International art historians Yumiko Chiba, Reiko Tomii and Yuri Mitsuda present a series of talks looking at performance collectives and movements in Japan 1960-70s, an era celebrated for its pioneering early experiments and innovations in body-based and time-based art.
Toyko-based Yumiko Chiba discusses her experiences working with the Estate of Jiro Takamatsu (1936-98), a central figure in the development avant-garde movements in post-War Japan. She discusses the significance of Takamatsu’s work, his international legacy, and the influence he has had upon the art world in Japan and worldwide.
Yuri Mitsuda discusses the influential Hi-Red Center (active 1963-64), founded in Tokyo by the artists Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jiro Takamatsu. Hi-Red Center created happenings and events that were socially reflective, anti-establishment and anti-commercial. The group used the urban environment to create interventions that raised questions about centralised authority and the role of the individual in society.
Reiko Tomii discusses ‘Publicity as Reward’ in 1960s Japan, a particular motivational factor in the context of an isolated location and lack of market for contemporary art. Publicity constituted “reward” in otherwise a “rewardless” (mushō) world of vanguard art. Tomii examines how publicity shaped the performative practices of artist Matsuzawa Yutaka (1922-2006), Kansai-based performance and happenings group The Play and Nigata-based group GUN.
YUMIKO CHIBA 千葉由美子 lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. She is the founder of Yumiko Chiba (YCA), an artist management office launched in 1998. YCA represents the Estate of many important artists in Japanese contemporary art history including Jiro Takamatsu, Masafumi Maita and Katsuro Yoshida. In 2010, YCA opened a commercial gallery in Shinjuku, Tokyo as “viewing room” and has held a large number of solo shows for both established artists and artists in the young generation. In addition to the above, YCA has planned and organised contemporary art shows at the galleries and museums inside and outside of Japan. YCA also has published many research booklets with critical essays, contributing to interpretations of artists in terms of art history, including the Critical Archive series looking at movements and ideas in pre- to post-war Japan.
YURI MITSUDA 光田ゆり(b. 1962, Nishinomiya, Japan) is an art critic and curator at Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art. She graduated from Kyoto University, Department of Literature. Some of her major books include Words and Things: Jiro Takamatsu and Japanese Art 1961 – 72(Daiwa Press, 2012), From bijutsu hihyo [Art criticism, 1952-1957] and its Era(Fuji Xerox Art Bulletin, 2006), Yasuzo Nojima(AKAAKA, 2009). Mitsuda has organized exhibitions including Talking about Art: The Viewpoint of Yusuke Nakahara(Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, 2016), For A New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Photography, 1968-1979(Japan Society, 2015), Hi-Red Center: The Document of “Direct Action(Nagoya City Museum, 2013- 2014), SHINJIRO OKAMOTO THE BIG BOMB at 25:00(The Shoto Museum of Art, 2011), Yasuzo Nojima 1889 – 1964 Works and Archives(The Shoto Museum of Art, 2009), Nakanishi Natsuyuki New Paintings(The Shoto Museum of Art, 2008), Kiyoji Otsuji: Encounter and Collaboration(The Shoto Museum of Art, 2006) and Nakaji Yasui photographer 1903-1942(Kyodo News, 2004).
REIKO TOMII富井玲子(b. Osaka, Japan) is an independent art historian and curator based in New York, whose work investigates post-1945 Japanese art in global and local contexts for the narration of a world art history of modernisms. Her early works include her contribution to Global Conceptualism(Queens Museum of Art, 1999), Century City(Tate Modern, 2001), and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art(Getty Research Institute, 2007). As Co-Founder/Co-Director of PoNJA-GenKon, established in 2003, she has organised several conferences and symposiums in collaboration with Yale University, Getty Research Institute, Guggenheim Museum, and University of Chicago, among others. She is a prolific writer whose latest publication is Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan(MIT Press, 2016), which has received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award.
CURATORS’ SERIES (2009 – ongoing) supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based exhibitions. The Series presents diverse fields of knowledge, methodologies and practices. Each year, DRAF invites an individual, duo or organisation to curate an original exhibition.
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) , Arcadia Missa (London) and Kunsthalle Lissabon (Portugal).
Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Institute of Asian Performance Art is supported by Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Daiwa Foundation.
VICTOR WANG王宗孚 is an independent curator based in Shanghai and London. Recent exhibitions include Michael Dean: Analogue LOL(2018) at ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai;XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) and the group exhibition Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Katja Novitskova (2017) at the Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai; Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive (2017) at the Korean Cultural Centre, London; Jac Leirner: Borders Are Drawn By Hand (2016) at MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai; Neïl Beloufa: Soft(a)ware (2016) at K11 Foundation Shanghai; and Ensemble sin órganos (2016) (with Blanca Victoria López) at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana.
In 2015, Wang was appointed by the K11 Art Foundation as a curator (with Jo-ey Tang) of the travelling exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant (Shanghai Station), the first collaborative exhibition between Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and K11 Art Foundation. Wang has curated film programmes, performances, talks and exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2014 Wang assisted the curatorial team of the Twelfth Havana Biennial (2015), and was Assistant Curator for the Vancouver Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Wang is a contributor to artforum magazine, and has been a guest editor of LEAP magazine. In 2016 he was awarded the AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
ASIA HOUSEis the UK’s centre of expertise on Asia. Through its Arts and Learning Programme, Asia House’s mission is to inspire and engage diverse audiences by encouraging dialogue aimed at finding common ground amongst different schools of thought on how to look at Asia’s historical and cultural development. This is done through a dynamic series of live events; from panel discussions to music, dance, performance, visual art, film, food, fashion and literature.
Artist Kim Ku Lim discusses his work with art historian and curator Dr Charlotte Horlyck (Senior Lecturer in the History of Korean Art, SOAS). The conversation addresses Kim Ku Lim’s practice over the last 40 years, specifically his prominent role in the development of performance art in Korea, through the Avant-Garde (A.G.) (established 1964) and The Fourth Group (established 1970), as well as his work with experimental film.
KIM KU LIM 김구림(b. 1936, Sangju, South Korea) is a pioneer of performance art and the first artist in Korea to make experimental films such as The Meaning of 1/24 Second(1969). Known as Korea’s first avant-garde artist, he has worked in film, light, performance and land art, often stretching the limits of a given medium. In Korea, he held his first solo exhibition in 1958 at Daegu Information Center, and soon expanded his artistic practice beyond painting. For his artistic “deconstructions” he often used burned plastics, vinyl and metal bits alongside oil paint. He incorporated ready-made objects into his painted canvases, installations and staged performances. Kim played a leading part in several artist collectives (Painting 68, A.G. Group, The Fourth Group). He staged the nation’s first body painting performance and initiated the first Korean mail art Maeseu Midieo ui Yumul[The Relics of Mass Media] (1969).
CHARLOTTE HORLYCK is an art historian and curator based in London. She received her PhD from SOAS in 2006, and was appointed Lecturer in Korean Art History at SOAS in 2007. Before taking up this position, she curated the Korean collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1998-2004). She has published widely on Korean material culture, in particular on ceramics and metal wares of the Goryeo kingdom, including their collecting in the early 20thcentury. More recently she has worked on modern and contemporary Korean art and her monograph Korean Art – From the 19th Century to the Present(Reaktion Books) was published in September 2017. Her co-edited volume (with Michael Pettid, SUNY Binghampton) Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea from Ancient to Contemporary Times(Hawai’i University Press, 2014) was selected for a Republic of Korea Ministry of Education Award (2015).
CURATORS’ SERIES (2009 – ongoing) supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based exhibitions. The Series presents diverse fields of knowledge, methodologies and practices. Each year, DRAF invites an individual, duo or organisation to curate an original exhibition.
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) , Arcadia Missa (London) and Kunsthalle Lissabon (Portugal).
Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Institute of Asian Performance Art is supported by Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Daiwa Foundation.
VICTOR WANG王宗孚 is an independent curator based in Shanghai and London. Recent exhibitions include Michael Dean: Analogue LOL(2018) at ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai;XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) and the group exhibition Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Katja Novitskova (2017) at the Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai; Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive (2017) at the Korean Cultural Centre, London; Jac Leirner: Borders Are Drawn By Hand (2016) at MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai; Neïl Beloufa: Soft(a)ware (2016) at K11 Foundation Shanghai; and Ensemble sin órganos (2016) (with Blanca Victoria López) at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana.
In 2015, Wang was appointed by the K11 Art Foundation as a curator (with Jo-ey Tang) of the travelling exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant (Shanghai Station), the first collaborative exhibition between Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and K11 Art Foundation. Wang has curated film programmes, performances, talks and exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2014 Wang assisted the curatorial team of the Twelfth Havana Biennial (2015), and was Assistant Curator for the Vancouver Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Wang is a contributor to artforum magazine, and has been a guest editor of LEAP magazine. In 2016 he was awarded the AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
SOAS (SCHOOL OF ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN STUDIES), UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
SOAS University of London is the only Higher Education institution in Europe specialising in the study of Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East. Uniquely combining language scholarship, disciplinary expertise and regional focus, it has the largest concentration in Europe of academic staff concerned with Africa, Asia and the Middle East. www.soas.ac.uk
At O2 Forum Kentish Town, 9-17 Highgate Rd, London NW5 1JY
With Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Martin Creed, Charismatic Megafauna, Das Hund, Bob Kil, Stacy Makishi, Grace Schwindt, Alma Söderberg and Tate n Lyle.
DRAF presents its 11th annual Evening of Performances, at 1930s Art Deco music venue the O2 Forum Kentish Town, with an exciting programme of live works that range across performance art, spoken word, dance, comedy and music.
The evening presents eight new commissions and a UK premiere by international artists responding to the theme of intimacy. Each artistic contribution brings forward a new reading and experience, charging the venue with different physical, sensual and intellectual approaches. A wide array of artistic positions take stage throughout the evening, expanding from the personal to the collective, exploring the ways in which people connect to one another. Bob Kil, Stacy Makishi, Charismatic Megafauna and Grace Schwindt explore individual and personal narratives. Alma Söderberg and, Martin Creed expand on the sensual dimension of intimacy. Artist duos Tate n Lyle and Das Hund incorporate additional performers to examine and express the role of the social and political in personal interactions. Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press stages a typographic catwalk that oscillates between a runway show and a military march of linguistic components. She publishes the event under a unique ISBN number, permanently registering it in the public domain.
Intimacy is the quality of close relationships between subjects, which may be physical and bodily, however not necessarily sexual. It requires reciprocation. Each deeper connection creates more room to grow, more to lose and more to become. The human condition, in that regard, relies on the willingness to transcend individual boundaries, and the urge to multiply ways of being in order to have meaningful encounters. Individuals engaged with acts of care, trust and love are invested in the transactions of desire. The programme at O2 Forum Kentish Town, responds to the various forms and powers of intimacy and its role in understanding and relating to the world around us.
The eleventh edition of the annual event is curated by new DRAF Director & Chief Curator Fatoş Üstek. The event is free to the public, and coincides with Frieze London.
PROGRAMME
Artist Bob Kil makes her first UK public appearance at DRAF’s 11th Evening of Performances. Her new commission, But Bob, emerges from a dream landscape, where she recounts a recent experience in R.E.M state. Her reading takes the form of a sleep journey, with pitfalls and peaks, her voice rising and falling at an unexpected pace. She exposes what might be the most intimate realm, and unfolds her fears and confusion into words. Her voice guides the audiences to a sensuous space where personal projections and associations run amok.
Here’s to… punctuates the evening with popping champagne corks. A series of toasts take place throughout the evening and across the venue. The artist duo Tate n Lyle, composed of Rohanne Udall and Paul Hughes, take the commission towards an expansion of ideas and positions. Through inviting six individuals with strong opinions –Angela Andrews, Wendy Houston, Bruno Roubicek, Tamara Tomic-Vajagec, Esmond Sage and Monsur Mansoor – and allocating each a space for expression through a celebratory toast, they isolate the individual and publish reflections from their respective lives.
Choreographer and dancer Alma Söderberg performs Deep Etude, 2018 for the first time in the UK. Alma Söderberg works with the body as her medium and responds to sound through choreography and movement. Deep Etude is informed by a composition of polyrhythmic sounds by Hendrik Willekens. Söderberg introduces endurance into the piece. She marks each movement with repetition and sound. Through improvisation and immediate choreographic response, each performance emerges as a unique composition.
Artist Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press publishes the eleventh DRAF Evening of Performances with an original ISBN number, registering it as both a fiction and a reality. Her distinctive visual and numeric identity runs throughout the venue and stretches across London. On stage, she presents a new performance Spring Summer 19 / The Walk in the form of a fashion runway show which foregrounds not clothes, but language. The performance melds fetishisms of display prevalent both on the catwalk and in military displays.
Turner Prize winning British artist Martin Creed reveals a new commission for An Evening of Performances.
Grace Schwindt’s new commission The Boxer centralises on the singularity of a subject from the perspective of multitude, looking at what makes an individual. Her response is told from the perspective of a lack, a wound, a loss. Schwindt composes an image of a person in his/her absence, through performances by a bodybuilder, a singer, a dancer, a drummer, alongside a boxing ring and a series of sculptures made of ceramics and bronze. The broken boxing ring she inserts on the stage stands for the central character whose narrative is told through moving image, accompanied by singing and choreography. Performers include Sophie Brown, Jia-Yu Corti, Rosie Middleton, Ellen van Schuylenburch and Ted Pollard.
The complexity of human narrative is the core of Stacy Makishi‘s new piece, Stacy Makishi and the Proud Marys. Her stand-up comedy is informed by her memories of her childhood. She juxtaposes vital facts (place of birth, conditions of upbringing) with semantic constellations (feelings of self, realisation of subjectivity, aspirations…) in the most hilarious and surreal ways. In this piece, Makishi directs her lens onto shame, an intimate feeling kept hidden from others. Through inviting the audience to respond and participate in her directional narrative, she builds a deep collective intimacy.
Environmentalist and gender activist punk trio Charismatic Megafauna are a female-only band composed of artists Jenny Moore, Georgia Twigg and Susannah Worth. They perform a drum-hop-punk-powered missives of “party music for politically minded people” in original costumes and projections. Their live set of songs from their latest album Semi Regularperforms the intimacy of the political self, through ever-active engagement with the world.
Artist duo Das Hund (Sam Levack and Jennifer Levandowski) launch their evocative debut album For Freedom,performed live for the first time at An Evening of Performances. The artists compose visual and sonic narratives around the alienated individual that resists the streams of regeneration and separation from nature. The duo, accompanied by a guitar and bass player, will perform tracks from the album, which is available as digital download and vinyl LP. This launch will be followed by a UK tour.
ABOUT
AN EVENING OF PERFORMANCES is an annual highlight in DRAF’s programme, bringing together artists, musicians and choreographers for an evening of live artworks. The event is both a key moment in the Frieze VIP diary, and open free to all. In 2017, DRAF presented the first off-site edition of the annual event at London music hall KOKO. In 2018, the event will take place at the 1930s Art Deco former-cinema O2 Forum Kentish Town.
Previous Evening of Performances have featured artists including Alexandra Bachzetsis, Nina Beier, John Bock, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Michael Dean, Rodney Graham & Kim Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, planningtorock, Eddie Peake, Laure Prouvost, Steve Reich, Cally Spooner, Sue Tompkins, Amalia Ulman and Mark Wallinger.
An Evening of Performancesis supported by DRAF Galleries Circle: Blain Southern, Goodman Gallery, Marian Goodman, Grimm Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Peres Projects, White Cube.
Bob Kil, But Bob, 2018 is supported by The Korean Cultural Centre UK.
VENUE
O2 Forum Kentish Town is an iconic 1,800-capacity live music venue in London, and one of the UK’s best preserved, original cinematic theatres. It was originally built as an Art Deco cinema in 1934 by Herbert Yapp, a cinema magnate who also owned the Forum cinemas in Ealing and Fulham and the architect was J. Stanley Beard with interior design managed by his partner W.R. Bennett. The cinema closed in 1970 to become a bingo hall and then a dance hall and in the 1980s the venue’s name and usage was changed to the Town & Country Club. It became one of the must-play venues on the indie circuit for up-and-coming bands as well as established acts. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, bands that played included The Velvet Underground and Pixies to Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine and The Wedding Present.
In recent years, O2 Forum Kentish Town has seen some legendary performers take to the stage including, Dave Grohl and Sound City players, Jack White, Rihanna, Bobby Womack, Justin Timberlake and KISS.
O2 Forum Kentish Town, 9-17 Highgate Rd, London NW5 1JY
Artist Tehching Hsieh discusses his work with curator Adrian Heathfield. The conversation explores Hsieh’s ideas on time and performance, in particular in his durational works including his influential One Year Performances and Thirteen Year Plan (1986-1999). They discuss Hsieh’s ambitious proposal for a career retrospective measured and displayed in both time and space.
Yingmei Duan presents a new performative lecture Future Imagination: A solo show by Yingmei Duan in 2021 at Nottingham Contemporary. Created especially for the event, the performance is the latest in a series that sees Yingmei adopt the role of museum guide to present an imagined solo exhibition at the host institution.
CURATORS’ SERIES (2009 – ongoing) supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based exhibitions. The Series presents diverse fields of knowledge, methodologies and practices. Each year, DRAF invites an individual, duo or organisation to curate an original exhibition.
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) , Arcadia Missa (London) and Kunsthalle Lissabon (Portugal).
Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Institute of Asian Performance Art is supported by Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Daiwa Foundation.
VICTOR WANG王宗孚 is an independent curator based in Shanghai and London. Recent exhibitions include Michael Dean: Analogue LOL(2018) at ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai;XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) and the group exhibition Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Katja Novitskova (2017) at the Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai; Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive (2017) at the Korean Cultural Centre, London; Jac Leirner: Borders Are Drawn By Hand (2016) at MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai; Neïl Beloufa: Soft(a)ware (2016) at K11 Foundation Shanghai; and Ensemble sin órganos (2016) (with Blanca Victoria López) at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana.
In 2015, Wang was appointed by the K11 Art Foundation as a curator (with Jo-ey Tang) of the travelling exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant (Shanghai Station), the first collaborative exhibition between Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and K11 Art Foundation. Wang has curated film programmes, performances, talks and exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2014 Wang assisted the curatorial team of the Twelfth Havana Biennial (2015), and was Assistant Curator for the Vancouver Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Wang is a contributor to artforum magazine, and has been a guest editor of LEAP magazine. In 2016 he was awarded the AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
TEHCHING HSIEH 謝德慶(b. 1950, Nan-Chou, Taiwan) lives and works in New York. Hsieh entered the United States illegally in 1974, receiving amnesty in 1988. From the late 1970s, Hsieh made five One Year Performancesinside and outside his New York studio, works spanning long durations that make art and life simultaneous. His Thirteen Year Plan(1986–1999), a self-imposed moratorium on exhibiting his work in public in retreat from the art world, set a tone of sustained invisibility. Since the completion of the performance in 1999, Hsieh has exhibited his work internationally including in North and South America, Asia and Europe. Hsieh lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is represented by Sean Kelly Gallery.
ADRIAN HEATHFIELD is a British writer and curator. He has curated a number of performances and durational events across Europe over the last eighteen years, including the Live Culture events at Tate Modern, London (2003). He was curator of Tehching Hsieh: Doing Time, the Taiwan Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), curatorial adviser and attaché for the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016) and an artistic director with the collective freethought of the 2016 Bergen Assembly, Norway. He has worked with many artists and thinkers on critical and creative collaborations including film dialogues, performance-lectures, writing and workshop projects. He is the author of Out of Now, a 2012 monograph on the artist Tehching Hsieh (MIT Press), editor of Live: Art and Performance (2004, Tate) and co-editor of Perform, Repeat, Record. Live Art in History (2012, Intellect Books). His essays have been translated into ten languages.
YINGMEI DUAN 段英梅(b. 1969, Daqing, China) is an artist who lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany and Beijing, China. In 1995 she participated in the influential performance To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountainalong with Zhang Huan and eight other artists, considered to be an influential moment in Chinese contemporary art. Much of Yingmei’s performance art explores human instincts such as fear and desire, examining society and questioning its conventions and human behaviour. Yingmei Duan has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, festivals, residencies, lectures and workshops. Her work has been exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum, Netherlands (2005), La Biennale di Venezia, Italy (2007), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Germany (2009), Guangzhou Live, China (2010), Lilith Performance Studio, Sweden (2011), Hayward Gallery, London, UK (2012), Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Wales (2013), He Xiangning Art Museum, China (2014), the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2014), Solyanka State Gallery, Moscow, Russia (2015), Wiener Festwoch, Austria (2016) and Capsule Shanghai in China (2017).
NOTTINGHAM CONTEMPORARY brings international art to an iconic building in Nottingham City Centre. Designed by Stirling Prize-winning architects Caruso St John, it is one of the largest and most ambitious contemporary art spaces in the UK. It opened in 2009 with 1.5 million visitors to date.
For the 11th edition of DRAF Curators’ Series, guest curator Victor Wang 王宗孚 launches the Institute of Asian Performance Art (IAPA), an international network to deepen the awareness and understanding of the history of early performance art in Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan.
Wang reconsiders the format of the Curator’s Series from an exhibition to a speculative institute. Three platforms connect the discipline and study of early East Asian performance art: Exhibition Case Studies, Classes and a Course Reader. They address and examine these diverse histories, which are often marginalised in the curriculum of universities and the collections of public institutions, and consider different ways to present and engage with them. The project investigates the trans-national connections and dialogues within the region, mapping the interconnected individuals and collectives.
EXHIBITION Jiro Takumatsu 高松次郎| Hi Red Center | Hirata Minoru 平田実| Kim Ku Lim 김구림
28 Sept – 27 Oct 2018 (Weds–Sat 12–6pm)
111 Great Titchfield St, London W1W 6RY (nearest tube: Warren St)
Opening Reception: Thurs 27 Sept, 6–8pm
Performance by Kim Ku Lim: 7pm
Free, no booking required
A new exhibition brings together works from 1960s and 70s Japan and Korea. It includes sculptures and works on paper by the late influential artist Jiro Takamatsu. Documentation of performances by Hi Red Center at the 1962 Yamanote Line Festival, one of the influential collective’s first events, by photographer Murai Tokuji. It presents 24 works by renowned photographer Minoru Hirata, which capture key performances and events during the 1960s and 70s across public spaces. Kim Ku Lim re-stages his 1974 work Wiping Cloth for his first UK performance, alongside archival material and documentation from his early performance works.
CLASSES
A series of talks, seminars and performances with international artists, art historians, gallerists, writers and curators. They present, discuss and exchange lived experience and research at partner venues across the UK. The classes are open free to the public.
READER Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s
A new publication edited by guest curator Victor Wang, which brings together a variety of essays, photographs and archival materials and on the history of early performance art in East Asia. The publication will include texts by KuroDalaiJee, Reiko Tomii, Joan Kee, Yao Jui Chung and Victor Wang; and images by Hirata Minoru, Jiro Takamatsu, Murai Tokuji, Ma Liuming, Yingmei Duan, Kim Ku Lim, RongRong, Tehching Hsieh and Jung Kangja. An invaluable new research tool, the publication is available free at events and online.
Conversation with Tehching Hsieh 謝德慶 & Book Launch
Mon 1 Oct, 6.30–8pm
111 Great Titchfield St, London W1
Following his presentation at Nottingham Contemporary Tehching Hsieh discusses his work, on the occasion of the launch of Performance Histories from East Asia 1960s–90s: An IAPA Reader.
CURATORS’ SERIES (2009 – ongoing) supports independent curators by commissioning special research-based exhibitions. The Series presents diverse fields of knowledge, methodologies and practices. Each year, DRAF invites an individual, duo or organisation to curate an original exhibition.
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) , Arcadia Missa (London) and Kunsthalle Lissabon (Portugal).
Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Institute of Asian Performance Art is supported by Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and Daiwa Foundation.
The Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) is IAPA international partner, and will host a second edition of the project in 2018/19 in Japan.
VICTOR WANG王宗孚 is an independent curator based in Shanghai and London. Recent exhibitions include Michael Dean: Analogue LOL(2018) at ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai;XUZHEN Supermarket (2007/2017) and the group exhibition Zhongguo 2185 at Sadie Coles HQ, London; Katja Novitskova (2017) at the Cc Foundation & Art Centre, Shanghai; Rehearsals from the Korean Avant-Garde Performance Archive (2017) at the Korean Cultural Centre, London; Jac Leirner: Borders Are Drawn By Hand (2016) at MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai; Neïl Beloufa: Soft(a)ware (2016) at K11 Foundation Shanghai; and Ensemble sin órganos (2016) (with Blanca Victoria López) at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana.
In 2015, Wang was appointed by the K11 Art Foundation as a curator (with Jo-ey Tang) of the travelling exhibition Inside China – L’Intérieur du Géant (Shanghai Station), the first collaborative exhibition between Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and K11 Art Foundation. Wang has curated film programmes, performances, talks and exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. In 2014 Wang assisted the curatorial team of the Twelfth Havana Biennial (2015), and was Assistant Curator for the Vancouver Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale (2012).
Wang is a contributor to artforum magazine, and has been a guest editor of LEAP magazine. In 2016 he was awarded the AICA Incentive Prize for Young Critics by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).
With works by Caroline Achaintre, Horst Ademeit, Fiona Banner, Sara Barker, Phyllida Barlow, Neil Beloufa, David Birkin, Karla Black, Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Lea Cetera, Susan Collis, Thomas Demand, Jason Dodge, Boyle Family, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, Rodney Graham, Harry Gruyaert, Jeppe Hein, Marine Hugonnier, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Day Jackson, Tatsuya Kimata, Rachel Kneebone, Elad Lassry, Bob Law, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Kris Martin, Marlie Mul, Nika Neelova, Man Ray, Magali Reus, Pietro Roccasalva, Analia Saban, Erin Shirreff, Monika Sosnowska, Oscar Tuazon, Gavin Turk, Franz West, Douglas White.
“She sees the shadows… she even counts the tree-trunks along a promenade by the shadows, but sees nothing of the shape of things.”*
In 1886, a 22-year-old woman in Lyon saw the world around her for the first time. Objects instantly recognisable by touch were hard to distinguish with her new sight, and shadows appeared more concrete than solid forms. Her doctors described the sudden strangeness of familiar environments, and her singular experience of the world as a newly sighted person.
In his 1932 book Space and Sight, Marius Von Senden collated the patient’s experiencesalongside testimonies of similar cases dating from 1020 to the present. These captivating accounts, which later inspired writers including Maggie Nelson and Annie Dillard, express how something familiar can show a previously unacknowledged beauty when seen in a new way.
She sees the shadows is a group exhibition of works from the David Roberts Collection that resonate with the ideas found in Space and Sight. Each artist has reconceived day-to-day objects and materials in unexpected ways – a bench, plug socket, grate, section of railing or broom – and invites viewers to see alternative qualities and narratives therein.
Some artists have used precious materials to confer value to unremarkable commonplace objects. Susan Collis’ paint-splattered broom is inlaid with mother-of-pearl; Lea Cetera’s disposable coffee cup is cast in ceramic; Tatsuya Kimata’s generic plug socket is carved from white marble; Kris Martin’s wall screw is solid gold; Gavin Turk’s cardboard box is cast in bronze; and Rachel Kneebone’s eggbox is filled with delicate porcelain. Meticulous tromp l’oeil studies of grimy undistinguished patches of a city street, including puddles, broken tiles and railings, focus attention onto the unnoticed fabric of daily life.
Other subtle modifications to objects can subvert their use: wooden bannister rails jointed into an endless loop, public benches where the seat is elevated beyond reach, notebooks opened to face the wall so their contents is entirely obscured, a single black leather glove behind a glass frame, a wind chime pitched to an atonal scale.
Stories and ideologies infiltrate the private sphere through different media channels. Isa Genzken’s Weltempfänger (World Receiver) points to the domestic radio’s influential role in both propaganda and resistance. Rodney Graham’s couple reading a comic magazine in bed enact a popular sketch in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film The Lady Vanishes. Theaster Gates places a charged 1970’s journal article ‘The Black Bourgeoisie’ in the seat of a piano stool. Harry Gruyaert’s TV Shots capture the constant news stories and dramas of 1970s colour television sets. Neil Beloufa carves a constellation of floating cats into compressed wood and power sockets, the ubiquitous trope of online videos and memes streamed into contemporary homes.
“I Was So Entranced Seeing That I Did Not Think About The Sight”. David Birkin’s title directly quotes deaf-blind activist Helen Keller, describing her experience at the top of the newly built Empire State Building in 1932. Birkin exposed a sheet of gelatin silver photographic paper to sunlight at the same location, embossed with a braille transcription of the quote.
Each of the works in a collection, like the testimonies compiled by Von Senden, speak of personal experiences and moments. She sees the shadows is accompanied by a new publication with responses to the project from writers Orit Gat, Claire Potter and Sally O’Reilly and artists David Birkin, Jason Dodge, Marine Hugonnier, Marlie Mul, Magali Reus and Douglas White (download free PDF version at top of page).
*M. Von Senden (trans. P. Heath), Space and Sight: the perception of space and shape in the congenitally blind before and after operation, 1932, Methuen & Co. Ltd.: London, 1960.
ABOUT
She sees the shadows is a collaboration between DRAF and MOSTYN, curated by Olivia Leahy (DRAF) and Adam Carr (MOSTYN).
MOSTYN presents international art and culture of our time, activating people’s lives through exhibitions, cultural programmes and commercial activities. Situated in the coastal town of Llandudno, it is Wales’ foremost contemporary gallery and visual arts centre, serving as a place to form and share new perspectives through artistic/curatorial practice and audience engagement.
MOSTYN is part of the Plus TATE, the UK-wide contemporary visual art network. MOSTYN (Mostyn Gallery Limited) is a registered charity in England and Wales (number: 507842) and receives financial support from the Arts Council of Wales.
