’s geography and anthropology are intricately conceived and revealed through Avery’s diverse works. As well as drawings and texts, he produces objects, posters, furniture and jewellery that substantiate the Island. Although rooted in Avery’s own upbringing on the Scottish island Mull, the landscape, architecture and anthropology of The Island are evolved through diverse mathematical and philosophical systems.

A new text by curator Tom Morton looking in depth at Untitled (The Ninth Resort) accompanies the project.

DRAF Studies are a series of focused case-studies of works from the David Roberts Collection. Each presentation centres on a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery with a printed booklet. The commissioned writer studies the work in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Michael Simpson, Yto Barrada, Sterling Ruby, Ida Applebroog, Andreas Slominski, Etel Adnan, Phillip Guston, Fiona Banner and Rosemarie Trockel.

Charles Avery (b.1973, Oban, Scotland) lives and works in London and Mull. Solo exhibitions include: The People And Things of Onomatopoeia, Ingelby Gallery, Edingburgh, Scotland (2015), What’s the matter with Idealism?, Gemeente Museum, The Hague – NL (2015), Vitrines: Charles Avery, L’Antenne, Le Plateau, FRAC Ile de France, Paris; Place de la Revolution, Pilar Corrias, London (2011). Selected group exhibitions include: GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2014); Year After Year: Works on paper from the UBS Art Collection, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan (2014); Drawing Room, London (2013); British Art Show 7 – In the Days of The Comet, touring (2011); Imagining Islands: Artists and Escape, The Courtauld Gallery (2013); Altermodern, 4th TATE Triennial, London (2009). Avery represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

Events:

Thurs 15 Sept, 6–8pm – Opening Reception of the exhibition with artists and curators.

Sat 12 Nov, 4pm – Artist’s tour with Justin Fitzpatrick

Sat 19 Nov, 2–6pm – Symposium Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes. Cultural perspectives on flesh from the 1980s to now with Cadence Kinsey, Olivia Laing, Matthew McLean, Tommaso Speretta

Sat 3 Dec, 4pm – Artist’s talk with Renate Bertlmann

Sat 10 Dec, 3pm – Artist’s tour with Athena Papadopoulos 

Streams of Warm Impermanence is a group exhibition at DRAF focusing on new iterations of flesh in a networked era. With Kelly Akashi, Jean-Marie Appriou, Dora Budor, Justin Fitzpatrick, Ann Hirsch, Max Hooper Schneider, Donna Huanca, Renaud Jerez, Jason Matthew Lee, Athena Papadopoulos, Anna Uddenberg, Stewart Uoo, Issy Wood; and works by Renate Bertlmann, Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong.

The body has always generated discussion in literature, politics, performance studies, fashion, biology, and more recently in cultural theory, bioethics and information technologies. The body has been scrutinised, reconsidered, modified and reconquered as both a subject and an object, a constructed material and a matter to form. Yet, the body is still not exhausted: it escapes, it decays, and ways to control it (fitness, plastic surgery, cosmetics, diets etc) only emphasise its plasticity, its malleability, its inescapable putrefaction.

Streams of Warm Impermanence looks beyond well-rehearsed anxieties about human corporeity rendered either excluded and redundant, or abstracted and vacuous. The glossy, photoshopped, hyper-hygienic image only represents the surface of our online-body, a mirage of identity. The exhibition re-focuses attention from the body to its more basic matter: flesh, in it material, cultural, sexual, medical or cosmetic aspects.

Flesh is the matter of empowered bodies, ‘informed bodies’ operating through networks and fields of information (social, cultural, medical, etc) to perform, transform, transcribe, reconfigure or reinvent themselves. This exhibition wishes to consider flesh not as a category to read, decode or classify, but as a material that acts as much as is acted upon, infiltrates and is informed by the systems around it.

The artists are surgeons or Frankensteins, creating, opening, re-inventing and hacking bodies, at once violating and celebrating the flesh. The exhibition is constituted of fragmented, precarious, abject and complex organs and systems. Eventually, the works re-inform the art of portraiture blurring the boundaries between human/animal/object/technological. They articulate a vision of flesh as both material and a locus of fluid identity. Neither static and solid nor fully fluid, be they infected, pollinated or mutated, flesh has the potential to be “trans-” in its literal meaning: across, through, beyond.

The exhibition includes sculptures, paintings, drawings and installations never previously presented in London and new commissions. Practices by international contemporary artists are accompanied by historical works that point to key moments of shift in artists’ engagement with the flesh and the body: liberated with Carolee Schneemann, feminist with Renate Bertlmann, contaminated with David Wojnarowicz and the multi-cultural with Martin Wong.

This exhibition is curated and produced by Vincent Honoré (Chief Curator, DRAF) with Nicoletta Lambertucci (Curator, DRAF), and Cedric Fauq, Callum Kirkbride and Serge Legagneux (Curatorial Assistants).

Thanks to the Institut Francais for supporting the participation of Renaud Jerez.

Opening Reception: Weds 20 Apr, 7–9pm

Performances of George Ridgway, Members We Are (Conversations 1,2,3,4), 2016: Thurs 21, Fri 22 & Sat 30 April, 1.30pm & 3.30pm

Opening Reception: Thurs 14 Apr, 7–9PM

with a new performance Sally (2016) by Beatrice Loft Schulz at 8PM

Afterparty 9–11PM with DJ sets by Goth Tech and Juliana Huxtable. Limited places

Curators’ Tours: Sat 4 Jun & Sat 23 Jul, 4pm

For the ninth edition of the Curators’ Series, DRAF invites Arcadia Missa, a self-organised space in South East London, founded in 2011.

The exhibition Ways of Living engages artists who occupy and transform spaces; with both emerging and historical artists including Hannah Black, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jesse Darling, Sharon Hayes, Eva Hesse, Jenny Holzer, Peter Hujar, Juliana Huxtable, Anne Imhof, Beatrice Loft Schulz, Adrian Piper, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Paul Thek, Lena Tutunjian and Holly White.

This exhibition looks at artists who have sought practices inverse to the individualised, satellite modes in which we are increasingly expected to work, using materials and situations contingent to the places they live, no matter how internationally connected they themselves may be. In doing so, these artists actualise, imagine or politicise the spaces in which they find themselves; fostering a still-needed sense of locality and producing directed responses to problems definitive of their time, place and situation.

Artworks that speak about society outside of the gallery are not new; nor is the model of the process, rather than the product, as art. A processual and collaborative way of working as a fallout of socio-political austerity also has historical precursors. Thus, this exhibition presents new commissions alongside twentieth century works from the David Roberts Collection or on loan to draw parallels as to how the residue, the material of the artwork itself, can exist potently after the act from which it was born.

“Ways of Living focuses on artwork that is directly geared to be within, or part of, the society and relationships in which the artist lives. It presents material that seeps out from the immediate and generative ways of working of a range of artists – works that are somehow performances, or documentations of performances. The works often subvert or cast a spotlight on the institutionalisation of power. Bluntly, we could say this show is about process-as-artwork, and many of these processes involve negotiation and agency – a reality of, or definition of, or even possibly alternative to, the term ‘collaboration’. We are interested in what documentation is, and how it can operate as a half-life: much of this exhibition explores how a process remains, how the work is an act in its own right, and how something so visceral can still speak to us when taken out of the specific context of its making.

Many of the artists in the show are artists connected to Arcadia Missa in some way: this self-organised nepotism functions as a transportation of the space created between us and our peers, but it is of course transformed rather than simply transplaced. This is why it is important for us to think about what space is. On the one hand, Arcadia Missa is a physical meeting point/production and exhibition space/publishers in a precariously-rented railway arch. Yet what has urged and inspired us is the space created through conversations with those close to us: conversations which have opened outwards, sometimes forcibly inserting themselves into a another place, sometimes picked up with or without the mouths that have voiced and willed a discourse into being.

This is why thinking about artworks as containing an act, a thought, from elsewhere, or being performances themselves, is key. This show continues an ongoing conversation, or battle, around how representations can work, how they can continue a critique when removed from their site of origin. Working with older artists we admire as well as works separated from their artists to reside in a collection helps us to think about this, and to learn from those who have been negotiating the terms on which artworks operate since before we existed.” Arcadia Missa, 2016

Live events as part of the project include performances by Beatrice Loft Schulz, DJ sets by Goth Tech (Holly White and Josh Grigg) and Juliana Huxtable; a week-long residency and performance event by artist duo @Gaybar (Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings); a book launch event by Holly White, and Curators’ tours by Arcadia Missa.

Arcadia Missa is a self-organised space founded in 2011 in Peckham, South East London. It combines independent research and curatorial projects, exhibition space and publications platform. It has presented off-site projects at international institutions including Astrup Fearnley Museet (Oslo), South London Gallery (London), 55 Sydenham Road (Sydney) and Tank TV (London and online). The journal How To Sleep Faster, which combines creative writing with critical theory and commentary, is now in its seventh edition. Arcadia Missa is run by Founding Director and Curator Rozsa Farkas (b. 1987, UK) and Director Zhoe Granger (b.1988, New Zealand).

DRAF Curators’ Series supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based projects, considering the curator as an author. The programme is not open to proposals: curators whose work DRAF has been following are specifically invited to develop an original exhibition at DRAF.

Former participants  include Cylena Simonds (UK), Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Mihnea Mircan (Romania), Mathieu Copeland (UK), Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp (It and US), Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico), Natasha Ginwala (India) and Vivian Ziherl (Australia) and Christine Eyene (Cameroon/France).

DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England.

Thanks to DRAF Galleries Circle for generously supporting performance at DRAF.

Opening Reception: Thurs 28 Jan, 6.30–8.30pm

Opening Reception: Thurs 28 Jan,6.30–8.30pm

Study #13 looks in depth at the work Every Word Unmade: a series of 26 metre-high neon letters, together comprising an upper-case alphabet, hand made by artist Fiona Banner in 2007. This first presentation of Every Word Unmade in London is accompanied by a selection of Banner’s works using language and light.

The installation opens with Neon Full Stop (1997), a moment of characteristic humour and a pause in which to reflect on Banner’s practice. In the same year, Banner founded The Vanity Press, a publishing house which is an integral part of Banner’s practice, producing books and exploring the act of publishing as a form of performative sculpture – tattoos, neons, tombstones, trousers all become ‘publications’ by virtue of ISBN registration. Scroll Down and Keep Scrolling (2015) is its most recent publication, a compendious 800 page artist’s book of archive material produced for the occasion of Banner’s solo exhibition at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, of the same name.

Throughout the galleries are a number of Full Stop bean bag sculptures (2015). Each is based on the full stop design in a different typeface (Avant-garde, Courier, Helvetica, Didot, Peanuts, Klang, Capitalist, Bookman, Onyx). These existing typefaces we combined by Banner to create her own Font (2015), used in this information sheet and for captions in the exhibition.

The Vanity Press (2013) is one of a selection of works hand made by Banner herself in neon. The letters and digits of an ISBN number are imperfectly wrought through the laborious process of bending molten glass tubes by hand, and then published under the imprint of The Vanity Press. Beagle Punctuation (2013) composes in neon punctuation marks) the well-known face of cartoon Beagle Snoopy (for copyright reasons unnamed in the title). Snoopy’s familiar face is reduced to pure form, almost a symbol or character, between sign and representation.

The vast central work of the display, Every Word Unmade (2007), assembles the entire upper case alphabet, so containing, as the title implies, the possibility of infinite anagrams and narratives.

I was thinking about a kind of unmaking of language. As if you could make every word, or story imaginable, from these 26 letters. All the potential is there, but none of the words. The fragile wobbly letters, a byproduct of incrementally, inexpertly bending the glass – then the electrical circuit pumping the gas through, make it like one big, constant stutter…words about to be made or unmade. Fiona Banner, 2007.

Language is also embodied in written descriptions of undressing and undressed bodies such as Striptease (2003) and Nude Portrait (2011). They point to the performativity of language, an act of translation which is repeated in Mirror (2007) as the model (actress Samantha Morton) encounters her own portrait for the first time while reading it aloud to a live audience.

A new text by writer Emily King studying Every Word Unmade (2007) is commissioned for the exhibition, available in the gallery or download the pdf below.

DRAF Studies are a series of focused case-studies of works from the David Roberts Collection. Each presentation centres on a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery with a printed booklet. The commissioned writer studies the work in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Michael Simpson, Yto Barrada, Sterling Ruby, Ida Applebroog, Andreas Slominski, Etel Adnan and Phillip Guston.

Study #14. Oh Mystery Girl 3, Rosemarie Trockel is also on display in DRAF Gallery.

Etel Adnan, Ida Applebroog, Philip Guston, Sergej Jensen, Hans Josephsohn, Oscar Murillo, Andreas Slominski and Michael E. Smith

Rarely seen artworks from the David Roberts collection become accomplices of an uncanny fiction. Albert the kid is ghosting occupies the entire DRAF building, transforming the space into an unsettling mise-en-scene of defiance: a crime scene.

…having last left you at the foundation, I walked away with this thought neologism ghosting all over me. I could give it a syntax long forgotten and shortly remembered literally footsteps from having left you. Albert the kid is ghosting. There’s this bridge with these words done painted on it. Albert the kid is ghosting. Looking for or should I say having found this model of equivalence to one disappearing act of a presence in this sentence thrown up on a wall I feel that this should be the title of the exhibition. ALBERT THE KID IS GHOSTING. 

The exhibition presents each work in a precisely-designed environment of bespoke materials and furnishings. Hans Josephsohn’s 1979 brass head sits on a hardwood plith, facing gold damask curtains. Etel Adnan’s 2000 landscape hangs on a gold leaf panel. Philip Guston’s Drive (1969) hangs on a wall of dark floral wallpaper. Vases of lilies, crimson walls, neon sheer fabric curtains and chainlink screens shape emotionally-charged situations throughout the space.

Works from the collection are complemented with new commissions by Michael E Smith and loans of works by Ida Applebroog and Andreas Slominski. English language poetry by Etel Adnan will be performed, as well as other live events. Writers commissioned to research in depth and produce studies of the works include Hannah Black (on Ida Applebroog), Harry Burke (on Etel Adnan), Craig Burnett (on Philip Guston) and Matthew McLean (on Andreas Slominski).

On the occasion of the Opening Reception, DRAF reveals its unique new space dedicated to performance and education.

Sat 13 Jun, 4pm: Tour by curator Christine Eyene

Sat 11 Jul, 8–11.30pm: An Evening of Live Music by artists Larry Achiampong, Julien Bayle and Evan Ifekoya

Thurs 23 Jul, 6.30pm: Curator Christine Eyene in conversation with artist and curator Barby Asante on the relation between music, cultural heritage and urban cultures

Sat 1 Aug, 4pm: Final Day Tour by curator Christine Eyene

All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm is the eighth edition of the DRAF Curators’ Series, with guest curator Christine Eyene (France/Cameroon).

With Larry Achiampong, Younes Baba-Ali, Julien Bayle, John Cage, Ayoka Chenzira, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Jon Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Evan Ifekoya, Zak Ové, Michel Paysant, Anna Raimondo, Robin Rhode, David Shrigley, William Titley.

Exhibition leaflet including essay by curator Christine Eyene online here

The exhibition presents Eyene’s original research into rhythmic sources in performative, material and immaterial productions within African traditional and contemporary cultures. This first exploration of this essential lineage encompasses dance, avant-garde composition, popular music and subcultures and rhythmic video editing through the twentieth century to the present day.

The project takes as a starting point Bikutsi, a fast paced percussive genre using balafons (African xylophones) that emerged in Cameroon in the 1940s. At the same time, Senegalese philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor developed his ideas on the ontology of African rhythms and their correlation with sculpture in the essay ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’ (1939).

All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm traces the integration of African rhythm into artistic practices in the twentieth century. Composer John Cage’s often-overlooked collaborations with African-American choreographers and dancers during the development of his iconic ‘prepared piano’ works include Bacchanale (1940), written for dancer Syvilla Fort (the subject of Ayoka Chenzira’s 1979 film Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum). Cage composed Our Spring Will Come (1943) for Trinidad-born dancer Pearl Primus based on Harlem Renaissance legend Langston Hughes’ Our Spring (1933), whose rhythmic poetry voices the racial politics and discrimination underlying the era of American modernism.

The presence of black rhythms in the twentieth century also spanned popular music subcultures: William Titley’s sound works document the rise of Northern Soul dance culture in England. Evan Ifekoya looks at cross-cultural translation through drum ’n’ bass dance moves in her video performance Nature/Nurture Sketch (2013).  

Against this backdrop of cultural assimilation by the Western avant-garde, several recent works in the exhibition see a re-appropriation of African rhythmic heritage by contemporary diaspora artists. Larry Achiampong’s autobiographical collection of Highlife vinyl records are included alongside the hybrid turntable/mask sculptures by Zak Ové. Robin Rhode’s Wheel of Steel (2006) photographic sequence shows a vinyl record on a chalk player, with the shifts of the tone arm visually suggesting a rhythmic pattern. Video works by Younès Baba-Ali and Anna Raimondo explore non-musical rhythmic patterns using voice and gesture. David Shrigley’s tragicomic Headless Drummer blindly continues his lively beat. Julien Bayle’s visualisations of rhythmic compositions derive from methods of encoding and algorithm.

Commissions for the exhibition include Michel Paysant’s VOX SILENTII (Eye Composing), 2015, a series of scores composed using an eye tracker, a co-production with Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. A new sound work by Em’Kal Eyongakpa uses contemporary field recordings made in Cameroon, a complement to Eyene’s own research in the extraordinary sound archives of the nineteenth century Pitt Rivers Museum Oxford.

Previous participants in the series include Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico) and Natasha Ginwala (India) & Vivian Ziherl (Australia).

Monument Stalagmite/P.T.A.C., 2012 by Sterling Ruby will be the eighth in the series of studies of works from the David Roberts Collection, with a new commissioned text by curator Alessandro Rabottini. The five metre high free-standing sculpture will be shown with other works by Sterling Ruby in the Collection.

Full Study #8 booklet available online here

Study is a focused case-study of a single work from the David Roberts Collection. Each work in the series is displayed with in-depth research material: from its technical production, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates.

Grand Opening Night: Thurs 5 Feb 2015, 7–10pm

DZ Hosts The Violet Crab – Nights of Cabaret at DRAF: Thurs 19 Mar / Fri 20 Mar / Sat 21 Mar 2015  

1865 – Café Royal opens in Regent Street, London

1915 – The Moulin Rouge is destroyed by fire; Cabaret Voltaire is created in Zurich

1965 –Liza Minnelli makes her debut on Broadway

2015 –The Violet Crab at DRAF opens in Camden, London…

The Violet Crab at DRAF looks to cabaret past and present in new commissions, live acts and works from the David Roberts Collection, taking residence in an extravagant mise-en-scene designed and directed by artist Than Hussein Clark. The Violet Crab at DRAF takes cabaret as a situation for queering the inscriptions of time and space.

“The white cube of the gallery must no longer be so terrified of the black box of the theatre. Turning the spatial and temporal architectures of exhibition-making upside down, cabaret provides a narrative framework in which to rearrange hierarchies between subject and object and performance.

I think here of a series of protagonists: Kander & Ebb, two Jewish homosexuals who gleefully pen a new fascist anthem two-thirds of the way through their score for the musical Cabaret; Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden, on whose lucky escape to the musical and sexual underworld of Wiemar the same musical was based; and the French Fumistes without whose radical disdain for order the erotic incoherencies of Wiemar would have never been possible.

So like The Black Cat before it, The Violet Crab at DRAF opens its doors to questions of how the erotic, the melodramatic, and the tragic might satirise the rules of production in the present.”  Than Hussein Clark

Than Hussein Clark dramatically reconfigures the structures and architecture of the gallery – from furniture (stages, tables, mirrors, curtains and screens) to concierge to printed matter. The exhibition spaces become cloakroom, bar, stage, backstage and shadow theatre to explore the dynamics of subject and object, attitude and identity. Commissions by other artists include murals by Allison Katz and Shaan Tariq Hassan-Syed, flower arrangement sculptures by Carter Mull, a video by Luiz Roque, with loans from iconic designers Claude and François Xavier Lalanne, a selection of paintings by Anj Smith, works by Cindy Sherman and jewellery by designer Frances Wadsworth-Jones.

Over sixty artworks from the David Roberts Collection are present including never seen works by Caroline Achaintre, Charles Avery, Hans Bellmer, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Felipe Jesus Consalvos, William N Copley, Enrico David, Andre de Dienes, Cerith Wyn Evans, Barnaby Furnas, Burt Glinn, Juan José Gurrola, Erich Hartmann, Ansel Krut, Roy Lichtenstein, Ludovico de Luigi, Susan Meiselas, Marilyn Minter, Helmut Newton, Julian Opie, Grayson Perry, Pietro Roccasalva, James Rosenquist, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jerry Schatzberg, Cindy Sherman, Anj Smith, Joseph Edward Southall, John Cecil Stephenson, Joana Vasconcelos, Andy Warhol, Paul Wunderlich, Emily Young.