MOSTYN
12 Vaughan Street
Llandudno
Conwy
LL30 1AB
Wales UK
Started in the mid 1990s, the David Roberts Collection currently comprises over 2,000 works. It focuses on contemporary art but also includes some modern works. It is not focused on a specific medium, generation or geographical area. The Collection is an evolving archive of forms and concepts. Works from the Collection are regularly exhibited by DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) and internationally within exhibitions at other institutions.
This evening of screenings of video works from the David Roberts Collection brings together a wide array of artistic positions, which oscillate between the factual and the fictional. The works document a setting or construct an imaginary one, to depict ideas of belonging and observation.
The programme starts with a humorous tone, as we strain to see the room in which David Shrigley turns the lights on and off. Our quest then follows Nicolas Provost through the casinos and streets of Las Vegas, as his curious narrative unfolds with intrigue and suspicion. Frances Young‘s abandoned entertainment park proposes a gloomier atmosphere, which crescendos into the silent night time demolition of a high-rise block in Cyprien Gaillard‘s work. Taking a twist in tone, Neil Beloufa presents a speculative tale of a terrorist group inhabiting a lush Modernist villa. The blurring of fiction and documentation is furthered by Lars Laumann‘s spurious mapping of seemingly unrelated references into an unlikely re-framing of an infamous event.
Through this sequence of video works, we walk through current and historic, real and fictional interiors and built environments, and reconsider the emotional structures of public and private spaces.
A Club Night in collaboration with Lisson Gallery opens with a special screening of Hans Berg & Nathalie Djurberg‘s Waterfall Variations series. Short videos present animated charcoal drawings of fizzing waterfalls running through fictional landscapes, forming and shifting in accordance with a sonic landscape of atmospheric sound effects and hypnotic tones. The screenings is followed by a live set by Hans Berg and DJ set by Haroon Mirza.
The video programme will be repeated on Sunday 8 Jul, 11am – 6pm for a special Art NightSunday Trail.
ABOUT
DRAF live programme is supported by DRAF Galleries Circle and Arts Council England.
Art Night is London’s largest free contemporary arts festival, transforming the city annually for one unforgettable night. Each year, Art Night invites a leading cultural institution to explore the history, culture and architecture of a different part of London, inspiring a series of new commissions, one off events and premieres by internationally renowned artists.
Alongside this, Art Night works with local organisations, curators and artists, encouraging participation in the festival’s Art Night Open programme offers local galleries, organisations, independent artists and curators the opportunity to take part in the festival, responding to the curatorial themes and cultural trail. Art Night contributes to the UK’s art sector through its Legacy programme, which delivers co-commissions, acquisitions for public collections and prolonged display periods – enabling broader audiences to enjoy the programme, year-round.
Visit: http://artnight.londonTwitter: @ARTNIGHTLDN, Instagram: @ARTNIGHTLDN, Facebook Art Night.
The festival was conceived and is organised by UNLTD London, and founded by Ksenia Zemtsova and Philippine Nguyen. Art Night is administrated by ArtCity Nights, a registered charity no 1164449.
Thanks to Lisson Gallery for their generous support and engagement.
DRAF presents an Evening of Performances and 10th Anniversary Party. The event takes place on Tues 3 Oct 2017 (during Frieze London week) at historic music venue KOKO, London NW1.
The evening opens with artist Lina Lapelyte’s Ladies. Violeta, Nijole, Danute and Judith have performed for 30 years as part of Lietuva ensemble, a folkloristic orchestra that toured worldwide during the Soviet regime. They perform a labour-intensive monotonous block of sound played using Kanklės (a traditional Lithuanian instrument).
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings working with singer Zee Asher and Producer Owen Pratt have created an immersive and highly sensual work that evokes the tragic and euphoric spirit of their ongoing UK Gay Bar Directory.
Next on the stage is a dance performance by Last Yearz Interesting Negro aka London-based choreographer Jamila Johnson-Small. Love Songs is a body of “techno-meditations on osmosis, internalisation and transformation, with a feeling for the tensions between things”, the work features lighting by Jackie Shemesh and original music from Junior XL and Shelley Parker.
Artist Kris Lemsalu is joined by singer-songwriter Glasser and four archangels for In Heaven Everything Is Fine.
Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost presents a new musical performance with UK grime MC Trim and DJ A.G. Exhausted.. excited exhaustion with Trim combines melodic compositions and improvised dialogue in front of a vast illustrated backdrop made by the artist.
The evening crescendos with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s MEGA HAMMER, a spectacular carnival of surreal acts by dozens of collaborators across the space. Madam (aka Adam Christensen) serenades the crowd with her accordion. Jedrzej Cichosz performs Earthly Delights, a live acrobatic action painting session supported by his cooing admirers. Chanteuse Mathilde Fernandez is joined by Etienne Dumas for The Ventriloquist’s Recital. Paul Kindersley performs the celebrated Henry Moore Workout. Mette Sterre and five collaborators awaken a giant monster costume for What I will Not Do For Halloween. Culture&Leisure (brothers Beinn, Rory and Lewis Watson) accompany a medieval mime troupe. All-female band Stasis (Olivia Norris, Aniela Piasecka, Isabela Palmstiera,Paloma Proudfoot) and duo Bugatti (Rebeca Oliva and Olivia Sabin) play short sets. Artist Elsa Lefebvre performs her musical turn with Thomas Dupal – THE GOST OF FAME 2017 – and Miserycorpse & Girthdaddy dreamguy perform Dopethrown. A giant handmade bunting sculpture The Stars Are Aligned (I should KOKO)2017 by artist Lucy Soni adorns the stage. Presiding over the entire troupe is the artist herself, Master of Ceremonies Marvin Gaye Chetwynd resplendent in red paint and papier-mâché breast extensions.
Nkisi finishes the evening with a DJ set of her distinctive mix drawing on influences from African club tracks to gabber and doomcore.
This is the tenth Evening of Performances curated by Vincent Honoré (Chief Curator, DRAF), who once again brings together artists, musicians and choreographers for an evening of live works. Over the last decade, the event has become a key moment in the Frieze week diary, and is open free to all. Previous editions have featured artists including Alexandra Bachzetsis, Nina Beier, John Bock, Michael Dean, Rodney Graham & Kim Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, planningtorock, Eddie Peake, Steve Reich, Cally Spooner, Sue Tompkins, Amalia Ulman and Mark Wallinger.
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ARTISTS
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd (b. 1973, London) lives in Glasgow, UK. Chetwynd’s practice intertwines performance, sculpture, painting, installation and video. Her work incorporates elements of folk plays, street spectacles, popular culture and Surrealist cinema. Her performances and videos often employ troupes of performers – friends and relatives of the artist – and feature handmade costumes and props. She has performed and exhibited internationally, and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include The Stagnant Pool, Gregor Staiger Gallery, Zurich, 2017; Uptight upright, upside down, CCA Glasgow, 2016; JABBA, I’M BACK!, Bergen Assembly 2016, Norway; Cocaine and Caviar, Bergen Assembly 2016, Norway; Camshafts in the Rain, Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, 2016; Bat Opera 2, Massimo de Carlo, Milan, 2015; Hermitos Children2, Studio Voltaire, London, 2014; Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2014; Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Nottingham Contemporary, 2014. Recent Group exhibitions include Coming Out, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2017; Dogsy Ma Bone for Tate Exchange, Liverpool Biennial Tour, London 2016; Diorama: Invention of Illusion, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, 2017; Room, Mead Gallery, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK, 2017; Dogsy Ma Bone for Touchstone, Rochdale, UK, 2017; and Room, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2017. She is represented by Sadie Coles HQ, London, Massimo de Carlo, Milan and Gregor Steigler, Zurich.
Lina Lapelyte (b. 1984, Lithuania) is an artist living and working in London and Vilnius. Her performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes, aging and nostalgia. Lapelyte explores contemporary forms of performativity that are related to rituals of folk, popular music and opera. Her works are fueled by expression, marked by pastiche and grotesque, contextual and conceptual musicality, theatrical suggestibility, stylised visuality. In Autumn 2017 she will have a solo show at Rupert, Vilnius as well the performance night at the FIAC, Paris. Her new collaborative opera Sun and Sea will be shown at the National Gallery in Vilnius and Dresden State theatre. Her recent shows and performances include Malmo Konsthall, Malmo, 2017; MACBA, Barcelona, 2017; Magma, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, 2017; Why Patterns?, Middleburg, Netherlands, 2017; Baltic Pavilion, Venice Biennial, 2016; Peculiar People, Focal Point Gallery, Southend, UK, 2016; Double Bind, NILO, Reykjavik, 2016; CA2M, Madrid, 2015; Listening, Hayward touring show, UK, 2015; Block Universe, London, 2015; Park Nights, Serpentine Galleries, London, 2014; Baltic CCA, Newcastle, 2014.
Last Yearz Interesting Negro(b. London) aka Jamila Johnson-Small currently makes dances and works to create spaces (on stage, in corners, on screens, in rooms, in bodies) with no single direction and no clear intentions, harbouring no desire to be useful other than to make gestures towards decentralised power and non-hierarchical structures for existing. Her practice looks to disengage with cultural systems of value that direct and inform style and in which she finds no interest or agreement. She is interested in surfaces, structures and the space/tension between things whilst looking to expose and discuss, the politics, perversities and movement of power within and around structures of production and the production of being. Jamila is one half of duos “immigrants and animals” (now defunct) and “Project O”, and works solo as Last Yearz Interesting Negro. She runs DIY event GUSH at home in London, conversation series HOTLINE with Sara Sassanelli and is happy to collaborate regularly with other artists including Fernanda Munoz-Newsome, Shelley Parker and Phoebe Collings-James. Her solo performance i ride in colour and soft focus no longer anywhere premieres at Fierce Festival (Birmingham) in October 2017.
Kris Lemsalu (b. 1985, Tallinn, Estonia) is based between Tallinn and Berlin. She often experiments with traditional techniques to create multilayered works, juxtapositioning porcelain casts of animal body parts and garments with found natural and synthetic objects to create large scale installations. These installations often function as a stage for Lemsalu’s performances, with the materials becoming part of her costumes. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include Beauty and the Beast (with Tiit Pääsuke) at Tallinn Art Hall (2016); Afternoon Tear Drinker at Kunstraum Lakeside, Klagenfurt; Blood Knot Step By Step, Bunshitu Gallery, Tokyo; Fine With Afterlife, Ferdinand Bauman Gallery, Prague. She has an upcoming solo show at Koppe Astner, Glasgow and will participate in Performa, New York.
Nkisi aka Melika Ngombe Kolongo (b. 1985, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is an artist raised in Belgium and now living in London. She’s a producer, DJ and co-founder of NON Records, a collective of African artists and artists of the diaspora, using sound as their primary media, to articulate the visible and invisible structures that create binaries in society, and in turn distribute power. She’s a regular at the Endless club night, playing an exciting mix of fast-paced music that draws from many influences (from central and west African club tracks to gabber and doomcore). While producing her own tracks, she goes for a heavily layered, relentless sound, often playing with collective memory. Performances include Corsica Studios, London, 2016; Bold Tendencies, London, 2015; Dance Tunnel, London, 2016; The New Museum, New York, 2016, and a regular spot on NTS London.
Here should be a biographie about Laure Prouvost. Her name, date of birth and location where she was born. A line here An list of exhibitions, information of where she studied and where she lives, a selection of solo show and group shows with dates in brackets following the exhibition title, the place and location, museum shows, names of publications, people who wrote about her work. Galleries that representing her, places that distributes her videos. Words talking about her practice, discribing what her work is about in 4 sentences, a coma and a list of future shows. A list of Residencies and awards. A line. possibly an image of her or an art work.
Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings (b. 1991, Newcastle/ London) live and work in London. They graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014. Their work centers themes of queerness and resistance, and includes an ongoing project @Gaybar, Wherein the artists rematerialise the historic gay bar as a container for queer practice. Selected solo/duo exhibitions include Fuck Me On The Middle Walk, Truth and Consequences, Geneva, 2017; GENTRIFICATION, presented by Daata Editions and Zuecca Projects, 15th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016; How to survive a flood @Gaybar, DRAF Studio, London, 2016; Cruising Extinction, @Gaybar, Oslo 10, Basel, 2015; If These Fossils Could Talk They Would Tell You Who Got Fucked and Who Didn’t, Room E10-27, Paris, 2015; Tifkas, Arcadia Missa, London, 2015. Selected group exhibitions include Coming Out, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2017; Late at Tate, Platinum Paradise (event), Tate Britain, 2017; Utopian Voices Here & Now, Somerset House, London, 2016; No! I Am No Singular Instrument, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, 2016; Curators’ Series #9: Ways of Living by Arcadia Missa, DRAF, London, 2016; CONDO Cinema (screening), Genesis Cinema, London, 2016; Frieze Art Fair, London, 2016; and S, Arcadia Missa, London, 2015. Forthcoming shows include a solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, 2017, and Queer Thoughts, New York, 2018. They are represented by Arcadia Missa, London and Truth and Consequences, Geneva.
Trim aka Trimbal Tali (b. 1984, London) is a grime MC from East London. After leaving the Roll Deep Crew in 2007, he has taken a path of experimenting different musical sides and standing as an artist on his own. This has led him into challenges such as starting his own collective and label (known as Saom – Secluded Area Of Music), releasing several mixtapes and EPs and collaborations with other musicians such as Skream, Mark Pritchard, Paul White, Ryan Hemsworth, Zdot and, more recently, with James Blake who released Trim’s recent album 1800 Dinosaur presents Trim on his own label.
ABOUT
(X) An Evening of Performancesis curated and produced at DRAF by Vincent Honoré (Chief Curator), Sandra Pusterhofer (Curator), with Olivia Leahy (Curator), Rachel Cass (Development & Communications Manager), Benedict Goodwin and Francesco Gorni. Thanks also to Paola D’Albore, Willoughby Cunningham, Nicoletta Lambertucci, Beinn Watson, Joni Zhu and all the team at KOKO.
An Evening of Performances is an annual highlight in DRAF’s programme, bringing together artists, musicians and choreographers for an evening of live artworks. The event is both a key moment in the Frieze VIP diary, and open free to all. In 2017, DRAF presents the first off-site edition of the annual event at iconic London music hall KOKO.
Previous Evening of Performances have featured artists including Alexandra Bachzetsis, Nina Beier, John Bock, Michael Dean, Rodney Graham & Kim Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, Goshka Macuga, planningtorock, Eddie Peake, Laure Prouvost, Steve Reich, Cally Spooner, Sue Tompkins, Amalia Ulman and Mark Wallinger.
An Evening of Performances is supported by DRAF Galleries Circle: Gagosian, Grimm Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, Kamel Mennour, The Modern Institute, Peres Projects, Sprüth Magers, Timothy Taylor, Michael Werner, White Cube and David Zwirner.
Lina Lapelyte, Ladies is supported by Lithuanian Cultural Institute. The work was commissioned by Rupert in partnership with The Living Art Museum and Oslo National Academy of Arts as a part of ‘Double Bind’ programme and produced under the EEA funding program and Lithuanian Republic in 2015.
Kris Lemsalu, In Heaven Everything Is Fine is supported by Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Embassy in London, Koppe Astner, Glasgow, and Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn. Thanks to Juhan Ulfsak.
KOKO is an iconic 1,400-capacity live music venue in Camden, London. It first opened as the Camden Theatre in 1900, and transformed several times over the next 100 years. KOKO has hosted stars including Charlie Chaplin, The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols, Iron Maiden, The Clash, Grace Jones, The Eurythmics, The Cure, Madness, Madonna, Amy Winehouse, Stormzy, Noel Gallagher, Roxy Music, Squarepusher, Bloc Party, Thom Yorke, Dizzee Rascal, the Chemical Brothers, Lily Allen, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Ed Sheeran, Prince and Kanye West.
Performance by Stuart Brisley of Action for body and voice: EVENING TIDE: 7.15pm
Art360 presents Shooting Performance: Edward Woodman and British Art of the 1980s and 1990s, a special exhibition in association with DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation).
Edward Woodman has been photographing artists and their work for over four decades, capturing historic moments and influential figures in British contemporary art. Shooting Performance assembles a selection of photographs of important performances and installations by artists including Phyllida Barlow, Stuart Brisley, Anya Gallaccio, David Medalla and Cornelia Parker from the 1980s and 1990s.
The singularity of Woodman’s achievement and influence lies in his unique collaborations with artists, which went beyond documentation to forge important creative relationships that became intrinsic to the work. At a time when installation and performance were becoming central to contemporary art practice, Woodman became the photographer of choice for a number of artists who recognised his unique ability to interpret their practice and ideas.
Having worked initially as a commercial photographer, Woodman brought a commercial eye to the documentation of contemporary art, which resulted in a groundbreaking vision which was recognised and highly valued by all the artists with whom he worked. British art critic and journalist Louisa Buck suggests “perhaps it was a childhood spent watching movies from the projection box of an east London cinema, where his father was manager, that gave Woodman an affinity with intense visual experience” (Moving Targets: A User’s Guide to British Art Now, Tate Gallery, 1997).
Now in his early 70s, Woodman has been participating over the last year in Art360, a three-year project to develop and sustain the archives and legacies of 100 leading modern and contemporary artists. Woodman has worked with curators and archivists to scan and catalogue thousands of photographic images, and Shooting Performance draws on this extraordinary archive.
Artist Richard Wilson reflects, “Edward was a genius, he was the only real practitioner at the time who was documenting professionally artists’ work, he was in big demand, and the fabulous thing was that Edward could really bring emotion into the photographs…He would come in and he would look at the piece of work for about half an hour, he would then set up and he’d go click, and that’s it, one image.”
The exhibition is curated by Gilane Tawadros and Judy Adam. It will take place in DRAF Studio, Symes Mews, London NW1 7JE, from Thursday 21 September to Saturday 7 October. The exhibition coincides with Frieze London and DRAF’s 10th Anniversary celebrations.
DRAF has for ten years presented a compelling and impressive programme of performance. A unique space dedicated to live work, DRAF Studio has hosted performance residencies and commissions by artists including Stuart Brisley, Guy Sherwin, Edward Thomasson, Stina Nyberg, Haroon Mirza, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Jacopo Miliani and Zoe Williams.
DRAF presents (X) A Fantasy, an exhibition of new commissions and works by historical and contemporary artists. With Dora Budor, Helen Chadwick, Keren Cytter, Jimmy DeSana, Theaster Gates, Harry Gruyaert, Celia Hempton, Melike Kara, Tala Madani, Paul Maheke, France-Lise McGurn, Pierre Molinier, Julian Opie, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Megan Rooney, Prem Sahib, Wolfgang Tillmans,Danh Vo and Zoe Williams.
When does the individual experience become a political statement? Over thirty artworks explore the subversion of the quotidian and the transgression of boundaries between public and private spheres. Living, eating, dancing, seducing, reading, watching films, going online; the exhibition traces how individual and collective engagements make the political personal.
On the occasion of the Opening Reception, the exhibition is activated with artists’ performances. Hannah Regel present her text work How to fill a room, with soundtrack by Hannah Regel and Luke Walker, with thanks to the Wellcome Collection. Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome presentssomething orange: our bodies slip slide through knowing, a new choreography “unravelling the in-between spaces of our private and public bodies”, performed by Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome and Jamila Johnson-Small, sound production by Nick Owen, Pumarosa.
Upstairs in DRAF Studio, artist Zoe Williams presents her ambitious commission Ceremony of the Void, a voluptuous banquet inviting visitors to experience her fantastical immersive environment and large-scale performance involving artist-made delicacies, musicians, performers, video projections and new ceramic sculptures. New costumes have been designed by Hydra Sartorial Latex. This unique performance will take place during the Opening Reception. Musicians: Patchfinder, Viki Steiri, Dario Papavassiliou. Performers: Mensah A. Bonsu, Freya Field-Donovan, Pegah Tahmasebi, Susu Laroche, Deniz Unal, Nadja Voorham.
We finish the evening with an afterparty in DRAF Studio, including a performance by Urara Tsuchiya and a DJ set by collaborative project and artists New Noveta.
(X) A Fantasy will be the last exhibition in DRAF’s Camden space. Following ten years of exhibitions and performances in London, the Foundation’s ambitions are expanding to include projects in different sites across the UK, reaching new and broader audiences. The exhibition continues to 7 Oct, and will exceptionally be open Mon 2 – Sat 7 Oct, 12–6pm during Frieze London in the final week. This exhibition is curated by Vincent Honoré (Chief Curator, DRAF) and Sandra Pusterhofer (Curator, DRAF).
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
With thanks to the Canadian High Commission to the United Kingdom for their support.
Thanks also to in-kind supporters of the performance Ceremony of the Void: perfume provided by Nishane, Istanbul; costumes by Hydra Sartorial Latex; ceramic works produced by Rochester Square; and Suze Saveur d’Autrefois liqueur provided by Pernod-Ricard.
Zoe Williams presents Ceremony of the Void, an ambitious commission for DRAF Studio performed on the occasion of the opening reception of the group exhibition (X) A Fantasy.
Ceremony of the Void is a voluptuous banquet, a fantastical immersive environment and a large-scale performance, involving artist-made delicacies, musicians, performers, video projections and new ceramic sculptures. New costumes have been designed by Hydra Sartorial Latex. This unique performance will take place during the Opening Reception. Musicians: Patchfinder, Viki Steiri, Dario Papavassiliou. Performers: Mensah A. Bonsu, Freya Field-Donovan, Pegah Tahmasebi, Susu Laroche, Deniz Unal, Nadja Voorham.DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Thanks also to in-kind supporters: perfume provided by Nishane, Istanbul; costumes by Hydra Sartorial Latex; ceramic works produced by Rochester Square; and Suze Saveur d’Autrefois liqueur provided by Pernod-Ricard.
Chief Curator Vincent Honoré reveals the stories behind the David Roberts Collection, a constantly evolving body of over 2,000 works by 700 iconic and emerging artists. He discusses the material and intellectual challenges of looking after a vast number of diverse artworks – some extremely fragile, some mammoth in scale – as they circulate to exhibitions at museums around the world.
Over the last 10 years, Honoré has engaged critically with the collection as an “archive of forms and concepts”. Works from the Collection have been activated in different exhibitions at DRAF and internationally: performing in a cabaret, haunting a ghost story, or as characters in a novel.
He has commissioned writers to study individual works, from the artist Hannah Black to design critic Emily King to curator Tom Morton, through DRAF’s unique ‘Study’ series. In contrast to the spectacle and acceleration of the art world, the series invites the viewer to focus and “ to enter into a dialogue with the work, to take up multiple viewpoints and to engage with the artwork by, at least, spending some time with it.”
Browse ‘Study’ leaflets online here to learn more about 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, Rosemarie Trockel, Charles Avery and Huma Bhabha.
Artist Haroon Mirza presents a live performance for DRAF Studio. Mirza and his studio hrm199 have been based on site at DRAF over the last year, sharing space and conversation. The event is part of DRAF’s Spring 2017 season looking at the intersections between music, sound and art; which includes performances by artist duo Emptyset (Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg) and Swedish musician Jay-Jay Johanson.
Emerging Paradigm is a device designed and developed by hrm199. The device is a multi-media player that allows users to synchronise up to four videos and 24 channels of electrical signal. The electrical signal can be used to generate light and sound simultaneously using binary processes and/or interface other electronic equipment.
This first piece made for the multi-media device, also titled Emerging Paradigm, 2015, presents a combination of iPhone and youtube footage collated over a three-year period. The content is a combination of mundane everyday observations, scientific and pseudo-scientific educational videos and documentation of works by artists and musicians. The material reflects Mirza’s ongoing interests in shamanism, psychedelics, quantum theories, astro-physics, fundamentalism and epistemology. It also features footage from artist Nik Void of Factory Floor. The videos interact with eight channels of live electricity, which can be heard through an array of speakers and seen through strips of LEDs. The work conjures a sense of intense media overload and multi-sensory and synesthetic stimuli.
The name Emerging Paradigm refers to a theoretical understanding of the current conditions that shadow artistic practice. Based on Nathalie Heinich’s idea of the modern and contemporary paradigms, which was later elaborated by Mario Perniola to provide lenses through which to understand art, the emerging paradigm extends that vocabulary to denote a culture of commodifying that which is not yet fully formed.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
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Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, UK) lives and works in London. He has won international acclaim for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound and light waves and electric current. He combines a variety of readymade and time based material to create audio compositions, which are often realised as performances, site-specific installations and kinetic sculptures. An advocate of interference (in the sense of electro-acoustic or radio disruption), he creates situations that purposefully cross wires. He describes his role as a composer, manipulating electricity, a live, invisible and volatile phenomenon and calling on instruments as varied as household electronics, vinyl and turntables, LEDs, furniture, video footage and existing artworks to behave differently.
Mirza has a BA in Painting from Winchester School of Art, an MA in Design Critical Practice and Theory from Goldsmiths College (2006) and an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design (2007). Solo exhibitions include Entheogens, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2017), ããã, Pivô, São Paulo (2016), Circuits & Sequences, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, Emerging Paradigm, Matadero Madrid, Haroon Mirza/hrm199 Ltd., Museum Tinguely, Basel (2015), The Light Hours, Villa Savoye, Poissy, Are Jee Be? , Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2014), The Hepworth, Wakefield (2013) and The New Museum, New York (2012). His work was included in the Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2016), The 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion. Among other awards he has won CERN’s Collide International Award in 2017, Calder Prize in 2015, Nam June Paik Art Center Prize and Zurich Art Prize in 2014, the DAIWA Foundation Art Prize in 2012 and Northern Art Prize in 2011. He is represented by Lisson Gallery, London.
DRAF invites Swedish musician Jay-Jay Johanson for a one-off performance in DRAF Studio. Johanson’s performance combines an acoustic set accompanied by pianist Erik Jansson of works from his forthcoming album (to be released Sept 2017), with video projections made by the artist.
Jay-Jay Johanson (b. 1969, Sweden) is a singer-songwriter whose work over the last twenty years is characterised by his distinctive vocals. Johanson was influenced by the 1990s Bristol trip-hop movement, and has also incorporated diverse influences including electroclash, jazz and experimental electronic influences into ten studio albums, from Whiskey (1996) to Opium (2015). His work has had particular commercial success in France, and he has also collaborated with German experimental groupFunkstörung and Swedish pop band The Knife.
For those not previously au fait with his work, Johanson melds sultry and bass groove-driven electronica to a smooth lead vocal. While this has led to him being described as “The great crooner of the electronica era”, this should not imply any lack of depth – these are gloriously creative songs.
Haydon Spenceley, CLASH, 2015.
Listen to the recently released single You’ll miss me when I’m gone from Johanson’s forthcoming album Bury the Hatchet (due Sept 2017):
The event is part of DRAF’s Spring 17 season looking at the intersections between music, sound and art; which includes performances by artist duo Emptyset (Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg) and Haroon Mirza.
Supported by the Embassy of Sweden, London and Iaspis, Stockholm.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
DRAF Studio is a space for live work unique in London. Over the last decade, DRAF has championed performance at the heart of its programme, and is celebrated for its work at the intersection between contemporary visual art and other disciplines (music, sound, dance, spoken word). Since 2008, notable music performances include Olof Dreijer (The Knife), Kim Gordon (with artist Rodney Graham), planningtorock, BorninFlamez, Japanese percussionist Seijiro Murayama, DJ sets by Larry Achiampong and Evan Ifekoya, improvisational saxophonist Evan Parker, electronic composer Julien Bayle, band Pumarosa and performances of works by Philip Glass, John Cage, Steve Reich and Peter Yard Martin.
Curators’ tour and talk with artist André Guedes: Fri 5 May, 12pm
Finissage with Laure Prouvost’s ‘Wantee’: Sat 29 Jul
The 10th 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: Thurs 4 May, 6.30–9pm Performances by Joshua Idehen, Penny Goring and Liv Wynter now available on Live Archive
Weds 17 May, 8pm*
Facebook live performance by Munesu Mukombe
Weds 31 May, 8pm*
Facebook live performance Rose Goddard
Weds 21 Jun, 8pm*
Facebook live performance by Caspar Heinemann
Weds 5 Jul, 8pm*
Facebook live performance by Liv Wynter
*With @DRAF_London instagram takeover by Liv Wynter from 7pm. Watch performances online on DRAF Facebook page.
(Enter – Greek chorus into the echo chamber) is a series of text-based interventions communicated and explored by Liv Wynter during May, June and July 2017.
Participating artists and poets include Rose Goddard, Penny Goring, Caspar Heineman, Joshua Idehen, Munesu Mukombe,Katrina Palmer and Liv Wynter.
In DRAF Gallery, an open lounge displays new sculptures and posters by Penny Goring, an audio work by Katrina Palmer and videos by Caspar Heinemann and Munesu Mukombe. Through the course of the project, the artists and poets will activate the space with readings and performances of new works, evolving written and drawn materials, and informal conversations and compositions in the space.
Concurrently, online interventions include a videos by Caspar Heinemann and Liv Wynter, a sound work by Munesu Mukombe and social media takeovers and live digital performances.
A call to arms – a confession – a break up via facebook messenger – a greek chorus enters an echo chamber – a radio loses signal and a television changes channels. In a time of ‘post truth’ – where language is diffusing but not dissipating – our narratives are becoming forcefully blurred. It is the duty of the writer to intervene and to be intrusive, to write emotively, truthfully and resist the symbiosis of human and toxic algorithm. Rinse, repeat, repost.
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Caspar Heinemann, 2017
Liv Wynter, For Ana Mendieta, 2016
Munesu Mukombe, Crane Flower, 2016
Since its foundation, DRAF has been committed to performance and education at the centre of its programme. Past collaborations have presented poetry and spoken word performances by artists including CA Conrad, Matthew Dickman, Tom McCarthy, Tim Etchells, Sue Tompkins, Harry Burke, David Raymond Conroy, Erica Scourti, Jesse Darling, Sam Riviere, Rachel Allen, Keren Cytter.
ARTISTS & POETS
Rose Goddard (b. 1993, UK) is a poet based in South East London. She was born in Macclesfield, but spent most of her childhood in a remote Suffolk village. After graduating from Goldsmiths with a degree in Fine Art, Rose has been working with both poetry and music on projects including Radiophrenia (CCA Glasgow) and Line 1 (Hotel Elephant, London).
Penny Goring (b. 1962, UK) is an artist and poet who makes sculptures, drawings, poems, paintings, songs, image macros, videos, and interactive digital poems. Her work includes: hatefuck the reader (5everdankly publications, 2016), DELETIA – self portrait w no self (New Museum/Rhizome, 2015), LOVE TESTER DELUXE (Peanut Gallery Press, 2014) and The Zoom Zoom (eight cuts gallery press, 2011). Her exhibitions and poetry readings include Looks Live at the ICA, Re-Materialising Feminism at the ICA, the Penarth Centre, and South London Gallery. Recent shows include Dreamfair/Frieze NY, ArcadiaMissa; Works Off Paper, SALTS, Basel; and PROJECT 1049 in Gstaad. She is co-editor of MACRO – an anthology of image macros, and was late summer/Autumn poetry editor for Fanzine, 2015.
Caspar Heinemann (b. 1994, UK) is an artist and writer based in London. Coming from a background in activism and DIY punk culture, their current research involves critical mysticism, countercultural mythologies, experimental poetics and queer biosemiotics. Heinemann recently graduated from Goldsmiths University of London where they studied Fine Arts and their first book, a homo-pastoral epic poem set in a near future Thames Estuary is soon to be published by Vile Torll Books. Their recent readings and other events have been held at institutions including ICA, Serpentine Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Arcadia Missa; Cell Project Space; and Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Their recent exhibitions and residencies have been hosted by Alt Stralau 4, Berlin; SPACE, London; Fokidos, Athens; and Res., London.
Joshua Idehen (b. 1980, UK) is a Nigerian-British poet, songwriter, novelist, show producer, and musician. Idehen is the frontman of Benin City. He has performed at many of the UK’s leading festivals, including the Big Chill, Glastonbury and Latitude; on BBC Radio One, and BBC Radio 3’s The Verb; his work has been featured by The Times, The Sunday Times and Prospect magazine, and published in anthologies alongside Linton Kwesi Johnson and Anthony Joseph. He regularly performs at and organises spoken word nights in London.
Munesu Mukombe (b. 1994, UK) is a London based multimedia artist. Her work explores life experiences she has had difficulty coming to terms with: whether its race, sexuality, mental health, death or heartbreak. Her work focuses on processing the multiplicity of the lived experience. Munesu is currently studying at Goldsmiths University.
Katrina Palmer (b. 1967, UK) lives and works in London. Her work uses found objects and writing in publications, live storytelling and elaborated audio environments. Her recent solo exhibitions have been shown at Void, Derry; MOT International, London; The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and End Matter, an Artangel commission with Book Works, BBC Radio 4. Other exhibitions include The Weight of Data, Tate Britain; MirrorCity, Hayward Gallery; Dr Sinclair’s Drawer, Flat Time House; From Morn ‘Til Midnight, Supportico Lopez; and Katrina Palmer Presents, Transmission Gallery. Palmer’s other publications include The Fabricator’s Tale (Book Works, London 2014) and The Dark Object (Book Works, London 2010). Her writing appears in Artists Writing, 2000–2015 (Paper Monument Publishing, New York 2016), The Object: Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery/MIT 2014), and Modern British Sculpture (Royal Academy of Art, London 2011).
Liv Wynter (b. 1992, UK) is a queer working class female artist working and living in South London. Wynter recently graduated from Goldsmiths University of London with a BA in Fine Arts. Her practice is focused on using the language of poetry and rap in live performance to draw attention and light to often ignored subjects such as sexuality, domestic violence, class structures and gender. Wynter recently completed a residency at Liverpool’s the Royal Standard. She has performed at artist-spaces, galleries and venues including The Royal Academy and Late at Tate as well as universities including UCL, KGL, CSM and Goldsmiths. Wynter is the founder of WHEREISANAMENDIETA, Lessons in Anti-Apathy and is currently co-organising Antiuniversity.
DRAF live events and education are supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
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.
Artists Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg (Emptyset) present an ambitious new commission at the intersection between architecture, sound and performance.
The performance is the culmination of a year-long period of research, design and composition by the artists in the space. The project marks a new direction in their practice: an entirely acoustic performance.
The performance is centred on two large-scale instruments realised in the space and developed from acoustic surveys of the building. The work incorporates constructed architectural elements and industrially manufactured materials, and using compositional aspects of micro-tonality, percussion and voice.
Vocalists: Josephine Stephenson, John Laichena, Tim Gowdy, Annie Garlid
This fifth performance residency commission in DRAF Studio follows projects by Edward Thomasson, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, Augustas Serapinas and Jacopo Miliani. The series invites artists to produce new live works in response to the space, and residency performances have incorporated theatre, dance, sculptural installation and music.
This project is curated and produced at DRAF by Sandra Pusterhofer, with technical support from Alex Roberts.
Thanks to Georgia Rodgers and Max Fordham LLP for their in kind support.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
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Emptyset is a London/Berlin based production project formed in 2005 by James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas. The project examines the material properties of sound and its correspondence with architecture, performance and physical modes of production.
Emptyset released the album Borders in 2017 under the Chicago-based record label Thrill Jockey. Their past recorded output includes the releases Recur and Collapsed for the German record label raster-noton (run by Carsten Nicolai), Signal a commissioned performance working with ionospheric propagation and Medium an expanded live recording in Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire.
Emptyset have produced installations for Spike Island, Tate Britain and the Architecture Foundation and presented live performances with CTM/Transmediale, Kunsthalle Zurich and Sonic Acts XIV.
How do artists work with words, and writers with images? Is the gallery today the space for avant-garde literary exercises to be realized and experienced? How has the relationship between literature and the visual arts manifested in both forms? This full-day symposium – hosted by Ben Eastham – will trace the history of the relationship between art and literature and review the way the two disciplines, and associated infrastructures, have supported each other over the past hundred years and – increasingly – today.
The day will comprise a number of lectures, presentations, screenings and readings with speakers working across the boundaries of art and literature. From the “collapse” of literature into the visual arts to the art world’s recent infatuation with poetry, to the conditions for publication of experimental literature today, the symposium will provide a critical overview of visual arts’ engagement with the written word and vice versa.
Schedule
11am
Introduction by Ben Eastham
11.30am
‘On the art world as home of literary experiment’ by Deborah Levy
12.30pm
‘The Wandering Bourgeois’ by Tom McCarthy
2.30pm
‘Is the gallery now the home of experimental publishing?’ Panel discussion with Jess Chandler (Test Centre), Anna Gerber (Visual Editions) and Catherine Hamilton (Swimmers)
3.30pm
‘Art and the essay’ by Brian Dillon
4.30pm
‘On collaboration’, screening of Everyday Performance Artists followed by conversation and Q&A with Adam Thirlwell
5.15pm
‘Art Hearts Poetry’ by Holly Pester and Nisha Ramayya
6.30pm
Readings and performances presented by Ben Eastham
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Ben Eastham is a writer based in London. He is Co-founder and Editor of The White Review, Assistant Editor of art-agenda.com, and Associate Editor of South as a State of Mind, the documenta 14 journal. His writing on contemporary art and literature has featured in frieze, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and TheNew York Times. He has written catalogue essays for Ed Ruscha and Camille Henrot, among others. He is the co-author with Katya Tylevich of ‘My Life as a Work of Art’ (Laurence King, September 2016).
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.
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.
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.
Artist Jacopo Miliani presents a new performance for DRAF Studio. The commission is inspired by Jeux, a 1913 poème-dansé (‘danced poem’) created in collaboration between Claude Debussy, Sergei Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky, which features a young trio frolicking during an evening game of tennis. Miliani’s performance re-imagines these flirtatious ‘games’ through a mixture of gestures and attitudes created in collaboration with divaD Magnifique, Prince Maya Magnifique, Benjamin Milan and Eve Stainton.
The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden. (Programme notes from the premiere of Jeux, 15 May 1913, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris)
Following the performance, DRAF invites you to join the artists and collaborators to celebrate the end of the year with drinks and dancing.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
DRAF invites art historians, writers and activists to discuss the changing meaning of flesh from the 1980s to the present day. Their research encompasses the AIDs crisis, emergent technologies and concepts of ‘fluid identity’, and their impacts on flesh as cultural material.
This event coincides with Streams of Warm Impermanence, a group exhibition of contemporary artworks that articulate visions of informed flesh, and historical works that point to key moments of shift in artists’ engagement with the body. As they infect, pollinate or mutate through networks, all bodies have the potential to be “trans-” in its literal meaning: across, through, beyond.
This event will be streamed live on this page, in partnership with This is Tomorrow.
PROGRAMME
2pm
Writer Matthew McLean responds to the premise of Streams of Warm Impermanence. Seeking to characterise models of corporeality in the practice of today’s emerging artists, his talk incorporates perspectives from writers including Mark Greif, Marquand Smith and Paul Preciado.
3.30pm
Art historian Theo Gordon and writer Tommaso Sperettagive a historical and theoretical overview of the AIDs crisis in the US and UK respectively, and discuss its cultural legacies. They are joined in conversation by writer Olivia Laing, whose forthcoming book Everybody asks “what it means to inhabit a body… that must necessarily age, sicken and die, that is subject to violence, and yet which remains a potent vehicle for both human connection and political liberation”.
(Sadly, Simon Watney is no longer able to join us for the discussion due to unforeseen circumstances.)
5pm
Lecturer and Researcher Cadence Kinsey presents ‘Lo Fidelity’, a new paper exploring the exhibition theme of ‘fluid identity’ in terms of a challenge to representation. Focusing on the current wave of interest in the concept of ‘trans’ and its relationship to early debates in the 1990s, she looks at how emergent networked technologies reconfigured models of the subject and presented both new possibilities and new problems for the representation of the body.
Theo Gordon is an art historian currently completing his PhD at The Courtauld Institute of Art, with a provisional title of ‘Mourning and Activism in Art of the American AIDS Crisis, 1987-1996’. His research examines questions of violence and aggression in artistic representations of people with AIDS, with a particular focus on the representation of women, and the works of Gregg Bordowitz and Félix González-Torres. He has been a Visiting Lecturer at University College London and The Courtauld Institute of Art.
Dr Cadence Kinsey is a Lecturer in Recent & Contemporary Art at the University of York. Her research focuses on the relationships between art and technology, with a focus on questions of gender, sexuality and subjectivity.
Olivia Laing is a columnist for frieze and writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Observer and New York Times. Her most recent book is The Lonely City (2016, Canongate).
Matthew McLean is a writer and editor based in London. He is a regular contributor to frieze, and in 2016 co-edited the frieze A-Z of Contemporary Art.
Tommaso Speretta is an independent writer, editor and curator who has worked for the Venice Biennale and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. He is the author of the book REBELS REBEL. AIDS, Art and Activism in New York, 1979–1989 (MER. Paper Kunsthalle, 2014), and his articles and essays have appeared in numerous journals and magazines including Domus, Flash Art and 032c. With artist Bjarne Melgaard he co-organised the MA program ‘Beyond Death: Viral Discontents and Contemporary Notion About AIDS’ at the IUAV University in Venice, as well as the exhibition Baton Sinister as part of Norway’s contribution to the 2011 Venice Biennale. He is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of the Arts London, focusing his research on the relationship between AIDS and video art in the 1980s.
Simon Watney is a British writer, art historian, and AIDS activist. He is author of the seminal 1987 article, ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’, and has published books including Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media, 1987 and Imagine Hope: AIDS and the Gay Identity, 2002. He has been actively involved in AIDS education and service provision since the early 1980s, and has written widely about and been closely involved with questions of AIDS and representation in areas ranging from from the mass media to fine art practices.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Choreographer Laura Dannequin presents a sensory installation in DRAF Studio. A floor of fresh grass with an ever-changing light and soundscape offers a space for quiet contemplation.
Laura Dannequin is a dance artist whose practice encompasses performance, installation and print. Recent works include ‘Dance Dark Dance’, ‘In the Making’ and ‘Hardy Animal’ (Aerowaves 2016). She works in close collaboration with Dan Canham & Still House and is currently training as a Body-Mind Centering Practitioner and working in a curatorial capacity on ‘Feel It’, a festival exploring pain and breathlessness.
Dance Umbrella is London’s international dance festival, celebrating 21st century choreography across the capital through an annual, international London festival, through year-round creative learning opportunities for all ages, and by developing choreographic talent. Since 1978, Dance Umbrella (DU) has been bringing outstanding contemporary dance to London, presenting more than 730 artists from 33 countries to over one million people. The first to present Mark Morris, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Michael Clark and many more in the UK, Dance Umbrella has commissioned over 77 new works and presented at 65 different venues ranging from Smithfield Market to the British Library, from canal long boats to Alexandra Palace Ice Rink, from car park rooftops to outer London parks.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle
Following the popularity of previous events, we recommend arriving early. The doors will open at 7pm, and entry will be strictly on a first come-first served basis. No booking.
A durational work with three actors, performed for the first time since its original 2007 performance at Kunsthalle St Gallen, Switzerland. A discrete group amongst the crowd, the ‘insiders’ ignore their surroundings as they dress and undress, reversing their clothes.
7.30pm – Amalia Ulman, Privilege, 2016
In a new video essay created for this event, the Los Angeles-based artist asks her audience “Are you vulnerable? What is valuable?”. Recent video-essays have combined the characteristic ‘middlebrow aesthetics’ and the confessional intimacy of amateur vlogs with an arch didactic tone, as they dissect contemporary topics from Justin Bieber to North Korea to hipster culture to the presentation of women online.
8pm – Mary Hurrell, Movement Study 5 (Pearlex), 2016
Hurrell presents a new performance for DRAF, in which the body is extended through sound, garments and movement made by the artist. Three dancers travel through the gallery and audience on a sculptural perspex structure choreographed to a live soundtrack.
8.30pm – Goshka Macuga, End of Line, 2016
An ambitious new durational work by Macuga includes two 4.5m motorised tables, artist-made costumes, two dancers perform original choreography on the moving tables. Choreography by Mbulelo Ndabeni, Fukiko Takase and Goshka Macuga. Commissioned score by Mira Calix.
9.30pm – Mark Wallinger, Make Me Think Me, 2006
First performed at DIA, New York in 2006, an actor reads the Turner Prize winning artist’s surreal and humorous text inspired by iconic American artist Bruce Nauman and the vivid experience of stage fright.
10.15pm – DJ set by Olof Dreijer (The Knife)
One half of legendary Swedish electro-pop band The Knife ends the night with a DJ set.
11pm – CLOSE
This ninth Evening of Performances follows previous editions with artists including Alexandra Bachzetsis, Nina Beier, John Bock, Michael Dean, Rodney Graham & Kim Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, planningtorock, Eddie Peake, Laure Prouvost, Steve Reich, Cally Spooner and Sue Tompkins.
Please note: the exhibition Streams of Warm Impermanence will not be on display during this event. During the week of Frieze Art Fair, the exhibition is open Mon 3, Tues 4 & Sat 8 Oct, 12–6pm.
Supported by DRAF Galleries Circle (Laura Bartlett, Sadie Coles HQ, Pilar Corrias, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Andrew Kreps, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Peres Projects, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Sprüth Magers, Timothy Taylor, Michael Werner, White Cube, David Zwirner).
Goshka Macuga, End of Line, is a co-production between DRAF, London and The Lowry, Salford. Supported by culture.pl.
Thanks to the Embassy of Sweden and South London Gallery.
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.
Curators’ Tour with Arcadia Missa (Rózsa Farkas and Zhoe Granger): 4pm
Performance by Beatrice Loft Schulz of Sally (2016): 5pm
Last chance to see the ninth edition of theCurators’ Series by Arcadia Missa. 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.
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).
Beatrice Loft Schulz (b. 1986, UK) is a Glasgow-based artist, writer and researcher. She recently exhibited a solo show, Living Arrangement # (2015), at Arcadia Missa, London. Her written works include The Story of Joan of Arc, for a collection edited by Babak Ghazi; booklet with text and typography (working title), with Tal Isaac Hadad’s modified piano series at the Istanbul Bienniale and in Senza Cornice; Seduction as a Virtual Object, with V.O.R.G., in EROS Journal.
DRAF Curators’ Seriessupports 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.
Choreographer and Dance Art Foundation Artistic Director Joe Moran invites dramaturge Martin Hargreaves and artist Pablo Bronstein to discuss the implications of camp and the queer body in the visual arts. This event is part of Dance Art Foundation’s Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got two-year research project, which began at DRAF Studio in September 2015 with the performance and live creation of Splendour by Swedish choreographer Stina Nyberg.
In Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (1964) she claims that the sensibility of Camp is “one of the hardest things to talk about”. As both Bruce La Bruce’s Notes on Camp/Anti-Camp (2012) and Chris Sharp’s Notes on Neo-Camp (2013) attest, at least since Sontag’s first salvo, any attempt to describe or delimit this sensibility is riven with contradiction and uneasy flirtations with sincerity. Sontag claims that Camp adopts an apolitical stance, precisely because it will not stand firmly and squarely on any ground. It wilts, feigns, slides and droops. It dissembles as caring too much and at the same time not at all. There are always quotation marks but where they fall is finally never clear. La Bruce claims that there is Bad Straight Camp that has been absorbed into mainstream cynical irony and Sharp echoes Sontag’s claim that it can be a tactic for producing and framing cultural production which is not intrinsically queer. We will perhaps consider this repeated attempt to moralise and value Camp as Good/Bad, Normative/Queer, Intentional/Naive (and many other failed attempts to draw distinctions) but also talk about pleasure and delight in the seriousness that misses its mark, the gesture which does too much and the anachronism which skews tastefulness.
Martin Hargreaves is an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and a Visiting Lecturer in New Performative Practices at DOCH, Stockholm. His research practices range between boredom and hysteria, covering the histories of contemporary dance, queer performance and camp misunderstandings.
Pablo Bronstein is an Argentinian artist who lives and works in London. His work spans from drawing and sculpture to choreography and performance, with a focus on architecture. His current project, Historical Dances in an Antique Setting, will be on view at Tate Britain in the Duveen Galleries, until October 2016.
Joe Moran is a choreographer with a wide-ranging practice incorporating touring theatre works, gallery installation, lecture-performances and curatorial projects. His work tackles contemporary propositions in dance, performance and critical thought. He is currently completing Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got, a two-year research project speaking up for dance’s critical acumen.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England
Thanks to the Galleries Circle for supporting performance at DRAF
Rather than selling an aspiration, the book looks honestly at our conflicted relationship with consumption. White intersperses recipes and self-sufficiency notes with prose, as the contributions collected on her food blog (http://holly-white-food.tumblr.com/) spark imagined and remembered references and memories. The pendulum swings between the author’s personal relationships with food and her critical deconstructions of metropolitan precarity, with a soft sleight of hand.
To celebrate the launch, White’s Supermarket Cafe Trilogy (2014–16) will be screened in its entirety for the first time. In keeping with the book, these video works navigate eating in the city and resultant affective relationships. A live music performance by LD will take place, and snacks and refreshments from the book served.
DRAF invites Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas for the third residency in DRAF Studio. Serapinas researched the history of the building, built in the 1870s as a furniture factory, carefully examining the current space for traces of former identities. The scars and marks on the floor of DRAF Studio, possibly the result of heavy machinery once occupying the loft, inspire a new installation using scraps leftover from past projects by the Foundation to design and create new woodwork compositions.
On 30 Jun, DRAF celebrates the end of Serapinas’ residency as the workshop is opened to the public, inviting visitors to discover both the process and the results of his residency.
Augustas Serapinas (b.1990, Vilnius) is an artist whose practice focuses on reimagining and restaging physical and social spaces through a variety of interventions, variations, and constructions. Serapinas studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2009-2013) in Lithuania, spending his final year at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark. Additionally, he completed the Rupert Educational Program in Vilnius (2013-2014). Interested in the relational and non-material practices of the early 1990s, Serapinas works with spatiality as a means of exploring the encounter and inter-personal social relations. His practice reveals and reinvents both public and private spaces, to consider individual subjectivity and collective identity.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Thanks to Lithuanian Cultural Institute and Emalin.
CAConrad performs recent works including MARFA Poetry Machine in 36 Things (2016): a unique opportunity to see the legendary American poet’s work live in London. He introduces British poets Sophie Robinson and Jo Mariner who also read their work.
London-based singer-songwriter Douglas Dare plays a solo piano and vocal set, the very first performance of songs from his upcoming second album (to be released on Erased Tapes Records label later this year). Dare’s rich and haunting vocals are combined with lyrics crafted from his own poems and short prose in his unique and intimate songs.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England
Thanks to the Galleries Circle for supporting performance at DRAF.
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CAConrad is award winning poet, the self-described “son of white trash asphyxiation”, who spent his childhood in Kansas “selling cut flowers along the highways for his mother, and helping her shoplift.” He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross. He is currently the subject of a feature-length documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), wherein the “eccentric Elvis worshiping poet and tarot card reader confronts his violent past and the suspicious death of his boyfriend, Earth….Conrad wrestles with his inner demons through a series of unconventional rituals and a tour of the deep South.”
Jo Mariner lived in the Northeast United States until 1995 when she settled in London. Her poetry has been published and performed in both the US and the UK. She was associate editor of American Writing: a Magazine 1990-93, and co-editor of a start-up poetry magazine, Shrike, in 1996. Her poems are about “the struggle a woman can have when she attempts the heroic – which is to follow her own mind without distraction”.
Sophie Robinson is a poet based in Norwich. Her first book, a, was published by Les Figues in 2009, and her second collection, The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair, came out from Bad Press in 2011. In 2011 she was also the poet in residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Sophie has a PhD in Queer Writing from Royal Holloway, and is currently a Lecturer in Poetry at the University of East Anglia.
Douglas Dare is a London-based singer-songwriter, originally from the coastal town of Bridport, South West England. The son of a piano teacher, Dare began composing instrumental music from a young age but it was not until studying popular music at University in Liverpool in 2008 that he began songwriting. After releasing his debut album Whelm in 2014, Douglas went on to tour extensively around Europe and North America, including support tours with fellow Erased Tapes artists Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm as well as Nina Tune’s Fink. Whelm achieved universal critical acclaim, ranked by Metascore as one of the top ten best rated debut albums of 2014.
Tickets £7.50 / £5 concessions + service fee – book here
Followed by Block Universe Closing Party with DJs NaimaMania and Crack Stevens and VJ Bleue Liverpool. Free, RSVP required to info@blockuniverse.co.uk
In a UK premiere of DISCOTROPIC | Alien Talk Show (2015), niv Acosta seizes on an elementary medium of intimate exposure – television and the confessional culture of the talk show – to explore the relationships between science fiction, disco, astrophysics and the black American experience. DISCOTROPIC is episodic and has premiered earlier episodes as a part of The Cooper Union’s exhibition BRING YOUR OWN body, New Museum’s Triennial ‘Surround Audience’ 2015, as well as in the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art’s (MoCADA) Brooklyn Soul Festival ‘Black August’ 2015.
niv Acosta is an award-winning and internationally acclaimed multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Acosta’s intersectional identities – as transgender, queer and black Dominican – have continuously inspired his community based work. Acosta’s performance work has shown at various spaces including The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, Human Resources, Los Angeles, MOMA PS1, New York, and the New Museum, New York.
Block Universe is London’s annual festival of performance art celebrating cutting-edge performance at the cross-section of contemporary visual art, dance and music. Following a successful launch in 2015, Block Universe returns for its second edition across major institutions and unique venues from 30 May to 5 June 2016, with an expanded public programme.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Installation on display: 14 – 28 May (free, all welcome)
Join the second event of How To Survive a Flood @Gaybar, as artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings transform DRAF Studio over a three-week residency. For this event, the duo invite artist Paul Maheke to perform Knowing less, danse exotic, and DJs Butch Traxx (Sydney Baloue) and Summer Faggot Deathwish (Sam Cottington), as well as serving cocktails as part of their bar-performance.
The commission, part of Curators’ Series #9. Ways of Living, sees the artist duo construct a functioning bar in DRAF Studio with new video and audio works and light boxes looking at the history and present of the legendary New York gay resort Fire Island.
Fire Island has since the beginning of the twentieth century been a holiday destination and space of freedom for New York’s white gay community, a history of police brutality, AIDs, gentrification and most recently hurricanes Sandy and Katrina have complicated the identity of the island. @Gaybar imagines Fire Island as a queer sci-fi to critique the relationship between private property, gentrification and the production of a standardised white gay & Lesbian subjectivity. An audio work combines Ariana Grande’s pop hitswith recordings of melting icecaps, hurricanes and other environmental disasters (produced with Jan Piasecki). Three videos weave together found footage of Fire Island immediately following Hurricane Sandy, as idyllic beach furniture collapses into the ocean. CGI landscapes on large light boxes imagine a surreal and mournful future for the island.
There will be the opportunity to make donations to the Albert Kennedy Foundation, a charity which provides urgent care for homeless LGBTQ youths.
Thanks to Chloe Filiani and Isabel Tennant.
How To Survive a Flood @Gaybar is part of Curators’ Series #9. Ways of Living by Arcadia Missa (15 Apr–23 Jul 2016).
DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England.
Thanks to DRAF Galleries Circle for supporting performance at DRAF.
Hannah Quinlan (b. 1991, UK) and Rosie Hastings (b. 1991, UK) are an artist duo living and working in London, best known for their project @Gaybar in which queer politics and history are remade in the context of a gay bar. They had their first joint solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, in early 2015, titled TIFKAS, a virtual fabrication of a queer landscape and experience.
Paul Maheke (b.1985, France) is an artist currently living and working in London. His practice focuses – through video, installation, sculpture and furtive interventions – on the body as both an archive and a territory. With particular attention to dance, he proposes to defuse the power relations that shape Western imaginations. Recently, Maheke initiated a series of public conversations at Open School East, Beyond Beyoncé: Use It Like a Bumper!, considering Hip-Hop cultures through the lens of Queer and Black Feminist theory. His solo shows I Lost of The Swarmand Green Ray Turns Out To Be Mauve are currently on show at the South London Gallery and Green Ray.
DJ Butch Traxx (Sydney Baloue) is a rising star in the London Ballroom Scene and member of the pioneering House of UltraOmni. Her weekly radio show to Brixton plays voguing beats, soulful disco and house.
@Gaybar in-house DJ Summer Faggot Deathwish is London-based artist Sam Cottington.
Installation on display: 14 – 28 May (free, all welcome)
Join the opening party for How to Survive a Flood @Gaybar by artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, a three-week residency transforming DRAF Studio. For this launch event, the artists design and serve cocktails in a bar-performance, with DJ sets by Nkisi and Summer Faggot Deathwish.
The commission sees the artist duo construct a functioning bar in DRAF Studio, with new video and audio works and light boxes looking at the history and present of the legendary New York gay resort Fire Island.
Fire Island has since the early twentieth century been a holiday destination and space of freedom for New York’s gay community, however a history of police brutality, AIDs, rapid gentrification and most recently hurricanes Sandy have complicated the identity of the island. @Gaybar imagines Fire Island as a queer, sci-fi and anarchic space to critique the relationship between private property, gentrification and the production of a standardised white gay & lesbian subjectivity. An audio work (produced by Jan Piasecki) combines pop music with samples of ecological disasters including hurricanes and melting ice caps. Three videos weave together found footage of Fire Island immediately following Hurricane Sandy, as luxury beach furniture collapses into the ocean. CGI landscapes on large light boxes imagine a surreal and mournful future for the island.
There will be the opportunity to make donations to the Albert Kennedy Foundation, a charity which provides urgent care for homeless LGBTQ youths.
DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England.
Thanks to DRAF Galleries Circle for supporting performance at DRAF.
Hannah Quinlan (b. 1991, UK) and Rosie Hastings (b. 1991, UK) are an artist duo living and working in London, best known for their project @Gaybar in which queer politics and history are remade in the context of a gay bar. They had their first joint solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, in early 2015, titled TIFKAS, a virtual fabrication of a queer landscape and experience.
Belgium-raised, London-based producer and DJ Melika Ngombe Kolongo is Nkisi. Her high-octane style fuses various danceable forms, from gabber to doomcore to Central and West African club tracks. She is the co-founder of NON Records, a collective of artists from the African diaspora whose releases are oriented towards loosening gridlocked hegemonies. Nkisi is a regular at London’s Endless club night, and as a producer, she fashions densely layered, obstinate tracks designed to trigger and question collective memories.
@Gaybar in-house DJ Summer Faggot Deathwish is London-based artist Sam Cottington.
Performances of George Ridgway, Members We Are (Conversations 1,2,3,4), 2016: Thurs 21, Fri 22 & Sat 30 April, 1.30pm & 3.30pm
DRAF Studio hosts a curated selection of works from Scottish art schools by the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation
New Scottish Artists presents fifteen artists graduating in 2015 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 Euphrosyne Andrews, Leo Arnold, Scott Baxter, Emily Binks, Miriam Chefrad Edward Humphrey, Rosanna Lee, Jamie Limond, David Evan Mackay, Hannah Murray, George Ridgway, William Spendlove & Bros. (Painters & Decorators), Josephine Sweeney, Guy Titterington, Felix Welch and Hamish Young include painting, sculpture, printmaking and photography to video and performance.
The exhibition also showcases the work of this year’s winner of the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, George Ridgway (Glasgow School of Art) whose practice includes performance, music, painting and sculpture.
Currently in its third 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 work produced with the award by the 2015 winner, video artist Edward Humphrey, is also included in the exhibition.
The judges were James Knox (Director, Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation), Vincent Honoré (Director, DRAF); Susanna Beaumont (independent curator), Kevin Harman (artist based in Edinburgh) and Bill Smith (former Director, the Fleming Collection).
The Fleming–Wyfold Bursary and exhibition New Scottish Artists are run in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
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’ Seriessupports 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.
Sometimes it’s like we both know what’s going to happen next
Like we know all the steps
It’s nice in a way
I just think you could use me a bit harder sometimes
Edward Thomasson, Volunteers, 2016
Over the course of one month, artist Edward Thomasson uses DRAF Studio as a site to develop a new project that incorporates the production of a video work and the public presentation of a new one-act play.