Numerous live acts animate The Grand Opening in collaboration with science fiction writer Nina Allan, Anja Dietmann and pianist Fion Pellacini, Pierre Huyghe, dance artist Carlos Maria Romero, live draughtsman Isobel Williams, pole dance by Ayumi LaNoire, go go dancers and more.

The climax of The Violet Crab at DRAF in March sees a programme of artistic, musical, literary and acrobatic acts in DZ Hosts The Violet Crab – Nights of Cabaret at DRAF.

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PLEASE NOTE: This exhibition contains nudity and explicit images and language, and is not suitable for visitors under 18 years old.

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LISTEN to artist Than Hussein Clark’s audio guide to the exhibition here

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The Violet Crab at DRAF is designed and directed by Than Hussein Clark; it is produced by Vincent Honoré (Director) and Nicoletta Lambertucci (Curator), with Dan Munn (Curatorial Assistant).

Than Hussein Clark (b. 1981, USA) is an artist who lives and works in London and Hamburg. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, Goldsmiths College, London and Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg. Clark’s practice draws on architecture, the decorative arts, and theatre to reimagine the queer present.Recent solo exhibitions include Sessions (with Christiane Blattmann), 2014, Amstel 47, Amsterdam; Vengeance… Oh Libya!, 2014, WCW Gallery, Hamburg; and Waves (Das Glückliche Rothschild), 2013, Mathew, Berlin. Group exhibitions include There is Nothing Personal of Yours to Exhibit, 2014, Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris; I Love You Me Either, 2014, Project Native Informant, London; Like A Virgin, VI VII, Oslo; and Life will be Frozen in Peaches and Cream, 2012, Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. He is a founding member of Villa Design Group and sits on the editorial board of Montez Press, Hamburg. He is currently represented by Mathew gallery, Berlin.

A solo exhibition by Nina Beier presents recent and new sculptures including a major spatial commission created for DRAF.

An ambitious new work, Tileables (2014), functions as a base for the exhibition. A 125 m²mosaic of ceramic tiles individually printed with texture patterns originally designed for 3-D modeling software to imitate concrete, marble, mud and other surfaces takes the relationship between the digital and physical namesake to its absurd conclusion. These tiles are accompanied by delivered boxes of fresh vegetables, hacked flatscreen fireplaces, tangled garden hoses and stacks of handmade carpets; plotting a muddy field of the fluid and the petrified, the imitation and the actual.

This exhibition is the culmination of a six-year conversation with Nina, presenting one of the most singular and accurate voices of recent years. We will focus this London presentation on sculptures, and so explore works that are trapped in an ambiguous position between an object and the representation of that object.  Vincent Honoré (Director, DRAF).

Beier’s practice negotiates social and political questions of representation and exchange, inhabiting moments of conflict and correlation. She traces the convoluted relationships between objects and images, as mediation mutates information from things to representations and back again and images subsume or discard their referents to become distinct objects in their own right. Works reveal stark contradictions between what they are and how they are used. Labour and production dynamics echo in DRAF’s building, a former furniture factory built at the end of the 19^thcentury.  

With thanks to Johnson Tiles; The Danish Arts Foundation; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; Croy Nielsen, Berlin; Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City; STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo; Mousse Magazine; Bakhtiyar and Frontier Craft Lager.

Nina Beier (b. 1975, Aarhus, Denmark; lives in London) graduated from the Royal College of Art, London (2004). She has recently exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at Mostyn, Llandudno (2014); Nottingham Contemporary (2014); Glasgow Sculpture Studios (2013); as well as in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2014); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2013); Museion Bozen, Bolzano (2012); The Artist’s Institute, New York (2012); KW Institute For Contemporary Art, Berlin (2012); and Tate Modern, London (2012).

Download the full exhibition leaflet below.

Curator’s Tour with Vivian Ziherl: Tuesday 22 July, 1pm. Free, no booking required.

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck… is the seventh edition of the DRAF Curators’ Series, with guest curators Natasha Ginwala (b. 1985, India) and Vivian Ziherl (b. 1982, Australia), co-founders of the ongoing curatorial research project Landings. Previous participants in the series include Raimundas Malasauskas (Lithuania), Mathieu Copeland (UK) and Pablo Leon de la Barra (Mexico).

This group exhibition brings together a range of international artists, poets and choreographers; including Etel Adnan, Boyle Family, Chandralekha, Bonita Ely, Simone Forti, Ganesh Haloi, Camille Henrot, Yee I-Lann, Juma-adi, The Otolith Group, Prabhakar Pachpute, Dashrath Patel, Selma and Sofiane Ouissi with research contributions by Angela Melitopoulos & Angela Anderson, Filipa César, Simryn Gill and Rachel O’Reilly.

“History doesn’t drive on camels anymore but it’s still eating dust. Communication lines, since, are buried deep under the skin.”  Etel Adnan, Seasons, 2008.

Modernity, as a human endeavour over Land, has drawn up the categories by which territory is divided and placed under a contract of subjugation. How might the current order of material progress then be infiltrated by the agency of Land as a narrative substance? Facing the geographic imperative of capital stand the claims of Land as a living archive, as political matter, and as corporeal agent.

A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck…engages artistic practices that approach Land as a language-form of kinship, affect, and decolonial resistance. Bonita Ely’s 1970s etchings of the salinating Murray-Darling River constellate with Indonesian artist Juma-adi’s errant figures bearing the burden of displaced geography. The South-East Asian archipelago is a matrix of socio-political memory in the Batik works of Yee I-Lann, while the repetitive hand gestures of rural women ceramics-makers form a movement-score in the work of Tunisian choreographers Selma and Sofiane Ouissi.

The abstract paintings and illustrations of Ganesh Haloi draw together symmetries of the organic world with an archaeological imaginary. The exhibition will also feature a new site-specific mural by Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute, responding to the DRAF gallery space.

An accompanying presentation of artistic research and archival materials will assemble references examining the subjective conditions of extraction. Desert fault lines converge in the seismic narrations of Californian ‘earthquake sensitives’ in the Otolith Group’s film Medium Earth, (2013) screened at Rio Cinema, Dalston on Tuesday 22 July, 6.15pm.
With thanks to The Map House, London; Milani Gallery, Brisbane; Experimenta, Bangalore; Akar Prakar, Kolkata and LUX Artists Moving Image, London for their support of the exhibition.

DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England.

Download the full exhibition leaflet below.

Study is a focused case-study of a single work from the David Roberts Collection. Each work in the series is displayed with in-depth research material: from its technical production, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates.

Wallpaper – Tangier, 2001 by Yto Barrada will be the seventh in the series of studies of works from the David Roberts Collection.

Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce, Boyle Family and Michael Simpson.

Study #6. Michael Simpson is a new exhibition studying in depth the work of British artist Michael Simpson.

The exhibition is a development of DRAF’s ongoing Study series (2012– ) of case-study presentations of individual works from the David Roberts Collection. Studies comprise in-depth research material: from the technical production of the work, its origin and history, to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates.

For Study #6. Michael Simpson, the entire DRAF gallery space is dedicated to the project. At the centre of the exhibition are four of Simpson’s Bench Painting series (1989–2009) of large-scale oil on canvas paintings in homage to the sixteenth century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, inspired by his writings and violent death. A selection of works from a new related series titled Leper Squint (2012–ongoing), is also presented. Alongside these paintings, a range of drawings and sketches are exhibited for the first time, with rare publications and videos from the artist’s archive.

Study #6. Michael Simpson has been developed closely with the artist, and is an unprecedented moment of concentration on Simpson’s methodology of work. His lifelong relationship to painting as a rigorously rational and analytical practice of repetition and iteration is investigated through his influential relationship with Samuel Beckett’s writings and plays, with whom he corresponded. Through the constant returning to and re-proposing of the same motif, Simpson proposes a visual investigation into cosmological philosophies and “the infamy of religious history”.

Previous subjects in the Study series include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce and Boyle Family.

Please download the Study booklet below.

Study is a focused case-study of a single work from the David Roberts Collection. Each work in the series is displayed with in-depth research material: from its technical production, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates.

Study of Shattered Red Tiles with Old Bricks and Decaying Wood, 1973-74 by Boyle Family will be the fifth in the series of studies of works from the David Roberts Collection. The fiberglass and mixed media work will be shown together with other works by Boyle Family in the Collection.

Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean and Martin Boyce.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

A new exhibition of recent works by ten contemporary artists tracing a growing interest in the pollution and breakdown of systems and processes. Slippages and spillages, disruption and contamination characterise sculptural, film and installation works.

A closed-loop fountain, corrupted translations of everyday items, mutant organisms with industrial, technological and organic components, loyalty cards and hard drives, and abstract spatial environments are among the unsettling objects in the exhibition. Many works are newly made or have not previously been shown in the UK.

Geographies of Contamination is co-curated by Laura McLean-Ferris, Alexander Scrimgeour and Vincent Honoré.

Artists:

Olga Balema (b.1984, Ukraine, lives in Berlin and Amsterdam)

Balema’s sculptures exist on the border of the alive and the inanimate, using materiality, fragmentation and bodily presences to reduce the distinction between object and subject. Her two works in the show feature an extended latex arm and deconstructed steel fountains, pointing to transformations and mistranslations within a strange environment of exchange. Balema has exhibited in Europe and the USA, including solo presentations at Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam (2013), 1646, Den Haag (2013) and The Vanity, Los Angeles; and group shows at The Approach, London (2013), Casco, Utrecht (2012) and Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (2011). www.olgabalema.com

Neil Beloufa (b.1985, France, lives in Paris)

Beloufa’s sculptures, assemblages, videos and installations use displaced, condensed or fictional images. Beloufa presents five works (including two from the David Roberts collection); panels of obscured electrical parts that hint at an opaque circuit system, and large freestanding ‘souvenirs’ made from a re-configured fragments of a wall built for a previous show. Beloufa has exhibited in art institutions and film festivals, including solo shows at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013) and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); and group shows at SongEun Artspace, Seoul (2013) and Royal College Of Art, London (2013). He participated in Venice and Lyon Biennales (2013), and is currently preparing a solo show at ICA, London. He is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; Galleria Zero, Milan and Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris. www.neilbeloufa.com

Nicolas Deshayes (b.1983, France, lives in London)

Deshayes works with glossy, synthetic materials (such as anodised aluminium and vacuum-formed plastic) to create skins, bulges and organic forms with both liquid and solid properties. The contrasting wipe-clean industrial aesthetics and the bodily undertones of his sculptures play on our visceral response to an object. For the exhibition Deshayes is making a new series of vacuum-formed sculptures and an installation of discreet cast aluminum reliefs. Deshayes has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at S1 Artspace, Sheffield (2013), Brand New Gallery, Milan (2013) and Jonathan Viner, London (2012); and group shows at Galerie Opdhal, Stavanger (2013), The Approach, London (2013) and Carl Freedman Gallery, London (2013). He is represented by Jonathan Viner Gallery, London. www.nicolasdeshayes.net

David Douard (b.1983, France, lives in Paris)

Douard’s works combine films, soundtracks, tweaked and motorised everyday objects to create environments of overlapping digital, virtual, mechanical and material experiences; including an unsettling animism. He presents a new commission for the show and group of recent works, including a freestanding fountain system; for the first exhibition of his work in the UK. Douard has exhibited extensively in Europe, including solo exhibitions at Signal, Malmö (2013), Les Eglises, Chelles (2012) and Bétonsalon, Paris (2012); and group shows at the Biennale de Lyon (2013), T293, Naples (2013) and 1857, Oslo (2013). He is currently preparing a solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014) and Sculpture Center, New York (2014). Douard is represented by High Art, Paris.

Renaud Jerez (b.1982 France, lives in Berlin)

Jerez’s installations use digital and material presences – mummified plumbing systems, abstracted computer animations, sand, plastic, fragments of decoration – and the vocabulary of the Internet and advertising to evoke an uneasy landscape of contemporary consumerism. They explore the systems of an increasingly intangible materialism. Jerez presents the latest iteration of his project Greed (2013–), premiered at MOT International, London in 2013, commissioned for the exhibition. Jerez’s exhibitions include a solo presentation at Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris (2014); a solo exhibition at MOT International, London (2013); and a group show at Sandy Brown, Berlin (2013). He is represented by Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris.

Sam Lewitt (b.1981 born in Los Angeles, lives in New York)

Lewitt’s works examine communications technologies (both obsolete and cutting edge) that are integral to our contemporary life; systems which are simultaneously familiar and obscure to us. For Fluid Employment, 2012, the artist used ferrofluid, a material used to make hard drives that responds to a magnet yet retains the plasticity of a liquid, straddling both states. Lewitt presents two new and two existing works from his Stored Value Field Separators series, building sculptures from credit and loyalty cards. Lewitt has exhibited globally, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln (2013), Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2011) and Gallery Taka Ishii, Kyoto, Japan (2009); and group shows at MUMOK, Vienna (2013), Whitney Biennial (2012), Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles (2011) and Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2011). He is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York and Daniel Buchholz, Cologne and Berlin.

Marlie Mul (b.1980 The Netherlands, lives in Berlin and London)

Marlie Mul’s work is often informed by everyday outdoor scenarios, such as air vents that have been appropriated as ashtrays, or gritty rain puddles. Cigarette butts and litter here are traces of human behaviour, suggesting the invisible presence of a virtual population or crowd. Sensitive to the banality of their imagery and narrative, Mul’s sculptures portray these common situations with such artificiality that they are rather a representation of ‘realistic’ than of ‘real’. Mul has had solo shows at Croy Nielsen, Berlin (2013); Fluxia, Milan (2012); Autocenter, Berlin (2012); SPACE, London (2012); and participated in group shows at Vilma Gold, London (2013), M/L Artspace, New York (2013); Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2011, 2013) and HHDM, Vienna (2012). Last year, Mul also co-curated the group exhibition “Door Between Either and Or” together with Judith Hopf at Kunstverein München.

Magali Reus (b.1981 The Netherlands, lives in London)

Reus is interested in the strategic manipulation of everyday things, translating a known object or image into forms more frustrated and collapsed. In Reus’ works, handmade approximations of these things are resistant or exhausted, abstracted from their expected functions. Making sculpture and video, her work is at once sanitized and hermetic, but agitated also by the debris and proximity of an inevitable human touch. Reus presents three sculptures, each mimicking the form and image of a ubiquitous waiting room chair, but all so graphically rendered that they deny the conventional invitation to sit or linger. Selected solo exhibitions include: Highly Liquid, Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Out of Empty, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (2013); ON, The Approach, London (2012). She is included in Assembly: recent artists film and video 2008-2013, Tate Britain and has forthcoming group exhibitions at Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; De Hallen, Haarlem. Forthcoming solo shows for 2014 include Freymond Guth Fine Arts, Zurich and Circuit, Lausanne. Her solo exhibition In Lukes and Dregs currently runs at The Approach, London until February 16th. She is represented by The Approach, London. www.magalireus.com

Rachel Rose (b.1986, lives in New York)

Rose’s work addresses the boundaries between life and death. The work featured here was shot in a cryogenic facility, a robotics perception lab and zoos across America, transposing through these places the sensation of being alive, yet feeling dead. Rose probes that underneath this feeling of dying is a fundamental mutability, felt in our everyday living, sense of being and time. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Electronic Arts Intermix, NY (2013), MOCA Miami (2013), Kunstverein Düsseldorf, DE (2013), Night Gallery, LA (2013) forthcoming, a new commission for Sculpture Center, NY (2014). www.rachellrose.com

Michael E. Smith (b.1977 USA, lives in Detroit)

Smith’s objects, pictures and videos appear as physical reconstructions of emotional disfigurement; his exhibitions as an archeology of humanity. He counters the ecological and economic disaster of our era with a materialism of basic needs, displayed as a layout of ruined bodies. Smith exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (2012), Culturgest Lisbon (2012), La Biennale de Rennes (2012), Ludwig Forum Aachen (2013) and CAPC, Bordeaux (2014). He is represented by KOW, Berlin.

Curators:

Vincent Honoré is a curator and writer based in Paris and London, and founding Director of DRAF, London (2008–present). Formerly, he worked as a Curator at Tate Modern, London, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He writes regularly on contemporary art for journals and magazines.

Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in New York and London. She regularly contributes to Frieze, Artforum, Mousse, ArtReview and Art Monthly. Recent curatorial projects include Cally Spooner’s And you were wonderful, on stage, at the National Academy Museum, New York, during Performa 13 (2013), with Charles Aubin; and Deliquesce, Jonathan Viner, London (2012), with Emma Astner.

Alexander Scrimgeour is a writer, editor, and curator based in London and Berlin. He is a regular correspondent for Artforum, where he worked as an editor from 2006 to 2012. He is also an editor for the bilingual Austrian art magazine Spike Art Quarterly and the new online publishing house Fiktion.

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An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré. With Juliette Blightman, Marcel Broodthaers, Jason Dodge, Félix González-Torres, Rodney Graham, David Maljkovic, Bruce McLean, Katrina Palmer, John Stezaker, Danh Vo.

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The “ghost of an image” is an expression used by the English artist John Stezaker to describe the process by which images disappear, travel across time, and rematerialize. It’s a suitable subtitle for Orpheus Twice, an exhibition investigating image and absence.

This project was nourished by sources as diverse as the problematic and hotly debated restoration two years ago of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne; Laurence Giavarini’s essay on a painting by Nicolas Poussin; and Jakuta Alikavazovic’s recent novel The Blond and the Bunker. 

Often in these sources, the mythological couple of Orpheus and Eurydice appears as a metaphor for the act of seeing and creating. The story is well known. At her wedding, while trying to escape from a satyr, Eurydice suffered a fatal snake bite to her heel. Her body was discovered by Orpheus who, overcome with grief, played such sad and mournful songs that all the nymphs and gods wept. On their advice, Orpheus travelled to the underworld where his music softened the hearts of Hades and Persephone, who agreed to allow Eurydice to return with him to earth on one condition: on his way back, he must walk in front of her and not look back until they had both reached the upper world. He set off with Eurydice following, but on their way he turned to look at her. She vanished again, this time forever.

Many renditions and interpretations of the myth exist. One of these focuses less on the existential and sentimental aspects of the story than on its metaphorical definition of artistic inspiration. In an essay, from 1955, entitled The Gaze of Orpheus, the French author and theorist Maurice Blanchot writes: “[Eurydice] is the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead”. As often with Blanchot, a classical myth is read through a highly personal vision, leading towards an understanding of the creative act.

He continues: “The work draws whoever devotes himself to it towards the point where it undergoes the ordeal of impossibility: an experience which is precisely nocturnal, which is that of the night”. Blanchot makes an analogy between Orpheus’s gaze, the creative process, and its philosophical interpretation. The path taken by Orpheus from light to dark, and back to light in search of his muse (inspiration) is symbolic of the artist’s journey from reality to the edges of the surreal. The force that enables Orpheus to cross the boundaries and to descend to Eurydice is that of art. Rendering this precise moment when the artist’s control is undermined, when an image (Eurydice) is about to disappear, is the object of the work of art.

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…drawn from darkness to light…

re-articulated as a gap

…

With support from:

And additional support from Hauser and Wirth, London and Lisson Gallery, London

An exhibition curated by Pablo León de la Barra with Carmen Juliá. With Diego Barboza, Ulises Carrión, Felipe Ehrenberg, David Lamelas, Leopoldo Maler, Hélio Oiticica, Pablo & Delia, Cecilia Vicuña and additional works by Artists for Democracy, Signals Newsbulletin, Ray Barrie, John Dugger, and Clay Perry.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Images here.

Pablo León de la Barra is the sixth guest curator invited by DRAF to be part of the Curators’ Series. ‘Friends of London’ will explore the vibrant and specific context of the Latin American art scene in London in the 60s and 70s. The title of the exhibition is based on a work by Argentinean artist David Lamelas, ‘London Friends’ 1974. Lamelas invited a number of friends to be photographed, thereby creating a remarkable image of the London scene at the time. The pictures were taken by a photographer who worked primarily in fashion and, as a result, the subjects took on glamorous poses. The images are at once fashion photography and personal portraits. They include pictures of the artist Marcel Broodthaers and his wife, London gallery owner Nigel Greenwood, curator and writer Lynda Morris (who played the leading character in Lamelas’s seminal work ‘Film Script (Manipulation of Meaning)’ in 1972), and Kamala Di Tella from the Di Tella family, who initiated the Center for Visual Arts of the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires, the foremost avant-garde cultural institution in Latin America during the 1960s.

‘Friends of London’ at DRAF takes its lead from this work and offers the opportunity to engage with a particular social and artistic scene established in London throughout the 60s and 70s. This exhibition focuses on London as an instrumental destination for artists from Latin America, whose work has previously been examined in the context of their native countries, or in relation to contemporaneous North American works. Through the display of artworks, letters, documents, interviews and publishing projects, the exhibition aims to contextualise the incredibly fertile and symbiotic relationship established between these artists, some political exiles, and their new London environment.

Leaving to one side ideas of nationality and regionalism, this exhibition focuses on London as a place of freedom and experimentation that enabled artists to produce radical works that engaged with issues of participation and collaboration, established new relationships with the public space and fostered art as an effective political tool.