For the first ever residency at DRAF, the space will shift between rehearsal studio, video set and theatre, as a group of actors develop and perform songs and narratives by the artist, first for camera, and then for a live audience. The project focuses on how individuals behave in mutually beneficial relationships and how this behaviour might be useful in understanding exchanges between performer and audience. Looking specifically at instances in which people voluntarily allow themselves to be used by other people, the project continues Thomasson’s investigation into how stories are shared on camera, on stage and in everyday life.
Edward Thomasson makes videos, plays and performances, both independently and in collaboration with artist Lucy Beech. His works are frequently set in institutional environments, which act as backdrops to the artist’s repeated investigations into the spoken and unspoken rules of social interaction.
Volunteers is supported by DRAF, The Elephant Trust and Southard Reid, London. DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Photography strictly forbidden; you will be asked to leave phones with an invigilator
Influential artist Stuart Brisley presents DRAWN (2016), a new live work for DRAF Studio presented alongside a selected film programme. Over four days, the octogenarian artist will perform solo in the space as his recurrent persona R Y Sirb (Curator of the Museum of Ordure) for a total of 24 hours, a feat of endurance during which he enters a trance-like state. Sirbresponds to the environment, viewers and a selection of domestic furniture props, chairs, tables, a mirror and wrapping materials are subjected to improvised precarious balancing acts and destruction, referencing the violent myth of Procrustes. As in his legendary performances since the 1960s, Brisley engages the audience and establishes a dialogue of action and reaction that induces a release from conventions of social behaviour.
DRAWN as in hanged drawn and quartered and as in drawing. Drawing as to draw out, to make a drawing, to describe, to express through drawing. Hanged drawn and quartered: to hang, cut down while still alive, disembowel and cut in pieces for exposure in different places.
Stuart Brisley, 2016.
Often hailed as the “godfather of British performance art”, Brisley’s radical practice has since the 1960 played a fundamental role in the development of installation and performance art as well as layering mediums. As the Head of Media Fine Art at Slade School his diverse students included Mona Hatoum, Douglas Gordon, Hayley Newman, Zarina Bhimji, Catherine Yass and Marcia Farquhar; Richard Gott wrote in the catalogue introduction for Brisley’s 1996 exhibition Black at the South London Gallery “homage to Brisley’s performances and installations and references to his work, can be found in many unexpected places and in the work of other artists”. He is included in the current historical survey exhibition at Tate Modern, Performing for the Camera (2016).
His seminal practice extends to painting, sculpture, community projects, pseudo-curatorial installations, sound, video, films and teaching. At the centre of this diverse work lies his exploration of the essential qualities of what it means to be human. He has challenged the human body in physical, psychological and emotional ways.
Film Programme
Arbeit Macht Frei (1972-3) is a film evolved from Brisley’s iconic performance And For Today Nothing at Gallery House, London, in 1972. The words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (“work makes one free”) were wrought in iron above the entrance gates to Nazi Concentration Camps. The film is conceived as a representation of the objection to genocide, and begins with a long sequence of vomiting shot in a formal frontal manner, as a bodily rejection of the idea.
In Being and Doing (1984), Brisley collaborated with filmmaker Ken McMullen to search out the origins of performance art, connecting it not to modernism but to ancient folk rituals in England and Europe. In these rituals, the division between performer and audience has not been institutionalised, and they testify to powerful behavioural traditions which have survived the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society. The recordings of the performances have been extensively manipulated: the images slowed down, fragmented, details isolated to construct a filmic memory of the events.
Stuart Brisley, DRAWN, 2016 is curated by DRAF in collaboration with João Laia. Thanks to Maya Brisley and Hales Gallery, London. DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
Stuart Brisley’s (b.1933, UK) pioneering practice spans over six decades and encompasses painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, sound, photography, film and performance. Brisley studied at Guildford School of Art (1949–54) and the Royal College of Art in London (1956–9), as well as at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich (1959–60) and Florida State University in Tallahassee (1960–62). Influenced by Marxist counter-cultural politics in the 1960s, he adopted performance as the democratic basis for a new relationship between artist and audience. Working solely within public spaces in the 1970s, Brisley developed a series of solo and collaborative works that pushed the body through various extended tasks or rituals. He lives and works in London.
DRAF hosts a second day of talks and live performances in DRAF Studio, looking at the production and presentation of performances in institutions.
This event was streamed live, in partnership with This is Tomorrow. Programme
3pm
Louise O’Kelly (Block Universe Performance Festival) speaks to curators Capucine Perrot (formerly Tate), Lucia Pietroiusti (Serpentine Galleries), and Nicola Lees (formerly Frieze Projects) about the ecosystems of performance, and how the art form is supported and presented within London’s institutional structures.
4pm
A special screening of Babette Mangolte’s 1973 Calico Mingling, a black and white film recording Lucinda Childs’ minimalist choreography. Courtesy Broadway 1602, New York, and the artist.
5pm
London-based artists including Stuart Brisley, Edward Thomasson and Florence Peake to discuss how they work with institutions to develop and present performances.
6.30pm
A new performance I”LL CHANGE WHEN I”M READY by IMMA for DRAF Studio, her first collaboration with a London institution. Originally trained as a dancer, IMMA studied at Parsons The New School for Design in New York and Central St Martins, specialising in Performance Art. Her performances are a compilation of his childhood memories and references, combined with the influence of Leigh Bowery, Grace Jones, Cindy Sherman and John Waters. Her work aims to broaden the limitations of movement to arrive at unforeseen outcomes.
7pm
A special live music set by Pumarosa, a five-piece band from London whose music has been described as “industrial spiritual” and brings together the brooding, heavier songwriting of PJ Harvey or Patti Smith with the groove-led and nocturnal electronics of The Knife and Cocteau Twins.
Watch the video for their debut single Priestess (2015), made in collaboration with artist Holly Hunter and choreographer Fernanda Munoz-Newsome.
If you missed our last afternoon of conversation and performance,Live Forever(21 Nov 2015), which discussed the documentation and collection of performance, you can watch it online here.
Thanks to Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle for supporting performance and education at DRAF.
Study #14 looks in depth at the work Oh Mystery Girl 3 (2006), a collage by German artist Rosemarie Trockel from the David Roberts collection, London. Four additional loaned works selected by Trockel are presented alongside to complement the piece. A new text by writer Matthew McLean studying Oh Mystery Girl 3 is commissioned for the project.
Based in Cologne, Trockel’s work has been highly influential since the 1970s, working with collage, sculpture, painting, video and performance to address feminism, female identity, sexuality and the human body. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MoMA, New York; the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; New Museum, New York and the ICA, Boston. Trockel represented Germany in the 1999 Venice Biennale, and participated in documenta in 1997 and 2012.
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 #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 makeevery 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.
Join us for the last party of the year at DRAF, co-hosted with Francesca Gavin.
DJ set by Emmanuel Balogun (Visual Ideation) and Francesca Gavin, dance class by Joelle D’Fontaine and a performance by David Raymond Conroy.
Take home free photocopy artworks by Aaron Angell, Alexandre da Cunha, Jeremy Deller, Benedict Drew, Beatrice Gibson, Celia Hempton, Allison Katz, Oscar Murillo, David Noonan, Athena Papadopolos, Peles Empire, Prem Sahib, Daniel Silver, Marianne Spurr, Julie Verhoeven, Jesse Wine, Bedwyr Williams and more…
Spirits generously provided by Absolut.
Thanks to DRAF Galleries Circle for supporting performance at DRAF.
Artists Guy Sherwin and Lynn Loo present a live exhibition of 16mm films adapted to the architectural space of DRAF Studio, including the three-screen Camden Road Station first filmed locally in 1973.
Celebrated since the 1970s for his work exploring time, light and sound through film and performance, Sherwin has exhibited at Tate Modern and Camden Art Centre, and with Lynn Loo at Palais des Beaux Arts Brussels, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane and MOMCA Seoul.
Central Saint Martins MA Culture, Criticism and Curation students present …At the slow party, copies sync towards zero, a new sound work by artist Andrew Sunderland commissioned for DRAF Studio. Sunderland takes as a starting point a recording of his voice made within the ground floor DRAF Gallery and deploys software plugins commonly used in the production of club music, such as time-stretching and auto-tune, to create an audio work with a duration of three days. The work points to the industrial history of DRAF’s building, a former 19th century furniture factory which has gone through usages including printing, dry cleaning, and tattoo parlour, and the re-purposing of similar post-industrial spaces in 1990s rave culture.
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Curating Sound. An conversation with David Toop, Ed Kelly, Antonia Blocker and Hamish Dunbar
Thurs 26 Nov, 4–6pm
Free, email: volumedissolvesintoatmosphere@gmail.com to reserve a place.
On the occasion of the project Volume Dissolves Into Atmosphere, Central Saint Martins MA Culture, Criticism and Curation students host a discussion into the relationship between sound and space and their coexistence in the gallery environment. What is the status of sound in the gallery and how can it be experienced as art? What are the challenges in exhibiting and curating sound work? What is the changing relationship between sound and its audiences?
With David Toop (composer/musician, curator and UAL Chair of Audio Culture and Improvisation), Ed Kelly (composer/musician and associate lecturer in Visual Art: Fine Art Digital at Camberwell College of Art), Antonia Blocker (Curator: Public Programmes, Whitechapel Galler) and Hamish Dunbar (Founder and Director, Cafe Oto).
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle
At 3pm & 5.30pm, a free curator’s tour of the current exhibition with rarely-seen works by Etel Adnan, Ida Applebroog, Philip Guston, Sergej Jensen, Hans Josephsohn, Oscar Murillo, Andreas Slominski and Michael E. Smith takes place in DRAF Gallery.
At 4pm, a panel discussion between Teresa Calonje (Author, Live Forever: Collecting Live Art), Claire Louise Staunton (Director, Flat Time House), dancer Ellen van Schuylenburch and Jonah Westerman (Postdoctural Research Associate, ‘Performance at Tate’) asks does performance need collecting? We invite questions from the audience, before taking a short break at 5pm.
From 6pm we present two performances. Fernanda Muñoz–Newsome performs 2 Dive In, a tapestry of dance and spoken score. The elastic counterpoint of movement and found text fragments form a study into how meaning is shaped in performance; shapeshifting between “the jester, the witch, the shaman and the poet”. Choreography by Fernanda Muñoz–Newsome, sound composed by Nena Zinovieff.
Next, at 6.30pm, a live music set by singer, pianist, performer and “Baroque creature” Mathilde Fernandez. This unique voice is trained with an operatic coach for performances which celebrate “freedom, madness, poetry and savagery”.
Afterwards, from 7.30pm, we invite you to stay for drinks and continue to the conversation with artists, panellists and guests.
Throughout the afternoon, Dora Garcia‘s, ‘The Game of Questions‘ (2004) will be activated across the space.
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Teresa Calonje is a curator and researcher based in London. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College and is currently commissioning a series of live interventions at Second Home, London. In 2014, she published a collection of essays and interviews critically engaging in issues of acquisition and conservation of performance, Live Forever. Collecting Live Art, (Koenig Books).
Mathilde Fernandez was brought up by a family of progressive rockers, and spent her early years attending performance art and music concerts; early encounters that were to be as informative as her mother’s favourite Kate Bush record. Her vocal practice is inspired by idols including Nina Hagen, Lisa Gerard, Lene Lovich, Mylene Farmer and Catherine Ringer. Fernandez is based in Brussels.
Dora Garcia is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Barcelona. Her work often draws on interactivity and performance, using the exhibition space as platform to investigate the relationship between the visitor, the artwork and place. Garcia represented Spain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, and has exhibited internationally including at (d)OCUMENTA 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012, Gwangju Biennial, Korea, 2010, Lyon Biennial, France, 2009, TATE Modern, London, UK, 2008, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2008 and SMAK, Gent, Belgium, 2006.
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome is a London-based dance artist, who creates and performs choreographies across the UK and Europe. She works with composers, visual artists, pop/punk bands and other choreographers in live performance and video works. Recently, she has collaborated with Savages and A Dead Forest Index in Station to Station at the Barbican. She co-founded the cross- disciplinary performance night London Topophobia, which she regularly curates and performs in.
Ellen van Schuylenburch was an independent dancer in the late 1970s in New York working with experimental and Post-Modern choreographers whilst training with Merce Cunningham from 1978 to 1984. In 1983 Michael Clark invited Van Schuylenburch to dance in a duet and she soon became a founder member of Michael Clark Company. More recently she set up Clark’s archive. She teaches at Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music and Dance. She has performed in Nina Beier’s The Complete Works since 2011 and in several Tino Sehgal’s productions.
Claire Louise Staunton is a curator and researcher based in London. She is Director of Flat Time House: an institute, gallery and archive in the former home and studio of artist, John Latham. Staunton is also Curator with Inheritance Projects that she established in 2007. She writes for a number of paper and on-line publications including Frieze and rhizome.org. Her research interests focus on the social imaginary, the idea of a “fictional public”, temporal contingencies, migrancy and newness as a condition for art making.
Jonah Westerman holds a PhD in Art History from The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) and a BA from Harvard University. He is now working on a two-year, AHRC-funded research project, ‘Performance at Tate’, which interrogates the place of performance in the museum’s collection and programming. He has published on the relationship between performance and its media in journals and edited collections, and has taught courses on modern and contemporary art at Brooklyn College, CUNY and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle
Transatlantic is the third in a series of events exploring lines of connection and points of dialogue between the LUX archive and the Cranford Collection. The series has been curated by Matt Carter (Distribution Manager, LUX) and Louise Chignac (Special Projects Manager, Cranford). This event is in partnership with DRAF, London, and will take place in DRAF Studio, a unique new space for performance, live events and education opened in September 2015.
Transatlantic presents three works from early nineties New York that highlight the differing concerns and challenges amongst an increasingly public gay community. The starting point of the programme is Cranford Collection’s In The Shadow of Forward Motion (ITSOFOMO) by David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill (1989-1992). Originally a performance, this highly personal work tackles head on the physical and psychological effects of the AIDS crisis, extrapolating these concerns to a broader critique of American society. Glenn Belverio’s Glennda and Camille Do Downtown sees the performance artist as his drag queen persona Glennda Orgasm with feminist scholar Camille Paglia intellectually (and humourously) ripping apart stereotypes and conventions beginning to calcify within the downtown scene. Charles Lofton’s I Like Dreaming is a contemplation of cruising straight acting and appearing men on the subway, highlighting the taboos of homosexuality still deeply imbued within a public psyche.
London-based artist John Walter will explore some of the themes in the programme in relation to his research and current project, Alien Sex Club, which has recently been presented at Ambika P3, London and is currently part of Homotopia Festival, Liverpool.
The screening will be accompanied by drinks and DJ set from JONES in DRAF Studio.
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On the occasion of this event, DRAF Gallery will be open until 8:30pm on Thursday with the current exhibition, Albert the kid is ghosting featuring works by Etel Adnan, Ida Applebroog, Philip Guston, Sergej Jensen, Hans Josephsohn, Oscar Murillo, Andreas Slominski and Michael E. Smith.
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David Wojnarowicz & Ben Neill, In The Shadow of Forward Motion (ITSOFOMO), 1989-1992 (22 min)
Glenn Belverio, Glennda and Camille Do Downtown, 1992 (29 min)
Turning Inward (Sternberg Press, 2015) is a new book of essays edited by artists’ collective Lou Cantor and Clemens Jahn. Writers including Philip Ekardt, Svetlana Boym, Marta Dziewanska, Dieter Roelstraete, Orit Gat and Reza Negarestani examine concepts of centrality and marginality in different contexts, including the aesthetic, the philosophical and the geospatial.
Join Lou Cantor at DRAF to discuss the ideas within Turning Inward with writers Philipp Ekardt and William Kerbek.
Kindly supported by artgenève/Fondation pour les Arts Visuels.
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Lou Cantor is a Berlin-based artists’ collective founded in 2011, whose practice explores the polysemic minefield of contemporary communication, where medium, message and meaning constantly fold back into each other. Previous exhibitions include: The Labour of Watching, Basel 2015; Epistemic Excess, NY, Artists Space 2015; the first Prinzessinnengarten Outdoor Sculpture Triennial, Berlin, 2013; 7th Berlin Biennale, 2012; New National Art, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2012; and the Villa Tokyo, 2011.
Philipp Ekardt is a theorist and critic based in London and Berlin. A former editor-in-chief of the journal Texte zur Kunst, he has taught at the Free University Berlin and is currently an envoy to the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. He works on topics including contemporary art, fashion, style, Alexander Kluge, Walter Benjmain and questions of image circulation. His writing has appeared in magazines such as OCTOBER, Texte zur Kunst, frieze d/e, and Ilinx; and he has lectured at institutions including the University of Cambridge, the Courtauld Institute, EIKONES/Basel University, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Secession Wien, Stanford, University College London, the Warburg Institute and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin.
William Kherbek is a writer, whose novels Ecology of Secrets and the forthcoming UltraLife are both published by Arcadia Missa. His writing has appeared in Port Magazine, Rhizome.org and in translation in the German cultural journal, Block.
DRAF’s celebrated annual Evening of Performances returns to present London-based artist CAROLINE ACHAINTRE (with her first live work), Swiss choreographer and artist ALEXANDRA BACHZETSIS,legendary German performance artist JOHN BOCK,Brooklyn-based electronic music act SHANNON F (LIGHT ASYLUM) and Glasgow artist and spoken word performer SUE TOMPKINS.
Over one thousand guests, including international artists, curators, collectors, writers, gallerists and friends, joined us for “[Frieze] week’s must-see event”.[1]
PROGRAMME
7pm – Caroline Achaintre, Chin-Chin, 2015
7.30pm – Sue Tompkins, Kim do the V, 2015
8pm – John Bock, UR-Unruh im Zugabteil (Primal riot in the passenger compartment), 2015, with Lisa Müller-Trede (acting) and Paul Hill (drums).
9pm – a live set by Shannon F (Light Asylum)
10pm – Alexandra Bachzetsis, Undressed, 2015, with DJ Lies Vanborm
This eighth Evening of Performances follows previous editions with figures including Nina Beier, Michael Dean, Rodney Graham & Kim Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, planningtorock, Eddie Peake, Laure Prouvost, Cally Spooner and Steve Reich.
Supported by DRAF Galleries Circle (Sadie Coles HQ, Pilar Corrias, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Sprüth Magers, Michael Werner, White Cube). In special association with Mousse Magazine.
Please note: capacity for this event is limited and public entry will be on first-come-first served basis via DRAF back gate at 13-15 Camden High St from 7pm.
Free. Email info@davidrobertsartfoundation.com to book
Splendour is a choreography that focuses on the body’s relationship to sound and how illusions of different causalities are created through actions and reactions.
The piece is created through a daily “techno dance practice”, which is to dance the album Archive One by Dave Clarke from beginning to end. Bound by the most banal relationship to music and by an attempt to avoid all interpretation, elaboration or creativity as such, the performers anticipate the music in order to do the sounds. The practice is strictly formulated through tasks relating to this doing, and in rehearsal no discussions are held concerning individual interpretation or performance.
“Live Creation” locates the performances in the context of an inquiry into the ways in which choreographic thinking and the agency of dance artists can be made visible and explored. This afternoon session sees the performance space transformed into a site of the live creation of new work. Stina Nyberg works with dances Nadja Hjorton, Sidney Leoni, Maryam Nikandish, Zoë Poluch and Rebecka Stillman to expose choreographic practices up close and offer an insight into the embodied critical knowledge, thinking and agency at the heart of contemporary dance production.
Splendour is co-curated by Joe Moran, Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation, as part of Moran’s Why Everyone Wants What We’ve Got research project, and supported by the Swedish Arts Council.
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Stina Nyberg (b. 1981, Sweden) lives in Stockholm where she makes and performs choreography. Her choreographic practice is related to the possibility to create through conviction and illusion new systems of logic in order to be able to construct the world differently, and act accordingly. Her departure point is always a feminist approach to the body; its social and political construction and ability to move.
Nyberg is the choreographer of the live concert Shaking the Habitual by the Swedish band The Knife and performed in the show which toured Europe and USA in 2013-2014. Several of her works investigates the non-hierarchical relation between the performance of sound and movement, such as The Way Sounds Attack (2010), Loudspeaking (2011), Orkestern (2012), Tones & Bones (for the Cullberg Ballet, 2014) and the latest work Splendour (2014). Her solo work Horrible Mixtures (2014), made in collaboration with Andros Zins-Browne, is a choreographic seance departing from a sceptics interest in spirituality. Nyberg have for several years collaborated with the Swedish choreographers Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch, investigating dance history from a feminist perspective.
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.
To celebrate its ongoing commitment to performance, DRAF opens a dedicated live projects space. The expansion occupies a 250 sq m converted industrial loft with original wooden rafters within DRAF’s London building.
The opening evening on 24 September includes performances Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room(again), 2015 by artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins and the UK premiere of choreographer Stina Nyberg’s Splendour,2014.
Since its foundation in 2008, DRAF has championed performance at the centre of its programme, presenting live work by iconic international figures including Phillip Glass, Rodney Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Sarah Lucas, Bruce McLean, Laure Prouvost, Steve Reich and Pipilotti Rist. It has supported emerging artists by commissioning performances by Nina Beier, Michael Dean, Eloise Hawser, Lina Lapelyte, Maria Loboda, Eddie Peake, Megan Rooney and Cally Spooner.
DRAF Studio is supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle (Sadie Coles HQ, Pilar Corrias, Marian Goodman, Hauser & Wirth, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Sprüth Magers, Michael Werner, White Cube).
Stina Nyberg, Splendour is supported by the Swedish Arts Council.
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (b. 1987, Poland/England ) is an artist and choreographer based in London. His work is concerned with the mediation and politics of affect, desiring subjects and embodiment. Baczynski-Jenkins graduated from the pilot project Contemporary Dance, Choreography, Context at the Universität der Künste, Berlin and participated in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, Beirut. He has shown work in contexts including expo zero at Performa, New York (2011), X-Apartments, Homeworks, Beirut (2013), Liste, Basel (2014), Sophiensaele Theatre, Berlin (2015) Block Universe, London (2015). He was associate artist with the Delfina Foundation, London as part of their Performance as Process 2015, and was also included in The London Open, 2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, London.
Stina Nyberg (b. 1981, Sweden) lives in Stockholm where she makes and performs choreography. Her choreographic practice is related to the possibility to create through conviction and illusion new systems of logic in order to be able to construct the world differently, and act accordingly. Her departure point is always a feminist approach to the body; its social and political construction and ability to move.
Nyberg is the choreographer of the live concert Shaking the Habitual by the Swedish band The Knife and performed in the show which toured Europe and USA in 2013-2014. Several of her works investigates the non-hierarchical relation between the performance of sound and movement, such as The Way Sounds Attack (2010), Loudspeaking (2011), Orkestern (2012), Tones & Bones (for the Cullberg Ballet, 2014) and the latest work Splendour (2014). Her solo work Horrible Mixtures (2014), made in collaboration with Andros Zins-Browne, is a choreographic seance departing from a sceptics interest in spirituality. Nyberg have for several years collaborated with the Swedish choreographers Amanda Apetrea, Nadja Hjorton, Halla Ólafsdóttir and Zoë Poluch, investigating dance history from a feminist perspective.
THE CHIC & THE BORDERLINE is an uncanny series of tableaux vivants conceived and performed by Vincent Honoré and Zoe Williams in a suite at the Grand Hotel de Londres, Istanbul with works by Celia Hempton, Pipilotti Rist & Zoe Williams. Inspired by figures such as Guy Bourdin, Helmut Newton or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, THE CHIC & THE BORDERLINE explores DRAF as a vector for memories and fantasies.
Join us for one night of characters performing an overtly charged script adorned in decadent attire & elegant animalic scents from Nishane.
Dress code: LUXE & LEATHER
Please note contains content some may find offensive. Not suitable for children: must be 18 or older to enter the suite. NO CAMERAS ALLOWED
With many thanks to Stephane Ackermann, Ozlem Ak, Hakan Bahar, Julian Elias Bronner, Pierre-Emmanuel Fournier, Alican Icoz, Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Antoine Levi, Nishane, Paul Seville, Southard Reid
THE CHIC & THE BORDERLINE is produced in collaboration with ARTINTERNATIONAL 2015 for THE HUNTER-GATHERER, an exhibition conceived by Paolo Chiasera.
Buyuk Londra
Mesrutiyet Caddesi
No: 53 34430
Istanbul
Barby Asante and Christine Eyene will be in conversation on the relation between music, cultural heritage and urban cultures in their respective practices.
Barby Asante is a London-based artist and curator. Her work aims to stimulate dialogue around the cross-cultural and multicultural and how we view and frame these questions in contemporary Britain, often using familiar or popular culture triggers as a means to begin the dialogue. Asante has been working on projects exploring music and its cultural and social significance, with particular emphasis on black music and its importance in the creation of a post-war British cultural identity. Projects include the Funk Chorus, a non-professional choir with a Funk repertoire (South London Gallery, 2006); Barby’s Karaoke (Studio Voltaire, 2009), a karaoke DVD made with Caribbean Elders group Stockwell Good Neighbours and Bamboo Memories (Picture This, 2009) and a film piece made with people from Bristol reflecting on Bristol’s first black music nightclub.
More recently she has turned her focus on working with young people exploring how their voices are heard in society, including the Noise Summit commissioned by SLG, working with school-aged children who live on an estate in South London, exploring their relationship to noise, making noise and having their voices heard in public space and Baldwin’s Nigger RELOADED a project with the sorryyoufeeluncomfortable collective that reflects on the contemporary relevance of Horace Ove’s 1968 film documenting James Baldwin’s visit that year to the West Indian Student Centre.
Christine Eyene is based in London and Preston, UK. She is an art writer, independent curator, and Guild Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her writing and curatorial practice encompass the fields of contemporary African and Diaspora arts, gender-related topics, design, immaterial art practices and sound. She has curated exhibitions in the UK and internationally including Embodied Spaces, Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2015); Residual: Traces of the Black Body, New Art Exchange as part of FORMAT International Photography Festival, Nottingham (2015), Basket Case II (with Raphael Chikukwa) National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare and Bulawayo (2014-2015); La Parole aux Femmes, Fondation Blachère, Apt (2014-2015); WHERE WE’RE AT! Other Voices on Gender, BOZAR, Brussels (2014); Thierry Geoffroy: Mobile Emergency Room at the 2nd Zimbabwe Pavilion (curated by Raphael Chikukwa), Venice Biennale, Venice (2013); Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar (2012); Photoquai Biennale, Paris (2011), Brighton Photo Fringe as part of Brighton Photo Biennial (2010).
Eyene is guest curator of DRAF Curators’ Series # 8 with the exhibition All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm. The project is draws from the cultural heritage of Cameroon’s Bikutsi music and dance and explores notions of rhythm through visual arts, poetry, sound, music and dance.
[Evan Ifekoya, Let the rhythm keep pulling you towards ur edges (after Marlon Riggs), 2015. Courtesy the artist]
Programme
From 6-8pm the exhibition Curators’ Series #8. All Of Us Have A Sense Of Rhythm will remain open for a special late viewing
8pm: Doors open for An Evening of Live Music
8.30pm: Evan Ifekoya presents a new performance, interweaving a post-lyrical rhythmn’n’bass soundtrack with a story of nightlife told live through twitter
9.30pm: Larry Achiampong DJs a selection of High Life records, samples and tracks from his own albums Meh Mogya and More Mogya, tracing personal and political connections within the music
10.30pm: ALPHA, an audiovisual live performance by Julien Bayle(aka protofuse), generates electronic sound and visuals in
real-time through the use of specifically designed sequencers
George Unsworth, founder of Hackney gallery ANDOR, invites artist Paul Kneale to launch ‘New Abject’, a new e-book in collaboration with Swiss designer Dan Solbach and one of the outcomes of Dreaming of Streaming, ANDOR’s alternative publishing studio.
The e-book will be available for free at the launch as well as through the artist’s one day takeover of the DRAF website. The launch event will also feature a screening of the latest version of tr0118044y‘s film ‘Holiday’, discussed in the text, a 20-year ongoing project based in and around the club culture of Ibiza.
+1 is a new series in collaboration with London’s most exciting emerging spaces, collectives and publications, who each invite an artist to present a current project in DRAF’s library. By hosting these intimate profiles-in-the-moment, DRAF invites colleagues and public to engage in direct discussions departing from practice-based research.
For third event, DRAF hosts Hackney-based gallery ANDOR. Founded in 2010 by George Unsworth, it specialises in supporting UK-based and international projects in the development of new exhibitions and projects.
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.
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, afast 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/NurtureSketch (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.
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.
Previous Studies include works by Victor Man, Carole Bove, Bruce McLean, Martin Boyce, Boyle Family, Michael Simpson and Yto Barrada.
*WARNING: strobe lighting will be used during this event
SOUND FACTORY brings together contemporary musicians and artists for one extraordinary night at DRAF. The space is taken over by music performances and video projections from cities across the world.
Arrive to Dara Friedman‘s montage of Miami dancers and enjoy a one-off alternative performance by buoyant London indie-pop band Citizens! as the sun goes down.
Watch Klara Lidén‘s nighttime moonwalk around New York. Discover new experimental works by contemporary composer Peter Yarde Martin performed by Sudden Junction ensemble.
A Glasgow towerblock crumbles in Cyprien Gaillard‘s work as darkness falls. Berlin-based Born in Flamez makes a London debut to end the night with a future electronics/grime set.
Supported by DRAF Galleries Circle (Hauser & Wirth, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, Pilar Corrias, Sadie Coles HQ, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Sprüth Magers, The Modern Institute, Michael Werner, White Cube)
Hoxton project space Kunstraum invites artist Dorine van Meel to discuss her current practice, situated within and between the media of moving image, sculpture and installation. The conversation between artist and curator (Thomas Cuckle) will both introduce van Meel’s past work and make public a work-in-progress collaboration towards her solo exhibition in late 2015 at Kunstraum.
Dorine van Meel (b. 1984, Netherlands) completed her MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 2014. She is the current recipient of the Nina Stewart Artist Residency at the South London Gallery. Selected solo exhibitions include: Between the Dog and the Wolf, South London Gallery; Kunstraum, London (both forthcoming 2015); …instead to meet strangers who might change our minds, Swiss Church, London (2014). Van Meel curated the group exhibition Luminous Flux at Arti et Amicitiae, Amsterdam (2014) and initiated Does Not Equal, a collaborative project on the creative potential and ongoing concerns of feminism at W139 in Amsterdam (2015).
Kunstraumwas set up in 2012 with a remit to exhibit artists based outside of the UK who are increasingly established internationally yet are underexposed within London.
+1 is a new series in collaboration with London’s most exciting emerging spaces, collectives and publications, who each invite an artist to present a current project in DRAF’s library. By hosting these intimate profiles-in-the-moment, DRAF invites colleagues and public to engage in direct discussions departing from practice-based research. Click here for information on the first event in the series, +1: Anne de Boer & Eloïse Bonneviot, guests of Jupiter Woods.
Join Bruce McLean, Alexandre da Cunha, Richard Wentworth and Drawing Room Confessions in the Library at DRAF for a drink to celebrate three new issues.
On this occasion, Drawing Room Confessions also launches a re-print of its most popular issue #2 Jason Dodge, including a specially commissioned new conversation.
Drawing Room Confessions is a self-funded publication. Each issue is dedicated to one artist, who plays the serious and playful game of conversation.
Artist Than Hussein Clark, Soho legend Dusty O and pole dancer and fire eater Ayumi LaNoire invite you to afternoon tea and conversation on the colourful history of cabaret in London.
Doors open 8.30pm, guests must be seated by 9pm. Closes at 11pm.
The climax of The Violet Crab at DRAFsees DRAF transformed into a cabaret for a live variety programme of more than twenty artistic, musical, literary and acrobatic acts.
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Rendez-vous at The Violet Crab. Pierre Huyghe’s Name Announcer trumpets your arrival. Sip a delicious bespoke cocktail designed by Arabeschi di Latte. Maria Loboda reads her tarot cards. As you take your seats, marvel at Japanese bondage acts by pole dancer and fire eater Ayumi LaNoire and Nina Russ. Isobel Williams is drawing the characters live.
Meet your host: Berlin-based singer Anja Dietmann and artist Than Hussein Clark, performing songs inspired by historical cabaret. The show begins with a stand-up recital from American poet Matthew Dickman. A ballet dancer performs for the first time Christodoulos Panayiotou’s intimate philosophical letter. Zhana Ivanova choreographs a theatrical menage-a-trois. A new performance by Celia Hempton is premiered.
Interval drinks, with Adam Christensen playing ditties on the accordion. For the final act, Pipilotti Rist has imagined for you a male striptease. Glamourous starlet Wendy Bevan serenades the end of the night.
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DZ Hosts The Violet Crab: Nights of Cabaret at DRAF is directed by Than Hussein Clark, Vincent Honoré and Nicoletta Lambertucci, with special guest Milovan Farronato.
Supported by DRAF Galleries Circle (Hauser & Wirth, Kurimanzutto, Lisson Gallery, Pilar Corrias, Sadie Coles HQ, Stuart Shave Modern Art, Sprüth Magers, The Modern Institute, Michael Werner, White Cube).
American poet and self-described “son of white trash asphyxiation” CAConrad performs from his latest book ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014), where security cameras, escalators, crystals and semen are employed to exert a new poetics.
CAConrad’s Kansas childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of seven books, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014). He is a 2015 Headlands Art Fellow, and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Banff, Ucross, RADAR and the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. He conducts workshops on (Soma)tic Poetry and Ecopoetics.
+1 is a new series in collaboration with London’s most exciting emerging spaces, collectives and publications, who each invite an artist to present a current project in DRAF’s library. By hosting these intimate profiles-in-the-moment, DRAF invites colleagues and public to engage in direct discussions departing from practice-based research.
For the first event, curator-led platform Jupiter Woods invites artists Anne de Boer (b.1987, Netherlands) & Eloïse Bonneviot (b.1986, France) to discuss their collaborative practice, including a recent fungal installation in the Jupiter Woods garden.
Jupiter Woods is an exhibition space, residency programme and shared research and studio facility established in 2014 in Bermondsey, South London. Its members are Hanna Laura Kaljo, Lucy Lopez, Carolina Ongaro, Barnie Page,Cory Scozzari and Emma Siemens-Adolphe.
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.
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.
Rut Blees Luxemburg and Alexander García Düttmann present their new book The Academic Year (SPBH, 2014) with a reading and projections.
An institution is a hothouse and the university, which should be a cool place, is no exception. It is both threatened and sustained by passions and moods, intrigues and power games. Can photography be factual and capture a frame of mind?
Rut Blees Luxemburg is a London-based artist and Reader in Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art, London.
Alexander García Düttmann is a philosopher and teaches aesthetics at the University of the Arts in Berlin. His publications include the books Naive Art: An Essay on Happiness (2012) and What Does Art Know? (2015).
A special night by artist Haroon Mirza. His performance will be followed by a DJ set by DJ/producer Tessela, who has recently released a variety of tracks influenced by house, techno and UK hardcore, and is currently signed to R&S Records.
10-11pm Expanded DJ set by Haroon Mirza
11pm-12am DJ set by Tessela
12-1am Haroon Mirza + Tessela LIVE
We are delighted to host this free event for artists, collaborators and friends. Join us for the party.
Supported by Arts Council England and DRAF Galleries Circle (Sadie Coles HQ, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Sprüth Magers, White Cube).
24-hour and night buses from DRAF include 24, 134, N5, N20, N29, N253 and N279 to Tottenham Court Rd, 214 to Moorgate, 88 to Clapham Common and N253 to Hackney and Whitechapel.
Harry Burke, Holly Childs and Sophie Collins present an immersive reading installation in Nina Beier’s solo presentation at DRAF. Burke and Childs will read a story that maps the space. Collins will read a series of ekphrastic poems. The event will also include video readings by Natalie Parker, Aurelia Guo, Jack Mannix and Autumn Royal.
Harry Burke is a London-based writer. He recently edited I Love Roses When They’re Past Their Best (published 2014, Test Centre) and published City of God, an ebook of his poemswith architectural drawings by Alessandro Bava (Version House, 2014).
Holly Childs is a Melbourne-based writer, editor and artist. She curated the exhibition Quake II, currently on show at Arcadia Missa, and her forthcoming novel Danklands will be published in December 2014.
Sophie Collins is a writer and co-founder of tender, an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry London, The White Review, and elsewhere. She is currently carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast.
The exhibition Nina Beier continues to 13 December 2014. Free, all welcome.
Event supported by DRAF Galleries Circle and Arts Council England.
Event free, booking essential via info@davidrobertsartfoundation.com.
In 1967, the British artist Richard Long walked a straight line back and forth across a field in an improvised track, until his steps flattened the grass. Predetermined paths do not always lead to a desirable destination, and they are often not direct enough. Over time, walkers wear away regulated groundcover to create “desire lines,” maps of longing.
This project borrows its title from Long’s work in order to reflect on what it presently means for a contemporary art institution to commit to critical modes of working with artists and curators. Its focus on artistic programmes will enable different actors to expand on present-day research interests, modes of production and display, and how these curatorial practices can shape the institution that generates them.
The institutions invited for this symposium show divergent concepts of what a contemporary art institution is, how it functions and the social responsibilities behind them. As curators and producers, how do we handle and work with these complexities?
The first day takes the format of a forum on the differences and similarities between the institutions and their respective specificities and strategies, concluding with a discussion mediated by Vanessa Müller (Director, European Kunsthalle). The second day takes a more theoretical stance as speakers discuss notions of desire. In this context, desire is considered as a necessity that is never fulfilled but that always has to be reconstituted, which reconfigures itself according to one’s position and identity; in Lacan’s words, to desire is to answer the question ‘What does the Other desire?’ The day uses the notion of desire as an entry point for discussing the production of an institutional identity: how do we produce desire through a programme of diverse creative activities? What constitutes this desire within an ongoing process of redefinition and self-awareness? How can each organisation’s vision effectively respond to present situations while inspiring audiences, artists and collaborators?
The invited institutions, all founded after 2007 and based in Egypt, Germany, Lebanon, the Netherlands, and Portugal have positioned their identities not solely within expectations of the market and audiences, but through their commitment to research and focus on non-traditional programmes and formats. Framed within, yet not defined by, socio-political, economical and spatial contingencies, this symposium presents an opportunity to reflect on how these differences and similarities can be negotiated and transformed into a productive and feasible discourse and practice.
Desire Lines is a project conceived and organised by Nicoletta Lambertucci (Curator, DRAF) with Sofia Lemos (Curatorial Assistant, DRAF) and produced by DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) in collaboration with European Kunsthalle and Goldsmiths MFA Curating.
Schedule
Friday, 28 November
2.00pm Welcome introduction
2.15pm Jens Maier-Rothe (Co-Director, Beirut) presents the not-for-profit art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo (EG), Beirut
2.45pm Luis Silva and João Mourão (Co-Founders, Kunsthalle Lissabon) present the Lisbon-based (PT) Kunsthalle Lissabon as an institutional hoax
3.15pm Kristine Siegel and Rhea Dall (Co-Directors, PRAXES) speak about PRAXES Centre for Contemporary Art, a not-for-profit venue for international contemporary art and research based in Berlin (DE)
3.45pm Break
4.00pm Arnisa Zeqo and Antonia Carrara (Co-Founders, rongwrong) discuss rongwrong, a space for art and theory in Amsterdam (NL)
4.30pm Mirene Arsanios (Co-Director, 98weeks) presents 98weeks a research project based in Beirut (LB)
5.00pm Break
5.15pm Discussion with the art institutions moderated by Vanessa Müller (Director, European Kunsthalle) followed by Q&A
7pm Drinks
Saturday, 29 November
11.00am Vanessa Müller (Director, European Kunsthalle) introduces the themes of the day and presents European Kunsthalle, followed by Q&A with the audience
12.00pm Rachel Mader (Researcher, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art) discusses the production of institutional identities, followed by Q&A
1.00pm Break
2.00pm Lecture by Simon Sheikh (Programme Director MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College) followed by Q&A
3.00pm Discussion with all participants moderated by Nicoletta Lambertucci (Curator, DRAF) and Simon Sheikh (Programme Director MFA in Curating, Goldsmiths College) followed by Q&A
Participating Institutions
98weeks is directed by Zeina Assaf and co-founded by Mirene and Marwa Arsanios. Based in Beirut (LB) it is conceived as a research project that shifts its attention to a new topic every 98 weeks. Since opening in 2007, it focuses on artistic research, combining both theoretical and practical forms of inquiry.
Beirut is a not-for-profit art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo (EG). Since its opening in 2012, Beirut has been considering institution building as a curatorial act. Its programme and activities are directed alternately by Antonia Alampi, Jens Maier-Rothe and Sarah Rifky. Beirut exhibits, writes, talks, shows, teaches, commissions artworks and organizes research, in Cairo and elsewhere. From October 2014 till May 2015, Beirut also runs the first edition of the Imaginary School Program.
Kunsthalle Lissabon directed by João Mourão and Luis Silva is based in Lisbon (PT). It was founded in 2009 as a wish for self-reflexivity for thinking about the existing conditions for the development and perception of a so-called institutional practice.
PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art is a not-for-profit venue for international contemporary art and research based in Berlin (DE). Founded in 2013 by Rhea Dall and Kristine Siegel, it investigates the objects, process and interactions that combined constitute an artistic practice, through half-year cycles centered on the full span of work of two unassociated artists. Recently Dall and Siegel were appointed Conveners of The Bergen Assembly 2016, a large-scale international triennial in Norway. In addition, they both currently hold positions as PhD Research Fellows at University of Copenhagen.
Rongwrong is a space for art and theory based in Amsterdam (NL), run by Arnisa Zeqo and Antonia Carrara, with Laurie Cluitmans and Vincent Verhoef. Opened in 2011, it explores recurrent questions concerned with the constant friction between the inner self and the theoretical, professional and artistic practices that describe and inscribe us in daily life.
Participants
Mirene Arsanios has been based in Beirut since 2008. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks research project in 2007 and launched 98editions, a small press for experimental and cross-genre writing, in 2013. Her writings have appeared both in arts and literary magazines such as Bidoun, Cura Magazine, The Rumpus, Ibraaz, Ink & Coda, and Enizagam amongst others. Arsanios holds a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Antonia Carrara is an artist. Carrara lives and works in Paris and Amsterdam where she co-runs rongwrong. Recent projects include in Despite of Death, Yale Union, and Portland Ciment, Publication Studio, Portland, USA. The Issues of Our Times III, Artists Space Books & Talks, New York, USA. Supernaturel, Fondation Ricard, Paris, FR. Schlöss Ringenberg, DE. De Fabriek, Eindhoven, NL.
Rhea Dall has been based in Berlin since 2006. Dall held positions at the Berlin Biennial’s 5th and 6th editions, in between which she coordinated The Danish & Nordic Pavilions at the Venice Biennial 2009. From 2010 to 2012, Dall was the curator at Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, initiating the Research Programme and curated projects including Palace Party, Corso Multisala,and solo shows with Christina Mackie, Nina Beier, and Clemens von Wedemeyer. Dall has written for and edited a range of papers and catalogues, and recently contributed to Spike Magazine, Bulletins of The Serving Library, and Mousse.
Jens Maier-Rothe works as independent researcher, writer and curator. He has exhibited widely and has edited and written for numerous publications and magazines. Since 2012, He co-directs the art initiative Beirut in Cairo together with Sarah Rifky. Recent curatorial projects include collaborations with the Lisson Gallery in London (The Magic of the State, 2013); the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2013 & 2014); the Stedelijk Museum and Trouw in Amsterdam (Here Today Gone Tomorrow, 2014); and the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (A Guest without a Host is a Ghost, 2014–2015).
João Mourão and Luis Silva are a curatorial duo based in Lisbon, Portugal, where they currently serve as co-directors of Kunsthalle Lissabon. Alongside their curatorial practice, Mourão and Silva are co-editors of the ongoing book series Performing the Institution(al), published by Kunsthalle Lissabon, which addresses recent developments in institutional practice. They are the curators of the 2015 edition of ZONA MACO SUR, the solo projects section of Mexico City’s contemporary art fair. Recent curated exhibitions include, Mariana Castillo Deball, Moi-Peau (2014), Petrit Halilaj, I’m hungry to keep you close. I want to find the words to resist but in the end there is a locked sphere. The funny thing is that you’re not here, nothing is (2014), Patrizio Di Massimo, Me, Mum, Mister, Mad (2014), Amalia Pica, Memorial for Intersections (2013), Leonor Antunes, a linha é tão fina que o olho, apesar de armado com uma lupa, imagina-a ao invés de vê-la (2013), Daniel Gustav Cramer and Haris Epaminonda, Early Summer (2012), Ahmet Ogut, Stones to Throw (2011), and Mounira Al Solh, The Sea is a Stereo (2010).
Kristine Siegel was based in New York for almost a decade before relocating to Berlin in 2011. Siegel held positions at the Dept. of Photography at Museum of Modern Art in New York, International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) and Dennis Oppenheim Studio & Archive. Working as an independent curator, she was responsible for several exhibitions and live programs, many of them collaborative endeavors, including Definitely Provisional (London) and Cabaret Tribunale (New York and Copenhagen). She has contributed to a number of publications, magazines, and catalogues.
Arnisa Zeqo studied history of art and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. In 2011, Zeqo co-founded rongwrong on the ground floor of her house in Amsterdam. In 2015, she will be Curator-in-residency at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. During her residency, she will research the relationship between art institutes and the presentation of performance art.
Speakers
Rachel Mader is an art researcher. Since 2012 she has directed the competence centre Art in Public Spheres, at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art. Between 2009 and 2014 she led the project Organising contemporary arts: artistic practice and cultural policy in Postwar Britain. From 2008 to 2009, she was a Research Assistant at the Institute for Contemporary Arts Research (IFCAR) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). Recently, Mader edited the publication Radikal ambivalent. Engagement und Verantwortung in den Künsten heute, Zürich (2014). Other notable publications include “How to move in/an institution” in ONCURATING.org (2014), and “Nameless Science – künstlerische Forschung zwischen Institutionalisierung und kreativer Autonomie” in Autorität des Wissens. Kunst – und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Dialog, edited by Anne von der Heiden and Nina Zschocke (2012).
Vanessa Müller is Head of Dramaturgy at Kunsthalle Wien and an independent writer. From 2000 to 2005 she worked as a Curator at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt/Main, and in late 2005 became Academic Director of the project European Kunsthalle, which explores different temporal and spatial models for a potential contemporary art institution. Her concerns for the social and philosophical contexts that contemporary art bring about can be found in numerous contributions to publications on contemporary art and art theory.
Simon Sheikh is a curator and theorist dealing with the modalities and potentialities of curating, within the relation between exhibition-making and political imaginaries. He is concerned with how exhibitions articulate through arrangement, narrative and spatialisation, as well as how the very format of the exhibition can be expanded, negated or transformed. His research areas include the making of publics, the instituting of subjectivity and the politics of display, both in terms of critical writing, the conceptualisation and realisation of exhibition projects, and in the form of an ongoing formulation of histories of exhibition making and reception. He is Programme Director, MFA Curating Department of Art, Goldsmiths College.
Organisers
European Kunsthalle conceives itself as a basis for a broad range of art forms including both known and emerging contemporary art practices, approaching these in an interdisciplinary and experimental way. It is a nomadic forum in which the aspect of artistic production is ascribed a similar significance as the presentation and reflection of art and culture. As an institution without a permanent site, the European Kunsthalle focuses on decentralised projects and collaborative structures.
Goldsmiths MFA Curating is a postgraduate study programme that draws on the international scope of contemporary arts practice at Goldsmiths College and in London, and instigates debate about the relationship between that practice, current critical discourse and concepts of curating. The programme is designed to provide a practice-led research context for students at any stage of their professional practice by focusing in-depth on aesthetic, social, political and philosophical questions that are brought to bear in any place or at any event in which contemporary art is situated.
DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation) is an independent non-profit space for contemporary art in London, founded in 2007. It is directed by Vincent Honoré who with his team produces an ambitious programme of exhibitions, commissions and live events. All DRAF projects are open free to the public.
It’s moving from I to It – The Play is a travelling performance for two actors written and directed by Tim Etchells and commissioned by FormContent.
The Play disseminates and performs questions and discourses that have informed FormContent’s last two years of research and programming: an investigation into fiction as a possible curatorial framework. Drawing from the dense body of voices and propositions that have alimented FormContent’s program, Etchells develops a subjective reading of the different scenes that have articulated It’s moving from I to It. By working across text, visual material and performance, The Play envisions concerns raised by the project’s various contributors in relation to issues of authorship, language, and institutional rhetoric. The performance instigates a dialogue with the context of DRAF’s institutional backdrop and display, allowing a reflection on different modes of cultural production and dissemination, and implementing such thinking within a broader public discussion.
Tim Etchells (b. 1962 UK) is an artist, performance maker and writer, best known for his role as the artistic director of the performance ensemble Forced Entertainment, based in Sheffield (UK) and founded in 1984. Etchells’ practice extends through writing and performance projects, neon and video works, through diverse collaborations and the author of several books, including a critical exploration of contemporary performance and theatre, a dream dictionary and a novel.
Supported by Arts Council, England and DRAF Galleries Circle.
DRAF is transformed into a stage for our annual evening of performances. Quinn Latimer & Megan Rooney, Joe Moran, planningtorock, Sarah Lucas and Eloise Hawser present new live works for a unmissable event.
First, Quinn Latimer and Megan Rooney perform their live script O LABOR, SISTER CONTINENT (2014), an intimate and increasingly poetic conversation that begins in two distinct languages and gradually evolves into one shared lingua franca. Inspired by Jean Pierre Gorin’s documentary film Poto & Cabengo (1978), and its layered elliptical depiction of two sisters who spoke in an invented language until the age of eight, this collaborative work evokes economies of gender, space, geography, class and the very medium – language – in which we perform them.
Next, Joe Moran presents two works. Singular (2011) is a durational performance installation for two pairs of dancers – one male, one female. Highly specific choreographic directives complicate and problematise performers’ subjectivities and their negotiation of conceptual and perceptual puzzles. The all-male performance work Maesk (2014) questions representations of the male body through its disruption. With dancers Katye Coe, Samuel Kennedy, Dominick Mitchell-Bennett, Erik Nevin, Christopher Owen, Hilary Stainsby, Alex Standard, Yiannis Tsigkris.
Sarah Lucas performs Fried Egg (2014). “I aim to get a thick crusty bit on the bottom, especially if I’m going to hang them up – I use pipe cleaners for this as ordinary wire cuts right through them. And sunny side up, naturally.” (from an interview with Frances Henderson, published in Sarah Lucas – After 2005, Before 2012).
Gender Baby (2014) is a live music and video performance by Berlin-based Planningtorock. Disruption and interference, not ordinarily associated with pop and dance music, arm a campaign to unseat norms in a mission towards transnational gender equality; combining spectacular performances with a direct political vision. “Surprisingly, given that Western dance music is born out of black, queer music, it rarely touches upon these themes”.
Finally, Eloise Hawser closes the evening with a new sound piece created for the event, I’ve been told by my lawyers to say nothing at all(2014). Disembodied voices greet, accost and interrogate a silent, unseen subject. Ranging from adoring to abusive – “Do you feel any remorse?” “Flash us a smile!” – these fragments are taken from YouTube footage of paparazzi crowds around hotels and courtrooms, and drift in and out of narrative. The constant, regular sound of a camera shutter adds a percussive undercurrent, building from a simple rhythm to a cacophony of clicks, and signifying to the audience that they are (complicit) subjects being watched by the unseen chorus.
Thanks to DRAF Galleries Circle (Sadie Coles HQ, Hauser & Wirth, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Sprüth Magers, White Cube), Mousse magazine and Frontier Craft Lager.
Free. A limited number of places will be available on the night. Entry will be on a first come first served basis from 7pm at 13-15 Camden High St.
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 19thcentury.
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).
A special screening as part of the exhibition A Special Arrow Was Shot In The Neck…, on display at DRAF from 13 June to 2 August 2014.Medium Earthis a film that attunes itself to the seismic psyche of the state of California. It listens to its deserts, translates the writing of its stones, and deciphers the calligraphies of its expansion cracks. Its intensive surface readings offer the cinematic survey of a techtonic upheaval to come.Within this volatile present, Californian ‘earthquake sensitives’ arise as corporeal self-instruments of premonition, prediction and preemption. Their bodies resonate in radical collusion with the geo-techtonic event sphere. They decode a symptomatology that implodes corporeal and chronological time as well as the global architecture of techno-industrial earth sensing.Commissioned by REDCAT, Medium Earthis the first work produced by The Otolith Group within an American context.PLEASE NOTE: Seats for this event are free but places are limited – please arrive by 6pm in order to be seated. This event will take place at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High St, London E8 2PB, London.DRAF Curators’ Series is supported by Arts Council England. Screening in association with LUX.
An afternoon of performances and discussion in celebration of the launch of Corps Medium, issue 7 of Afrikadaa, the bi-lingual online review of Afro design and contemporary arts. During this ‘live editorial’, Afrikadaa transforms itself into a vibrant, mobile and living body, inviting the public to navigate its multiple organs of performance.
“My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
With Larry Achiampong, Louisa Babari, Holly Bass, Kamau Brathwaite, Jayone, Francine Mabondo, Sika Fakambi, Pascale Obolo and Celio Pallaird.
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.
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.
A new series of events explores the complex relationship between art and education in the UK since the 1960s. The three talks are organised by Elena Crippa (Curator, Tate Britain) and Nicoletta Lambertucci (Curator, DRAF).
All events are free.
Art School: Another History
Tuesday 6 May, 7–8.30pm
Prof. Catherine Elwes (artist and Professor of Moving Image Art, Chelsea College of Art), Prof. Lisa Tickner (Visiting Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Amy Tobin (Doctoral Researcher, University of York) discuss the history of the art school from a female perspective and the limits of an institution traditionally shaped and dominated by men.
A London Underground strike is expected on 6 May, but DRAF is easily reached by buses including numbers 24, 27, 29, 88, 134, 214, 253.
Museum Education and Public Programmes: From Object to Discourse
Tuesday 13 May, 7–8.30pm
Andrew Brighton (art critic and writer, formally Senior Curator Public Events, Tate Modern) and Victoria Walsh (Head of Curating Contemporary Art Programme, Royal College of Art) discuss their roles and experiences across art schools and public museums.
Imagining Art Education: The Artist Speaks
Tuesday 20 May, 7–8.30pm
Artists Aaron Angell, Celia Hempton and Cally Spooner imagine their own ideal public programmes through the lenses of their diverse artistic practices. Each will present personal responses to art and education, bringing their individual experiences to the discourse. The talks will be followed by a Q&A session.
Elena Crippa recently joined Tate Britain as Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art. Previously she was co-Pathway Leader on the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins, UAL.
Speakers:
Aaron Angell (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in London. He recently presented Woman expecting triplets returning home from the cinema: Aaron Angell and Jack Bilbo at SWG3, Glasgow, 2013, and is preparing a solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire, London in 2015. Recent group shows include pool: Kunst aus London at Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover; Die Marmory Show, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, 2014 and BRITISH BRITISH POLISH POLISH: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long ’90s and Today, CSW Ujadowski Zamek, Warsaw, 2013.
Andrew Brighton was formally Senior Curator: Public Events at Tate Modern and has taught at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths’ College and the London Consortium. As well as art criticism, his publications include essays on cultural policy and the rise of management. He recently published ‘Valuing modernism: prejudices, markets, traditionalism, future-value, criticism, ethics’ in Critical Quarterly of which he is a contributing editor. He is currently working on a graphic novel with Catherine Brighton.
Catherine Elwes is a video artist, writer, teacher and curator who was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About Time, 1980, ICA, London. Throughout the 1980s her work and writings continued to explore time–based media in general and feminist themes. Elwes is the author of Video Loupe (K.T. Press, 2000) and Video Art, a guided tour (I.B.Tauris, 2005) and her writings have appeared in books, journals, exhibition catalogues and periodicals. She is currently writing Installation and the Moving Image and Landscape and the Moving Image for Wallflower Press. Elwes is Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London, and Founding Editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ).
Celia Hempton (b. 1981) is an artist living and working in London. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2003, from the Royal College of Art in 2007, and from 2008-2010 she studied at the British School at Rome. She has exhibited recently at the Kunstverein, Aachen, 2013; Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, 2014; Southard Reid, London, 2013 and Galerie Sultana, Paris, 2014. Group shows include OhWow Gallery, Los Angeles, 2014; Cell Project Space, 2014, David Roberts Art Foundation, 2013, the Moving Museum, 2013 and Studio Voltaire, London, 2012. This summer she has been awarded residencies at Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Villa Lena Italy, and will be participating in the Fiorucci Art Trust’s Forget Amnesia in Stromboli.
Cally Spooner (b. 1983) is an artist living and working in London. Using theory, philosophers, current affairs and pop cultural figures as alibis to help her write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive theatre plays, looping monologues and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behaviour of speech. Recent work has explored how high performance economies have affected speaking as a live, undetermined event. Her work includes writing, film, live performance, and broadcasting. Spooner’s productions have been presented at Tate Modern, London, 2014; Performa 13, New York, 2013; Kunstverein Munich, 2014; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2013; Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen, 2013; KW Institute, Berlin, 2013; Wysing Art Centre, UK, 2012; Jeu De Paume, Paris, 2013; Serpentine Gallery, London, 2012. Cally Spooner is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists 2013.
Lisa Tickner is Visiting Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art and Professor Emerita of Art History, Middlesex University. Her books include The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 (1988), Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century(2000), and Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (2008). She was an art student in the 1960s, and has taught art and art history students for more than forty years.
Amy Tobin in a researcher in the history of art department at the University of York. Her PhD, supervised by Dr Jo Applin, concentrates on the dynamics of collaboration between artists influenced by feminism in Britain and the United States in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Victoria Walsh is Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at the Royal College of Art. Previously she was Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain (2005-11) during which time she was involved in the creation of the Tate Research Department and secured Tate’s first major AHRC-funded project ‘Tate Encounters’ along with the museum’s first three collaborative doctoral awards. She is currently Director of the RCA’s major EU- MeLA funded project on ‘Curatorial and Artistic Research’, in collaboration with four European museums, and is Principal Investigator of a new RCA / Tate research project ‘Cultural Value and the Digital’.
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 Studyseries (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”.
Present Fictions is a two-day special programme of screenings, performance lectures and discussions. Diverse events focus on contemporary approaches to visual culture, poetry, science fiction and narrative structures and explore their relationships to new technologies and the expanded information society. A temporary research library presents a selection of publications and materials that have informed the research for this project. The exhibition Geographies of Contamination is on view in the gallery space.
Artists and speakers include Rachael Allen, Hannah Black, Ami Clarke, Tyler Coburn, David Raymond Conroy, Robert Cowley, David Cunningham, Keren Cytter, Jesse Darling, Rózsa Farkas, Barnaby Lambert, Pablo Larios, Hannah Perry, Heather Phillipson, Cher Potter, Val Ravaglia, Sam Riviere, Erica Scourti, Richard Sides, Michael E. Smith, Lucy Soutter and Georgina Voss.
Curated by Sandra Pusterhofer (Curator DRAF) with Micola Brambilla and Nina Trivedi.
Please scroll down for links to images and the leaflet.
FRIDAY 28 MARCH
2 – 3 pm > Gallery 5 |Screening
Through characteristics of fast-cutting, re-mixing and layering of images these videos address ideas of repetition and distortion and explore the possibility of non-linear and fragmented narratives.