• David Lamelas in Conversation with Lynda Morris (22 June 2013)

David Lamelas will discuss his series London Friends, 1974, with curator Lynda Morris and Pablo Leon de la Barra, curator of Friends of London. Artists from Latin America in London from 196X -197X. They will discuss the course of Lamelas’ work in London during the 70s and the contemporaneous context of his practice.

David Lamelas (b. 1946 in Buenos Aires) was a key figure in the emergence of an international conceptual art in the late 1960s. Originally a sculptor, he became a pioneering film artist. Lamelas has lived and made work across Europe and America. His work has been exhibited in Europe, America and Asia including at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MACBA, Barcelona; Kunsthalle, Berlin; PS1 Contemporary Art centre, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and MOCA, Los Angeles.

Lynda Morris worked for Nigel Greenwood Inc Ltd from 1971 to 1974 who published David Lamelas Publication 1970. Morris established his bookshop and curated The Book as Artwork 1960-72  for Germano Celant. Lamelas’ Filmscript  starred Morris at the time and was set in the Gallery. She was also one of the London Friends. Lamelas arranged for her to be the London correspondent of Art Press in Paris. They have remained friend over the years and Morris wrote about David in the Witte de With and the Vienna Secession catalogues. Morris devised and curated EASTinternational in Norwich 1991 to 2009. She currently has two touring exhibitions Dear Lynda… originated by Matthew Higgs at White Columns in New York and due to open at BQ in Berlin in July and Documenting Cadere 1972-78 originated by MAO and now showing at Artists Space New York.

• Friends of London exhibition tour with David Medalla (6 July 2013)

David Medalla will give a tour of the exhibition and discuss his memories of Latin American artists in London and Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.

David Medalla (b. 1942 in Manila) is a pioneering figure in the areas of kinetic, participatory and live art. His practice is diverse, including sculpture, installations, paintings, drawings, impromptu events and performances. Medalla has been based in Britain on and off since the 1960s, when he co-founded the influential Signals gallery in London and edited the Signals newsbulletin. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including Tate Modern, the Whitechapel, the ICA and the Hayward galleries in London, as well as in Japan, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and the Philippines. Medalla has also lectured widely at universities, art schools and institutions, including a series of lectures on global culture at MOMA, New York.

This exhibition is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England .

Sponsored by Corona Beer.

Supported by the Mexican Embassy, London

ABSTRACT

1. Existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.

2. Dealing with ideas rather than events.

3. Not based on a particular instance; theoretical.

4. Denoting an idea, quality, or state rather than a concrete object.

5. Relating to or denoting art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, colors, and textures: abstract pictures.

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Works of art can fully embody the promesse du bonheur only when they have been uprooted from their native soil and have set out along the path to their own destruction. The procedure which today relegates every work of art to the museum is irreversible. It is not solely reprehensible, however, for it presages a situation in which art, having completed its estrangement from human ends, returns to life.

(Theodor W. Adorno, Valéry Proust Museum)

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CABINET

1. An upright, cupboard like repository with shelves, drawers, or compartments for the safekeeping or display of objects.

2. The box that houses the main components of a computer, such as the central processing unit, disk drives, and expansion slots.

3. A body of persons appointed by a head of state or a prime minister to head the executive departments of the government and to act as official advisers.

4. A small or private room set aside for a specific activity.

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It was Dorner who, in the 1920s, invited Lissitzky to Hannover, Germany, to develop a dynamic display for what he called the “museum on the move.” Having defined the museum as a kraftwerk, he reconfigured the pseudoneutral spaces prevalent at the time with curatorial ideas that seem totally up-to-date even today. On several occasions, he spoke or wrote about the museum as a space of flux or permanent transformation, oscillating between object and process. (“The idea of process has penetrated our system of certainties.”) He envisioned a museum with multiple identities, active, never holding back – in short, pioneering. He talked of the museum as a relative (not an absolute) truth, and contextualized this radical museum within a similarly dynamic concept of art history. He dreamed of the “elastic museum” i.e. flexible displays within an adaptable building.

(Daniel Birnbaum, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Museums on the Move.)

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We occasionally sense that these works were not after all intended to end up between these morose walls, for the pleasure of Sunday strollers or Monday ‘intellectuals’. We are aware that something has been lost and that this meditative necropolis is not the true milieu of art – that so many joys and sorrows, so much anger, and so many labours were not destined one day to reflect the museum’s mournful light. The museum kills the vehemence of painting. It is the historicity of death.

(Merleau-Ponty, Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence)

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Abstract Cabinet is a project created with Nicolas Deshayes, Adham Faramawy, Anthea Hamilton, Celia Hempton, George Henry Longly, and Prem Sahib, curated by Vincent Honoré and Nicoletta Lambertucci.

Abstract Cabinet brings together six London-based artists that in the past few years have been actively operating together through exchange, discussion, and sometimes collaboration. For the first time these artists are exhibited together to investigate whether a dynamic relationship could be a potential movement. The exhibition resists an historicisation of this group, and it asks: is this context strong enough to be an art movement? But can art movements still be relevant? And if so, how might an art institution react to one?

The format of the cabinet, despite its apparent obsolescence, opens up a range of possibilities, and allows the artists to freely transform the exhibition space into a studio and a paradoxical living room with daybeds that are used as plinths, mood board, curtains, candles, and hooks.

George Henry Longly has created the daybeds especially for this project.

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PREM SAHIB on ADHAM FARAMAWY

My most intimate experience of Adham’s work occurred at my desktop when I downloaded his piece Total Flex 2 from Legion-tv.com and found myself enjoying the company of a naked man exercising on my screen. Occasionally this man would disappear, only to resurface again, surprising me with his metallic presence. At other times we’d play more directly; once, I grabbed him and put him in a Beyoncé video. I sent a screen shot to Adham, as did many other cohabiters of this work, and eventually he became viral.

The ubiquity of this downloadable man, his continued endurance and exertion through exercise, became increasingly emotive the longer I spent with him. He had the capacity to blend and exist within different interfaces. This made me wonder how long he would last. Would he outlive the ‘updates’, or someday exist as a newer version – perhaps older and performing different moves?

I found the energy with which he pursued his programmed task (in the here and now of the screen), synonymous with Adham’s work. There is a distinct and unashamed directness about Adham’s handling of the ‘current’ and its implicated technologies. I personally like how the work avoids being self-conscious about this and instead utilises nowness both as position and material.

ADHAM FARAMAWY on ANTHEA HAMILTON

I recently read Chaikamatsu Monazaemon’s comment that art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and unreal. He was talking about Kabuki actors, suggesting that they should favour the imitation of real characters over fictitious ones. This connection between representation, the image, and ‘the real thing’ is key to how I approach Anthea’s works.

Often I’ve felt that, in engaging with Anthea’s installations, I’m being asked to deal with an idiosyncratic system of material choices and image associations. A sculpture comprised of a cut-out of a muscular, young Karl Largerfeld and a small pile of dried beans can be placed in the gallery in such a way that the object flattens, merging with the other assemblages in the room. The installation becomes a tableau. There have been times when this moment is like a ‘magic eye’ print and the installation shimmers between physical presence and allegorical representation.

ANTHEA HAMILTON on NICOLAS DESHAYES

18 May 2013

Dear Nicolas,

Of the group I know you a little less than the others. With Adham, I could discuss working together on Shama Khanna’s Flatness programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival last month (I’ve known him the longest). Had I to do this with Prem, we could discuss growing up in the ethnic ghettos of Greater London, or Disco (I could try and keep up at least). With George – I’m not sure, something about Paris and residencies. With Celia, that she comes from the same place as where some of my older sisters live, the current and future brilliance of Alex Padfield (and shared territory we never mention: using sexualised imagery of men in our work and being women in a gay world – too reductive…)

But with you, I know the work first and look to what you do formally and professionally, and it makes me have to (obviously too personally and literally) respond to say that the surface your works simulate remind me of the yoghurts my father ate when he was very sick.  The cold rich dairy of Greek yoghurt, with synthetic strawberry compote at the bottom, a foil peel-off lid and a teaspoon – bed-bound appreciation.

After this show, I’m sure we’ll have much chattier stuff to share.  As I finish now, I remember a rich woman with a full-length fur coat at your and George’s Vanille show at Valentin in Paris last January; you tried it on. Looked good.

NICOLAS DESHAYES on GEORGE HENRY LONGLY

GEORGE HENRY LONGLY on CELIA HEMPTON

Celia Hempton Radiant Touch.

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CELIA HEMPTON on PREM SAHIB

When I first met Prem’s work, I responded to formal and surface characteristics, seduced by its immaculate and contained precision. Then, as I got to know him, I began to learn so much more about a way of making art that is alien to mine. I am very impulsive; I look, and then I do – and think usually at the same split second. But Prem’s meticulous attention to detail and his relentless analysing of things before he does them (as well as during and after) typifies his work and approach  – deliberating for what seems like days and weeks over minute changes in colour and form.  I think this makes the work fizz or feel full of something that is about to come out but doesn’t, a tension and electric static charge, like when you are in the presence of someone you want to have sex with and they want to with you, but you can’t because circumstances in that moment prevent you from it.

The work appears stand-offish to me to begin with, but then it reveals itself eventually.  Sometimes slowly and sensually, sometimes aggressively. Objects are poised perfectly – a black glass neon shape near the ceiling positioned behind and above you, something you might not notice straightaway but which you catch sight of as you leave a room; or the hard, white-and-black, upright protrusions from the wall that, though architectural, designed, and frozen-seeming, have such a human and tactile presence, glowing and breathing from behind. Incidentally, I have always found repression to be sexy.  I think it’s something to do with the idea of an impending explosion of what has been built up.

Study is the generic name for a series of focused case-studies of works from the collection. Each involves a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery. The work is studied in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Each Study is made available in a booklet.

An artwork is a system that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate, instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme will research.

To study is to devote time and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also refer to a piece of work done for practice or as an experiment. It is this latter sense that we would like to pursue – of study not as the transmission of knowledge or an act of contemplation, but rather as an invitation to act.

Study is not an attempt to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on the provisional as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise in responding to the infinite demands of the work, not meant to bring forth any historical truth but rather to enter into a true dialogue with the work.

In this sense Study is not finite, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at the very least, spending some time with it.

The Fourth Study is Eyes by Martin Boyce. For the first time an external critic, Steven Cairns, has been commissioned to write a text for the booklet.

Steven Cairns is Associate Curator of Artists’ Film and Moving Image at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He recently coordinated the LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images 2012, curated Alma Mater (2011/12) a LUX annual touring programme of recent Moving Image from the UK and has contributed to numerous screening programmes and panel discussions. He is also a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze among other publications.

Martin Boyce was born in 1967 in Glasgow, where he lives and works.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

WEAPON is the first solo exhibition in a London institution by French artist Benoît Maire (b. 1978). Arising from his interest in philosophy and conceptual art, but nonetheless immensely formal, his work reveals him as an artist who has inherited as much from surrealism and minimalism as from Marcel Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys. This aspect of his practice is the focus of the current exhibition curated by DRAF’s director, Vincent Honoré, with assistant curator Nicoletta Lambertucci.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Benoît’s work often involves collage and assemblage, forcing structures, references and materials into paradoxical but productive relationships. The original sources,  frequently borrowed from art history, are not crucial; what matters is to make cognitive structures collide and to find a wild and sensual rapport with theory and culture. Besides a discourse on theory as shape, Maire proposes a surprising relationship to freedom (of interpretation, at the very least) and thought as co-production.

This exhibition introduces a large group of new works: photographs, sculptures and videos, produced for London. The entire exhibition can be read as a cohesive assemblage of autonomous works , in which art becomes a sort of aesthetic terrorism. The exhibition revolves around two main motifs: vision and measuring devices as weapons.

Weapons are objects the artist creates as measuring tools. Objects become weapons either through performative actions captured on video, or through assemblage. By this translation, the object gains a new meaning and function: it becomes a weapon and takes on violent associations. As the artist explains: ‘I wear on my wrist a weapon that gives me time. In the bathroom, I stand on a weapon that says a weight. In my pocket, I have a multi-function weapon that gives me the next day’s weather and today’s price of gold and wakes me up when I need to. I have a weapon that destroys time, one that destroys my being, others that destroy the landscape, the market, and the dream.’ The measuring device thus disrupts and perverts our relation to the world. The question posed in WEAPON is, Are we losing or destroying our existential relationship to the world through our constant calculations of it?

DRAF, a museum remodelled as a laboratory, becomes itself a place for measurement, where a mirror can double space and a series of sculptures frame and re-frame it.

Benoît Maire has presented works at the Luma Foundation, Arles; I.C.A., London; Magasin, Grenoble; Tate Modern, London; and Centre Pompidou, Paris. He has had solo exhibitions in numerous art centres in Europe. He is represented in London by Hollybush Gardens, in France by Cortex Athletico, and in Berlin by Croy Nielsen.

WEAPON was organized by DRAF, London, in collaboration with Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, and supported by Institut Français and Fluxus, with the participation of Chateau Citran and additional support from Cura Magazine and Mousse Magazine. Our media partner is Spike Magazine.

With a performance of For Philip Guston by Morton Feldman and works by Katinka Bock, Luis Camnitzer, Jason Dodge, Dora Garcia, Pierre Huyghe, Marie Lund, Benoît Maire, Kris Martin, Manuela Ribadeneira, Pietro Roccasalva, Adam Thompson, and Lawrence Weiner…

The Epilogue will be a movement towards the void, emptying the exhibition space to explore the architecture and the volume, revealing semi-permanent works and interventions in the building.

MORTON FELDMAN – FOR PHILIP GUSTON. “Listening to it is to become immersed in a unique musical world, one built from the simplest of four-note motifs (C,G,A flat, E flat, an anagram of Cage, the composer who introduced Guston and Feldman in 1950), in which the smallest details or change of emphasis assumes huge, expressive significance. Every so often the original motif returns, but each time its significance has shifted, because of a new context and the experience of what has happened since it was last heard. In that way Feldman maps his way around this unique, fragile musical space. It’s the most extraordinary journey” (Andrew Clements) and this is the journey we propose to share with you to close the doors of A House of Leaves. The event celebrates Guston’s anniversary as well as the acquisition of a work by Guston for DRAF’s collection. For Philip Guston (1984) a trio for flutes, tuned percussion, and piano will be perfomed by musicians from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. It will start at 1pm on Saturday 23 February. The work lasts almost four and a half hours: as per Morton Feldman’s wishes, you will be allowed to come and go.

A House of Leaves is an exhibition imagined as an experience of time: the exhibition will change constantly, the experience will never be the same, with works being replaced by others to gradually alter the general context and naturally evolve from one movement to the next. The title references US novelist Mark Z. Danielewski’s eponymous novel in which different storylines, told in different styles, intertwine. The story is centred around a house which keeps changing and in which the interior dimensions become larger than its exterior over time. Much like in Danielewski’s novel, A House of Leaves borrows different languages, tells multiple narratives in different ways, and asks its viewer to become co-author in order to present a collective effort to define an art form – in this instance the contemporary art museum, from its collection, displays, special commissions and loans, to its educational and interpretation system. This troubled museum we are creating abandons any authoritarian voice. It reflects a trust and respect for the works the museum is responsible for, to the guests joining the project, and to the visitors engaging with it.

The exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, Director and Curator, DRAF, and inaugurates the new premises in Mornington Crescent, a 19^th century former furniture factory.

An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré with works by Danai Anesiadou, Ida Applebroog, Hans Bellmer, Jonathan Binet, Katinka Bock, Trisha Brown, John Cage, Ben Cain, Luis Camnitzer, Martin Creed, Patrizio Di Massimo, Jason Dodge, Morton Feldman, Ryan Gander and Mario Garcia Torres, Laura Gannon, Dora Garcia, David Gorton, Jeppe Hein, Neil Heyde, Pierre Huyghe, Chosil Kil, Lina Lapelyte, Bob Law, Marie Lund, Bruce McLean, Benoît Maire, Babette Mangolte, Kris Martin, Jonathan Monk, Paul Mount, Roman Ondak, Marlo Pascual, Falke Pisano, Manuela Ribadeneira, Pietro Roccasalva, Lorna Simpson, Simon Starling, Adam Thompson, and Lawrence Weiner, etc.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

A Silent Score

Silent Score by Pierre Huygue opens the third and final movement of A House of Leaves, the inaugural exhibition in our new building. This dense and multi-layered project has enabled us to introduce and develop the major motifs in our programme.

Conceived as a process that would last six months, the exhibition has been structured as a symphony in three movements and an epilogue, each section deriving from the close study of a single key work. The first of these, Echo VIII, a late sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, from 2007, cast in bronze from her jumper, defined the First Movement, in being part body, part abstraction. The Second Movement began with Fuji, an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter, from 1996,  which, like many of the artist’s abstract works, was realized through the performative process of erasure. Silent Score, which introduces the Third Movement, is a transcribed performance piece by Pierre Huyghe, originally performed in 1997, and based on a live recording of John Cage’s 4’33’’ , otherwise known as Silence. After the Third Movement, an Epilogue will move the exhibition towards the void, emptying the gallery space to explore its architecture and volume. This movement will not develop from a single artwork; rather, it will gradually reveal the long-term works – special commissions and interventions – inscribed in the building itself.

This project was planned as a continuous dissolve, the exhibition self-organizing internally, proceeding mostly from the artworks and the building themselves. In constant flux, never the same and never entire, composed and completed by its visitors: the museum as deferred action and imaginary space. Our museum is intended to be a productive medium in its own right. By opening with an exhibition structured as a metonymic chain – from body to abstraction, abstraction to performance, performance to volume, volume to site – we hoped to accentuate different aspects of our project for the museum: as structure and collection; as academy; as stage; and lastly, as site.

With the third movement, we are now looking at the museum as a stage. The exhibition assumes a musical state of mind, inspired by the rhythms, choreographies, sequences and repetitions of the artworks, which are like musical instruments (after John Cage) for an institution whose main duty is to dance (after Paul Holdengräber). Not a museum as temple, supermarket, mass media outlet, fun park, or forum: but a museum as a score  – free, uncertain, non-productive, and fictive – outside ordinary rules.

Study is the generic name for a series of focused case-studies of works from the collection. Each involves a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery. The work is studied in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Each Study is made available in a booklet.

An artwork is a system that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate, instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme will research.

To study is to devote time and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also refer to a piece of work done for practice or as an experiment. It is this latter sense that we would like to pursue – of study not as the transmission of knowledge or an act of contemplation, but rather as an invitation to act.

Study is not an attempt to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on the provisional as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise in responding to the infinite demands of the work, not meant to bring forth any historical truth but rather to enter into a true dialogue with the work.

In this sense Study is not finite, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at the very least, spending some time with it.

The third Study is: Pose Piece For Three Plinths Work, Bruce McLean

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré with works by Sara Barker, Phyllida Barlow, Nina Beier, Karla Black, Carol Bove, Ben Cain, Varda Caivano, Luis Camnitzer, Marieta Chirulescu, Keith Coventry, Tony Cragg, Jason Dodge, Alex Dordoy, Nikolas Gambaroff, Gary Hume, Ian Law, George Henry Longly, Marie Lund, Benoît Maire, Victor Man, Kris Martin, Katy Moran, Anselm Reyle, Manuela Ribadeneira, Gerhard Richter, Pietro Roccasalva, David Schutter, Adam Thompson, Lesley Vance, Gary Webb, Lawrence Weiner and Alison Wilding.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Notes on the museum as school

1. Gerhard Richter

This exhibition, A House of Leaves, self-organizes internally: its curatorial methodology is derived from the study of the three major artworks structuring the exhibition itself, and the gallery where these artworks are successively displayed. The exhibition is conceived as a symphony in three movements plus an epilogue. The first movement, structured around a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, looked at hybrid forms, from fragmented figures to abstraction. An abstract painting by Gerhard Richter now introduces the second movement, an exploration of abstraction, minimalism and performance. In early 2013, a performance by Pierre Huyghe will take us into the third movement, in which performance, rhythm, and volume are investigated. A House of Leaves will end with an epilogue, a final movement towards the void; the exhibition space will be emptied, exposing its architecture and volume, to reveal the museum’s long-term works, special commissions and interventions that have been embedded into the material structure of the building.

2. Process

The constant substitution of artworks over the course of the exhibition gradually alters the overall context and evolves naturally from one movement into the next. Since the exhibition is in a constant state of flux, it is never the same and never whole; it is impossible to experience entirely, in all its sequences, but must be virtually (re)composed and completed by visitors. The exhibition thus functions on several planes simultaneously: real, virtual, and fictional. Like the house in the novel by Mark Z. Danielewski from which the exhibition borrows its title, the museum hosting such an exhibition becomes a productive medium in its own right, involving visitors in the (co)production of an artistic situation: the exhibition as deferred action and mental space.

3. Intention

Ideally, a museum is a site where thoughts and visions are formed and transformed, culture disassembled and the contemporary redesigned. Our aim at DRAF is to promote exhibitions not as pre-established formulas or didactic presentations of items, but as prototypes and experiences. From the start (2008), we have conceived DRAF as a forum for discussion and a structure acting beyond the confines of an exhibition space, a generative site that will establish and support an informal cultural community in a unique context.