Hannah Black: Intensive Care/Hot New Track, 2013, 5:36 min; My Bodies, 2014, 3:30 min.Black’s recent work across video, text and performance draws on communist, feminist theory, autobiographical fragments, and pop music as a collective imaginary.
Richard Sides:He tried to be a nice guy, but it just didn’t work out, 2012, 21:12 min.Sides’ work uses a variety of media to explore notions of presence, temporality, complexity, conflict and the possible idea of ‘an ontology of communication’. This video is a tragedy or perhaps a stream of consciousness in which an anonymous protagonist pursues a moral balance or a positive outlook.
Hanna Perry: While it Lasts, 2012, 7:28 min. Continuously generating and manipulating materials (footage, sound clips, images and objects) Perry develops a network of references, carefully exploring personal memory in today’s hyper-technological society. Inspired by dance music loops and hip-hop sampling, the video reveals the strength of our personal investment in images of the illusory (power, sex, taste, lifestyle) and the vulnerability of youth.
3 – 5 pm > Studio | ‘Present Fictions’: Presentations followed by Q&A consider how visual arts, design, ‘eco-cities’ and technological innovation relate to contemporary science fiction and notions of the future.
Georgina Voss: Bodies of Glass: Interfaces between science fiction, design, and material forms. Despite overwrought frothing about the technologies that have transformed from the science fiction texts and ‘into the real’, there are relatively few examples of such artefacts. Far more numerous are the fictional ‘technologies’ that influence how design and technological initiatives are framed and ushered in. In this talk Voss explores the relationship between science fiction, design, and innovation as one of mutual engagement and co-constitution, tracing the importance of desire, persuasion and influence in this process.
Cher Potter: The Speculative Arts. Cher Potter outlines the emerging fields of Design Fictions and Speculative Art as a creative approach that lies between hard science fiction, emerging technologies and cultural myth. She will introduce and discuss the work of a cross-section of artists and designers such as Lu Yang, Kenny Irwin, Daisy Ginsberg and Katja Novitskova who work with wildly differing notions of the future.
Robert Cowley: The eco-city as ‘applied fiction’. Robert Cowley will consider whether the contemporary ‘eco-city’ might be usefully characterised as a type of ‘applied fiction’. On the one hand, the eco-city has been increasingly mainstreamed into policy making and become aligned with the interests of big business; on the other, its pragmatic, experimental qualities reflect the speculative dimensions of its origins as a radical and visionary concept.
5 – 6 pm > Gallery 5 |Screening (see above)
6.30 – 8 pm > Gallery 5 | Talk: From Production to Consumption
Pablo Larios, Lucy Soutter and David Cunningham discuss the political and cultural implications of the use of commodities and products in current artistic practices. The conversation, chaired by Nina Trivedi, also asks how new forms of distribution relate to fractured narratives and how this in turn can result in a new affective encounter with the work.
12 – 6pm > Office, 1st Floor | Research Library and Screening
Throughout the two days of events DRAF will host a Temporary Research Library with books, magazines and articles that have informed the research for this project.
Michael E. Smith, Spider Leviator, 2008; No ball-swing low, 2007; Dope dog, 2008; Hammerpants, 2010 and Jellyfish, 2011 are miniatures, usually looped fragments of no more than a few seconds. Like Smiths’ other works— sculptures, pictures, and installations —his videos are based on found materials; with simple technical means, he makes the vulnerability of bodies and emotions palpable in everyday objects lost in a world without human kindness.
SATURDAY 29 MARCH
1 – 2 pm > Studio | Performance lecture: I Know That Fantasies are Full of Lies(Take IV), 2013 by David Raymond Conroy. Followed by Q&A with curator Valentina Ravaglia.
David Raymond Conroy presents a performance lecture investigating the gap between the experience of something as sincere or inauthentic. How does our fascination with images, from advertising to mainstream cinema affect our interactions with objects and with each other?
2 – 3 pm > Studio | Performance/readings/distributed texts: Unidentified Fictionary Objects. Curated by Ami Clarke (Banner Repeater).
When the paradox of science fiction is everyday, artists are testing the limits of language as code, blurring the distinction between computational linguistics and natural language, hinting that technology is not merely a medium to represent thoughts that already exist but is capable of dynamic interactions producing the thoughts it describes. The following presentations act as a back-flip for the forthcoming exhibition at Banner Repeater in May.
Oral Backstoryby Erica Scourti live performance. A feedback loop produced by reading the past month’s search history into Google’s voice activated search function, activating voice as both semantic and operative, and generating text and image through an interplay of spoken language, voice recognition software and search algorithms.
Robots Building Robots by Tyler Coburn, (live reading by Chris Polick) meditates on the “lights out” factory, so-named for the lack of need for regular, human supervision. The book takes form as a travelogue of improvised performances, which Coburn conducted at a science park in Southern Taiwan; rumour has it that a robotics company is presently building one such facility on site. During a long walk through the park’s grounds, the author considers literary and philosophical speculations on labour, machinic intelligence and the “automatic factory”: an enduring fiction gradually creeping into reality.
Zoēpicby Jesse Darling, performance lecture with powerpoint, 2014. “There is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to zēn auto monon]. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoē] as if it were a kind of serenity [euēmeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness.”Aristotle, “Politics”, 350 bc
Error-Correction: an introduction to future diagrams (take 3): Impossible Structures “the eye that remains of the me that was I” – HD video (08:19 mins) and pamphlet (script)by Ami Clarke (Error-Correction App available soon). A series of experimental takes of an on-going enquiry into diagrams, that reference and include appropriated texts, whereby the voice, through language, is constituted “between someone else’s thoughts and the page’, and considers the production of meaning through inference, association, paradox, and contradiction.
3.30 – 4.30 pm > Gallery 1-5 | Poetry Readings and Performances, considering the artistic use of narrative, poetry, rhythm and fictional elements in language.
4.10 Barnaby Lambert, A Planet in My Mouth, 2014. Staged as a performance in prose poetry; A Planet in My Mouth is a miniature sci-fi adventure across the language of high technology.
4.20 – (Gallery 5) Keren Cytter, Poker Face, 2009 (Performed by Andrew Kerton). One night on stage a romantic poet is overtaken by the murderous ambition of his alter ego. As he fights for the audience’s attention and for his sanity Lady Gaga’s eponymous hit is heard undulating around his poetry. His alter-ego coerces him to kill off his colleagues in order to reclaim the spotlight. Poker Face was originally conceived for the Serpentine Gallery’s poetry marathon in 2009.
5 – 6 pm > Gallery 5 | Performance Lecture: It’s Not Me It’s You, by Rózsa Farkas.
Building on her research at the Post Media Lab, on affect after the Internet, Rózsa Farkastakes Anger as her point of departure. Tracing Anger as a media and medium in art practices, as well as a socio-political device for both structural oppression and counter culture, this story asks: who is afforded Anger, and on what terms? (Please click herefor the script).
From 1 – 4 pm Heather Phillipson’s sound piece The TX Script (Splashy Phasings) will be played in Gallery 1 at 1, 2, 3 and 4 pm.
12 – 6pm > Office, 1st Floor | Research Library and Screening
Throughout the two days of events DRAF will host a Temporary Research Library with books, magazines and articles that have informed the research for this project.
Michael E. Smith, Spider Leviator, 2008; No ball-swing low, 2007; Dope dog, 2008; Hammerpants, 2010; Jellyfish, 2011
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.
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.
Everything I Do, I Do It Big is a three day long exhibition, conceived as an exploration of the DRAF space and interaction with it. The project inhabits the gallery site as a stage or as a place for action, tension, repetition and chance.
London-based Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelyte will feature new and existing works including performative installations, videos and events; and on the evening of 9 January at 7pm the first performance of Where Are You?, a new work constructed using early music originally composed for castrati singers.
Performers and contributing artists include Nouria Bah, Ornella Biagetti, Lieve Carchon, Anat Ben David, Angharad Davies, Sharon Gal, Phil Goss, Rebecca La Horrox, Heidi Heidelberg, Kate Lowry, Nissa Nishikawa, Margarita Zafrilla Olayo, Federico Strate Pezdirc, Andrea Puerta, Sebastian Schmidt, Florence Shaw, Maria Sideri, PA Skantze and Miguel Valdivia.
PLEASE NOTE: Performances occur between 2pm and 6pm on Friday 10 and Saturday 11 January. Due to the open call format of the works, we cannot confirm exact times but expect regular performances throughout the day.
With support from The Ministry of Culture of The Republic of Lithuania.
DRAF is delighted to present the UK premiere of Pierre Huyghe’s masterpiece The Host and the Cloud (2009–10), a feature-length film by the acclaimed artist. “Combining staged and improvised action, and running to just over two hours, the film [….] might be Huyghe’s most elaborate, intriguing and, quite possibly, weirdest offering to date” (Naomi Fry, Frieze, 2011).
Shot during a three-day live project, the film follows a group of actors through a series of fragmented narratives, improvised scenes, and fantastical visions staged within a deserted museum. The result is a mesmerising masterpiece, and the inauguration of Huyghe’s ongoing experiments with ecosystems as presented at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 and his current retrospective at Centre Pompidou, Paris (to January 2014).
Ritual, commerce, and mythology intersect with mordant effect in […] The Host and the Cloud. Filmed in a building that once housed the French National Museum of Art and Popular Traditions, and shot on three separate occasions coinciding with Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and May Day, in this piece the emptied museum becomes a sort of Gormenghast castle populated by a stealthy cast of characters derived from both urban and historic folklore, including, among others, the grim reaper, E.T., and witches. Via the repetition of decontextualized ceremonies and farcical processions over the course of the film (including a trial, a coronation, and an impromptu catwalk), the gathered ensemble attempt to invoke, and perhaps thereby locate and release, those archetypal forces that lie bound within the institution of the culture industry.
[…] [T]he mask now becomes the visage of false illumination. Indeed, as Jean Baudrillard noted in an essay accompanying the artist’s Tate Modern solo exhibition “Celebration Park” in 2006, “Huyghe’s strength lies in his understanding . . . [that] images have become masks for universal media ventriloquism.” The vestiges of ceremony and myth, particularly costumes and procession, become, for the artist, symbols of this cultural ventriloquism. Ultimately, in a staged world we are, according to Huyghe, but mere actors.
Joseph Akel, Artforum, 2010
PLEASE NOTE: Seats for this event are free but places are limited – please contact info@davidrobertsartfoundation.com to book. The work is not suitable for those under 15 years old. This event will take place at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High St, London E8 2PB, London. The screening will start at 6pm; please arrive in time to be seated.
The Harder You Look is a temporaryart institute that takes inspiration from and follows the procedures of scientific research as a tool for thinking and producing collaboratively. Students and specialists meet in London to discuss the specificity of perception in its relation to contemporary artworks. What are the parameters that come into play when looking at a work of art? What does instigate or affect its reading? How and when does the work reveal itself? What does its context or history bring? What about its location or its position as part of a collection? What is it that we have in front of our eyes and what happens when we look harder? The Harder You Look focuses on the various aspects of the context that generates a work and traces its relation back to the viewer.
WHO WE ARE
Collecting Matters is a partnership between three Foundations that marks a collective commitment to encouraging new ways of thinking, sharing and producing knowledge about collections. Founded in 2012 by the Kadist Art Foundation (Paris), Nomas Foundation (Rome) and David Roberts Art Foundation (London), Collecting Matters wishes to develop an exchange on notions of collection/collecting through an interdisciplinary curatorial fellowship.
Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders (CAHF) is a research environment and knowledge platform built around the collections of the 4 leading contemporary art museums in Flanders, Belgium: S.M.A.K. (Ghent), Mu.ZEE (Ostend), M HKA & Middelheimmuseum (Antwerp). Through a series of projects and actions (workshops, symposia, publications, exhibitions) CAHF both questions and strengthens the institutional practice of collecting, by accommodating dialogue and collaboration between its 4 partner museums and an international community of art professionals.
The Harder You Look is curated by Nicoletta Lambertucci (DRAF) & Pieternel Vermoortel (CAHF) in collaboration with the participating institutions.
PROGRAMME
EVENTS AND TALKS ARE FREE. ALL WELCOME
WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER FROM 6.30 TO 9.30PM – A PERFORMANCE AND A PANEL DISCUSSION CHAIRED BY LOUISA BUCK
We will start the evening with a composition for percussion and voice by the American composer Frederic Rzewski, To The Earth, from 1985, performed by George Barton. It will be followed by case studies from the participating institutions, which will each address issues of responsibility to artworks within a collection. The panel will discuss amongst other concerns, de-collecting, lost works, and the tension between domestic and public spaces.
THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER FROM 6.30 TO 8PM – JONATHAN LAHEY DRONSFIELD IN CONVERSATION WITH IAN KIAER
The format of this evening will consist of a 45 minute discussion between philosopher Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield and artist Ian Kiaer. It will be followed by a question and answer session. The guests will present, with examples from their work the back-and-forth between object and theory.
FRIDAY 22 NOVEMBER FROM 6.30 TO 8PM – MICHELE ROBECCHI AND SKYE SHERWIN ON MARCEL BROODTHAERS AND FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES AND THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC
An investigation into how critical discourse is constructed, conducted and presented in relation to the works of Marcel Broodthaers and Félix González-Torres featured in Orpheus Twice (the current exhibition at DRAF).
SATURDAY 23 NOVEMBER FROM 6.30 TO 8PM – WAYS OF LOOKING (HARDER) BY OSSIAN WARD
Ossian Ward discusses the ideas behind his new book (tentatively titled Ways of Looking: Contemporary Art Explained, published 2014) with an introduction to the seminal book by John Berger: Ways of Seeing from 1972.
ABOUT THE HARDER YOU LOOK
Running parallel to these events The Harder You Look also incorporates a timetabled series of events for a selected group of 25 students and specialists from Belgium, France, Italy and the UK. Each day will focus on a binary structure: image/work, conservation/restoration, presentation/representation.
DAY 1 – THE HARDER YOU LOOK…THE IMAGE OR THE WORK 21 November 2013
The first day is dedicated to the investigation of the distinction between the work and its image. What is that image that we create in our mind when thinking about a work of art? How does this image corresponds to its physical reality? The highlights of the day include a presentation by artist Manon de Boer, a lecture by artist Mark Leckey, and novelist Tom McCarthy in conversation with Pieternel Vermoortel.
DAY 2 – THE HARDER YOU LOOK… CONSERVATION ANALYSIS
22 November 2013
What does constitute the work, when does it reveal itself and what elements need to be in place for it to be able to be perceived. Be it through interpretation, through conservation, through memory, through reenactment. What is it that makes the work perceptible and what readings should be preserved. The programme of the day features a video interview with artist Artie Vierkant and presentations by curator Claire Louise Staunton, and a lecture by critic Camiel van Winkel.
DAY 3 – THE HARDER YOU LOOK… PRESENTATION OR REPRESENTATION
23 November 2013
As we continously try to come closer to the actual work we look at what the context brings to it, and when representation potentially merges with its presentation. The programme of the day includes a video interview with artist Matthew Day Jackson, presentations by curator Lisa Le Feuvre, and a lecture by artist Marie Lund.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Percussionist George Barton has studied at Oxford University and the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and is currently enrolled on the Artist Diploma course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A Britten-Pears Young Artist, he has worked with the Colin Currie Group and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group among other ensembles. Recent projects include Morton Feldman’s 4-hour trio For Philip Guston at the David Roberts Art Foundation, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontakte as the headline act of Nonclassical’s “Pioneers of Electronic Music” festival, and Iannis Xenakis’s Psappha at the Southbank Centre’s The Rest Is Noise festival.
Manon de Boer (born 1966 in Kodaicanal, India) completed her artistic education at the Akademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Rotterdam, and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Using personal narration and musical interpretation as both method and subject, de Boer explores the relationship between language, time, and truth claims to produce a series of portrait films in which the film medium itself is continuously interrogated. Her work has been exhibited internationally, at the Venice Biennial (2007), Berlin Biennial (2008), Sao Paolo Biennial (2010), Documenta (2012) and has also been included in numerous film festivals in Hong Kong, Marseille, Rotterdam and Vienna. Her work has been the subject of monographic exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam (2008), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2008), London South Gallery (2010), Index in Stockholm (2011), Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis (2011) and Museum of Art Philadelphia (2012), among others. De Boer currently teaches at the School of Arts in Ghent and ERG in Brussels. She lives and works in Brussels.
Louisa Buck MA Cantab, MA Courtauld Institute, is a writer and broadcaster on contemporary art. Since 1997 she has been London Contemporary Art Columnist for The Art Newspaper, and is a regular reviewer on BBC radio and TV, including Front Row, Nightwaves and BBC World Service.
Other outlets include Vogue, Art Quarterly, Sotheby’s Magazine, The Guardian and The Sunday Telegraph and she is the author of a number of catalogue essays for institutions including Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA London and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Her books include Relative Values or What’s Art Worth? (co-authored with Philip Dodd) (BBC Books 1991); Moving Targets 2: A User’s Guide to British Art Now (Tate 2000); Market Matters: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Art Market (Arts Council England 2004) and Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (co-authored with Judith Greer) (Cultureshock Media 2006) Her latest book, Commissioning Contemporary Art : A Handbook for Curators, Collectors and Artists was published by Thames & Hudson in October 2012.
Louisa was a judge for the 2005 Turner Prize.
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield is a philosopher and, if there is such a thing, an artist-philosopher. He has published widely in continental philosophy of art, ethics, responsibility, on Derrida, Deleuze, Rancière, Nancy, Lyotard, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Kant; and at the same time he has given many readings of what he calls performative texts in galleries, including Wilkinson (‘Where narrative stops’), Focal Point (‘Goldmine ten theses on music’), Stroom (‘The swerve of freedom after Spinoza’), and Extra City (‘Philosophers enowning that there be no own’); and he collaborates with artists, notably Ian Kiaer, Benoît Maire, and Gregory Maass & Nayoungim. Dronsfield is Reader in Theory and Philosophy of Art at the University of Reading, and sits on the board of the Forum for European Philosophy at the LSE.
Martin Germann is senior curator at S.M.A.K., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent since autumn 2012. At least he organised various collection presentations as well as solo shows with Rachel Harrison and Jordan Wolfson.
From 2008 and 2011 he has been curator at kestnergesellschaft Hanover, where he worked on exhibitions and publications with artists like Michaël Borremans, Michael Sailstorfer, Elke Krystufek, Larry Sultan, Aaron Curry, Julian Göthe, or Joachim Koester. He was also part of the curatorial team for ‘Made in Germany Zwei’, a survey show of young international art at kestnergesellschaft, Kunstverein Hannover and Sprengel Museum (2012). Prior to his position at Buero Friedrich, Berlin (2006-7) he was responsible for the programme of Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, a project space of the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2005-6). At the 3rd Berlin Biennial (2003-4) he coordinated five thematic spaces within the Biennial.
He regularly publishes in books, exhibition catalogues and magazines, and has written on artists such as Kai Althoff, Dirk Braeckman, or Mathias Poledna. He is also a visiting lecturer at HISK – The Higher Institute of Arts, Ghent.
Ilaria Gianni is a curator and writer based in Rome. Since 2009 she has been co-director of Nomas Foundation, along with Cecilia Canziani. She holds the position of Adjunct Professor of Art at the John Cabot University, Rome and is lecturer on the Master of Art at the University Luiss Guido Carli, Rome. In 2008 she co-founded the art publishing collective Impress (active until 2011), and since 2009 she is member of the collective Art at Work. She has curated a number of exhibitions, and independent research based projects, coordinated a series of exhibitions and symposiums for museums, and has contributed with texts to various art catalogues. Ilaria Gianni collaborates with magazines such as «NERO», «Lo Specchio+», «Circa», «Flash Art», «Arte e Critica», and is one of the Italian contributors for artforum.com.
Vincent Honoré is a curator and writer based in Paris and London. A former curator at the Palais de Tokyo and Tate Modern, he is the curator and director of David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) in London and the co-founder and chief editor of Drawing Room Confessions.
Matthew Day Jackson(born 1974) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice encompasses sculpture, painting, collage, photography,drawing, video, performance and installation. Since graduating with an MFA from Rutgers University in 2001, following his BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle, he has had numerous solo exhibitions. His work has been shown at MAMbo Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna, Italy; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado; the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA; the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in Portland, Maine; and the Whitney Biennial Day for Night in New York.
Ian Kiaer is an artist who has exhibited internationally since 2000, with solo exhibitions at institutions including Kunstverein München, Tate Britain, London; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin;and Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice. He has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale (50th), Istanbul Biennale (10th), Berlin Biennale (4th), Lyon Bienniale (10th) and Manifesta 3. He is developing a critique of painting as a ‘minor form’ informed by notions of the model and the fragment both in studio practice and writing. This research is also explored through teaching on the doctoral programme at the RCA. His next exhibition entitled “Tooth House” will be in March, 2014 at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.
Nicoletta Lambertucci is assistant curator at David Roberts Art Foundation. Graduate of Philosophy and Art Theory, she has been a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College on Michael Foucault. She contributes to Cura Magazine and has written for catalogues and artist books.
Lisa Le Feuvre is Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, a centre for the study of sculpture that she has led since November 2010. The Henry Moore Institute is an award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre, library and sculpture archive. The Institute hosts a year-round programme of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research and publications, to expand the understanding and scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture. It is a part of The Henry Moore Foundation, which was set up by Moore in 1977 to encourage appreciation of the visual arts, especially sculpture. The Institute’s role within the Foundation is to place sculpture right at the centre of the writing of art history, and to develop scholarship around works of art.
In 2010-2011 Le Feuvre was co-curator, with Tom Morton, of British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet. Between 2005 and 2009 she directed the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum. Le Feuvre’s other curatorial projects have been staged in spaces across the UK and she regularly contributes to journals, publications and exhibition catalogues, including the 2010 edited publication Failure published by Whitechapel Art Gallery/MIT Press. Between 2004 and 2010 she taught on the postgraduate Curatorial Programme in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London
Desire and transformation are key motifs in Mark Leckey‘s work, returning repeatedly in a variety of manifestations. His own state of being – an artist in London, a participant in contemporary culture, and a man who grew up in the 1980s in the north of England – is used as a construct through which he can investigate these forces. His wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary practice combines sculpture, film, sound and performance.
Marie Lund (born 1976 Copenhagen) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2004, and lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Back Pack at Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City, Handstand, IMO, Copenhagen, Clickety Click, Croy Nielsen, Berlin, and Turtles at Laura Bartlett Gallery, London and The Object Lessons at Mudam, Luxembourg. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions in Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Sorø Kunstmuseum, Denmark, Cologne Kunstverein, Kunsthalle Mulhousse, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, Nomas Foundation, Rome, David Roberts Foundation, London, Braunschweig Kunstverein, The Swiss Institute, New York, CCA Wattis, San Francisco amongst others.
Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, Remainder, which deals with questions of trauma and repetition, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and is currently being adapted for cinema. His second novel, Men in Space, set in a Central Europe rapidly disintegrating after the collapse of communism, was published in 2007 in the UK and 2012 in the US. His third, C, which explores the relationship between melancholia and technological media, was a finalist in the 2010 Booker Prize. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and the Secret of Literature, an exploration of the themes and patterns of Hergé’s comic books; and of numerous essays that have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum. In addition, he is founder and General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network of writers, philosophers and artists whose work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Palais de Tokyo Paris, Tate Britain and Moderna Museet Stockholm.
Léna Monnier is a curator and a writer. She is in charge of the collection and of communications at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris since 2010. Kadist Art Foundation encourages the contribution of the arts to society, conducting programs primarily with artists represented in its collection to promote their role as cultural agents. Kadist’s collections and productions reflect the global scope of contemporary art, and its programs develop collaborations between Kadist’s local contexts (Paris, San Francisco) and artists, curators and art institutions worldwide.
Iris Paschalidis studied Painting at Sint-Lukas (Brussels and Ghent) and Art History at the University of Ghent. As the head of the contemporary art collection at S.M.A.K. she is on a daily basis challenged by the research, archival, presentation and conservations problematics this particular collection brings. Before joining S.M.A.K. Paschalidis worked for the Flemish Community Art Collection at the department collection management and conservation. She further has vast experience as a researcher for institutions a.o. Richard Foncke Gallery, The Jan Van Eyck Academy (Maastricht) and the contemporary art and theory magazine De Witte Raaf.
Michele Robecchi is a writer and curator based in London, where he serves as Commissioning Editor at Phaidon Press and Visiting Lecturer at Christie’s Education.
Skye Sherwin is an arts writer living in London. She is a regular contributor to The Guardian and former Deputy Editor of Art Review.
Els Silvrants-Barclay holds a Masters Degree in Chinese Studies. During her studies, she was elected president of the Student Culture Council of the University of Leuven based in the STUK Arts Centre in Leuven, with whom she organized a series of emerging artist projects (2003-2004). In 2004 she moved to Beijing to work as the program coordinator and performance curator for the Dashanzi International Art Festival (DIAF) (2004-2008). She was involved in festivals, projects and organizations in China such as the Convergence satellite exhibit of the Beijing Biennale (curator, 2005), the Platform China Contemporary Art Institute (artistic director, 2005-2006) and the Borderline Moving Images festival (co-founder and co-director, 2007-2008). In 2005, she founded Theatre in Motion, renamed as the Institute for Provocation (IFP) in 2010, a Beijing-based workspace for artists and architects. In 2009, she co-founded Natural Born Architects with Miguel Steel Lebre and started Louiza, consulting artists, organizations and governments on their cultural policy with China. From 2010-2012, she coordinated the Advanced Masters in Theatre Studies at the University of Antwerp and taught a course in Dance Theory. Since November 2012, she is in charge of Contemporary Art Heritage Flanders. She has edited the Making of Meeting (with Defne Ayas & Davide Quadrio) and Everything Beautiful is Far Away (with Jean Bernard Koeman). She is also part of SPIN, an artist-run production platform and discursive environment with the artists Diederik Peeters, Hans Bryssinck and Kate McIntosh.
Claire Louise Staunton is Curator/Director of Flat Time House an institute, gallery and archive in the former home and studio of artist, John Latham. Claire Louise is also Curator with Inheritance Projects, a curatorial group working with artists and writers in collaboration with institutions on critically informed research-led projects.
Pieternel Vermoortel is an independent curator and co-founder/director of FormContent, a curatorial programme. Her most recent programme at FormContent It’s moving from I to It uses fiction as its main tool to reflect upon cultural production. Currently Vermoortel teaches Exhibitions and Cultural Productions at TEBEAC, Ghent and is a visiting lecturer at the BA Fine Art and the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths University London. She has taught on various MFA and curatorial training programmes, such as LUCA Brussels, MFA Fine Arts Sint Lucas Antwerp, HISK Ghent, Doctoral Research Programme in Fine Art and Curating Goldsmiths University London and wrote for various catalogues and magazines such as the Venice Biennial Catalogue 2011 and Metropolis M. She edited various publications such as a.o. Out of the Studio, 2008 and The Responsive Subject, 2011
Artie Vierkant (born 1986) received an MFA from the University of California San Diego in 2011 and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. He has shown his work internationally, including exhibitions at New Galerie, Paris; Higher Pictures, New York; Exile, Berlin; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; China Art Objects, Los Angeles; and in a variety of noninstitutional contexts on the Internet. His work has been featured in Artforum, the UbuWeb archive, Rethinking Photography (Routledge), and more. He is represented by New Galerie in Paris, and teaches at New York University. He lives and works in New York.
Ossian Ward is Head of Content at Lisson Gallery and a writer on contemporary art. Until 2013, he was the chief art critic and Visual Arts Editor for Time Out London for over six years and previously contributed to magazines such as Art in America, Art + Auction, World of Interiors, Esquire, The News Statesman and Wallpaper, as well as newspapers including the Evening Standard, The Guardian, the Observer, The Times and The Independent on Sunday. Formerly editor of ArtReview and the V&A Magazine, he has also worked at The Art Newspaper and edited a biennial publication, The Artists’ Yearbook, for Thames & Hudson from 2005-2010. His book, tentatively titled Ways of Looking is due to be published in 2014 by Laurence King.
Sara Weyns (born 1979) has been working as a freelance publicist and curator since 2002. In 2005, she joined the team of the Middelheim Museum, an open air museum for modern and contemporary sculpture, as senior curator. As such, she has specialised in spatially oriented art, the subset between sculpture and architecture, art in open air and– by extension – art in public space. Via extensive and close collaborations with artists such as Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy and Carsten Höller new monumental artworks or groups of works are made in situ for the occasion of the exhibition project. Since October 2012 Sara Weyns has been acting director of the Middelheim Museum.
Camiel van Winkel writes on contemporary art and occasionally curates exhibitions. Based in Amsterdam, he teaches art theory and art philosophy at LUCA School of Arts / Sint-Lukas Brussels. He is advisor at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. He is the author of Moderne leegte. Over kunst en openbaarheid (1999), The Regime of Visibility (2005) and The Myth of Artisthood (2007/2013). His latest book, based on his PhD dissertation, is During the Exhibition the Gallery Will Be Closed. Contemporary Art and the Paradoxes of Conceptualism (Valiz, 2012).
The Harder You Look is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
In spring 2003 Chisenhale Gallery commissioned Per Hüttner to create an exhibition that reflected on collective and collaborative practices and to developed his experimental exhibition practice. The outcome was I am a Curator (IAAC), a project where people from all walks of life came to the gallery for a day to reflect on the complexity of art and exhibition-making. They did so by researching and negotiating the work of 57 artists with the help of a technical and conceptual team.
For the project’s 10-year anniversary, DRAF has invited Per Hüttner to think about the project and how IAAC has influenced exhibition making.
IAAC, along with a handful of other experimental projects, introduced a practice whereby exhibitions changed throughout the time that they were open to the public. The project also provoked profound questions about artistic identity and its relationship to collectivity. Both shifts, in turn, lead to changed perspectives on the relationship between artworks, exhibitions, curators and artists. In short, IAAC opened a floodgate of problematics that overwhelmed the team working with the project. It is therefore important to revisit these questions after 10 years have passed, and to see how they have influenced individual artistic processes and how they can guide us into meaningful future reflections on related issues.