4. Mouseion

More than a collection of artifacts, a museum should be defined as a collective narrative, a cognitive theatre that must be continually examined and confirmed through a variety of individual positions. After all, the word “museum” finds its origin in the Greek “mouseion”, a temple dedicated to the muses, whose activities were akin to those of a university or philosophical academy, an institute for studies and a community of scholars and thinkers. The pre-modern form of the museum was a space for musing, a space for the production and exchange of ideas.

5. Against interpretation

“A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something: it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or a commentary on the world… (…) Which is to say that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than knowledge of something (like a fact or a moral judgement in itself).” (Susan Sontag) If we consider an artwork not solely as an object but as an experience, we might also consider the gallery as a hybrid space in permanent reconfiguration: all at once a gallery, an auditorium, a screening room, and a performance space. Here all hierarchies are rejected, and a conversation is as important as a six-month display. A House of Leaves can then become a house of signs and the museum a mode of representation. In this space, everything is exhibition and any exhibition is an experience. Together we create a powerhouse for the creation, redeployment, and dissemination of our collective knowledge.

6. Programmes 2008 – 2011 – 2012

In 2008, we started to invite external curators with our programme The Curators’ Series. In 2011, we launched Fig., a programme which explores how knowledge can be co-produced and shared through an innovative format of talks, conferences, research projects, and book presentations. Within this flexible format, which can vary from an event to a temporary installation to a radio programme, Fig. aims  to trigger new questions and alternative models by considering knowledge not as transmission of information, but as a performative co-production. Now, in 2012, we are opening our Studio: a laboratory, workshop, theatre, school, meeting room, and library, where we can meet, discuss, co-produce ideas, and examine works. This space, like a salon, is private, but from time to time will host public activities and discussions. Artist Ruth Beale has designed special shelving and furniture for our event space on the first floor at DRAF and will present a series of ‘kitchen conversations’ starting on November 17^th 2012. For the first session of this Ad Hoc Salon Series, Ruth Beale invites artist Giles Round to discuss his research into American designer Ken Isaacs’ theories of matrix design and 1974 publication How to Build Your Own Living Structures.

7. Luis Camnitzer

On leaving the building, please read the façade.

Study is the generic name for a series of focused case-studies of works from the collection. Each involves a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery. The work is studied in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Each Study is made available in a booklet.

An artwork is a system that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate, instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme will research.

To study is to devote time and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also refer to a piece of work done for practice or as an experiment. It is this latter sense that we would like to pursue – of study not as the transmission of knowledge or an act of contemplation, but rather as an invitation to act.

Study is not an attempt to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on the provisional as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise in responding to the infinite demands of the work, not meant to bring forth any historical truth but rather to enter into a true dialogue with the work.

In this sense Study is not finite, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at the very least, spending some time with it.

The second Study is: Machine Gun and Figure, Carol Bove

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Study is the generic name for a series of focused case-studies of works from the collection. Each involves a single work, displayed on its own in a gallery. The work is studied in depth: from its techniques, origin and history to its position in the artist’s practice and contemporary debates. Each Study is made available in a booklet.

An artwork is a system that cannot be reduced only to an object or an index (certificate, instructions, etc.). It also includes the histories (material and conceptual), the trajectories (physical or virtual) and the narratives (past or to come) generated by the artwork: this is what this programme will research.

To study is to devote time and attention to a particular subject, to acquire knowledge. It can also refer to a piece of work done for practice or as an experiment. It is this latter sense that we would like to pursue – of study not as the transmission of knowledge or an act of contemplation, but rather as an invitation to act.

Study is not an attempt to capture or seize but a methodology of encounter and the insistence on the provisional as both form and content within the process of research. It is an exercise in responding to the infinite demands of the work, not meant to bring forth any historical truth but rather to enter into a true dialogue with the work.

In this sense Study is not finite, but demands the reader to take up multiple positions and viewpoints. More than anything, it asks the viewer to engage with the artwork by, at the very least, spending some time with it.

The first Study is: Senza Titolo (Dopo la strage degli innocenti, Anonimo, verso 1400), Victor Man

An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré with works by Horst Ademeit, Ida Applebroog, Phyllida Barlow, Nina Beier, Louise Bourgeois, Bettina Buck, Miriam Cahn, Keith Coventry, Tony Cragg, Enrico David, Matthew Day Jackson, Shannon Ebner, Thomas Houseago, Bethan Huws, Chosil Kil, Martin Kippenberger, John Latham, Alvin Lucier, Marie Lund, Benoît Maire, Victor Man, Kris Martin, Eddie Peake, Man Ray, Steve Reich, Pietro Roccasalva, Wilhelm Sasnal, Rebecca Warren, Lawrence Weiner.

A Museum (1) of Leaves (2)

An exhibition curated by Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp with works by Caroline Achaintre, Phyllida Barlow, Yto Barrada, Morton Bartlett, Bram Bogart, Boyle Family, Sir Frank Brangwyn, Peter Buggenhout, Gerard Byrne, Carter, Susan Collis, Burt Glinn, George Condo, John Currin, Jules Dalou, Thomas Demand, VALIE EXPORT, Graham Hudson, Tamara De Lempicka, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Manders, Susan Meiselas, Marlo Pascual, Grayson Perry, Seth Pick, Man Ray, Santiago Sierra, David Shrigley, Jamie Shovlin, Andreas Slominski, Oscar Tuazon, Gavin Turk, and Douglas White.

Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp are the fifth guest curators invited by DRAF to be part of the Curators’ Series. The title for the exhibition is taken from Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel where two Parisian copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet meet, become dear friends, and stoke each other’s curiosity to know the world and its rational, post-Enlightenment ways better. They become autodidacts of a dozen different orders, teaching themselves everything from agriculture to medicine. However, despite their best intellectual intentions, any application of the often contradictory knowledge they recklessly accumulate almost always results in confusion, failure or disaster. Yet success is not entirely elusive. One moment a given principle works, whereas in the next it doesn’t. This in turn leads them to continually cry in vain, Où est la règle? (Where is the rule?), as if the clarity and understanding of the supposedly knowable world promised by the Age of Reason was but a farce. In a time when any one individual can access and amass vast and even arcane stores of information, Flaubert’s hapless antiheroes seem to be both prescient harbingers and symbols of our era.

Their headlong approach can also be said to implicitly describe a good portion of what takes place in contemporary art today, in which we are faced with an obscure and at times questionable expertise on a bewildering multiplicity of subjects. Seeking to render this implicit tendency explicit and examine its implications, Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Compendious Quest for Beauty sees the hasty methodology of the perplexed copyists applied to the field of curating. By effectively becoming Bouvard and Pécuchet, the curators liberally allow themselves to engage in the foredoomed hubris of trying to define one of the most protean and subjective qualities of all: beauty. They do so by using a format that is a byproduct of the Enlightenment itself: the exhibition.

The selection of works in the exhibition was deliberately limited to DRAF’s vast and variegated collection of more than 1800 works. The curators outlined ten categories of beauty with the intention of disobeying and scrambling the traditional history of aesthetics. Indeed, the art works presented in the show are arranged within unwieldy and contradictory criteria, which range from egregious misreading to mutual contradiction and from poetic fancy to traditionally acceptable interpretation. Categories of beauty include: Classic; Expressive; Female Nude; Memento Mori; Realism; Landscape; Moral; Outsider art; Abstraction; and the Sublime.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

“Varying degrees of presence lead to different strengths of voice, tensions. The intimate is measured and restrained. A library of nuance is taken from a private studio activity, to a public site, a public moment. Halfway objects provide a starting point. Things come into being in their very utterance, emerging through the telling. I question which of my actions ‘hold’ their own, what can stay. Some insist, some withdraw. The work sits on the boundary of completion, where tenses co-exist.” Lydia Gifford, 2011

Lydia Gifford’s artistic research is an enquiry of the language and possibilities of painting, of painterly thought, which are subsequently allocated and transposed by means of subtle actions,  gestures, ideas and processes into a physical space. This activity, like a silent choreography, underpins ones reading of the  work. The exhibition is marked as a common-ground  where the works mutually create points of fragmentation and linger, in which they are to be activated and meaning is to be reinvented by the presence of the viewer.

For the DRAF, Gifford creates new in-situ installations in the gallery that prior to the opening reception, will become her studio, her testing ground, her stage and her mental space. With Gifford, the works are never detached from their context, they are on the contrary originated by the context as much as they create their own conditions of perception and sometimes production. Gifford investigates painting as a temporal attempt to visually crystallize a fragile moment of surfacing and its temporal indecision.

Lydia Gifford (b.1979, U.K) lives and works in London. This exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, director and curator, DRAF.

Miriam Cahn’s work emerged from a compelling physical experience instilled by the performative happenings of the 70s and is heavily influenced by the feminist movement of the 1960s. First structured around performances, large black charcoal drawings and interventions in the street (for which she was arrested in Basel), her practice grew to include films, music, photography and the medium for which she is perhaps best known—painting. Cahn’s paintings are uncommon and immediately recognisable: an extraordinary colorist, she uses vivid pink, violet and blue to represent ghostly silhouettes, faces and animals. Cahn works in series, some of which are related to political issues, for instance her series of works on Sarajevo or the Iraq war.

The exhibition opens with the room installation Schlafen (1997), comprising of thirteen paintings of lying figures of different sizes. The lying figure in Cahn’s imagery has often been associated with the war and its disasters; nonetheless the reading of these paintings remains ambiguous.

A second room installation, RAUMICH räumlichich (2010-11) follows. Shown in London for the first time, the work consists of ten portraits. The performative element of Miriam Cahn’s work is just as prevalent as her own corporeality and its influence on the formation of her pieces. The body is not only the object of contemplation, but also the medium with which the artist’s corporeal images are expressed. This installation, probably one of the most ambitious she has produced, expresses a number of her preoccupations together with revealing a wide range of techniques and forms.

Finally, the third room consists of an installation made of various existing works including some notebooks with drawings Cahn has never shown, alongside some of her latest paintings and photographs. Connecting the various media she works across—painting, drawing, performance, film, photography and music—Cahn sets the works in correspondence with each other within the given space. By allocating her works into different series she has not only created a private index, dividing the paintings into cycles, but also demarcates direct positions, which—in the whole and especially when they are hung together—interact with each other as autonomous bodies of work.

Miriam Cahn (b. 1949, Switzerland) lives and works in Basel and Bergell (GR), Switzerland. Her works are included in the collections of museums all over the world, significant solo exhibitions have been held at the Kunsthalle of Basel, Musée la Chaux-de-Fonds, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, Kunsthaus of Zurich, Kunstverein of Hanover, Musée Rath of Geneva, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Tate Gallery in London, Museum of Modern Art of New York, Cornerhouse in Manchester. She was included in Documenta 7 in 1982 and represented Switzerland at the 41st Venice Biennial, in 1984.

This exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, director and curator, DRAF.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Download press release here.

An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré with works by Özlem Altin, Neil Beloufa, Elad Lassry and Rinus Van de Velde.

How do we inhabit an image? The exhibition explores how alternative knowledge and counter-memories exist from the displacement (misplacement, condensation or fictionalization) of collected images. The works in the exhibition explore the construction and transposition of narrative systems applied to systems of representation and images’ production and dissemination. The separation of roles between authors, actors, protagonists and observers in the images’ treatment and manipulation leave them as unanswered enigmas in which meaning is to be reinvented through an active participation to the reading of the works.

Özlem Altin (b. 1977, Germany) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through her work Özlem Altin explores ideas surrounding the body and it’s representation in imagery. It is through the image of the body that she induces concepts concerned with disappearance, shadow, and memory. Her extensive research has amassed a large collection of images that can portray these principle interests and allow her to combine imagery in a complex manner, resulting in a final installation that is capable of transcending the original, two-dimensional image. Özlem Altin will be producing a new installation. Özlem Altin has had solo shows at Circus of Berlin, Museum voor Moderne Kunst of Arnhem, Swingr of Vienna, and Tent of Rotterdam. She has also participated in group exhibitions at Kunstraum Innsbruck of Innsbruck, Wiels of Brussels, Stedelijk of Amsterdam, rm 103 of Auckland, and Exile, Berlin among others. It will be her first exhibition in London.

Neil Beloufa (b. 1985, France) lives and works in Paris, France. In his practice Neil Beloufa demonstrates a persisting interest in dichotomies; reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence, all of which he communicates through mediums ranging from sculpture, video, installation and conceptual photography. Through his construction of dichotomies Beloufa is able to deconstruct our perceived ideas of truth and fantasy, thus posing fantasy as truth. Beloufa himself dubs his work as “ethnological sci-fi documentary”. His video Untitled (Algier Modernist House) (2010) charts the story of an Algerian family whose house was forcefully occupied by terrorists. Yet, truth is questioned here through the family’s attempts to imagine how the terrorists may have acted in their home, thus replacing truth with fantasy in order to create documentary. Neil Beloufa will be creating a new site-specific installation in which he will screen Untitled (Algier Modernist House).

Neil Beloufa has had solo shows at Galerie LHK of Paris, Whitebox of New York, and Chung-King Project of Los Angeles. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Netherland Media Art Institute of Amsterdam, Israeli Centre for Digital Art of Holon, The Soap Factory of Minneapolis, Palais de Tokyo of Paris, and National Centre for Contemporary Arts of Moscow. It will be his first exhibition in a public space in London.

Elad Lassry (b. 1977, Israel) lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. Elad Lassry defines his work as “consumed with pictures”. Pulling images from magazines and film archives Lassry recontextualises this imagery in a manner that evokes traditions of story building and of narratives. “I’m fascinated by the collapse of histories and the confusion that results when there is something just slightly wrong in a photograph”. Whilst Lassry is successful in recontextualising this found imagery he never loses touch with its original source, the images never being displayed larger than a magazine spread and the frames painted to match the dominant hue of the original. Elad Lassry will be producing six new works especially for inclusion in the exhibition.

Elad Lassry has had solo shows at Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis, Massimo Di Carlo of Milan, David Kordansky Gallery of Los Angeles. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Kunsthalle of Zurich (curated by Beatrix Ruff), Museum of Modern Art of New York, Kunstverein of Amsterdam, and Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin.

Rinus Van de Velde (b. 1983, Belgium) lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium. Through his practice Rinus Van de Velde explores the narratives of collective myth and collective history. His imagery is first generated by a large archive of collected photographs, which in some way must illustrate these collective myths, before he transforms the image into a large-scale black graphite drawings. This transformation from ‘realistic’ image to ‘allegoric’ image, accompanied by narrative text, is successful in creating work that not only resembles the original photograph in appearance, but also completely reconstitutes the collective myth or history we can take from it. Rinus Van de Velde will be producing an ambitious, new site-specific installation.

Rinus Van de Velde has had solo shows at Galerie Zink of Berlin, Tim van Laere Gallery of Antwerp, Monique Meloche of Chicago, and Susan Nummeroff of New York. He has also participated in group exhibitions at  Extra City of Antwerp, Nanzuka underground of Tokyo, Small Project Space of Amsterdam, Muhka of Antwerp, and Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery of Amsterdam. It will be his first exhibition in London.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition curated by Mathieu Copeland with works by Elena Bajo, Emma Bjornesparr, Julia Rometti and Victor Costales, Gustav Metzger, Roman Opalka, Karin Sander and Niele Toroni together with a book with contributions by Robert Barry, Jarrod Fowler, Nicolas Garait, Karl Holmqvist, Bethan Huws, David Medalla, Yann Sérandour, Cally Spooner, and Sue Tompkins.

Mathieu Copeland is the fourth guest curator invited by The David Roberts Art Foundation to be part of the Curators’ Series. Copeland’s group exhibition, Studies for an Exhibition, looks at how contemporary artists negotiate the relationship between works and spectators, and between works and the context in which they are exhibited and performed. By collaborating with offsite venues that are public as well as educational spaces for cultural promotion, Copeland will produce an environment that will question the idea of what an exhibition can be and how peripheral structures and strategies can affect and inform the center both in terms of space (The David Roberts Art Foundation) as well as common cultural thought.

The exhibition brings together practices that explore the possibility of immateriality and transient nature of an art object, institutional as well as everyday contexts of its making, exhibiting/performing and consuming. The works in the exhibition range from sculpture, installation and performance and include new pieces especially commissioned for the exhibition. A symposium dedicated to the issues of contemporary exhibition-making will be held in May thus extending curatorial enquiry into the discussion. Mathieu Copeland is editing a publication, titled å Etre Lue//An Exhibition to Hear Read (Volume 3), to accompany the exhibition. It is a compilation of specially commissioned performance scripts by the artists participating in the exhibition and other invited contributors. These scripts will be read out at the same hour every day for the duration of the exhibition.

Mathieu Copeland (b. 1977, lives in London) has been developing a practice seeking to subvert the traditional role of exhibitions and to renew our perceptions. An independent curator, he published ‘Perfect Magazine’ in 2003, and curated – among many others, the exhibitions Expat-Art Enter/EAC, Soundtrack for an Exhibition, Alan Vega’s retrospective and initiated the touring A Spoken Word Exhibition. In 2008, he curated A Choreographed Exhibition at the Kunsthalle in St. Gall, Switzerland, and at the Ferme du Buisson in Noisiel, France. In 2009, he co-curated the exhibition VOIDS, A Retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Kunsthalle in Bern. He is also the co-editor of the catalogue Vides/Voids. In 2010, he curated The Continuous Exhibition (echo) at the CNEAI, and Une Exposition (du) Sensible (an exhibition of the sensitive) at the Synagogue de Delme, and initiated the series of An Exhibition to Hear Read. He teaches in the Fine Art master’s program at the HEAD–Geneva University of Art and Design, and lectures in numerous universities and art schools. He also releases a collection of artists’ films            on DVD.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition in two parts by Keren Cytter, curated by Vincent Honoré.

“Every page will correspond with the page following it and the page preceding it. The paragraphs and the sentences in it will correspond with the following and preceding sentences and single words which might not be written in the following lines.

Is this enough?

No

It isn’t -“ Keren Cytter, White Diaries

Avalanche is a solo exhibition by Keren Cytter in two parts, starting in two spaces.  For the first half, Keren Cytter produces an ambitious new work in Berlin and London, consisting of a 4 screen installation that will be shown at DRAF and Pilar Corrias Gallery, all parts linked together, dialoguing in and through the spaces. The second half of the exhibition introduces a sharp change of focus. The artist alters the formula of a solo show, by abandoning the control of its content. Solely at DRAF from February 15, Cytter asks artists Willem de Rooij and Falke Pisano to select a group of her films and therefore to define the content of her exhibition.

For her new project, produced in Berlin and London, Keren Cytter will play with the specific geographic situation of the Foundation inviting her, DRAF, and the gallery representing her, Pilar Corrias. She will produce a new group of works, all linked together and dialoguing in and through the two spaces. She will alter the formula of the solo exhibition, unravelling it in two spaces, with different temporalities. Keren Cytter has worked in a range of medias including videos, drawings and books. In 2008 she formed a dance theatre group D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe Now). With an analytical approach to language and image, she has developed a narrative style using interruptions, repetitions and dissonances. Reflection is not only focused on the form of the image but on its functions, presenting captivating and explicit clichéd roles with a rhythmical interlocking of actions and dialogues.

Alterity, conundrums and absurdities together with no distinctions between the banal and the extreme, or the subjective and the objective are the structure for actions and language situations. Incommunicability informs and penetrates characters that, like in tragedies, are subjected to destiny. They are determined by external factors and remain powerless inside social mechanisms of opinion forming. There is the impression that the everyday is identified with a pathetic and sentimental spectacle. From this perspective. Cytter artistic syntax is an investigation of linguistic and visual truisms reinforced with an impressing quantity of mixed references from the media world of communications and intellectual inspirations.

Keren Cytter was born 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1997–1999 she studied at the Avni Institute in Tel Aviv and in 2002–2004 at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her recent solo exhibitions include Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2010), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2010), X Initiative, New York (2009); CCA Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu (2009); Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporaneo, Huarte (2008). Recent Group exhibitions include 53^rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Younger than Jesus, New Museum, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Manifesta 7, Trentino. She was awarded the Båloise Art Prize at Art Basel in 2006. She also received the Ars Viva Prize in 2008 and the Absolut Art Award in 2009. In 2009, she was shortlisted for the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art in Berlin.

Part I (14/01 – 12/02/2011):

A solo exhibition by Keren Cytter for David Roberts Art Foundation and Pilar Corrias Gallery. Playing with the specific geographic situation of the two sites, Cytter creates a single project in four parts, produced both in Berlin and London. The artist alters the formula of the conventional solo presentation by unravelling her exhibition across the two spaces.
Language is everywhere in Avalanche, and it is a language of duplication and fractures that becomes the prison of the actors’ mind.

Part II (15/02 – 12/03/2011):
In the second part of Cytter’s solo show, at DRAF solely, the artist releases her authorial control by inviting artists Willem de Rooij and Falke Pisano to select the content of her exhibition by choosing a selection of her films.