For the event Per Hüttner will reflect of the project together with Céline Condorelli, Stephen Whitmarsh and Véronique Wiesinger.
Céline Condorelli (architect and artist, London), created the first version of Support Structure with Gavin Wade for IAAC. She will reflect on how the shifts in outlook on artwork and (gallery) space in IAAC has informed her work with display and support structures in the last decade. Stephen Whitmarsh (neuroscientist Nijmegen and member of the international network OuUnPo), will reflect on the differences and similarities between how process and practice is formulated in neuroscience and in contemporary art. Véronique Wiesinger (curator and director of the Anette and Alberto Giacometti Foundation, Paris), contributed to the IAAC catalogue in 2005 raising questions about power and authorship in the art world. She will revisit these issues and look at how artistic practice and globalisation dialogue and to see if certain forces encourage acts and artworks that border on or play with illegality.
Per Hüttner (b. 1967) is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Paris. He was trained at Konsthögskolan, Stockholm and at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He has shown extensively in Europe, North America, Australia and Asia, solo exhibitions include >unkown at Zendai Contemporary in Shanghai, Repetitive Time at Göteborgs konstmuseum, and I am a Curator atChisenhale Gallery in London. Participation in group shows include The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Hayward Gallery in London and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. He has had performances at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the Venice Biennial. A dozen monographs on the artists work have been published in the last decade. Hüttner is the founder and director of the Vision Forum, a project-based international experimental research network.
First, the exhibition Orpheus Twice dramatically changes to become a set, a situation, and a fiction for unique events to happen in the entire gallery. The doors close at 6pm, they reopen at 7pm.
From 7.30pm, we play Swell the thickening surface of, a new movement work by Florence Peake comprising of two duets and a solo. First you were my mother or a landscape, soon a votive figure dissolved into a humping dog, maybe something more explicit; this quake is liquid and transitory, unfixed, ready for distillation. Swell the thickening surface of is performed in collaboration with dance artists Gaby Agis, Amaara Raheem, Nikki Tomlinson and Rosalie Walfrid. Costumes are designed by Corinne Felgate.
At 8pm, an act by Michael Dean resonates in the space. How inanimate that alphabet. With the policy of its use in its face. A demonstration of the letter n for you. You user with your policies.
A break at 8.30pm. The light may change. The building rests and Juliette Blightman orchestrates Between Acts, a new event created for the evening.
Rodney Graham plays at 9pm. His psychedelic performance Softcore – More Solo Guitar Music for the Sex Scene, Zabriskie Point is presented for the first time in London. The perfect way to end an evening and to begin the night.
The evening of performances is curated by Vincent Honoré, director and curator of DRAF. Please note: during Frieze Art Fair, the Foundation presents Orpheus Twice, an exhibition also 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.
Free admission. Please arrive early as space may be limited. These acts and performances have never been played in London before. They last between 20 minutes to 35 minutes each.
At the occasion of Frieze Art Fair we have extended our opening hours and the exhibition will be exceptionally open on Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 October from 12 to 6pm.
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
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With support from:
And additional support from Hauser and Wirth, London and Lisson Gallery, London
Thursday 19 September: 7pm – 9pm. Please arrive early as space may be limited. Free admission, no booking or invite required, all welcome.
7.30pm: The evening will start with a piece by Paul Burnell for hands and voice. At once a score, a poem and a performance, And She Flew, composed in 2006, is performed by percussionist Sam Wilson. Paul Burnell is a British composer, born in 1960 in Ystrad, South Wales who now lives and writes in London. His music often utilizes repetition and pulse within a structure that can be easily perceived as a process.
8.00pm:Philip Glass (born 1937) is one of the most influential American composer of the late 20th century. Shortly after arriving in New York City in March 1967, Glass attended a performance of works by Steve Reich, which left a deep impression on him; he simplified his style.Glass began performing mainly in art galleries and studio lofts. The visual artist Richard Serra provided Glass with Gallery contacts, while both collaborated on various sculptures, films and installations, including the iconic Splash Piece. Between summer of 1967 and the end of 1968, Glass composed nine works, including Music in the Shape of a Square (for two flutes, composed in May 1968, an homage to Erik Satie). The first concert of Glass’s new music was at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers Cinemathèque in September 1968. This concert included Music in the Shape of a Square(performed by Glass himself and Jon Gibson). The musical scores were tacked on the wall, and the performers had to move while playing. Glass’s new works met with a very enthusiastic response by the audience which consisted mainly of visual and performance artists. During this time he made friends with other New York based artists such as Sol LeWitt, Nancy Graves, Michael Snow, Bruce Nauman, Laurie Anderson and Chuck Close. Music in the Shape of a Square is performed by Caoimhe de Paor and Miriam Nerval.
8.30pm: In 1965, Bruce McLean (born 1944) abandoned conventional studio production in favor of impermanent sculptures using materials such as water, along with performances of a generally satirical nature directed against the art world. In Pose Work for Plinths (1971; David Roberts Collection), a photographic documentation of one such performance, he used his own body to parody the poses of Henry Moore’s celebrated reclining figures. When in 1972 McLean was offered an exhibition at the Tate Gallery, he opted, with obviously mocking intent, for a ‘retrospective’ lasting only one day. King for a Day (included in the exhibition Orpheus Twice) consisted of catalogue entries for a thousand mock-conceptual, non existing, works, among them The Society for Making Art Deadly Serious piece, Henry Moore revisited for the 10th Time piece and There’s no business like the Art business piece (sung). A performance, 1000 works, forms the basis of the catalogue/exhibition/performance from 1972 King for a Day. It was performed once in 1969 and is re-played at DRAF for the first time by Bruce McLean himself.
Ewa Axelrad in conversation with Huw Hallam and Eszter Steierhoffer.
Warm Leatherette is an artist book by Ewa Axelrad, focusing on the fetishistic potency and a sculptural dimension of speed and a crash. Through juxtaposing the intimate with the cool representation of a crash, the project addresses the sense of confusion between the solid and the precarious present in our relationship with technology and its aesthetics. The conversation at DRAF will evolve around Ewa Axelrad’s project and the aesthetics of a crash culture by exploring issues such as speed at the moment of an economical impotence, an accident as culture’s punctuation mark, the unwanted idea of a democratic death and the control over a machine as a commodity.
The book has been published in a limited and numbered edition by Museum in Gliwice and includes two texts by Huw Hallam and Tomasz Plata.
Ewa Axelrad (b. 1984) is an artist based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art and works primarily with photographic image and architectural installation, through which she often examines violence present in architectural configurations and trivial interpersonal gestures. The reoccurring theme in her practice is hygiene, its social and political implications and aesthetics. She is represented by BWA Warszawa gallery in Poland. http://ewa-axelrad.com/
Huw Hallam is a writer and a musician. He has recently submitted a doctoral thesis in musicology at King’s College, London, examining the political significance of sound in National Socialist Germany and experimental musical practices in its wake. Also studied art history and cultural theory at the University of Melbourne (Australia). Lives and works in Oxford.
Eszter Steierhoffer is an art historian and curator based in London. Her research focuses on contemporary practices inbetween art and architecture and the recent developments and debates around contemporary exhibition making. She is a regular contributor to a variety of international arts publications and led a number of research seminars and workshops. Currently she is undertaking PhD research at the Royal College of Art.
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.
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 exhibitionand 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 .
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.
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’sFlatness 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.
An-artist, Unlearning, programmed by Louise Garrett, is a series of film screenings, performances and discussions animating aspects of pedagogical address in the shadow of the gallery, academy and art school. The programme encompasses enactments and presentations engaging forms, sites and practices connected to ‘undoing,’ ‘unlearning’ and ‘not-knowing,’ coinciding with the frame of experimental educational modes since the 1960s. ‘An-artist’ suggests a radical and continual repositioning of the artist vis-à-vis prevailing discourses: an on-going and urgent resistance to received representational structures. Allied to this is the process of actualization inherent in ‘unlearning’ conventional codes and operations, and creating alternative discursive environments.
Pedagogical experimentation in British art schools, 1960s-1980s. 2 July 2013
The final installment of An-artist, Unlearning presents talks and conversations illuminating various pedagogical experiments that took place in British art schools between the 1960s and the 1980s. Guest speakers: Beth Williamson, Elena Crippa, Jean Matthee and Simon Pugh (in conversation with students from the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation programme, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design).
Programme details:
I. Beth Williamson, The Colour Experiment, Cardiff c.1968
This talk takes the film The Colour Experiment as its point of focus. The film documents some of the experimental colour teaching undertaken by teacher Tom Hudson (1922-97) at Cardiff College of Art c.1968. The talk will first contextualize the film within developments in British art education in the 1950s and 1960s, especially Basic Design training. The film, and the teaching it documents, might be taken as emblematic of an approach to making and teaching art that sought to balance intellectual and theoretical perspectives with other more intuitive approaches.
A short extract of this archival film footage will be screened, courtesy of the Estate of Tom Hudson.
Beth Williamson is a researcher and lecturer based in London. Since 2009 she has been a post-doctoral Research Fellow on Tate’s ‘Art School Educated’ research project. In 2011 and 2012 she devised and taught a postgraduate module on the history of British art education post-1960 at the University of York. Her research ranges across the field of British art and art pedagogy post-1960. She is also writing a monograph on art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig to be published by Ashgate.
II. Elena Crippa, Art & Language and the Teaching of Art Theory
Mid 1960s. A particularly prescriptive type of discourse, informed by the writing of the American critic Clement Greenberg, was framing art practice and shaping its production, both in the USA and UK. A number of artists, feeling constrained by this discourse, started to expose and challenge its reproductive power. Among them were the founding members of Art & Language, who developed the short-lived Art Theory Course at Coventry College of Art (1969-71). Some of the questions underlying their teaching and the underpinning critical attitude towards ‘the language-use of the art society’ remain relevant when addressing the present state of art education. What is the relationship between art criticism and art making? What theoretical instruments do art students need? If artists, as Art & Language thought, are foremost intellectuals, what is the process of ‘unlearning’ they should undertake? And what pedagogical formats should be implemented?
Elena Crippa is a curator and researcher based in London. In the past few years, she has been developing her PhD as part of the Tate’s ‘Art School Educated’ research team, and she is a lecturer on the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Her current research focuses on the history of artist-initiated exhibitions and the development of discursive pedagogies and practices in the 1950-60s.
III. Jean Matthee, Department of Environmental Media, Royal College of Art, c.1974-1986
Jean Matthee discusses ‘unlearning’ and ‘non-knowledge’ in relation to her experience as a student in Peter Kardia’s Environmental Media programme at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in the 1980s. Before Kardia founded the Department of Environmental Media at the RCA, he was known for his pedagogical experiments at Saint Martins College in the 1960s, including the 1969 ‘locked room’ experiment. His approach to teaching sought to break with preconceived assumptions of what an art practice might be. The three-year Environmental Media course challenged existing departmental divisions by offering a flexible programme designed to accommodate unconventional mixed-media projects by students. Matthee describes how her broad-ranging practice as an artist, teacher, writer and curator was influenced by Kardia’s teaching orientation and the inspiration of RCA tutor, film-maker and AIDS activist Stuart Marshall.
Jean Matthee was a student in the Department of Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art from 1984 to 1987. As student representative of the course, she fought against its closure in the mid-198os. She also completed a PhD on ethics and the stakes and implications of topological space for subjectivity and art practice at the RCA in 1994, which led to an eight-month event called ‘Topology’ at Tate Modern (5 November 2011 – Saturday 16 June 2012). She considers all aspects of her work – teaching, research, psychoanalysis, writing, filmmaking, painting, drawing, curating – as performed modalities of her art practice.
IV. Simon Pugh, Fine Art and Critical Studies, Saint Martins College/Central Saint Martins (1983-1993)
Students from the MA Culture, Criticism and Curation programme at Central Saint Martins talk to Simon Pugh about the Fine Art and Critical Studies (FACS) course Pugh co-founded (with Roy Trollope) at Saint Martins College in 1983. The FACS course was set up in response to a perceived need for a part-time interdisciplinary fine art course. Its distinctive features included inter alia: the close interaction of ‘theory and practice’; a compulsory period of art practice in the real world; an engagement with key issues of the time (such as feminism and multiculturalism); and the forging of an interaction between art practice to theoretical and social ideas. Run independently of the full time painting and sculpture courses at Saint Martins College, the course was eventually incorporated into a redesigned fine art course at Central Saint Martins in the early 1990s and started a new life as the (predominantly full-time) Critical Fine Art Practice option.
Simon Pugh was head of theoretical and historical studies at St Martins/Central Saint Martins from 1972, and was latterly Dean of Graphic and Industrial Design. He has written on theory, art and landscape architecture and is now retired and writes poetry.
Thin Air: The Psycho-Vocalic Discoveries of Alan Smithso. 18 June 2013
A work by Paul Rooney
For the third installment of An-artist, Unlearning, we are proud to present Paul Rooney’s 2009 film Thin Air: The Psycho-Vocalic Discoveries of Alan Smithson. The screening will be followed by commentary from Richard Whitelaw, Head of Programmes, Sound and Music, and artist-critic Peter Suchin.
Part academic lecture, part science fiction story, Thin Air highlights the legacy and little known research of 1970s Leeds Polytechnic student Alan Smithson. Smithson claimed that ‘voices’ he had recorded in the Polytechnic’s H Building were sonic manifestations of memories that had been somehow preserved in the electromagnetic ether of its rooms through a process which he called ‘site-anamnesis’. Smithson also asserted that the particularly radical and eventful – and, ultimately, tragic – history of the building had contributed to its facility for preserving and recalling the charged moments of remembrance. Combining information culled from conversations, archives, poems, songs, press cuttings and Smithson’s own extensive journals and tape recordings, Rooney and his collaborator, Belgian architectural historian Dr Annette Gomperts, decipher a myriad of correspondences between historical moments in the life of individual students, the H Building, and the wider world.
Thin Air was originally commissioned by Leeds Metropolitan University, Sound and Music and MAAP.
Filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson present and discuss excerpts of their films Facs of Life (2009) and Through the Letterbox (2010). Both films draw on footage of Gilles Deleuze’s seminars at Vincennes (1975-76).
Artists’ statement: Why is it that traces of experimentation from the 1970s continue to elude the archival fixity and periodization that has already crystallized much of what went on in the preceding decade? Perhaps it has something to do with the peculiar mixture of post-68 entropy and diasporic unravelling of mass political and social movements and the concomitant emergence of more radically elusive and secretive strains of resistance, unable or unwilling to be reduced to a defining form or identity.
It was watching video footage (shot by Marielle Burkhalter in 1975-76) of Gilles Deleuze’s seminar at the often riotously experimental University of Vincennes that first spurred us on to seek out some of the students who appear in the images and map the affective singularity of their encounter with Deleuze’s thought in our film Facs of Life (2009). A fascinating record both of the process of building concepts that would eventually appear in Mille Plateaux – for many the high point of Deleuze and Guattari’s great adventure in nomadic “outsider” philosophy – and of the unique pedagogical space that made such thinking possible (informal, at times anarchic, uncomfortable and dangerously overcrowded), these blurred and ghostly smoke-blinded images were never properly edited nor incorporated into an official archive.
Lecture as performance. 14 May 2013
The first installment of An-artist, Unlearning plays on the performative character of the lecture as a form. With a screening of a film by Babette Mangolte/Robert Morris and performances by artists Fay Nicolson and Aaron Williamson.
Babette Mangolte/Robert Morris, 21.3 (1993). 21.3 is a film-remake of a 1964 performance by Robert Morris in which Morris, in the guise of a lecturer, lip-synched to an excerpt of a foundational art-historical text by Erwin Panofsky. The film is one of four remakes of Morris’s performances from the early 1960s by Babette Mangolte entitled Four Pieces by Morris (1993), first screened at Morris’s 1994 Guggenheim retrospective The Mind-Body Problem. Film courtesy of Babette Mangolte/Robert Morris.
Fay Nicolson, (In Search of) The Perfect Lecture, (2010 – 2013). This performative lecture traces the physical and conceptual boundaries of the lecture theatre in relation to communication, performance and pedagogy. Whilst reflecting on the lecture-structure as the centre of academic dissemination, Nicolson wonders about the possibilities that lie at its periphery.
Aaron Williamson, Flannel, (2011/2013). Flannel was first performed at the ‘Parlour Principia’ event at Swedenborg House, London, May 13th, 2011. Artist’s statement: ‘Flannel’ has two meanings in English. Firstly it is a small cloth used for washing the hands and face with; but a less common usage of the word means ‘indirect or evasive talk.’ It’s impossible to estimate the average percentage of lecturing time that is filled with this kind of flannel. I, for one, can say that many was the time I’ve attempted to conduct a learned, alimentary dissertation on something I knew little about – perhaps at the request of an awkwardly fastidious student. On the lectern, just like in the pulpit, one cannot confess to uncertainty. And besides, ‘flannel’ isn’t a difficult way to talk once armed with a suitably abstruse vocabulary.
This series of events is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England .
DRAF will host a Think Tank that will discuss the possibilities of future developments of de-centralised institutions, presenting the project Beyond Entropy Mediterranean as a starting point.
What is the value of marginality in contemporary art?
How is contemporary art able to create new models of spacial practice and political participation? How can it provide complex mechanisms for territorial development, opening public debates, participation and collaborative practice beyond the tired notion of local identity?
Beyond Entropy is a research-based non-profit organisation practicing architecture, urbanism, and cultural analysis and production.
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.
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.
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 iscurated by Vincent Honoré, Director and Curator, DRAF, and inaugurates the new premises in Mornington Crescent, a 19th century former furniture factory.
Bruce McLean (b.1944) is a Scottish artist who has gained International recognition for his paintings, ceramics, films and performances. At the occasion of his recent exhibition in Berlin, and the display of one of his iconic works at DRAF, Bruce will screen some of his films and discuss his practice with assistant curator Sandra Pusterhofer.
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.
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
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.
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 17th 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.
Fig.5: An Academy, an Opera, and other Fictions, is a four months educational project, presented in tandem with the exhibition A House of Leaves.Fig.5 is the fifth in a series of initiatives launched at DRAF in 2011 investigating the production and dissemination of knowledge. “Fig.” (short for “Figure”) points towards Marcel Broodthaers, evocating the peculiar arrangements of objects, details, references, and inscriptions included in his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. “Academy” emphasises the programme’s educative potential; “opera” calls for a theatrical, musical and participatory context; “fictions” manifest cumulative efforts to draw plural narratives and conversations through the museum.
Fig.5 explores the pedagogical potential of DRAF and questions the role of the audience. We want to stimulate cultural democracy rather than the democratization of culture, as we produce together and for individuals, rather than publics. Fig.5 is free and open to all, but we ask for an active engagement that rejects the museological rhetoric of combining ‘amusement without excess and knowledge without fatigue.’
Fig.5 comprises three courses: FormContent, Vision Forum and DRAF. FormContent’s course explores issues within visual language that lie at the core of its current programme It’s moving from I to It. Within the framework of a class run by an artist, a performer and an academic, each mode of thinking and working is presented indistinctively in a setting of knowledge-production.
Vision Forum Course: An Opera in Five Acts invites enrolled participants to take part in its course of production. This unconventional art opera is constructed as a series of five acts – each of which bears witness to a cumulative process, leaving traces of the acts that came before it.
The DRAF course focuses on the progressive opening up of the notion of the museum. It starts from a focus on location (First session: The London Eye), by pointing to the problematics that affects the relationships between programming and its context. Fig.5 becomes a forum for different museographical methodologies – sharing ideas and imaginative processes with a range of institutions not devoted primarily to contemporary art (Second session: On Museology). We believe that knowledge could be visual and linguistic, immediate and time-based. Different artworks and events by artists (Third session: Practicing Knowledge) will explore how knowledge can be an artistic material. Academies traditionally frame knowledge through a rigorous and hierarchical allocation of power. Fig.5 aims to consolidate its scope by eschewing codified information for processes that empower the notion of ignorance (Fourth session: On Education). The project tests a pointed query: how can the museum investigate knowledge if not by placing it within ignorance?
Fig.5 is conceived by Vincent Honoré and Nicoletta Lambertucci.
THE INCLUSION
The Inclusion is a blog – an independent structure extending in parallel with Fig.5. Sharing resources essays, projects and articles, The Inclusion operates as a forum and platform for the diversification of discourse. The Inclusion is conceived by Nicoletta Lambertucci and Alex Ross. Please visit: http://theinclusion.davidrobertsartfoundation.com/
9 February from 1.30 to 3.30pm.
FormContent Course.In the end, as a worm: a melodrama, by Sîon Parkinson
Siôn Parkinson performs “In the end, as a worm: a melodrama” displaying a system of philosophical thought that first fictionalises a thing of absolute Otherness then speculates about its relation to truth of us humans.
Siôn Parkinson is an artist based in Edinburgh. His practice combines objects, text and voice. His work has been exhibited internationally and he has received awards, public commissions and residencies. As a writer he has been published widely, including recent commissions by FormContent, Chisenhale Gallery, and the ICA. Book Works published his first monograph in 2006. He was born in Dundee, Scotland. He has a daughter.
From 4 to 6pm. An Opera in Five Acts. ACT V: Soundtrack and Scene
Please join us for the hearing of the soundtrack of An Opera in Five Act composed by Jean Louis Huhta sourced upon the four former acts, within the scenery conceptualised by Anna Berglind.
An Opera in Five Acts is initiated and led by Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner with Ariella Yedgar, Joel Vacheron, Annalisa Sonzogni, Jean Louis Huhta, Anna Berglind and Manuela Ribadeniera.
An Opera in Five Acts is an interactive production of an imaginary opera where each act is treated as the place of proliferation for one of its components, namely libretto, stage, orchestra. An Opera in Five Acts is based on the conceptual framework of A House of Leaves and sources its content from the exhibition. An Opera in Five Acts seeks for audience who are willing to take part in its course of production hence requests for pre-enrollement except ACT V.
An Opera in Five Acts is a project of Vision Forum realized in collaboration with DRAF.
ACT I – 17.11.2012 : Libretto
Please join us for the production of the characters and the script of the Opera. Led by Ariella Yedgar, Fatos Ustek, Annalisa Soznogni, Joel Vacheron.
ACT II – 15.12.2012: Musical Instruments
Please be invited to join Joel Vacheron, Manuela Ribenaidenira, Annalisa Soznogni, Fatos Ustek, Ariella Yedgar and Per Huttner to produce the musical instruments for the characters of the Opera from the installation tools of DRAF.
ACT III – 19.01.2012: Choreography
Conceptualised by Manuela Ribadeneira and Fatos Ustek, realised with Annalisa Sonzogni, Joel Vacheron, Ariella Yedgar, ACT III invites you to take part as performers both on stage, in the orchestra and in the audience.
ACT IV – 26.01.2012: Stage and Lighting
Please join Per Huttner, Fatos Ustek, Annalisa Sonzogni, Joel Vacheron, Manuela Ribenaidenira creating the stage and lights for the opera built on ACT III.
7 February 2013 from 6,30 to 8pm. On Education and Ignorance.
What is in danger when education permeates all practice?
The talk will investigate the effect of the recent proliferation of schools, academies and educational projects. The scholastic model seems to be adaptable to many practices and purposes; is this trend about learning, the need-to-learn or a “fear of ignorance”? Recent pedagogical euphoria inside and outside of the academies necessitates a new understanding, a cultural shift away from the didactic and instead towards the performative, the active, the self-informed, the collective. The last session will be triggered by the intervention at DRAF by Luis Camnitzer A Museum is a school, 2010 and will focus on the concept of ignorance as a possible key to the reading.
Guests:
Luis Camnitzer (External intervention). German-born Uruguayan artist and academic who resides in the United States.
Simon Sheikh, Programme Director MFA Curating, Goldsmiths College.
Stefano Velotti, Associate Professor of Philosophy (Aesthetics) at “La Sapienza, Università di Roma”.
Please join Per Huttner, Fatos Ustek, Annalisa Sonzogni, Joel Vacheron, Manuela Ribenaidenira creating the stage and lights for the opera built on ACT III.
An Opera in Five Acts is initiated and led by Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner with Ariella Yedgar, Joel Vacheron, Annalisa Sonzogni, Jean Louis Huhta, Anna Berglind and Manuela Ribadeniera.
An Opera in Five Acts is an interactive production of an imaginary opera where each act is treated as the place of proliferation for one of its components, namely libretto, stage, orchestra, musical instruments, choreography, stage and lighting, soundtrack and scene. An Opera in Five Acts is based on the conceptual framework of A House of Leaves and sources its content from the exhibition.
An Opera in Five Acts seeks for audience who are willing to take part in its course of production hence requests for pre-enrollement except ACT V.
An Opera in Five Acts is a project of Vision Forum realised in collaboration with DRAF.
ACT I – 17.11.2012 : Libretto
Please join us for the production of the characters and the script of the Opera.
Led by Ariella Yedgar, Fatos Ustek, Annalisa Soznogni, Joel Vacheron.
ACT II – 15.12.2012: Musical Instruments
Please be invited to join Joel Vacheron, Manuela Ribenaidenira, Annalisa Soznogni, Fatos Ustek, Ariella Yedgar and Per Huttner to produce the musical instruments for the characters of the Opera from the installation tools of DRAF.
ACT III – 19.01.2012: Choreography
Conceptualised by Manuela Ribadeneira and Fatos Ustek, realised with Annalisa Sonzogni, Joel Vacheron, Ariella Yedgar, ACT III invites you to take part as performers both on stage, in the orchestra and in the audience.
ACT V – 09.02.2012: Soundtrack and Scene
Please join us for the hearing of the soundtrack of An Opera in Five Acts composed by Jean Louis Huhta sourced upon the four former acts, within the scenery conceptualised by Anna Berglind.
19 January 2013. Fig.5 Third Session.
1 / FROM 1.30 TO 3.30PM: FORMCONTENT COURSE
Michael Newman will present The impossible relation: Bellmer, Sade, Blanchot, a lecture in which he will engage with the movement from I to It and the disappearance of the object.Michael Newman is an art historian and critic whose writing is concerned with the image in its fascination. He teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the University of London.
2 / FROM 4 TO 6 PM: AN OPERA IN FIVE ACTS. ACT III: The Stage. AN OPERA IN FIVE ACTS invites enrolled participants to take part in its course of production. More details soon.
3 / FROM 6,30 TO 8PM: DRAF COURSE. PRACTICING KNOWLEDGE
‘There is very often a moment in which the art world meets another world, the world of Palaeontology perhaps or the world of International Trade.‘ (Simon Starling) How does knowledge become a practice? With Aurélien Froment, Jiacopo Miliani and Simon Starling.
6,30pm. A one off screening of one the most elaborate project to date by British artist Simon Starling Project for a Masquerade, 2010-2011. The film documents a solitary Japanese mask-maker meticulously producing a set of six traditional Noh masks while simultaneously overlaying this visual narrative with a web of further narratives in the form of voiceover.
7,15pm. If You Can Dance…You Will Be My Memory, 2013 by Jacopo Miliani is a new project that the young Italian artist conceived exclusively for Fig.5 in collaboration with The Place, the London based premier centre for contemporary dance. Between October 2012 and January 2013, the artist led a series of workshops with six professional dancers collaboratively investigating the idea of memory not only as a visual or narrative stance, but particularly as corporal and emotional. The performance and installation at DRAF, will be an investigation on how movements could translate a total experience of an artwork.
During the day, two films by Aurélien Froment will be presented. Pulmo Marina, 2010 is a single 5-minute long shot of a changing form jellyfish seen through the window of an aquarium. Pulmo Marina constructs the notion of the viewer whose social life would shift from the collective experience of the museum towards the private experience of the screen/projection. Rabbit, 2009 present the idea of literally tying things together. The film is about nautical knots and based on the format of instructional films for aspiring sailors.
DRAF wishes to thank The Place and Chris Thomson for the precious help and assistance.
Saturday 15th DecemberFig.5 Second Session.
1 – 2 pm DRAF Course: On Museology
Is the role of museums to educate? In what way could educational strategies forge the programme and display (ordering of artifacts and spacial configuration of rooms) of institutions?
Presenting a range of approaches through museums of different scales and histories, the session seeks to understand the current relationship between museology and gallery education, and its future development. The discussion will be based on the programmatic text by Carmen Mörsch At a Crossroads of Four Discourses. Gallery Education in between Affirmation, Reproduction, Deconstruction, and Transformation.
With GLENN ADAMSON (Head of Research, Victorian and Albert Museum, London), KEN ARNOLD (Head of Public Programmes, Wellcome Collection, London), CARMEN MÖRSCH (Head of the Institute of Art Education, University of Arts, Zurich), CAROL SEIGEL (Director, Freud Museum, London). The discussion will be mediated by NICOLETTA LAMBERTUCCI (Assistant Curator, DRAF).
This event will take place in our STUDIO space on the first floor.
4 – 6 pm An Opera in Five Acts. Act II: Musical Instruments.
Join Joel Vacheron, Manuela Ribenadeneira, Annalisa Sonzogni, Fatos Ustek and Per Huttner for the creation of musical instruments (made out of everyday objects, trash, toys etc.) for the Opera, based on the characters profiled in ACT I.
15 December 2012 DRAF Course First Session: The London Eye
How to continue to maintain relevancy within London?
The first session of the DRAF Course aims to open up the relationship that different models of London-based spaces devoted to contemporary art have been establishing with their community and how this relationship was challenged by most recent global economic events. Each organization will contribute to the debates concerning the role and future development of London public institutions. By mapping their respective reactions and management/programme strategies that they have undertaken, the guests will be examining future possibilities for development.
How does each space operate between the conflicting pressures of the didactic vs the contemplative? Has this dichotomy been superseded by that of opposition between the political and the experiential?
Guests:
ALESSIO ANTONIOLLI, Director of Gasworks
Alessio Antoniolli is the director of Gasworks and Triangle Arts Trust. Previously, Alessio ran the International Residency Programme at Gasworks and was also involved in developing an artist-led residency programme for the Triangle Art Trust.