A selection by Falke Pisano:
15th – 19th February: French Film, 2002 and Les Ruissellements du Diable, 2008.
22nd – 25th February: The hottest day of the year, part 1 and 2, 2010.

A selection by Willem de Rooij:
1st – 5th March: Continuity, 2005.
8th – 12th March: New Age, 2007.
Please note: New Age is the first feature length film by Keren Cytter. It lasts 73 min and will be screened daily at 10.30, 12.00, 13.30, 15.00, 16.30.

All films courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Download press release here.

An exhibition curated by Vincent Honoré, Director, DRAF and Patrizio Di Massimo with works by Paul Chan, George Condo, Keren Cytter, Simon Denny, Patrizio Di Massimo, Simon Fujiwara, Amy Granat/Cinema Zero, Thomas Houseago, Bethan Huws, Nathaniel Mellors, Laure Prouvost, Pietro Roccasalva.

Exploring indexical motifs such as the dissolution of language, the theatricalised body and the “breakdown” of an image, the project questions how a notion such as “exhaustion” can be formally enacted. The exhibition is the outcome of a twelve months dialogue and research between curator Vincent Honoré and artist Patrizio Di Massimo about contemporary practices and curatorial projects.  Most of the artists invited in the exhibition had been asked to participate in this conversation by either entering into a collective dialogue, sharing references or sources, proposing new works and interventions.

Language informs many of the works on view. Abused and manipulated to the point it cannot be conceived even as an imperfect tool for communication, language is characterized by collapses, stammers, fragmentations, collages, ellipses, mixed idioms or unknown tropes. This peculiar manipulation forces language to its dissolution. The same is applied to the body. Choreographed, distorted and fragmented, this “anxious” body manifests the convulsive aspects of the human condition through the burlesque. Body and language can only be overtly theatricalised for them to reflect any intimate existential needs (creativity, History, history of art, decay, religion, eroticism, etc.). “The work of art for those who use it, is an activity of unframing, of rupturing sense, of baroque proliferation or extreme impoverishment which leads to a recreation and a reinvention of the subject itself.” (Felix Guattari  in Chaosmosis)

Such (mis)treatments of language and body naturally lead to the image’s breakdown. Because the works “take by force a structure that was on the verge of asserting itself” (as Felix Guattari wrote on George Condo’s paintings in an early text, 1990), they generate disquieted and often humorous images: incongruous, absurd, anachronistic, kitsch, regressive or hybrid works. It is through this methodical and rhizomatic manipulations, borrowing of classical codes in an iconoclastic approach, that the works eventually address a crisis of the standard representative modalities, and of creation itself.

More Pricks Than Kicks borrows its title from the first book published by Samuel Beckett. This collection of short proses, in particular their witty and dry humour together with the formal qualities of Beckett’s style (as analysed by Gilles Deleuze in his essay The Exhausted), confers its tone to the exhibition. More Pricks Than Kicks intends to create a platform to question creation in its more sinister quality, contemporary time in its less graspable entity. The works are not fixed proposals but active processes: exhausted since themselves are necessary failed attempts to exhaust a form, a medium, a system, a notion. Their linked dynamic is formed by a methodical crisis that cultivates accidents, a crisis that accepts exhaustion as the paradoxical core of any creative dynamic.

Paul Chan (born 1973 Hong Kong, lives in New York). Paul Chan works with video, drawing, collage, text, installation and collaborative site-specific projects. Engaging such fundamental topics as war, religion, philosophy, and desire, his works include a recent large-scale production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in two neighborhoods of New Orleans. […]

Oh Stexts, 2009, wall texts. Oh Stexts is a recent continuation of Paul Chan’s Alternumerics project, started in 2000: a series of customized fonts, in which each letter or digit has been replaced by fragments of texts inspired by various sources. The fonts can be downloaded for free on the artist’s website, so that anyone can use them to explore, as he intends, “the fissure between what we write and what we mean”. Oh Stexts is a collection of texts written by Chan using some of the fonts belonging to the Sade for Fonts Sake series. These fonts have the ability to mutate any attempt to type on a keyboard into a Sadean fantasy; each one of them is based either on a character from Sade’s novels or on actual persons, as diverse as tabloid icon Monica Lewinsky or poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Paul Chan exploits computer fonts making to create monstrous poetic pieces that escape from his control; he goes one step further than the many experimental writing techniques developed along the 20^th century. Thus, this quite basic technology, made to be easy-to-use and immediately efficient (“what you see is what you get”) is diverted to annihilate language, and at the same time, expanding its boundaries.

George Condo (born 1957 Concord, USA, lives in New York). George Condo engages with history of art and gives his “abstract-figurative” version out of it.  Freely using a ”pre-existing” imagery (Velazquez, David, Picasso, Comics, etc.) with in a non nostalgic way, his paintings and sculptures reinvent what he had called “existential portraits” of contemporary modern subjects.  He paints portraits, vanities, still lives, “a whole collection of things”.

Couple on Mattress, 2005, oil on canvas. St. Jerome, 2007, oil on canvas. A humorous element you “could call it a kind of harmonic resolution of opposites”, which “rather than ways of seeing, involves ways of thinking” (Condo). A humorous element, that, far from being superficial, “takes by force a structure that was on the verge of asserting itself.” for a “destabilising, vague, shimmering, disturbing effect” (Guattari on Condo, in a surprising early text). This humour can be generated by absurdity, displacement, misplacement, distortion, hybridity, idiocy, caricature, etc.

Keren Cytter (born 1977 Tel Aviv, lives in Berlin). Keren Cytter writes novels and directs plays, but she is mostly known for her videos and films that portray characters entangled in complex relationships, simultaneously connected and alienated from one another. Inspired by direct experiences and observations of her surroundings as well as the films, plays, and novels of such luminaries as Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Roman Polanski, Jack Smith, Jorge Luis Borges, Tennessee Williams, and Samuel Beckett and mainstays of popular culture like soap operas and science fiction, her work is carefully scripted and produced while maintaining an immediate sense of spontaneity and unpredictability.

Der Spiegel, 2007, video, 4’30. The desire for a young body and the love of a man are at the centre of Der Spiegel (The mirror). The other women comment on her feelings and are continuously trying to manipulate the protagonist. As the “voice” of a pitiless society, they are driving the woman into emotional turmoil. The action reaches a climax when two men appear on the scene. Keren Cytter sets the theatrically condensed plot in an almost empty room. The only props are the mirror and the camera itself. Society is represented by the looks and comments from the others. Time and again the dichotomy between how the protagonist perceives herself and how she is seen by others is highlighted; the relationship between the individual and her social context is staged as a continuous process of collapse.

Simon Denny (born 1982 Auckland, lives in Auckland and Frankfurt). Simon Denny presents his audiences with situations that tend to foreground an engagement with associations of form, purpose and action. Constructions of everyday materials are combined with – and are often comprised of – domestic ready-mades and found imagery. His apparent crude modesty of form belies the poetic intelligence of the works coming-to-be and sculptural conceits. Denny’s art-making is rooted in consumption and presentation; considerations of performance and moments of recapitulation which embed the artist’s activity in his material – objects and images chosen in the first instance for the character and activity they already inhabit.

For More Pricks Than Kicks, Simon Denny will explore the notion of negation that lies in Beckett’s work: indeed, he was asked by the curators to handle the display of the artworks in the exhibition, and, after having accepted this challenge, announced that he “would prefer not to”, quoting Bartleby’s famous motto (mention source Bartleby as not Beckett). He will then plan “this installation through negation of explicit planning, by deferring all decisions, by passing all decision concerning other artists in the show and how their work is presented on to the other decision makers in the show.” At the same time, he will present a chapter of his recent project “Introductory Logic Tutorial Video” (2010), specially adapted to London’s context; each chapter is a double canvas mimicking a television screen, and depicting “a still from a non-existent video tutorial which taught basic propositional philosophical logic, and focused on certain defined ‘structures of argument’”. But, following the artist’s original will of being part of the exhibition by negating his participation, this work will be hanged outside the space.

Patrizio Di Massimo (born 1983 Jesi, Italy, lives in Amsterdam and London). Patrizio Di Massimo has used repetition and drift as a strategy in both his drawings (repeating the same motif) and his sound piece The Secret Proceedings in the Trial at Benghazi, 15 September 1931. The work is the registration of the juridical process made by the Italian Government to the leader of the Libyan resistance Omar el-Mukhtar that then brought him to decapitation (It is part of Massimo’s Libya project). “I found the document in English in an Arabic web-site and then I decided to ask an actor for reading it and do the voice-over. What stroke me the most about the document was that the trial was given in a three-fold way. To put it better the same interrogation was written three times in three different ways according to the juridical way of transcribing the proceedings. The three ways are: 1) The interrogation of the prisoner 2) The typewritten of the interrogation of the prisoner 3) The record of the interrogation of the prisoner. It is therefore a play of narrations in which the use of rhetoric, that creates the three different proses, is interweaved with the fact that Law is a branch of rhetoric in itself.” Another work, Untitled (My Father Emulating Me) shows an old photograph of the artist’s father in the 70s, at the same age than the artist when he discovered the photograph (23 years old). They look identical. The work becomes a somewhat cynical reflexion of the lack of originality, creation, difference in contemporary culture, the authorship and paternity, and impossibility to escape repetitions and sources.

Simon Fujiwara (born 1982 London, lives in Berlin and Mexico City). Encompassing formats including performance-lectures, published fiction, and collections of various articles and artefacts, the recent projects of Berlin-based Simon Fujiwara take shape as if scattered trails of evidence whose parts are more-or-less plausible. Each unearths an implicit myth of human origins and an explicit sexual archeology which together weave narratives that take us from our shared and most distant human past, to up close and personal with Fujiwara and his family history. e son of a British mother and a Japanese father, the artist unfolds a practice that is ostensibly a ‘journey of personal discovery’ about his own origins, or so the cliché goes, into a carefully constructed borderline of ethnology, eroticism, architecture and ancestry. Histories and biographies are written, rewritten – or faked –and gay porno stories hold just as much credence and cra as paleontological treatises. – Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna.

The Unwritten Erotic Saga of the Fujiwara Family 1975-2010, 2010. The Unwritten Erotic Saga is composed of 18 volumes displayed as a pile. The only text carried by each one of the 12,775 pages is a date and number since the lifting of Spain’s censorship ban on erotica, which corresponds to Franco’s death on November 20, 1975. The Saga could be seen as a symbol of the artist’s ongoing struggle to write Welcome to the Hotel Munber (2006 – ongoing), the fictive erotic story of his parents as they were running a hotel in Spain during the last years of Franco’s dictatorship.  It is the physical framework in which the novel could exist. The last page of Volume 18 ends on November 20, 2010, which coincides with the 200th anniversary of the Mexican revolution – a former Spanish colony and the country where Simon Fujiwara travelled to in his attempt to write the novel. The pile made out of the 18 volumes of the Saga is approximately 1.60 m high, the height of the artist’s father, architect Kan Fujiwara, who is also the main protagonist of his novel in the fragments published until now. Thus, the books are not only a representation of the time passed since the liberation of Spain, but also a personal portrait of the father who was largely absent from his life.

Amy Granat (born 1976 Saint Louis, USA, lives in New York). The majority of Amy Granat’s work consists of films and photography. Often creating abstract films without a camera, she uses the materials in untraditional ways. The destructive use of color or acid, the scratching and puncturing of the film strip: these manual modifications manifest themselves in a variety of reflections and distortions that, through the process of projection, generate pictorial shapes. Central to Granat’s work is how she experiments with and defamiliarizes her media. Her films have a pictorial feel, while her photographic works are reminiscent of sculptures: scratched lines make up her projected images, and pieces of film strips appear on her photograms and collages […]. For More Pricks Than Kicks, Amy Granat will conceive a Cinema Zero evening, a performative event that will include video screenings and possibly dance.

About Cinema Zero: “Initiated in the summer of 2004, I wanted a place where film would engage with painting, dance, sound, and where ideas would connect work more than form. I wanted to expose old experimental films -that had rarely been seen – at that point. And I wanted to establish a space that could provide freedom and experimentation. One by one, I invited people to join me, founding members were myself, Felicia Ballos, Richard Aldrich, Gabrielle Giattino, and Fabienne Stephan. We opened on the winter solstice of 2004 with a painting and sculpture show by Swiss artist Paul-Aymar Mourgue D’Algue and film screening by Hollis Frampton and Marie Menken. Since 2005 Cinema Zero has been nomadic and has taken many different shapes and forms. […]” – Amy Granat, 2009 source

Thomas Houseago (born 1972 Leeds, lives in Los Angeles). Thomas Houseago’s work can be questioned as un-original, as a failure of the figure, as the failure of modernism, as failure of materials. They also bring an uncomfortable feeling of authoritarian art (colonialism: cf Patrizio di Massimo). Colonialism (of the materials, of a tradition, of a culture) is not foreign to Houseago’s practice. “It’s always suspect to examine the forgotten ‘primitive’ memory of the figurative in Modernism – to return to Modernism’s repressed, barely formed ‘wild urges’. When such an attempt is filtered through an ironic, neo-expressionist approach, it’s even more difficult for the viewer to locate the philosophical and cultural contexts behind the work. Thomas Houseago’s exhibition forces the viewer to ask whether the work on display transcends its influences or merely references them. Houseago’s sculptures re-work many of the stylistic quirks and formal concerns of Cubism. The objects’ armature is exposed revealing all aspects and surfaces in the final form. Yet, Houseago deals almost exclusively with opposites, turning the object inside out and back to front so construction and form become one. This is not to say that they are not successful in their own right, but you can’t escape the feeling that they are half-realised, begging to be transformed into monumental bronzes, public sculpture that would not look out of place in front of a university library.” Alexander Kennedy. source

Bethan Huws (born 1961 Bangor, Wales, lives in Paris and Berlin). Bethan Huws’ series of Word Vitrines begun in 1999: office display boards on which she affixes discursive snippets, or some decontextualised words, in white plastic lettering. The process of translation in the work of Bethan Huws has been highlighted. Translation responds to a movement of displacement (from one language to another) and reframing (from one culture to another). At its best, translation undergoes a return to origins in order to express a text or concept in another language. It is not translation per say that structures the work of Bethan Huws, rather it is the investigation of procedures of displacement and the search for origins in language that has led to her interest in translation as one of clearest ways of making them manifest (procedures of displacement and the search for origins are also found in her installations, in Scraped Floor, and in her readymades, watercolours, and films). By opposing different modes of enunciation (narratives, discourse, writing, speech), language games (dominant/dominated languages, Welsh/English, poetry or philosophy/bureaucracy, spoken language), and word games, she makes of language a tool of deconstructive critique. Words are readymades (Untitled [Love Letter], 2001): displaced, they reinform the contexts of enunciation and demonstrate the complexity of all discourses.

From 1993 to 1995, Bethan Huws ceased exhibiting art in order to explore the theoretical and critical foundations of her practice. Without a predetermined plan, she read and wrote, and from this research produced six volumes of reflections and studies. Origin and Source, which runs 1342 pages, is the result of two years of silence and research. What is important about this project is neither the artist’s withdrawal nor her reconsideration of the basis of her artistic practice; what is important is the fact that she decided to exhibit it, to enter the project into her oeuvre. In this way she identified retreat, the fragment, doubt, fertile repetition and even collapse as valid artistic approaches. The negation inscribed in these two years of retreat—of exile and introspection—and the anxiety of turning away become motor and flywheel. Scraped Floor, an earlier work by Huws, shows a surface in negative. Origin and Source is also a surface in negative: retreat and sterility have become generative forms. The title is important, pointing as it does to the aspect of excavation in the work. The project shows us the fruits of retreat, exposing it “as it is.” Origin and Source situates Huws’s work in a literary tradition based in post-symbolist 20th-century poetry, according to which language, in its structuralist nature, is a machine for deconstruction (think of Mallarmé and Apollinaire). The idea is relevant in the context of some well-known breakdowns (Nerval, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, Rimbaud, etc.): errant paths that found their way through silence, drifts or repetition, or were absorbed by it (an idea best theorized by Mallarmé and, later, Maurice Blanchot). The late 19th century saw a relationship develop between art and writing that would lead the way to a conceptual dynamic (Alphonse Allais’s monochromes, Larionov, Dada and the links between poetry and conceptual art in the work of Robert Filliou, Carl Andre, Vito Acconci and Marcel Broodthaers, among others). Origin and Source belongs to a tradition that links creativity to breakdown: “deconstruction” (Derrida), “worklessness and disaster” (Blanchot), “the accursed share” (Bataille), “the unsaid” (Levinas), “a literature of the unword” (Beckett). It is a tradition of anxiety in which the tension and distance between the self and the other “I” defines the modern subject.

Nathaniel Mellors (born 1974 Doncaster, lives in London and Rotterdam). There is a technique in comedy that builds up not to necessarily knock you down, but to disintegrate gently before reaching a climax. Such undermining of expectations was the perennial comic ploy of Tommy Cooper in his bad magician bungles, for instance. Nathaniel Mellors conducts similar moments of dissolution in many registers: over time sense collapses, a mood darkens or narrative falls apart; physically, too, everything seems poised to clatter to the ground. It is as though the chaos from which things have been formed permanently threatened to regain (lack of) control. – Sally O’Reilly.

Altermodern catalogue: “I love absurdism and satire and I am fascinated by the range of effects that words can have.” “my own narratives are played out in scenarios where the relationship between word and external reality has often slipped, or is in the process of slipping further away from its sense. The character wrestle with this confusion.” “it is possible, within these scenarios, to use humour in different ways, to pitch things so that they are funny in parts, then not entirely funny or suddenly not funny at all. I like these shifts in register.” “I want to see art that works for and against the idea of art, rather than within its image.”

Laure Prouvost (born 1978 Croix-Lille, France, lives in London). One of the watchwords in contemporary video and photography during the past decade or so has been ‘narrative’, the candid, the documentary and the aesthetic have been sidelined somewhat by the pull of the narrative image whether it be moving or still. Gregory Crewdson, Tacita Dean, Douglas Gordon, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Sophy Rickett, Hannah Starkey and Bill Viola and are just some artists who have forefronted the idea of the narrative image. In her compact, raw-edged video pieces, Laure Prouvost provides narratives that seem to parody the whole genre from which they spring, with their wall-to-wall hyperbole and whimsical fantasy they charm and disturb at the same time. […] Self-deprecating illusions thrust us in and out of a bizarre fantasy world, which is both richly imaginative and outrageously implausible. The raw and flawed, artless, aesthetic of Prouvost’s visuals echo the motto of Prouvost & Sons Ltd., which is, ‘we promote imperfection’ and bring to mind a statement by the critic and commentator, Pavel Buchler in his book ‘Ghost Stories’ where he writes, “to produce a blurred photograph has come to be seen as the exclusive right of the professional, even a sure sign of the professional mandate, whereas the same blurred image taken by the lay photographer implies a ‘human error’.” Here he is thinking of the work of such photographers as Uta Barth or Bill Jacobson, while Provoust’s aesthetic fits neatly into this mould, her make believe company, ‘Provoust & Sons Ltd.’ should certainly hold back from listing themselves on the Stock Exchange. […]

The strands of parody, poetry and flimsy deception that are closely entwined in Prouvost’s canon of work, through which satire, irony, whimsy and fantasy seamlessly operate, offer us many levels on which to read the work, but however we choose to perceive it at any one particular moment, we cannot help but be charmed by the sheer inventiveness and sense of mischief through which these works have been conceived. – Roy Exley.

Pietro Roccasalva (born 1970 Modica, Italy, based in Milan). Escaping from any kind of linearity, Pietro Roccasalva’s creative process always has its coinciding beginning and end in a painting. To discern the diverse moments of its trajectory, the artist opens the doors of what he defines as a “worksite”. There, together with all the phases of the graphic creation—objects, furniture, audiovisuals, actions and tableaux vivant—there are visions and obsessions filled with philosophical, historical and artistic instances mixed with events, circumstances and coincidences by which the artificer likes to be surprised. In this way, every image always determines another one, and every work carries a trace of something that has preceded it in a constant back-and-forth of iconographies, which repeat themselves in variety and generate new situations.

Roccasalva’s exhibitions are a trail in which the flow of information is framed in different “stages”, formally closed and autonomous (settings, installations, sculptures, videos and digital images) but also part of a wider process. Fluency and solidity pursue each other and exchange until they crystallize in the dynamic two-dimensionality of the painting-processor. What remains is a screenplay, or a musical score, not written beforehand but rather determined by the event and by an artificer unaware and unwilling: “the purpose flourishes through the outcome”.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition curated by Thom O’ Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martinez-Kandt with works by Sadane Afif, William Anastasi, Robert Barry, Rosa Barba, Ricardo Cuevas, Edith Dekyndt, Tim Etchells, Matias Faldbakken, Robert Kinmont, Kitty Kraus, Germaine Kruip, Roman Ondak, Fernando Ortega, Bradley Pitts, Joélle Tuerlinckx.

The David Roberts Art Foundation is delighted to announce The Moon is an Arrant Thief, the first exhibition of The Goldsmiths’ Project. Through a process of open call, the Foundation offers to one curator (or curatorial group) from the MFA Curating every year the opportunity to develop and present a project for and with the Foundation. This year winning exhibition is The Moon is an Arrant Thief, by Thom O’Nions, Luiza Teixeira de Freitas and Oliver Martínez-Kandt. The show brings together a selection of contemporary and more historical artists whose works exist on the cusp of visibility, in the space between object and idea. It is an exhibition that elaborates a story; that looks at the relationship between contemporary artistic practice and the legacy of dematerialised art. Rather than engaging directly with the dominant historical practices of conceptualism, the exhibition seeks to find a space of reflection on the peripheries of the debate, to engage with practices that remain provocative in their engagements with ideas of immateriality, space and formal resonance.

The Moon is an Arrant Thief looks at the durability of sets of ideas that reticulate history in a way that opens up the potentials of these relationships rather than closing them down, as would a more traditional process of historicization. The selection of works posits a provocation to understand history as a set of concerns, as a complex web that can be used to generate new meanings and configurations. In this sense the legacy of ideas can be read more productively as a series of orientations and re-interpretations rather than as a linear progression.

Artworks in the show sit in a relationship of discursive fluidity; the exhibition space becomes an invisible network of connections and meanings within which viewers position themselves. The exhibition proposes a plurality of interpretations that weave through, confirm and confound each other. What is provoked is an awareness of the spaces and gaps of intentions between works, the liminal areas in which connections are made and meaning is generated. There are many layers of time, both historically and within the gallery space. Temporality and duration are key concepts in many of the artworks, which produce a sense of motion, a situation in flux that is never experienced conclusively.

Saâdane AFIF (Born 1970, Vendôme, France). Saâdane Afif adopts strategies from the field of music in order to critically explore the concepts of interpretation and repetition in his work. He often commissions artists, writers, designers and musicians to be actively involved in his productions, questioning the notion of artistic authorship in relation to the artwork and its system.

William ANASTASI  (Born 1933, Philadelphia, USA). One of pioneers of Conceptual Art, William Anastasi has explored since the 1960s ideas of chance and indeterminacy, site-specificity, self-representation and self-reference, seriality and repetition. Through his installations, sculptures, and images he has challenged the use of ready-made and industrial materials, and of text as visual material.

Rosa BARBA (Born 1972, Agrigento, Italy). In her filmic installations Rosa Barba breaks up and recombines the narrative unity of space and time, text and image, perspective of author and of viewer introducing shifts and empty spaces. History unveils as an incomplete project, full of possibilities and absences.

Robert BARRY (Born 1936, New York, USA). Exploring a number of different avenues towards defining the usually unseen space around objects, Robert Barry’s work has been focusing on escaping the physical limits of the art object in order to express the unknown or unperceived. By putting into focus the relationship between positive and negative, absence and presence of form, the artist questions the way the spectator engages with the artwork.

Ricardo CUEVAS (Born 1978, Mexico City, Mexico). Ricardo Cuevas explores the relationships and failures that co-exist while trying to translate from language to a visual medium and vice versa. He uses text as a conceptual paradox to explore the duality between the visible and invisible, which acts as a stepping-stone in his creative process. Misunderstandings, loses in translation and fragmentized messages posit the possibilities of different approaches to experience and knowledge.

Edith DEKYNDT (Born in 1960, Ieper, Belgium). Edith Dekyndt’s work counterpoises methodical explorations of conceptual and video art traditions with the individual and global roles of people in society. Whatever the form in which her works exist they become observations about existing protocols, as well as subjective elements looking for a fundamental transformation. With simple material tools drawn from everyday life such as paper, neon, texts, flags and music Dekyndt immerses the viewers in atmospheric relationships between art, science and reality.

Tim ETCHELLS (Born 1962, Derby, UK). Tim Etchells’ work navigates in the territory between performance, visual art and fiction. Working across different media and contexts, the artist is fascinated with the rules and systems that inhabit language and culture and the way these systems are both productive and constraining.

Matias FALDBAKKEN (Born 1973, Hobro, Denmark). Matias Faldbakken is an artist and writer whose work covers a wide range of media and languages. Faldbakken’s practice questions the potential of artistic intervention to disrupt and negate the existing system of behaviors and beliefs in order to generate new content and release creative freedom.

Robert KINMONT (Born 1937, Los Angeles, USA). The work of Robert Kinmont has been inspired by the surrounding landscapes and ecosystems. With an amateur and handmade approach to both photography and sculpture, Kinmont investigates with irony and humor human scale and its relationship to the surrounding.

Kitty KRAUS (Born 1976, Heidelberg, Germany). In Kitty Kraus’ work the viewer is confronted with the physical presence of objects that create unusual tensions between visibility and invisibility. In her sculptures and installations, the artist uses materials and physical processes in unexpected ways placing abstract symbols in space, encrypted messages made of glass, metal, cloth or found objects, which cross and circumscribe the field of the human condition.

Germaine KRUIP (Born 1970, Castricum, The Netherlands). Working in a variety of different media including photographs, films, performances, book projects and installations Germaine Kruip elevates everyday gestures and common actions or appearances. By directing, enlarging or altering reality, she produces contextual shifts and proposes a new layer of meaning.

Roman ONDAK (Born 1966, Zilina, Slovakia). Roman Ondák explores in his installations, photographs, drawings, and performances a specific situation, which very often provokes a double-take in the viewers, making them question their perception or awareness of social codes. Fernando ORTEGA (Born 1971, Mexico City, Mexico)

Fernando Ortega uses the processes and histories of conceptual art to examine modes of everyday perception. Ortega often uses music or the idea of notation as a way of looking at memory and the process of translation that it provokes. There is a delicacy of humour and a poetry that pervades the work.

Bradley PITTS (Born 1978, New York, USA). Bradley Pitts employs the infrastructure of technological rationalism (concepts, tools, methods, and apparatus) in order to explore personal, intuitive realities. He explores the intersection between the material with the human, the universal with the personal or the inside and the outside, not leaving behind the moments that they are revolving in the void of space.

Joële TUERLINCKX (Born 1958, Brussels, Belgium). With a distinct interest in conceptual art’s formal structures Tuerlinckx works are occasions to point, to count and to measure the relationships between forms and signification. In her work found objects, books, vitrines, video monitors, and the gallery space itself establish and connect ideas about objects co-existing in the same space.

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An exhibition curated by Mihnea Mircan with works by Agency, Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Pavel Büchler, Etienne Chambaud, Luc Deleu, Alison Gerber, Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi, Ian Law, Alon Levin, Jill Magid, Benöit Maire, Navid Nuur, Jonas Staal, Mladen Stilinovic.

Developed over the last year, Mihnea Mircan’s group exhibition History of Art, the, addresses art history, and more explicitly how contemporary artists navigate and inscribe themselves in a future art history and how they negotiate their future interpretation and their translation as history. The exhibition brings together practices that explore the symbolic transactions, institutional protocols and historiographic disconnections between contemporary art and the discourse of art history. The works in the exhibition range from sculpture and installation to photography and video, and include new pieces especially commissioned by the David Roberts Art Foundation.

History distinguishes between objects and proposals that ‘stand the test of time’ and art that does not extend beyond the present it inhabits, that is captive to it, and hence unworthy of historiographic attention. But what happens when art is itself ‘the test of time’, if resilience or efficacy of works is to be measured in the time the works create, against a future they envision for themselves? The exhibition proposes that the future available to art is not the futurism of doom or the futurology of gridlock, not an allegory of ecology or technology, but the future of interpretation.

The exhibition suggests a time, right after ‘the contemporary’, when art and history, the present and its transcription as an art-historical past, unfold in simultaneity. The curator invites us to ask the questions: How will contemporary art works be recuperated, as indispensable to an understanding of our present artistic moment? How can they ensure their own relevance to art history and question its capacity to imagine the future? From the point of view of what they will mean, how and to whom, can works of art administrate themselves – and therefore become quasi-institutions?

The exhibition seeks to map the positions from which art-historical assertions – about the continuities between objects and subjects, institutions and selves, pasts and present – are made. Specifically, to do so across a spectrum of conditions that define the existence and legibility of the artistic object, from its intuitive possibility or inception to its disappearance from the artworld circuit. It inquires into the ways in which these links and reciprocities operate temporally or historiographically, and might define, imagine or fabricate a future. Beyond the symbolic transactions, institutional protocols and disconnections between contemporary art and the discourse of art history, the exhibition suggests a territory where separate timelines converge, a vanishing point where they can be reconciled interpretively, a time, right after ‘the contemporary’, when art and history, the present and its transcription as an art-historical past, unfold in simultaneity. Finally, the exhibition argues that the future that art has indeed access to is not an allegory of ecology or technology, but the future of interpretation. A future art history occurs in response to the conceptual instigations, interpretive claims, consequences and afterlives of present    artistic objects.

Alison Gerber. Artists’ Work Classification, 2006. “There has been little systematic research on the daily labor of artists and, as a result, it has been difficult to say what it is that artists do. While individual artists have occasionally documented their activities, there has never been a standardized, comprehensive list of artists’ work practices that artists may use to describe their work. This classification fills that gap. (…) It is hoped that with future research and development the classification will become easier to use, more accurate and generalizable to artists working in more areas of the world.” – Preface to Artists’ Work Classification. The book uses standard social science research methods to document the everyday activities that artists engage in to produce their work. The entire print run was sent to 500 public, academic, and institutional libraries for shelving. For this exhibition, Artists’ Work Classification was loaned from Manchester City Library together with all the books it shares a shelf with according to the indexing system used by this library.

Hilario Isola and Matteo Norzi. Large Glass, 2010. The video presents a prologue to the artists’ project, for their exhibition at Art in General New York, running from April 23 to June 4. This scenography for a yet unrealized art work converges an invocation of Marcel Duchamp, and his explorations of “seeing through” the work, and a reference to Jacques Yves Cousteau’s project of livable underwater architecture, specifically his  experimental underwater aquarium-cum-observation capsule off the coast of Sudan. On this stage, the action happens in the future anterior: the work for Art in General will have materialized as a double obstruction, via an interruption of the normal cleaning process in a fish tank at NY Aquarium in Coney Island, leading to an accumulation of algae on both the “screen” and the transparent polyhedron, and the invisibility of figure and ground in the “flooded museum”.

Alon Levin. Or Why Not Celebrate the Past Before the Future Will Come (account of a happening I). Or Why Not Celebrate the Past Before the Future Will Come (account of a happening II). Or Why Not Celebrate the Past Before the Future Will Come (account of a happening III), 2010. The work is an expansive visual archive, a database of protruding shapes that organize themselves according to covert systems and in the absence of the textual props that would anchor them to specific cultural or political narratives. The installation organizes and painstakingly classifies distinct geometries that flirt with plural interpretive possibilities, that evoke banners and emblems, abandoned meanings and reconfigured ideas, or that could simply serve to produce an infinite collection of monochrome paintings and sculptures. As the artist notes, “there is no defined front, back or side to the work. If seen as a timeline on the wall, it repeats and mirrors in all directions. Some surfaces are painted on both sides, other expose a back, but as a complete unit it does not face any direction in particular. The varying tones of color could read as inbuilt shadows, or, more significantly, as decay from exposure to light.”

Nina Beier and Marie Lund. The Remains (The Making of), 2010. A scale model of the gallery space in chalk stone is carved, over the duration of the show, into an image – a sculptural copy or model – of the exhibition, reproducing the topography of works and gallery furniture. The work seeks to locate the possible effects or afterimages of an exhibition across two categories of imprints: on one hand, a kind of retinal persistence, a blur of works and texts that vie for preeminence in recalling the experience of the exhibition, and, on the other hand, the mode of the archive that exhibitions of contemporary art in general gesture towards, the database where they would like to register. It materializes a question about the often unspoken links between curatorial ideas or aspirations and the discourse of art history, indirectly inquiring into a historicization of the present, with the exhibition as instrument.

Nina Beier and Marie Lund. (Calling – The Sunbathers) Loss and Cause, 2010. (Calling – Necktie and Navel) Loss and Cause, 2010. Belonging to an ongoing series, the two works are temporary replacements of sculptures that have disappeared from public and private collections: Jean Arp’s Necktie and Navel, 1931, present whereabouts unknown, and Peter Peri’s The Sunbathers, lost after being exhibited at the Festival of Britain 1951. The unfired clay models will be destroyed as soon as the originals resurface. The sculptures are made just before the exhibition opening and exhibited on the plinths upon which they were modeled, making the traces of their production emphatically visible. The project pursues Beier and Lund’s interest in cultural heritage, authorship, ownership and mediation: Calling… fills gaps in history with objects that can be understood as makeshift props or conservation models for an utopian archive of everything, or as artifacts in a growing museum of destruction, loss and entropy. They activate a complex discussion of the lost Original, functioning as neither its replicas nor its copies; they can only be temporarily owned, as the Original is temporarily unavailable to History.

Pavel Büchler. Bulgarian Group Portrait, 1999-2010. Palindrome No. 21 (After Sol LeWitt), 2009. The Bulgarian Group Portrait is a composite of all the compositional diagrams from the book Dutch Group Portrait: Compositional Characteristics, by Gregori Kostov, 1993. The palindrome is made up from a fragment in sentence 21 from the German translation of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art: “Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.” Both works seek to define and locate a central point of experience, organizing themselves around an empty core – the point from where the artistic idea might surge, setting in motion the art-historical methodology and mythology that attends to this episode in the production of artistic work. Staging yet absent ideas, they question the paradoxical discipline (and rhetorical machinery) whose fundamental preoccupation has been to isolate the spark of artistic inspiration from the mass of historical material.

Etienne Chambaud. Counter-History of Separation (The Naked Document), 2010. The work bridges between History of Art, the and The Sirens’ Stage, Etienne Chambaud’s exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation between 19 March – 24 April 2010. Oscillating between “previous” and “current” show, and functioning as a layered afterimage of the former, the photograph documents a performance staged in Chambaud’s installation, one pregnant with art-historical implications. The glass covering the photograph has been treated to replicate the work To be titled (On Separation): the partial covering of the windows at DRAF for The Sirens’ Stage. It therefore conflates into one object two missed experiences, the performance not seen through the mediation of a work no longer there, and suggests an anteriority that keeps ramifying and advancing towards the future, as opposed to quietly awaiting historical investigation.

Ian Law. Prelims (2010). “Two interrelating units are installed across the gallery space, recasting the conceptual ground and physical dimensions of a previous installation, Prelims (2008). A painting made to fit the previous architecture is here edited; cut and repainted in relation to a new work that is itself made to fit the gallery space. Smaller works documenting the shift in scale and a specific transformation accompany each unit. These documents point to the ambulant nature of the working materials and latency of the painted elements fixed in the exhibition. Prelims (2010) investigates the space between surfaces through a system of associations that are reasserted upon the work. Painting is utilised as activity and the resulting works are installed in relation to formats of documentation that suggest other congruent activities.” – Ian Law

Mladen Stilinović. An Attack against My Art Is an Attack against Socialism and Progress, 1977. The work – a banner turned into a quasi-painting – claims to ally itself with the repression and censorship of Croatia in the 1970s. It attempts to insulate itself against criticism, even the criticism of said censorship, in the way totalitarian regimes do, by continually unmasking the enemy and portraying its vile nature. It sardonically emulates the existential and interpretive conditions of its own age and context and thus survives them, as a document of their brutality.

Benoît Maire. The Spider Web, 2006. The video documents a discussion the artist had with art historian and philosopher Arthur C. Danto. The screen remains blank, inviting viewers to imagine the scene, as Danto patiently begins to pull meaning from what appears to be an arrangement of objects in front of him: a mirror, a clock, a book, a reproduction of a Veronese painting. When Danto accidentally upsets the Vanitas, Maire suggests that this does not affect the work, which resides in encounter and exchange, in doubling and imagination, in testing the adherence of contemporary practices to the larger spider’s web of art history. This narrative of proliferating signification, referring the trope of the ‘unknown masterpiece’, the notion of iconography as a system of encrypting messages to the astute viewer, and the strategies used by contemporary art to disrupt these epistemological scripts, hinges on Danto’s own work, his thesis of the “end of art”: the termination of the Hegelian narrative of dialectical reconciliation and the beginning of art as philosophy.

Portrait of Alex Cecchetti, 2009. The work looks at the tradition of artists making the portraits of artist friends, as a site for double, indirect aspirations to be recuperated by history. The portrait of the artist is understood as a disguised generational self-portrait, as the assertion of a form of communality, transformed here into a disjointed discourse that flirts with illegibility and that resembles a code.

Mladen Stilinović. Work Cannot Not Exist, 1976. Using a strategy complementary to that of the banner, the prints articulate a refusal – and its reversal – of the conditions for the existence and interpretation of the art work. The double negation and its graphic negation operate at two levels: a question, after Duchamp, as to the possibility of making a work of art that is not a work of art, and a political reflection on what the converse of artistic work might be, on how work can evade non-work – that which discourages it to exist – or can exist as a permanent negotiation with that which threatens to obliterate it. Work and non-work are conflated into a definition that accepts its antonym, into the dispute between disjunctive rules.

Jill Maggid. Auto Portrait Pending, 2005. A contract signed by Jill Magid and Lifegem Corporation to turn the artist’s cremated remains into a one-carat diamond, in addition to an empty ring setting and a beneficiary contract – these  constitute, for now, the work Auto Portrait Pending. The beneficiary contract hinges between the life of the artist and the post-mortem crystallization of her body in a way that affects both: Jill Magid is expelled of her body to the same extent that the beneficiary of the diamond-to-come is separated from the object of desire. The literalness of possession, gesticulating awkwardly toward its object, engulfs a work that belongs to no one, whose operation is to resist ownership. While the collector buys the simultaneity of non-body and non-diamond, the possibility of ownership and its interruption, the art historian is given an ellipsis of all tropes of inspired artistry, legally disarticulated and recreated, concomitant with the rest of the artist’s practice: between them, congruence will need to be written, or confabulated.

Luc Deleu. The Last Stone of Belgium, 1979. The work is both a manifesto etched in stone and a tombstone for monumentality. Declaring the closure of commemoration – or perhaps the inauguration of a “post-metaphysical” commemorative practice and its “nonumental” correlates –, it not only challenges the validity of subsequent monuments, but draws attention to what lies underneath the flurry of current memorial culture: in this case, Belgium’s colonial history, divisions and disparities, then and now. In relation to these issues, and the monuments designed to silence them, Deleu’s work functions as a permanent epilogue, one that can adhere to and upend any constructed timeline of commemoration.

Agency. Thing 001254 (For Pok), 2010. In 1979, Victor Vasarely instructed his assistant Valluet to enlarge the painting For Pok and to reproduce it on a grayscale from 1 to 10. After a dispute over payments arose between Valluet and Vasarely, Valluet claimed to be the author of the new painting. The matter was settled in court in 1983. At Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the judge debated the authorship of the painting For Pok, trying to discern if the instructions given by Vasarely were just an idea for an artwork or already its expression; whether the instructions given by Vasarely were vague enough for the possibility of various interpretations to exist. The Tribunal ruled in favor of Valluet, and For Pok was deemed the work of the assistant alone. The work is here remade on the basis of the same instructions that Valluet received from Vasarely, proposing a discussion of how a judicial interpretation of a work might diverge from an artistic one.

Jonas Staal. Art, property of politics, 2010. Jonas Staal’s preference for a mode of artistic and political engagement that pursues the ultimate, most troubling and impure consequences of its own embeddedness, translates into a curatorial investigation of seven art collections, belonging to Dutch political parties. This reverses the classic institutional critique scenario, and engages the complicity between art and politics at the other end, by treating the political party as an art institution. The project inquires into the correspondences between the art collected and the ideological self-perception of the collector, and asks how this art will figure against the unfolding of our political future. On show here are works belonging to the Christian Democratic Appeal (a small clay figurine representing the importance of family values and faith), the Labor Party (a piece of a new kind of asphalt, more endurable under extreme temperatures, connoting stability, employment and freedom of movement for the working class), the Socialist Party (photos of a protest by harbor workers in Rotterdam that went on strike in 1979 to demand higher salaries), and Leefbar (“Livable”) Rotterdam (an image of tolerant multiculturalism, at odds with the ideological identity of the owners.)

Unless otherwise noted, the interpretation texts have been written by curator.

The exhibition is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam and the Ratiu Foundation.  The Foundation would also like to thank the Romanian Cultural Institute for their support and assistance. The David Roberts Art Foundation is proudly supported by the Edinburgh House Estates group of companies.

Guest Curator for Curators’ Series #3. History of Art, the:

Romanian born Mihnea Mircan (b. 1976) curated the exhibition ‘Sublime Objects’ and the ‘Under Destruction’ series of interventions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest, Romania, as well as mid-career surveys of artists such as Jaan Toomik and Sean Snyder. He was the curator of ‘Low-Budget Monuments’, the Romanian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007). His latest project is the exhibition ‘Since we last spoke about monuments’ at Stroom Den Haag. He contributes regularly to international publications, having recently written for monographs of Plamen Dejanoff, Mircea Cantor and Deimantas Narkevicius. History of Art, the is his first exhibition in London.