VINCENT HONORÉ, Director DRAF
Vincent Honoré has been the director of DRAF since 2008. Vincent has previously worked at Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Tate Modern, London.
MILIKA MURITU, Director of Cell Project Space
Milika Muritu is the co-founder Cell Project Space, a self-funded not-for-profit organisation which aims to offer a high level of curatorial, administrative and practical support for artists whilst hosting a range of educational talks and workshops, which run alongside an exhibitions programme.
EMILY PETHICK, Director of Showroom
Emily Pethick has been the director of the Showroom since September 2009. Previously, Emily has worked as the curator at Cubitt and as the director of Casco in Utrecht. She is a member of the Afterall editorial board.
Mediator: PAUL PIERONI, Curator of SPACE
Paul Pieroni is the curator of SPACE, where he has been heading an experimental exhibition programme since late 2009.
At once a laboratory, a workshop, a salon, a theatre and a library, the Studio is a space where we meet, discuss, read and examine works. Artist Ruth Beale has designed special shelving and furniture for our event space on the first floor at DRAF and will host a series of ‘kitchen conversations’.
02 February from 4-6pm
Miss B’s Salon: Meanwhile Uses
At their best, ‘pop-ups’, or ‘meanwhile uses’ can provide refreshing interventions, access for community groups and artists to otherwise out-of-bounds land and property, and an inventive use of space in a jam-packed city. But in the wake of several high profile pop-up-flops, and the rise of the corporate and institutional pop-up, have they now lost their edge? Or can policy create incentives for landowners, property owners and developers to support creative and community uses?
Four speakers give their perspective on the subject:
Jude Bennett, Pop Up Curator, Camden Town Unlimited
Camden Town Unlimited (CTU) has been appointed by the business community to improve Camden Town by introducing innovative approaches to upgrade the commercial and environmental performance of Camden Town.
Celia Coram, Trustee, Global Generation
Global Generation supports young people to generate change in the business and local community to create a sustainable future by implementing interdependent projects to increase awareness of self, community and natural environment.
Jessica Tsang, Project Coordinator, Meanwhile Space
Meanwhile Space are a Community Interest Company that aim to boost community uses of empty properties and sites.
Jo Wilson, Director, Future of London
Future of London is an independent not for profit organisation focused on developing skills and capacity across the urban regeneration sector in London, through the provision of training, policy briefings and new analysis.
08 December from 4-6pm
Ruth Beale and Nina Gerada
For the second session of the Ad Hoc Salon Series, Ruth Beale invites artist Nina Gerada, an Urban Designer and graduate of the Bartlett and London Metropolitan University architecture schools, who runs an informal drawing group in East London. Gerada will host an experimental drawing workshop in the Studio, using different drawing techniques, media and materials to draw in a playful and free manner. The session will also include a general discussion about Nina and the groups interests, and the desire to draw. Nina’s past projects include ‘Map Conversations’ a participative and conversational drawing process, and work with RARA (the Redundant Architects Recreation Association) and a team of young designers to convert a disused library in Walthamstow into a community centre.
Pamphlet Library
In anticipation of Ad Hoc events in the new year, a small selection of political pamphlets on the subject of anarchism, alternative approaches to governance, and grassroots activity will be available as a reference library from 8 December.
15 November from 4-6pm
Ruth Beale and Giles Round
For the first session of the 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’.
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
Nina Beier, Chosil Kil, Alvin Lucier, Eddie Peake, Steve Reich
Thursday 11 October: 7pm – 9pm. Doors will open at 6.45pm. Please arrive early as space may be limited. Free admission, no booking required.
7pm The evening will start with an iconic work by American composer Alvin Lucier‘I’m sitting in a room’ (1969): through the repetition of recording and re-recording, the words eventually become a hypnotic noise and echo. Richard Bernas is the consultant for Lucier’s performance. Performed by Robert Worby and Philip Tagney from the Langham Research Centre.
7.45pm ‘Clapping Music’ (1972) is a historical work by the American composer Steve Reich. It is conceived as a piece performed entirely by clapping to (in his own words) “create a piece of music that needed no instruments beyond the human body”.
8pm Chosil Kil‘s performance translates one of her series of scripts in an attempt to make the windows vibrate, and create harmonic tension in the space.
8.15pm A performance by British artist Eddie Peake involving dance, music, actors and a camera crew in the whole building. The work, entitled ‘Creating And Collapsing a Drama, or How It Must Feel To Be An Ill Dog Wearing One Of Those Plastic Head Funnels’ will be improvised and devised for the occasion.
8.45pm A second performance of ‘Clapping Music’ (1972) by Steve Reich.
9pm ‘The Pack’, a new work by artist Nina Beier, will be carried out by successive performers in front of the building.
The evening of performances is co-produced with Absolut Art Bureau.
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) ofLeaves (2)
(1) Ournewbuilding – a former furniture factory built between 1870 and 1890 – reminds us that a museum is a production site. A site that not only presents and describes an existing context, but generates new contexts, a site where artists, curators, critics and other stakeholders can produce, share, discuss, act and interact, where visitors are co-producers, and where the machinery of exhibitions produces prototypes, experiences, catalysts for thought. Here thoughts are formed and visions transformed, culture is disassembled, and the contemporary redesigned. The dimensions of such a museum, in a state of permanent reconfiguration and hybridization, are impossible to measure, far greater than its actual floor plan or elevation, being at any one time a gallery, a laboratory, a studio, a workshop, an academy, a theater, a fiction.
Since 2008, at our temporary headquarters in Fitzrovia, DRAF has produced group and solo exhibitions, established a Curator Series, and hosted a programme of discussions and performances. Knowing that we would eventually be moving into a bigger space in Mornington Crescent, we viewed this incubation period as an opportunity to interrogate our model of what a contemporary art museum should be. From the start we conceived DRAF as a forum for discussion and a structure acting beyond the confines of an exhibition space. Our initial goal was to generate a unique context by establishing and supporting an informal cultural community, and this polyphony is something we intend to extend to the new building.
“Museums are houses full of thoughts,” according to Marcel Proust. DRAF can be such a house, rich in sensibilities, styles, and voices. Already this museum speaks many languages and tells multiple narratives in numerous ways. The library-cum-meeting room will serve as a cultural platform for a parallel programme of talks and screenings. Caroline Achaintre created a tapestry and Ruth Beale designed the furniture for this room. The Labs are invitations to researchers, critics or curators. We offer a space/office in which to work in our building, with the possibility of testing new ideas. Each participant is independent from DRAF. These and other aspects of our proposal for a museum will continue to adapt to the heterogeneous and constantly changing needs and visions of contemporary art. Other programme includes a focused case-studies of works from the collection, entitled Study, in which a single artwork is shown on its own and studied in depth, everything from its technique to its position in contemporary art debates.
(2) The title of the exhibition inaugurating our new premises, AHouses of Leaves, references a work by American novelist Mark Z. Danielewski in which different storylines, told in different styles, intertwine. The story centres around a house that keeps changing, a house that resists measurement because its interior gradually becomes larger than its exterior.
This exhibition has been conceived as a process lasting six months, a symphony structured in three movements and an epilogue, each deriving from the study of a single key work that defines the whole movement: Echo VIII, a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois (First Movement); Fuji, an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter (Second Movement); and Silent Score, a performance by Pierre Huyghe (Third Movement). The Epilogue moves towards the void, emptying the exhibition space to explore the architecture and volume of the space and reveal the long-term works – special commissions and interventions inscribed in the building itself. Each division will also highlight one different aspect of our project for a museum: the museum as structure in the first movement, as school in the second, as stage in the third, and as site in the final movement.
Rather than being structured around an external theme selected by the curator and “illustrated” with artworks, the exhibition self-organizes internally, the process mostly coming from the artworks and the building themselves. The substitution of works over the course of the exhibition will gradually alter the overall context and evolve naturally from one movement into the next like a dissolve in a movie. Since it will be in a constant state of flux, the exhibition is never the same and never entire, but is always virtually composed and completed by visitors: the museum as a deferred action and a mental space. Our museum, like the house in the novel, is a productive medium in its own right. It creates its own function. But who are its authors?
This immeasurable museum we are creating abandons the authoritarian voice. Many individuals directly or indirectly participate in its creation. By reading this text, you have entered this museum of leaves we have yet to define, and are now contributing to A House of Leaves, a co-author of this narrative, a player of this game, a character of this fiction, a performer in this symphony.
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.
An event with John Coxon, Evan Parker and Toma Gouband for Lydia Gifford’s exhibition.
This will be a rare opportunity to experience improvised music by John Coxon, Evan Parker and Toma Gouband, made in direct response to artworks. The musicians have been exchanging ideas and references with Lydia Gifford over a period of time, ideas such as a non verbal practice and communication, repetitions and differences, improvisations and rhythms, interaction between thought and the physicality of playing or making, and the private experiments of the studio made public.
“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.
A project by Fatos Ustek with Lisa Skuret, Vanda Playford, Kaz, Ole Hagen, Soledad Garcia, and Jean Matthee.
Time Capsules and Conditions of Now is an accumulative artistic research / production project initiated by curator & art critic Fatos Ustek under the framework of Vision Forum, Linkopings Universitet, Sweden. The project embarks upon the notion of encounter whilst introducing a variety of conditions where the reception and recollection of the “present moment” diverges.
The project simultaneously manifests as a publication and an exhibition. Aiming at situations that primarily embrace experience, this research team of artists, curators and writers, has already embarked upon heterogeneous threads of the conditions of now while taking in the continuously shifting constellation of time-presence-gravity.
The participating team of artists, writers and curators are Lisa Skuret, artist & writer; Vanda Playford, artist & practicing GP; Kaz, artist; Ole Hagen, artist & lecturer; Soledad Garcia, curator & writer, and Jean Matthee, artist & theorist.
With Danai Anesiadou, Karina Bisch, Leah Capaldi and Cally Spooner.
To coincide with Frieze Art Fair, DRAF is again hosting a special evening of performances.
7 – 8.15pm Leah Capaldi Give (2011)
Collapsing the boundaries between performance and sculpture, Leah Capaldi (b.1985 in England, lives in London) explores themes of exploitation, power and objecthood. Capaldi questions the role of the performance artist through exploring ideas of hyper-authenticity and the validity of performance. Created for this evening Capaldi’s work Give focuses on the structure and transformation of an object (person) whilst also incorporating a response to Miriam Cahn’s paintings.
7.15pm Cally Spooner, with Dulcie Lewis A Solo Event For Thinking (2009) Version 4 (2011)
With outputs ranging from performance, film and broadcasting, Cally Spooner (b. 1983 in England, lives in London) writes in dialogue to script the anxieties and obstructions of turning theory into thought, thought into text and text into events (plays, projects and productions). Drawing on theatrical tropes and devices, she embodies this movement between states using historical thinkers as alibis to help her write and casts of colleagues, friends and actors to help her perform. Spooner has produced a new work as part of an on-going system in her practice.
7.45pm Karina Bisch ça c’est Paris! (2011)
Karina Bisch (b. 1974 Paris, lives in Paris) generally develops her work as a response to modernist, architectural geometry. Each work begins with existing forms that have undergone many manipulations and reformulations, dismantling modernist codes through introducing outside referents, contemporary film or music. Bisch’s practice has evolved across various media—paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and performances—without conforming to formal, stylistic or technical restraints. Tonight she is staging her theatrical performance ça c’est Paris!, a series of tableaux vivants premiered in Rome and now shown for the first time in London.
The performance by Karina Bisch is supported by Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.
8.15pm Danai Anesiadou There’s no such thing as a pretty good omelette (2011)
Danai Anesiadou (b. 1975, Germany, lives in New York) has achieved a fascinating body of works, structured around chains of associations and a deep fascination for cinema. Anesiadou herself grounds the communal experience of her performances, creating a rhythm of connectedness between her co-performers, the audience and the small acts that unfold. Her performances are hypnotic, possibly due to the inclusion of ritualistic gestures — including hand signs, dance moves and silhouettes created on overhead projectors. She is showing tonight for the first time in London, presenting a new work especially created for the occasion.
Performers: Elisa Platteau, Michael van den Abeele, Benedict Goodwin & Nicoletta Lambertucci
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.
An event with Ruth Buchanan, Ghislaine Leung, and Noah Angell
Fig.2: 1 pm: Ruth Buchanan Traveling Exhibitions. Transferring and interpreting her text based projection and paper works into movement across the gallery, Buchanan will give a guided tour of Fig.2 reflecting on instructions outlined in the Unesco Manual of Travelling Exhibitions from 1953 and Yvonne Rainer’s Lecture on Moving, 1970-71. Limited places are available. For bookings please email info@davidrobertsartfoundation.com.
1.45 pm: Ghislaine Leung This is Living. Leung will discuss the problem of critique played out between notions of common production and self-reflection. In some way, what links these propositional modes of acting is a concern with proximity; either a distance from self or a closeness to others. An artwork might be seen to perpetuate or indicate this distance by at once being both a thing in-itself and a distributed form.
This project is curated by Sandra Pusterhofer, Assistant Curator, DRAF.
Fig.3:
2.30 pm: Noah Angell Forgetting and negative space within the ethnographic field recording by Noah Angell is a lecture / performance which focuses upon lapses in historical memory, misremembering, archaic speech, and the absence of the historical subject as heard in field recordings. Also prominently featured are songs and articles of recorded speech which take forgetfulness as their subject. Included in the program are recordings from Borneo, Italy, Greece, Malaysia, Mexico, New Guinea, and the United States.
An artist’s book by Claire Nichols and David Garner will be available in the gallery. The artist’s book is a result of Dark Room (7 seconds), an intervention that took place on the opening night of Fig. 2 & Fig. 3 – an attempt to create a relationship between the lens of the camera and the social scenario of the private view.
This event is curated by Stefanie Hirsch and Anca Rujoiu.
Two simultaneous projects with interventions by Noah Angell, Brandon La Belle, Stefan Brüggemann, Ruth Buchanan, David Raymond Conroy, Patrick Coyle, Kelly Large, Ghislaine Leung, Claire Nichols and David Garner, Sally O’Reilly, and Mark Selby and works by Fionna Banner, Karla Black, Cyprien Gaillard, Dora Garcia, Marine Hugonnier, Lothar Hempel, Donald Moffett, Roman Ondak, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel.
A new program of events at the David Roberts Art Foundation, the series of ongoing figures explores how knowledge can be co-produced and shared through innovative formats of talks, conferences, research projects or book presentations.
Fig.2: Studies of a Collection is a short self-reflective project, featuring a number of artworks from the David Roberts Collection together with the archives attached to them. Displaying works that have been lent to other spaces the collection will be opened up in a manner that offers both transparency and receptiveness by revealing the movements of the selected works to manifest how the collection has been used. Guests have been invited to activate and freely interpret artworks and archival material for their own accord, through different methodological approaches. Invited guests: David Raymond Conroy, Ruth Buchanan, Ghislaine Leung, Sally O’Reilly. This project is curated by Sandra Pusterhofer, Assistant Curator, DRAF and Vincent Honoré, Director and Curator, DRAF.
Fig. 3: I don’t know what to say will introduce a series of artistic interventions that engage with the phatic in a gallery space. The phatic function, as a concept, designates speech actions that are not intended to transmit information but carry a social goal: such as greeting rituals or chitchat. Intervening and questioning the meaning of these seemingly insignificant utterances, the invited artists insert communicative gestures to produce new meanings. Taking as its setting the display of Fig.2, the projectwill reconsider the private view, casual conversations, the press release, and other aspects of social etiquette, in an attempt to create awareness of art’s physical and social environments. Invited artists: Noah Angell, Brandon La Belle, Stefan Brüggemann, Patrick Coyle, Kelly Large, Claire Nichols and David Garner, Mark Selby. This project is curated by Stefanie Hirsch and Anca Rujoiu.
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.
Location: Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, London SE1 8LF
Cally Spooner performs Indirect Language (2010) at the occasion of the current exhibition Studies for an Exhibition, curated by our fourth guest curator in the Curators’ Series, Mathieu Copeland (on until 11th June). Spooner’s performance is an evolving translation of Merleau Ponty’s essay Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence (1952) and disassembles Ponty’s original essay on speech, history and cultural expression into 8-acts that include dialogue, dramatisation, un-workable stage directions, a growing cast of historical references and a non-chronological order. For her performance at the Calder bookshop Spooner and her cast will deliver five acts, in their original order of appearance.
With (in order of appearance): Will Holder, Richard Parry, Dulcie Lewis, Andrew Kerton, Philomene Pirecki, Patrick Coyle and one other…
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.
A book launch and event organized by Krist Gruijthuijsen
First published in 2000 in Dutch, The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists is an anthology of imaginary biographies of the artists invented by writers across several centuries, from the beginning of the seventieth century to the present by author and editor, Koen Brams. The Addition is an editorial response from the Dutch curator and writer, Krist Gruijthuijsen, who invited artists to reflect on the aspirations and ideals of encyclopedias through the deconstruction of the notion of fiction.
During the evening there will be a film screening featuring the publication’s “spokesperson”, while on another floor a virtual ‘concert’ via Skype a.o. will take place. A selection of artists who contributed to the Addition will perform in the following time slots:
6.00 – 6.15 Adam Pendleton: THE ABOLITION OF ALIENATED LABOR
6.15 – 6.30 Benoît Maire: the concept of Cordélia
6.30 – 6.45 Heman Chong: 2.15 am (Songs About My Future)
6.45 – 7.00 Alexandre Singh: Excerpt of Part Three of The Alkahest
7.00 – 7.15 Will Holder: Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Charles Bernstein in conversation
7.15 – 7.30 Matthieu Laurette: GUY DEBORD IS SO COOL!
7.30 – 7.45 John Fare Estate: Gary Wilson
7.45 – 8.00 Michael Portnoy: Will Walk You Through His Entire Library or Biblio-Safari
8.00 – 8.15 Dirk Dietrich Hennig: WQXR Radio’s Seth Widman talks with filmmaker Michel Antoine Seurat about his 1978 newly discovered short film: A rainy day with George Cup in Easthampton.
8.15 – 8.30 Luca Frei: Chatter
8.30 – 8.45 Chris Evans: The Freedom of Negative Expression (Trailer)
8.45 – 9.00 Alan Abel: I came, I saw, I farted
9.00 – 9.15 Bik van der Pol: Replacing a moon rock with a piece of petrified wood and how this changed our perception of the world
9.15- 9.30 Michael Blum: Dear Tom
9.30 Roee Rosen: I was Kuney-Lemel
The publication is co-produced by Kunstverein and de Appel and published by JRP Ringier.
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 53rd 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.
A walk and a conversation with Keren Cytter and Vincent Honoré.
Location: Starting at Pilar Corrias Gallery, 54 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EF and it will end at The David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY
An evening of events, happenings and performances with Patrizio Di Massimo, Cinema Zero, Amy Granat and Flora Wiegmann, and Laure Prouvost.
The Negus said: Give me the lion, keep the stele is a performative reading of an eponymous text piece by Patrizio Di Massimo (b. 1983, Italy). Analysing consequences and implications of the restitution of the Lion of Judah and the Obelisk of Axum: two artefacts that were stolen by the Italians during the second Italo-Ethiopian war and then returned to their original possessors in 1969 and 2005.
Initiated in 2004 with the help of artists Olivier Mosset and Steven Parrino, Cinema Zero is a concept of nomadic events mixing screenings (of early 20th century experimental films as well as contemporary works) with performance, painting, sculpture, dance or sound. For More Pricks Than Kicks, Amy Granat (b. 1976, USA) will conceive a Cinema Zero evening for the first time in London, involving dance, sound and a choreography recently developed with Flora Wiegmann.
For More Pricks Than Kicks, Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, France) presents From The Sky, a performance in which the narration seemingly falls short with no fixed conclusion. Prouvost will tell us about an event that occurred a few weeks ago within a room slightly smaller than the one you are standing in. Remnants of the performance will become part of a new installation at the gallery.
This event is curated by Patrizio Di Massimo and Vincent Honoré, director and curator, DRAF.
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 20th 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”.
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.
A conversation with curators Mihnea Mircan, Vincent Honoré and Paul Pieroni.
Location: Manchester Square, 18 Fitzhardinge Street, London W1H 6EQ; Tel. 020 7486 0295, ext 108; e-mail: bookings@romanianculturalcentre.org.uk; Entry is free but booking is essential.
Hosted by Mihai Risnoveanu, Artistic Advisor of the Romanian Cultural Centre as part of Culture Power Presentation.The discussion will engage the ways in which contemporary artists navigate art history and ask whether it is possible to conceive of curatorial practice as a historiographic discourse.
Seijiro Murayama was born in 1957, in Nagasaki, Japan and as a percussionist and drummer, has worked with Fred Frith, Tom Cora, Keiji Haino and KK Null between 1980 and 1998, and is now resident in Paris. His solo playing is often described as a continuum of microscopic sounds, using snare drum and cymbal with brushes, sticks, air and occasionally contact microphones. In this rare UK visit he is joined by two of London’s finest improvisers.
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.
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?
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 Philowill 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
In the final reaction to the premise of The Object Of The Attack, Five Storey Projects will host a live music event by Raagnagrok with an intervention by artists Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann. Raagnagrok, a London based experimental music project, will produce an interpretative performance of musical rituals to create an entrancing and altered environment. Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann work with sound samples generated from Ballard’s short story, collaboratively creating sculptural resonances to create an encapsulating parallel universe.
A screening of Lars Laumann’s Morrissey Foretelling The Death of Diana, 2006 (David Roberts Collection) followed by a performative talk by Samuel Craven.
Laumann’s brief montage is embedded with fragmented myths and believable suggestions that produce an appropriated reality where Morrissey operates as a prophet of disaster. Samuel Craven will expand on his ongoing research based work that comments on conspiracy theories and symbols surrounding celebrities, extraterrestrials and cults, presenting them in a wider context.
The evening is organized by Five Storey Projects – a young five person collective consisting of artists, curators and writers based in London.
A discussion chaired by Dr. Marq Smith with Dr Garin Dowd, Stephen Melville and Dr Alev Adi.
Dr Garin Dowd is Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory in the Faculty of the Arts at Thames Valley University and has published extensively on Beckett, Ballard, Derrida, Deleuze and Aesthetics.
Stephen Melville is Professor in the Department of History of Art at the Ohaio State University. He has published widely on contemporary art as well as contemporary theory and historiography. Most recently, he served as resident faculty at the Getty Summer Institute in Visual and Cultural Studies, and has given lectures at Cornell University, The Johns Hopkins University, and Tate Modern in London.
Dr Alev Adil is Head of the Department of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies at University of Greenwich, a scholar and a poet of longing, belonging, technologies, and desire.
An event organized with The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster
A discussion chaired by Dr. Marq Smith with Lennard J Davis, Ben Watson and Chris Horrocks.
Lennard J Davis is Professor in the Department of English, Department of Disability and Human Development, and Department of Medical Education at University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes prolifically, lectures internationally, and broadcasts on literature, disability, the medical humanities, and science within the context of the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Professor Davis’s books include Factual Fictions (1983), Resisting Novels (1987), Enforcing Normalcy (1995), The Disability Studies Reader (1997), My Sense of Silence (2000), Bending over Backwards (2002), Obsession (2008), and Go Tell Your Father (2009). He has been honoured regularly by the likes of the Guggenheim, and has extensive senior management experience as Head of School, as the Director of the international project Biocultures, and as a member of the Executive Committee on Stem-Cell Research at Illinois.
Ben Watson is an independent music critic, Marxist theorist, poet, and author of books on Frank Zappa, art and class, and Derek Bailey.
Chris Horrocks is Principal Lecturer in the School of Art and Design History at Kingston University. He is author of books on Marshall McLuhan and Virtuality, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Tokyo Glamrock.
An event organized with The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster
A discussion chaired by Dr. Marquard Smith with Sally O’Reilly, Uriel Orlow and David Joselit.
Sally O’Reilly is a cultural critic for Time Out, Art Monthly, and Modern Painters, a writer of catalogue essays, an events organizer, Founder of Implicasphere, and author of The Body in Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson)
Uriel Orlow is a Swiss multi-media installer, historian, and narrator of the impossible, based in London and working at University of Westminster. With recent shows in London, Vienna, Lisbon, Bern, Zurich, Palm Beach Florida, and China, he has exhibitions upcoming at Seventeen Gallery, Laure Genillard, and Museum Nachum Gutman, Tel Aviv.
Jon Cairnsis an artist, curator, and Course Director of the BA Fine Art at Byam Shaw/Central Saint Martins, London
David Joselit is Carnegie Professor of History of Modern Art and Culture in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, and author of books including ‘Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941’, ‘American Art Since 1945’, and most recently ‘Feedback: Television Against Democracy’.
An event organized with The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster
A discussion chaired by Dr. Marquard Smith with Tom Corby, Benjamin Noys, Kester Rattenbury, John Timberlake and David Cunningham.
Tom Corby is an artist and writer whose research is concerned with relocating digital imaging processes within wider aesthetic and social frameworks. He is the deputy Director of CREAM and coordinates the digital art research cluster in the school of arts and media. His experimental digital artworks (produced in collaboration with Gavin Baily) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards,
Benjamin Noys is Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester. He is author of, among other works, The Culture of Death (2005) and Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Film-Philosophy. He is currently writing on accelerationism and has a forthcoming book entitled The Persistence of the Negative due in 2010.
Kester Rattenbury is an architectural journalist, critic and writer, whose many publications include the edited collection This is Not Architecture. She is a consulting editor for the Architects Journal, series editor for the SuperCrit series with Routledge, and leads the ExP research group at the University of Westminster.
John Timberlake is a photographer and writer, who also leads the BA in Fine Art at Middlesex University. He has exhibited widely in Europe and North America and is an alumnus of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Programme. A former editor of Everything Magazine, his most recent publication is the book Bussard Ramjet (Artwords 2008) and he is currently exhibiting work at the Pittoresk: Neue Perspektiven auf das Landschaftsbild group show at MARTa in Germany.
David Cunningham is Principal Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. He is an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy, co-editor of the book Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005), and has published widely on modernism, aesthetics, architectural theory and urbanism. He is currently completing a book entitled Reflexes of the Future: Essays on the Avant-Garde.
An event organized with The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster.
An evening of performance and experimentation with Ben Judd and Sidsel Christensen.
From their study of traditional forms of mediumship, hypnosis and religious rituals, Ben Judd and Sidsel Christensen have developed this new, playful and open ritual. One of the artists will enter into a state of trance in order to contact the other side, acting as a medium for the audience in the attempt to bridge the gap between the actual room and the space and people that exist in another dimension.
Nina Beier (b. 1976, Aarhus, Denmark)
Beier presents the work Performer Performing Performance: an understudy for a part in a play taking place at a theater nearby, comes to the gallery to perform his/her lines, in time with the play being performed at the theater.
Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris, France)
For Silence Score, Pierre Huyghe transcribed an original recording from 1952 of the ambient noises heard during John Cage’s seminal work 4’33” into a musical score. Cage’s musical experiment, also known as Silence, is ironically translated into a sound performance and will be presented to the public for the first time.
Reto Pulfer (b.1981, Bern, Switzerland)
Reto Pulfer’s performances are the vivid exteriorisation of an intense creative process. The structures he sets in place and his technical versatility allow for a direct connection with the audience and for a full exploration of art’s diverse possibilities of expression and communication.
Alexandre Singh (b.1980, Bordeaux, France)
Currently based in New York, Alexandre Singh explores a variety of media and exhibition formats, working with collages, installations and performances. In his work he often combines elements of reality with fiction, reassessing historical and narrative conventions and questioning systems of knowledge and interpretation.
Jack Strange (b. 1984, Brighton, UK)
Jack Strange uses the common and the banal as strategies to convey and disrupt meanings. Recently graduated from London’s Slade School of Art, Strange has produced a variety of sculptures, videos, works on paper and photographs all characterised by his sardonic yet direct approach.
This project is curated by Vincent Honoré, Director and Curator, DRAF.
A project with works and interventions by Katinka Bock*, Ulla van Brandenburg*, Miriam Cahn*, Stefano Calligaro, Sidsel Christensen & Ben Judd, George Condo*, Hans-Peter Feldmann*, Five Storey Project, Cyprien Gaillard*, Justin Gainan, Clare Gasson, Graham Gussin & Jeremy Millar, Pierre Huyghe, Chosil Kil, Lars Laumann*, Maria Loboda, George Henry Longly*, Benoît Maire*, Marc Manders*, Patrizio di Massimo, Roman Ondak*, Eduardo Paolozzi*, Seb Patane, Falke Pisano*, Reto Pulfer, Alexandre Singh, Jack Strange, Adam Thompson, Joshua Thorpe, Charlotte Warne Thomas, Westminster University, Ian Wilson (* indicates works from the collection)
Running parallel to the exhibition Sculpture of The Space Age, The Object of the Attack is a series of footnotes and infiltrations. Deliberately reacting against a linear approach to interpretation, The Object of the Attack will work as an echo chamber to the main exhibition and raise multiple questions about art production and curatorial engagement, translations and communication, avoiding any fixed answers. Artists have been invited to contribute to a collective and evolving conversation. The space will be constantly re-installed over the Autumn, hosting every week a new intervention, performance, artwork, sound piece, discussion, etc. The interventions will have different durations: some will last five minutes, other will stay for three months.
The set of the gallery will reflect this process, providing a space where the audience will be encouraged to have a more active and creative role. Artists Reto Pulfer and Patrizio di Massimo will create, one after the other, a different interpretation of what this space can be. For the final week, the space will consist of an installation by Roman Ondak. The David Roberts Art Foundation has also collaborated with Westminster University and the curatorial group 5 Storey Projects who will present discussions, screenings and interventions during November and December.
The Object of the Attack will aim at reconsidering the way institutions propose educational or interpretative strategies. Not an exhibition, not an interpretation space, the project is a fluid experiment that escapes any definition. The project is curated by Vincent Honoré, Director, David Roberts Art Foundation, in collaboration with assistant curators Sandra Pusterhofer and Gaia Tedone.
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.
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 (arguabl