Mihnea Mircan is editing a publication, titled The Impresent, to accompany the exhibition. It is based on Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s The Imprint and is designed and sponsored by Åbäke.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

The Sirens’ Stage is an exhibition by Etienne Chambaud in the framework of Vincent Normand’s project Permanent Exhibition, Temporary Collections. The exhibition is curated in london by Vincent Honoré and is developed with Kadist Art Foundation in Paris and Nomas Foundation in Rome. The exhibition, interpreted in a different language almost simultaneously in each foundation, is based on mechanisms of writings and transcriptions. Translation should be considered both the medium and the shared language of the whole project.

Stay, illusion !

If thou hast any sound, or use of voice,

Speak to me.

The tablet shouts, it cries aloud.

Look, look at what I have seen in written letters,

A song speaking aloud !

The project takes its title from the mythological sirens’ song, which invents itself in the ear of its addressee. Here The Sirens’ Stage is conceived as a group of “written objects”: absent but described, motionless but translated, unique but repeated, mute but transcribed. Excluded from the present time, they only exist in the delayed time of their transmission in language.

The Sirens’ Stage is made up of an installation of Figures, a group of named, empty plinths (The Reef), which acts as a space from which are emitted layers of speech and text. Actors occasionally interact with this space, reading, memorising and rehearsing fragments of script and dialogue. Sometimes The Reef remains silent. A group of framed Instruction Pieces hung on the wall outlines a series of gestures and acts. These change over the course of the exhibition. A writer (The Copyist), present at all times, transcribes the evolution of the exhibition day after day. The Foundation’s collection is included through a series of photographs of its storage, in which all crates are named (Stock Figures). A written contract, drawn up by a lawyer, outlines the conditions for the exchange and the conservation of copies of sculptures exchanged between the three foundations’ collections (The Exchange (The Horse, the Cobblestone, Above the Weather)).

The Sirens’ Stage is a collection of fragmentary narratives, playing with accumulations and disappearances, survivals and hauntings. The exhibition stages the oblivion and the burial of its original sources, meanings and forms under its own echoes, misunderstandings, partial interpretations and incomplete memories. Between mute traces and promises of a speech act, polyphony and cacophony, transcription and oral tradition, the remains of the song of these « sirens » stand for fossils organising their own archaeology.

The Reef. At once a monument in ruins, a stage under construction and a support for absent objects, The Reef is a group of empty plinths. All of them are named after abstract figures, conceptual characters, places, usual objects etc. Some had been especially designed and produced for the exhibition, others are plinths stored by the foundation for its collection. Actors activate it randomly by memorising and rehearsing a written script. The script had been created for the exhibition, it includes theoretical and descriptive monologues, excerpts from books or movies’s dialogues, etc. The script is not public: it exists solely in the actors’ performances. The time of the exhibition precedes the time of a performance that never occurs. Some plinths are places or show traces of more specific actions (a nude model will pose on The Missing Part, The Remains is progressively hollowed out and supports its own residues, The Work I (The Cube) is marked by the evidence of its successive displacements), others points to past or future actions (The Gift, The Hanger).

The Copyist. The Copyist, one of the figures which form The Reef, is present at all times during the exhibition. Different writers successively play The Copyist: their role is to describe all that happen in the exhibition, to transliterate its course in the guise of a script. The Copyist’s style is neutral, limited in the objective recording of the information he or she directly experiences. The Copyist is both the ideal viewer of the exhibition and its ambiguous author. Pages are displayed in the exhibition space as they are written. Åbake, the graphic designers and editors of the book to be published from this material, will come on site to start editing and annotating the pages directly on the walls. The Copyist inserts the time of the catalogue in the time of the exhibition.

Instruction Pieces. The Instruction Pieces are performative statements, signed and framed. They orchestrate a group of gestures and actions as much as they document them. The only apparent sign of an external authority in the exhibition, they paradoxically manifests its limits.

Stock Figures. In a series of photographs of each Foundation’s storage, the crates have been renamed, as an echo to the plinths in The Reef. Images of a permanent memory, the Stock Figures point in an allegorical way, in a negative space, the stratas of discourse, language, writing and speech that are sedimented in the exhibition space.

The Exchange (The Horse, the Cobblestone, Above the Weather). A contract established by lawyer Daniel McClean frames the conditions of exhibition and conservation of 3 sculptures exchanged by the 3 foundations (The Horse by William Turnbul the Cobblestone by Joseph Beuys, Above the Weather by Jason Dodge). The sculptures are copies of the original. The actual copies cannot be shown at any time: only the litterature established for them is to be displayed, whereas the copy must be stored in a sealed crate at all time. A signed contract and a certificate of authenticity are the only visible part of the work, vouching for its existence and defining it in the negative at the same time.

There are so many things that one would hope might never be fathomed,

Or only partially,

And not as one might expect.

What communication do you desire, or know, or simply pretend?

Which real project has been lost?

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Shiiin, Jet Stream, White earphones sees Roach continuing his research into modes of perception and understanding, analytical thought, creativity and mental freedom. Beginning by looking at the object of an exhibition in its most simple terms – as space and time – Roach has set about creating an environment in which these two fundamentals can be used to their fullest potential.

Roach employs an ambitious and constantly shifting exhibition design, transforming the gallery into a liminal space between lounge and garden – sites that find counterparts in the most open and public communal spaces (airport lounges, parks) and the most enclosed and private situations (living room, home, garden).  Borrowing expertise and problem-solving approaches from disciplines as seemingly diverse as architecture, improvised music, garden design, psychoanalysis, stand-up comedy, Quantum Physics and philosophy, the exhibition space becomes a dynamic site of potentially constructive frictions and a bridge between, or rather a conflation of, both inside and outside, public and private. A system of mobile, semi-transparent screens will simultaneously multiply and divide the space, which is continuously being reconfigured as required.  The strongly hued screens operate as both ‘soft’ walls, and ‘distorting lenses’ or filters – altering our vision and the nature of what we may see through them.

Walls, works, performances, discussions, screenings, readings, demonstrations and workshops will come and go over the seven-week run, lending a heavy temporal element to the project which will never appear in the same form twice.  In a space where change may occur at any moment, time, and more specifically the present, comes into sharp focus.  Recognising that the present is all one can work with, or in, Roach makes a concerted effort to produce a constantly appearing and active present in which the numerous experiences take place.

“For this project I’ve envisaged the show as a truly active situation” explains Roach, “A process has been set in motion whereby the gallery can become a locus for the active production and exchange of thoughts and ideas.  Where like a public bench, or bar, the silent invitation is for one to come, sit and take part in constructing the meaning of the situation itself – to activate it with one’s thoughts and presence.”

Artist’s biography: Damien Roach (born UK, 1980) lives and works in London. This is his first solo exhibition in London in three years. Recent solo exhibitions include: Lemuria, Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf (2008); When the sun goes down, La Maison Rouge, Paris (2008); Transmissions, Ibid Projects, London (2007). Recent group exhibitions include: Conflicting Tales: Subjectivity (Quadrilogy, Part 1), Burger Collection, Berlin (2009); The Eternal Flame, Kunsthaus Baselland, Switzerland (2008); All-Inclusive. Die Welt des Tourismus, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2008). Damien Roach is represented by Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf.

This exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, Curator, David Roberts Art Foundation in collaboration with Gaia Tedone, Assistant Curator.

Programme of talks and events curated by Damien Roach:

• A Conversation with Burkhard Meltzer.
  16 January 2010
  Burkhard Meltzer will be talking about his research project Prototype – furniture in art and design. Meltzer is an independent curator and critic based in Zurich who writes on a regular basis for art magazines such as Kunstbulletin and Frieze.

• A conversation with Antepress and an installation by Organ Octet.
  20 January 2010
  An experimental lecture on ‘ekphrasis’ with actions, performances and readings by antepress, imprint and project platform set up in 2008 by Julia Calver, Patrick Coyle, Cressida Kocienski, Claire Nichols, Tamarin Norwood and Gemma Sharpe. www.antepress.co.uk
  The evening will continue with shimmering, transcendent reed organ music by Organ Octet.

• A screening by Richard Feynman and a performance by Hype Williams.
  27 January 2010
  A screening of excerpts from Fun to Imagine (1983), a documentary about Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman followed by a ritualistic performance of live music and projections from band Hype William.

• Radio Show. A radio project by Charlie Woolley
  30 January 2010
  Charlie Woolley will transmit his essential, wide-reaching internet radio station ‘RADIO SHOW’, live from the gallery, banishing dead air with records, conversations and phone-ins. He is joined by special co-host, curator Paul Pieroni.

• Son et Lumiere for Earth, Fire and Water. An installation and performance by the Boyle Family
  3 February 2010
  Sebastian Boyle introduces an evening of live projections and films related to the seminal event Son et Lumiere for Earth, Fire and Water by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills from 1966.

• The Assassination of Time. An installation by Sue Golding.
  6 February 2010
  Philosopher Sue Golding / Johnny De Philo will plunge the gallery into total pitch-darkness to envelop the space with her live, spoken ‘fractal philosophy installation’ The Assassination of Time.Sue Golding is a philosopher, artist and professor of Philosophy in the Visual Arts and Communication Technologies and Director of the Postgraduate Programme “Media Arts Philosophy” at the University of Greenwich. Her research covers the intra/interdisciplinary discourses associated with the media arts, web sciences and communication technologies. Set out in terms of installation, performance, rolling-documentary, books, articles and aphoristic text, her works address the various aspects of contemporary art practice. She has also published under the pen names Johnny Golding and Johnny de Philo.

• Riddles of the Sphinx. A screening and discussion with Laura Mulvey.
  17 February 2010
  A screening and a discussion with Philosopher Laura Mulvey on her and Peter Wollen’s groundbreaking film ‘Riddles of the Sphinx’ (1977).
  Laura Mulvey is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at the British Film Institute for many years before taking up her current position. Mulvey’s is best known for her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” written in 1973. Her article was one of the first major essays that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Mulvey’s contribution was to inaugurate the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Mulvey was prominent as an avant-garde filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s. With Peter Wollen, her husband, she co-wrote and co-directed ‘Riddles of the sphinx’ and other films.

• The Drive & The Unconscious. A conversation with Noga Wine.
  20 February 2010
  Psychoanalyst Noga Wine will present a lecture entitled The Drive and the Unconscious: two psychoanalytic concepts, which sustain the dimensions of time and space, making drawings throughout, to open up new access to her dense and illuminating quick-fire delivery.

• A Performance by Temperatures/Sculpture.
  24 February 2010
  An evening of music.
  An intense, time-bending live music duos close the events programme part of the exhibition Damien Roach. Shiiin, Jet Stream, White earphones, with Thurston Moore’s favorite fuzzed-out bass & drums duo Temperatures and a narcotic live audio-visual feast of exotic esoterics from tape maestros, Sculpture.
  http://www.myspace.com/danhayhurst
  http://www.tapebox.co.uk/
  http://www.myspace.com/temperaturestheband

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition curated curated by Raimundas Malasauskas with Gintaras Didziapetris, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres and Rosalind Nashashibi.

The David Roberts Art Foundation is delighted to invite its second guest curator, part of our Curators’ Series: Raimundas Malasauskas. The Curators’ Series aims to support international curators with unique and experimental vision by commissioning projects for the David Roberts Art Foundation.

Raimundas Malasauskas presents the group exhibition Sculpture of The Space Age, which he has developed over the last 12 months. The title refers to a purely fictional exhibition mentioned in J. G. Ballard’s short story The Object of the Attack (1984) which was supposedly held at the Serpentine gallery in the late 70’s. This exhibition never happened, it is not even described in the text but exists solely as a title. Malasauskas started a discussion with some artists about this potential exhibition and describes his process as ¬´ Re-visiting the exhibition that only took place in a novel: an interdisciplinary experiment of space-time traveling. Four artists had been invited to be part of the project. Gintaras Didziapetris, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres and Rosalind Nashashibi will work collectively with the invited curator and the David Roberts Art Foundation to make a fiction real. The exhibition will examine aspects of art production and transmission, porosities in between fiction and reality as well as positions of the art works in time and space.

Malasauskas writes “Sculpture of The Space Age became an anachronism that keeps living on its own ambivalence as something that could have happened, then almost happened again. It openly contains its own possibility and impossibility, as this new diversion suggests: Mario Garcia Torres with Ryan Gander and Gintaras Didziapetris with Rosalind Nashashibi bring Sculpture of The Space Age to where it could have been and where it has never been yet: the year 2009. The show looks as if it was installed in the 70s, but will open its door only tomorrow.”

Dear Matthew Young

I knew one day you would be reading this. Forgive me if I will finish my letter abruptly – time is short and may run out at any moment. And please accept my apologies for missing each other in the 70s. It was ‘Hangar 18’, the movie, where we had a chance to meet for the first time while staring at dismembered bodies of astronauts floating in space. I watched it from the cinema mechanic’s pit where our teacher brought us – perhaps she wanted us to learn how a projection works. Gintaras was not born yet.

Many things happened since then: some affirmed your vision, some crushed it with a weight of aluminum. For example, the immediacy of real-time communications eradicated space-time that you saw as evil, yet technologies of simultaneous transaction brought even more continuity than you could have ever imagined. Colonel Stamford never took the world power, yet The Soviet Union collapsed. Religious wars have become a soup of the day, fanatics traded ideologies like fruits, future markets bursted loudly. When Michael Jackson filmed a new version of Thriller video there we saw 2000 corpses coming back from the grave instead of 200 in the original video (if back to the 80s Thriller predicted AIDS crisis, the new video confirmed predictions made back then.) Mario still claims that moon-walking was invented in Mexico and Rosalind contemplates galactic archaeology in action, carried by light emitted by stars millions of years ago. The setting sun gilds her bow and arrow. Wearing tightly woven bark cloth, a Chacobo Indian paddles through a flooded forest in Bolivia’s northeastern province of Beni. Some unknown forms from the past remain unknown, some turn ubiquitous. More and more people develop acute chronodyslexia – things that are far in time look closer than they are and things that look close sometimes are not even there, or they are inside you. Moments in between clog. It seems that time has undergone same transformation that you applied to the prison chapel creating an impeccable Ames Room in order to escape it: illusion draws us in there.

Manchester United won 2-1 against Tottenham Hotspur that night of 1999 when I was talking to Graham Gussin in Vilnius. He told me about the exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1979 where you attended the opening.  It was the same show that Graham and Jeremy Millar tried to curate in the same gallery more than a decade later. The show was called ‘Sculpture of Space Age’. Graham did not learn much of it from you since you were too drunk and disorderly at the opening. However neither he nor Jeremy managed to see more. After doing an extensive research on the content of the show, talking to J.G. Ballard who wrote the story where the exhibition is mentioned, and even contacting some of the artists who might have possibly been in it, they ended up leaving the potential of the show on the shelf. The shelf had a portable hole in it – it landed in the press-release of the show in London in 2009. The mark was similar to what Ryan found one day in the park while looking for a forgotten title.

It is strange to write you this while waiting for images of the show to arrive. The show that neither Mario or Ryan, nor Rosalind with Gintaras have seen either. I feel that we are joining the community of those who never entered the exhibition. The images are full of suspension – of both belief and disbelief, of tiles and aluminium. Inscripted with a pre-monition of the show from the 1979 it brings it to 2009, or another time. A diptych of Gintaras and Rosie is supposed to split into two separate parts during that period – we will look at it carefully following the veines of marble.

“Would you open a time-capsule if you had one?” Alexis Vaillant asked me last week. I thought what aged most in the time capsule is the division between outside and inside, not what is inside. Because when we opened a time-capsule last time we found ourselves at the opening of the exhibition, drinking cocktails. However Alexis is right to claim that time-capsules have become time-machines.

Did you know they did open one of your capsules? Or, at least that is the way they thought about it. Ah, for them it was a big deception, they had the illusion of finding the final clue in it. That is why they eventually discarded it as evidence. They could tell from their scientific research that the piece of film in the metal container had been produced sometime around 1981, but that you had not exposed it until at least a couple of decades after its expiration date. I wondered what were you trying to save or recuperate in that film. Why did you save it for that long? The information in it is so little, I guess due to your excessive sensitivity condition to light. Sometimes I even doubt you actually exposed the film. Maybe it was just forgotten there, and they came up and made a whole story out of it. In any case I wondered what exposing a film really meant to you, and if you really thought of it as a    time capsule.

People said that the exhibition only took place inside a fiction. Others claimed that it was itself a fiction. Or a monadic fold in someone’s mind. “No, something else”, one of the guests said while looking through a cocktail glass of Rosalind and Gintaras. I realised that sometimes, when you look through that glass you see one exhibition, other times – another one, perhaps the one you once fallen into from another time breaking the window in 1985. By the way, was it you that actually wrote the following passage?: “Looking for B-plots and C-spots, scanning backgrounds of film scenes and surface of celluloid, dust of beats, flip sides of everything including dust (dust of vinyl records including;) looking for unclassified acts of emergence, obscure transmissions, extinct specimen and specimen with no species, operational codes of irreproducible zombies, impossibility of action, attraction; extracting the DNR of inextractable and unleashing it on new demand of irreproducible, full            stop moon.”

Jay told me that you were living in London. And so we wanted to add you in the artists list. Your talent as an arsonist was very convincing. But when you jumped in through that window breaking it, it became difficult to convince the rest of the crew. We believed you will come for an opening though.

Actually it took me years to understand what you were doing then. When we opened the show in 2009 it was just the beginning of the operation. You said you would be there. And you were – to celebrate the enduring mysteries of Ames room.

Thanks for coming.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

Writer, publisher and curator, Oscar Tuazon is above all one of the most captivating and radical sculptors of his generation. Tuazon’s practice is characterised by a form of contemporary sculpture bricolage, which recalls Arte Povera in its inventive use of natural and industrial materials. References to minimalism and artists such as Richard Serra or Sol LeWitt can be found in the formal structure and positioning of his sculptures and installations.

Tuazon’s use of raw materials infuses his work with an energy and tension, which sets him firmly within the lineage of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. However, the way he considers this heritage draws upon concepts prevalent in contemporary culture, such as ideas of collapse and ruin, recycling and reforming. For his project at The David Roberts Art Foundation, Tuazon was asked to challenge the space. He creates a new body of site-specific sculptures, working with marble for the first time and using works from the David Roberts Collection. Using materials in new and unexpected ways he questions the gallery’s architecture and the public’s interaction with it.

Tuazon’s starting point for this exhibition was the desire to create an autonomous artwork. “Starting with a kind of abstraction and pushing it towards function. Take something and use it, misuse it. So the autonomous work of art wouldn’t necessarily tend towards emptiness, negation, blankness—but towards function.  This ‘abstract function’ is a more straight-forward, literal idea of autonomy than Ad Reinhardt would have it: it is simply a self-contained artwork, something that can stand on its own. An object, actually, that doesn’t need any kind of support structure. It doesn’t need a wall, it doesn’t need lights, it doesn’t even need to be displayed inside. It’s just a thing. It can be left outside, left alone. It doesn’t even need to be looked at. And so it remains stubbornly abstract. Abstract in the sense that it doesn’t need anyone. It can function on its own, but the only function the object is capable of performing is that of an artwork, useless and inexplicable. To put it another way, the work is onanistic.”

The exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré, Curator, David Roberts Art Foundation. The Foundation would like to thank Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling for their assistance in the preparation of the exhibition and the production of the works.

TO ROLL, TO CREASE, TO FOLD, TO STORE, TO BEND, TO SHORTEN, TO
TWIST, TO DAPPLE, TO CRUMPLE, TO SHAVE, TO TEAR, TO CHIP, TO SPLIT,
TO CUT, TO SEVER, TO DROP, TO REMOVE, TO SIMPLIFY, TO DIFFER, TO
DISARRANGE, TO OPEN, TO MIX, TO SPLASH, TO KNOT, TO SPILL…

(Extract from Richard Serra, Verb List, 1967-68.)

Oscar Tuazon had explored living structures and how they define and frame human lifes in works such as Coming Soon, 2002, City Without a Ghetto, 2003 or Locked Room, 2004. His work had been often analysed through notions of (utopian) architecture, habitat, and use. However, his exploration of architecture and habitats had been much inspired by the notion of resistance: how the architecture can be changed, altered or negated through the use of uncommon forms and materials. His installation Kodiak, created with Eli Hansen for the Seattle Museum of Art in 2008, is exemplary: he uses a staircase that he turns into a monumental sculpture, an abstract and dynamic form.

For his exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation, Tuazon goes one step further: he  totally engages with post-minimal sculptures. The works he had created all adopt primary geometric forms (cubes, colomns, etc). He makes a creative use of a wide range of material (wood, concrete, steel, and for the first time, marble) and explore the tensions created by their juxtaposition. The title also refers to his uncommon use of materials.

“One of the first thing I did when I started working in New York was to write down a list of verbs – to splash, to tear, to roll, to cut, and so on. I then enacted those verbs in the studio with rubber and lead in relation to time and place. The residues of the activities didn’t always qualify as art. I was primarily interested in the process and it was important that whatever was finally made reveal its making. Some of the residues were so replete in their exploration of material and the simplicity and singularity of the process that they would go unquestionned.” (Richard Sierra in Richard Sierra. Sculpture: Forty Years, Museum of Modern Art, 2007. P. 29). The practice of Richard Serra, together with others by minimal or post-minimal sculptors such as Sol LeWitt or Tony Smith, had infused the exhibition: the works are partly generated by the inner property of their materials, they have basic forms, their proportions make them neither an object nor a monument, they are made of industrial materials, etc.

The sculptures had been positioned in the space to create a rythme and engage with the visitor’s body as much as with the surrounding architecture and its luminosity. The artist had choosen to include works by other artists from the David Roberts Collection. These works, by various artists, photographers, painters, sculptors are mostly figurative. They  either conflict with Tuazon’s works, or are clearly instrumentalised to lit part of                  the exhibition.

Works from the David Roberts Collection:

Andre de Dienes: Cowgirl, Turning, 1945. The friend and prefered photograph of Norma Jean Baker, before she became Marylin Monroe, Romanian photographer André de Dienes (1913-1985) emigrated to the US in 1938. He settled in New York to work for Esquire, Vogue, Life, and Montgomery Ward before moving to Hollywood in 1944. De Dienes’ association with Marilyn Monroe began in 1945 when he hired her for her first modeling job at age 19. A five week road trip photographing the young Norma Jean across California, Nevada, and New Mexico resulted in a love affair and numerous magazine covers around the world. Their working relationship continued until 1953.

Jim Goldberg (born 1953, USA) is most known for his famous series Rich and Poor (1977-1985) exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New york, in 1984 and published in a book in 1985 by Random House, Inc. Jim Goldberg’s photographs of rich and poor people, with the subjects’ own handwritten comments about themselves on the prints, give an inside look at the American dream at both ends of the social scale. His pictures reveal his subjects’ innermost fears and aspirations, their perceptions and illusions about themselves, with a frankness that makes the portraits as engrossing as they are disturbing. Jim Goldberg joined Magnum Photos as a Nominee in 2002 and became a Full Member in 2006.

Susan Meiselas (born 1948, USA) first major photographic essay focused on the lives of women doing striptease at New England country fairs. She portrayed (from 1972 to 1975) the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She also taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers, and paying customers. The series of photographs, Carnival Strippers, was published in 1976. Produced during the early years of the women’s movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterized a complex era of change. A selection was installed at the Whitney Museum of Art in June 2000. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976 and became a full Member in 1980.

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) started his Torso and Sex Parts series in 1977. According to Warhol’s assistant at the time, Ronnie Cutrone, Warhol would take polaroids of of men having sex that Halston’s boyfriend, Victor Hugo, would “recruit” from gay bath houses. Warhol also later incorporated sex work into the making by hiring street hustlers to urinate on his Oxidation Paintings (1978). Linda Nochlin asserted that Warhol’s nudes of the 70s brilliantly navigate the shadowy territory between the two (arguably) mutually exclusive categories of the classical male nude and pornography. The male nudes, as exemplified by this work, is a significant part of Warhol’s oeuvre.

In the 1930’s and 1940’s British-American artist Gerald Leslie Brockhurst (1890-1978) was one of the most celebrated portraitists, first in England, then in America.  He specialized in portraying beautiful women, often-famous personalities such as Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor. The etching is based on a painting, Ophelia, ca 1937, now in the collections of the Royal Academy of Arts. It is a portrait of Kathleen Nancy Woodward, the artist second wife.

One of the most famous photograph by Burt Glinn (1925-2008, US) shows Andy Warhol With Edie Sedgwick And Chuck Wein in the streets of New York. of prostitutes working on the streets of New York. Glinn had covered many subjects, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro’s entrance into Havana, to the Sinai War as well as the U.S. Marine invasion of Lebanon. The work is part of a series Glinn took in 1971, of prostitutes working in the streets in New York in 1971. Burt Glinn joined Magnum Photos in 1951 and became a full Member in 1954

Born in Glasgow (1919-1970), Robert Henderson Blyth trained at the Glasgow School of Art. He was appointed to a teaching position at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1946 and served as Artist-in-Residence at Hospitalfield House (Arbroath) in 1947. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1941 and served until the end of World War II. This led to him painting Existence Precarious (1946), a self-portrait showing himself as a soldier in a trench, which is now held by the National Gallery of Scotland.

The artist’s “Leuchten” (lamps) are hybrids of the materiality of his paintings and the geometric transformations of his works on paper, translated into space. Reinforced concrete fragments of varying lengths with unworked ends jut out into the space of the gallery. The weakly shining light bulb mounted on the upper end places purist functionality and minimalist sculpture into a single, tension-filled context. Hoischen’s sculptures aim to draw out the moment between function and larger abstract concerns. The title “Geklärt im rechten Winkel” translates into “clarified in the right angle”

Liliane Lijn was born in New York in 1939, educated in Europe and has lived in London since 1966. She is a leading pioneer and exponent of kinetic art who in her work has experimented with light, movement, words, film, liquids and industrial materials. “I would like to make cosmic maps. It should be that in the discipline of a drawing there is the same rhythm as that of cosmic forces.”

Oscar Tuazon (born USA,1975) lives and works in Paris. This is his first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include: Standard, Oslo (2009); Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin (2009); Michele Maccarone, New York and Jonathan Vyner, London (2008); Seattle Art Museum (2008); and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007). Recent group exhibitions include: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (Marco), Vigo (2009); Kunsthalle St Gallen, St Gallen (2008); Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, St Louis; Sculpture Center, New York (2008). Oscar Tuazon is represented by Balice/Hertling in Paris, Standard in Oslo, Michele Maccarone in New York and Jonatahn Vyner in London.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

An exhibition curated by Cylena Simonds with works by Raul Ortega Ayala, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Susan Collis, Yara El-Sherbini, David Ersser, Mauricio Guillen, Graham Hudson, Gayle Chong Kwan, Harold Offeh, Nada Prlja, Ana Prvacki, Manuela Ribadeneira, Paul Rooney.

The David Roberts Art Foundation launches its Curators’ Series with its first guest curator, Cylena Simonds. The Curators’ Series aims to support international curators with unique and experimental vision by commissioning projects for the Foundation. Cylena Simonds, an American curator based in London, will present the group exhibition At Your Service.

At Your Service engages the concept and dynamics of the service and hospitality industries in today’s political and social climate and brings together a wide range of artwork from emerging international artists. Simonds writes “Economic migrants in Britain (as well as the rest of Europe) have changed significantly over the past 50 years. Yet what they have in common is that their first, and often only, points of entry into employment are via the service industries. Many contemporary art practices engage in or reflect services that challenge our perceptions of who performs the roles of host and guest.”

At Your Service examines aspects of service industries such as building construction, cleaning and catering as a way of addressing concepts of belonging, patterns of migration and the less-than-distinct roles of host/guest and native/foreigner. The artworks investigate themes within service labour such as routine, invisibility and the mundane.  Juxtaposed with these works are projects that explore the notion of contemporary art practice as a service to the public, asking us to examine the kinds of interactions, expectations and desires we take on.

The work in At Your Service ranges from sculptural objects to photography and video as well as featuring specially commissioned performances taking place both within the gallery and in public locations. The Foundation is glad to have contributed to a number of these productions. Gaia Tedone, Assistant Curator, David Roberts Art Foundation, assists Cylena Simonds with the exhibition.

Cylena Simonds is an independent curator working with the politics of representation and the representation of politics within contemporary art. From 2004-2008 she was Exhibitions Curator at Iniva, heading their on-site and touring programme as well as off-site public art projects. Her final show, States of Exchange, was the first exhibition of Cuban contemporary art to be shown in the UK since 1997. In July 2008 she co-founded Butcher’s, a roving alternative space for presenting contemporary art projects. Working with emerging as well as mid-career artists, she has developed new commissions with Laylah Ali, Meschac Gaba and Idris Khan in addition to presenting several premieres of work never before shown in the UK.

Raul Ortega Ayala (Born in Mexico, based in UK). Ayala’s practice and methodology is based on a ‘participant observation’ approach towards subject matters where he purposefully involves himself with common yet somehow unfamiliar worlds like that of the office, food and gardening. His ongoing immersion/research into food has included his attendance in cooking and/or butchering courses in Mexico, London and New York. The results of this ongoing series use performance, video, text and happenings to explore food beyond bodily sustenance.  Ayala will present a specially commissioned performance and installation of The Last Supper (2006/09).

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson (Born in Spain and Iceland, based in Netherlands). Often described as “citizens of the world,” Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson utilise different media in order to raise questions addressing social issues and urban politics. The aim of their work is to portray a group of people living in a specific cultural, social and economic environment and mapping the spatial and architectural context where they live. With their “site-related practices,” they also actively engage with the dynamics of locality, reactivating and revealing its current concerns. The video The Caregivers (2008) investigates a fairly recent phenomenon in the sector of female-labor, that of East European domestic caregivers who take care of elderly Italians in their homes. At Your Service will present the UK premiere of The Caregivers.

Sue Collis (Born and based in UK). Within Collis practice, everyday objects and surfaces are presented splattered and stained with the marks of wear and tear, and the viewer might, upon further investigation, realise that the timeworn flecks of paint that cover an old broom, are in fact delicate and precisely inlaid pearls, jasper, turquoise, garnets and black diamonds. Initially, the demarcations seem to be the accidental results of a service activity, both undervalued and easily ignored. At Your Service will present Waltzer, 2007 (David Roberts Collection) and works from her 2008 series Sweat.

Yara El Sherbini (Born and based in UK). El-Sherbini’s playful and multi-disciplinary approach to art making uses popular culture and humour to make engaging and accessible works that explore contemporary social and political issues. Recent commissions include Universality Challenge: a game show exploring universal experiences, and she is currently touring A Pub Quiz throughout England and to Australia.  El Sherbini will perform her work Auctions Speak Louder Than Words as well as create a new installation, Socially Engaged, for At Your Service.

David Ersser (Born and based in UK). David Ersser produces cold, meticulous models of electrical appliances, tools and domestic objects. Assembled from balsa, the least majestic of woods, in a dead pan and un-dramatic way, the work owes more to the culture of the enthusiast model maker than the great history of carved sculpture. Recently Ersser has begun to create entire rooms or environments from his surroundings, such as the artist’s desk from his studio, his tools, equipment, detritus, chair, keys and his half finished artworks themselves. For At Your Service the artist will present a new work from his upcoming series developed in early 2009.

Mauricio Guillen (Born in Mexico, based in Frankfurt). Mauricio Guillen is interested in the role aesthetics play in the organisation of social space and the formation of identity. Appropriating and re-signifying existing dominant cultural models, Guillen creates poetic language capable of making visible the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that frame social relations. At Your Service will present Noon (2008/9), a new series of photographs exploring construction workers on their breaks.

Graham Hudson (Born and based in UK). Graham Hudson’s practice involves a variety of media and an ever-evolving array of materials, treading a line between sculpture and installation, his work evolves in response to places and events. Addressing subjects including political and religious ideology, advertising, media, and the nature of the art object, his concerns range from the moral and social, to the aesthetic and the common-place. Continuing his exploration of the tools commonly used in both building construction and sculpture At Your Service will present Hudson’s Beginning to End (2008) a DIY limited edition part of the David Roberts Collection.

Gayle Chong Kwan (Born and based in UK). Gayle Chong Kwan’s practice is often the result of a process of working with notional communities featuring elements of photography, video, installation and performance. Her work plays with concepts of communication, participation and authorship through utopian ideas, food, culinary rituals, tourism, trade, memory and the senses. At Your Service will present work from the artist’s recent series Green Flash (2008) which creates soundscapes from migrant workers in kitchens throughout the UK.

Harold Offeh (Born in Accra, based in UK). Harold Offeh employs a range of strategies to assess contemporary popular media representations of race, identity and desire. Being Mammy (2004-2007), is a series of objects, installations, video and performance work, exploring the world of the domestic maid ‘Mammy’ caricature. In this series Offeh examines the life and career of actress Hattie McDaniel, who famously played and won an Oscar for her role as ‘Mammy’ in Gone With the Wind. At Your Service will present objects from the series as well as a newly commissioned performance.

Nada Prlja (Based in UK). Having lived in Sarajevo, Skopje and London, for more than a decade in each place, Nada Prlja avoids defining herself as belonging to a single nation. This unsettled condition defines her practice. Prlja’s work deals with the complex situations of inequality and injustice in societies in transition, ranging from political and economic to religious issues. Using different media, her projects are multi layered and ‘site, space or condition specific’. The main aim of her work is – through the ‘re-appropriation’ of the art (or art-systems) – to provoke reaction and activate, affect, and modify other, parallel, socio-political systems in society. For At Your Service, Prlja will present work from her ongoing series exploring sweat shop labour in the garment industry, this time focusing on the situation within the UK.

Ana Prvacki, (Born in Serbia, based in Singapore). Prvacki often provides services to the public as part of her lifestyle consultancy, Ananatural Production, which she founded in 2003 to explore the aesthetics of consumer goods, as well as the propagation of ideas, brands, or “mantras” that are designed to frame a way of living. Within the context of a global bank that handles millions of dollars each day, Prvacki set up At the tips of your fingertips, a money cleaning service that cleanses and “purifies” one note at a time through the use of specially branded wet wipes. At Your Service will re-enact At the tips of your fingertips performance as well as present a video installation of the piece.

Manuela Ribadeneira (Born in Ecuador, based in UK). Ribadeneira views her artistic work as a social, political and spatial investigation. Her practice is based around constructions of objects and sound, utilising strategies of participation and performance in work that comments or intervenes on social and public spaces. In particular interest to At Your Service is her practice as part of the collective Artes No Decorativas (AND) which aims to develop, promote, produce and diffuse all expressions of contemporary art in forms of research, products and services to the public. At Your Service will present the piece Working/Not Working, 2007 as well as a newly commissioned work.

Paul Rooney (Born and based in UK). Rooney often collaborates with people to engage with their working or leisure experiences, highlighting everyday practices, and peripheral positions, as potential sites for resistance to wider social structures. At Your Service will present recent sound work Words and Silence (2008), which features the fictionalized voice of a female call centre worker.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

For his first solo exhibition in London since 2005, British artist Alastair Mackie (born 1977) will present a new group of three major sculptures. The works in the show have been especially commissioned and produced over the past 12 months by The David Roberts Art Foundation.

Mackie introduces the exhibition with a 1930’s glass taxidermy display case. Entitled Metamorphoses (2008): the object originally created to protect and reveal has been mirrored from the inside thus changing its function. Instead of viewing the object displayed within the glass the viewer is now confronted with their own distorted reflection. House (2008) is a large scale dolls house meticulously built from the wood pulp of 262 abandoned wasp and hornet nests. Shown on a high plinth: the toy becomes a possible model of drama, partly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Untitled ( /-) (2008) is a large scale wooden loom with a material woven from mouse hair.

Alastair Mackie in conversation with curator Vincent Honoré.

This exhibition is your first solo presentation in London since 2005. We had been developping it for more than twelve months. You decided to produce three major new works and excluded the idea to show past works part from the David Roberts Collection. How did you conceive this exhibition ? Does it mark an important step in your artistic practice ?

The conception of the show came at an interesting time for me, just as I was starting to relax with the way that my work was going – really for the first time. I had previously been doing a lot of group shows, but wanted to stop showing my work for a while so that I could take stock and focus more specifically on ideas. This exhibition gave me something more specific to focus on, so in a sense it was good timing.

The works are ambitious, not only in terms of scale but also in that they sum up a number of your previous preoccupations. You carefully choose the materials to highlight the tensions between natural and constructed structures. Using uncommon materials in surprising ways enables you to create at once delicate and unsettling sculptures and installations, and to raise a subtle sense of the uncanny. Can you describe the way your had created the three works?

I had worked with some of the materials before, but felt that they could be pushed further. I wanted to focus more on the processing roll behind the production of a piece, which was becoming more and more important to the general concept of the work as well as the relationship between the end product and the original material. The dolls house and the loom were both very much process based pieces, whereas Metamorphoses was more of a diversion, something that would off-set the atmosphere of the show by approaching similar ideas from a different angle, both conceptually and aesthetically.

Could you explain further the loom piece, its process and how you made the work?

Over a period of one year I have collected tens of thousands of barn owl pellets (the regurgitated indigestible parts of a mouse). These were subsequently processed in to their raw components of mouse fur and bone. The fur was then spun into yarn and the yarn woven into a sheet of fabric with the use of a loom. The skeletons which are the by-products of the process, have been left in a heap alongside the loom to show the correlation between the length of fabric to amount of mice it took to make it.

Childhood, science, beleifs and traditions are some of the themes you had been addressing in your work: they all point to a broader exploration of time, decay and melancolia – with, from time to time, a certain sense of humour and absurdity. This description could also apply to works produced by Damien Hirst or Kris Martin. How do you position your work first in the previous generation of English artists (YBA in particular) and second, in the current contemporary debate?

The YBA generation were in their prime when I was at art school. Although I had been making “things” for a long time they helped me understand where I was coming from – in terms of why I was making these things, and inspired me to become an artist. Much of their works shared a sense of sensationalism, which I appreciated, but this is quite different to the feeling that I’d like my own work to hold – which is quiet in comparison. In this sense I believe my work relates more closely to particular artists from the current generation who are using a less loud voice, but while speaking a similar language.

Could you name some of these artists?

Initially, although they’re probably considered to be more accociated with the slightly older generation, artists like Tom Friedman, Olafur Eliasson and Ai Weiwei strike a cord. From the current generation I am interested in the work of artists similar to Jochem Hendricks, Mircea Cantor, and Kris Martin.

You will be also presenting a public art project in London, coinciding with the exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation, you are planning your first catalogue for the spring, etc. Can you explain these projects ?

The public art project will be at the Economist Plaza, commissioned by the Contemporary Art Society as part of their programme of outdoor sculptural works. It’s my first outdoor piece and touches on ideas to do with place, context and confrontation. The book will be published by Other Criteria as the second in a new series of project based publications on young artists. It will be focused on the two process based pieces I’ve been working on this year – the loom and the dolls house. RS&A have commissioned me to make a chess set for the forthcoming ‘The Art off Chess’ Exhibition at Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland, opening at the end of January and there are a few group exhibition oportunities looming as well as my first major exhibition with AVA, which is penciled in for 2010.

Download exhibition leaflet here.

A solo exhibition by Nina Beier and Marie Lund curated by Vincent Honoré turning into a group show with works by Johanna Billing, Aurélien Froment, Dora Garcia, Cecilie Gravesen, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen, Chosil Kil, Jiri Kovanda, Benoît Maire, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Roman Ondak, Mario Garcia Torres and graphic design group Åbäke curated by Nina Beier and Marie Lund.

Nina Beier and Marie Lund have been working collaboratively since 2003. Their work stems from a fascination with shared history and group dynamics, be they awkward, fervent, polite or tender. The artists play with social customs often by orchestrating simple situations that allow instinctive human reactions to determine the viewer’s experience.

Their works – videos, photographs, altered or displaced objects, installations, performances –reveal a subtle awareness and critique of the institutional, social and cultural systems of representation. They often start by exploring collective memory and the possibility of a physical or intellectual act of resistance to the established structures of communication.

Beier and Lund are interested in failed ideas and political involvement, and have a fascination with storytelling and invisible human relationships. They investigate group dynamics with a clear knowledge and understanding of the utopian pursuit of collectivism, and political performative actions mainly inspired by artists of the 70s (Jiri Kovanda, Julius Koller, Vito Acconci, Daniel Buren, Adrian Piper, etc.).

The piece All the Best, consists of an instruction to leave all post sent to the gallery for the duration of the show, unopened on the floor. For another work, All the People at Tate Modern (Clap in time),  the employees of the museum were asked to stop what they were doing and start clapping at a given time during the opening hours. Visitors chose to either clap along or be clapped at.

During the course of the show the artists gradually alter the exhibition, changing this solo show into a group show. They invite other artists to exchange their own work for work by these artists. Each new piece added changes the dynamics of the group. Rather than problematising the difference between artist and curator, the exhibition is an experiment in opening up this relationship and in collaborative curating.

Nina Beier and Marie Lund explain: “As a response to the solo exhibition Vincent Honoré has curated of our work, we have invited artists that we feel related to, know and have shown with before to replace each of our works over the course of the exhibition. By picking up on these relations built over time with people we have previously been put in context with, we wish to operate from within the structure of the group exhibition and open up for a collective process in the forming of the show.

In dialogue with the artists each work is exchanged based on inherent relations, following any strand of logic, which may be thematic, intuitive or formal. This can either result in a new work responding to the situation or bringing in an existing piece.

Adapting to the format of the exhibition, placing the new work in the same spot, on the same plinths, nails etc, the final group show will carry the traces of the first show. All decisions will be taken locally relating to the exchange of each piece and it will be assembled from the inside without regard for the overall. This way the final group exhibition will not end up as a full curatorial rendition of the initial solo exhibition, but rather as a series of discussions. Through this rough translation we mean to take the focus to the intentions behind, both the curation and each work brought into the exhibition.

Download exhibition leaflet here.