Before a book begins. A visual essay in 7 parts.
Nils Röller (2022)
Before a book begins. A visual essay in 7 parts.
Nils Röller (2022)
For this lecture, Nils Röller has developed a visual essay in 7 parts. He discusses (muses on) the transition from note to book. In the situation between reading, writing and perceiving, disturbing noises from the environment emerge. Nils relates the book to the ship and the tram, to vehicles for "experiencing the world". In a reflection on Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil, a question arises: how does the "core" of a book differ from the notes? This leads to the discussion regarding how the decision is made as to whether a book can have a core content when it addresses multiple events with the aim of discharging them, i.e. taking away their tension. The visual essay recapitulates the making of Nils’ book Alpentram (Vienna: Klever, 2021).
Nils Röller is a professor at Zurich University of the Arts. His research focuses on the relation between text, image and philosophy (Iconography of Philosophy). He has published experimental texts in collaboration with artists and poets in the Journal for Art, Sex and Mathematics since 2006. Nils is a member of the editorial team for the platform Text-Image Parergon of the Shared Campus. Recent publications in English and German include Alpentram (Vienna: Klever, 2021) and “Interfacing Philosophy”, "Oswalds Hubble" on Dieter Roth and Oswald Wiener, and more.
He built up the Vilèm Flusser Archive together with Siegfried Zielinski and Silvia Wagnermaier. He also directed the festival Digitale (with Siegfried Zielinski). This led Nils to research at the interface of art, science and philosophy (Ahabs Steuer – Navigationen zwischen Kunst und Naturwissenschaft (Berlin: Merve, 2005). His literary work on Dieter Roth, Roth der Grosse, was awarded the Schiller Prize of the Zürcher Kantonalbank in 2014.
www.instagram.com/n_roeller
In addition: Dimensionen des Buchs by Nils Röller (German language text)
In: Medialität Historische Perspektiven - Newsletter Zentrum für Historische Mediologie Universität Zürich 23/2021, https://www.zhm.uzh.ch/de/newsletter.html
(pdf version)
ACTS 2022
The ACTS programme was established in 2020 to explore how artists might conceive of staging speculative events online.ACT VII (25/02/22) Nils Röller, ACT VI (28/01/22) Cédric Maridet, and RYBN.ORG
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Amy Hale (03/03/2022) online lecture, Anne Tallentire (08/03/2022) open studio event at the ICA, Joanna Walsh (08/03/2022) Book launch.
Phainologies, sound composition in 2 parts and 6 pentads, 25’ with text
Cédric Maridet (2019)
Phainologies, sound composition in 2 parts and 6 pentads, 25’ with text
Cédric Maridet (2019)
Phainologies explore alternative relations with nature and epistemology with different forms of writing through sound and text. The work is composed of a few pages taken from an unrealized fictional screenplay, a sound composition that stands as a soundtrack from that film. The text relies on scientific facts about the possibility to archive data in DNA. The sound is composed of archived field recordings from various locations (South Africa, the Arctic Circle, etc.) and synthesized sounds. It is linked to the solar calendar (yushui) with its 24 terms corresponding to the position of the sun that are each divided into 3 pentads. This work points at two positions of the sun (330° and 345°) and their interpretations (rain water and the awakening of insects). The 6 pentads in this 2 moments are referred to within the composition with Chinese sayings associated with the 6 pentads.
Cédric Maridet is an artist based in Hong Kong. His work explores the act of listening, collecting and archiving as a departure point for a possible reinterpretation of knowledge and fiction to construct alternative landscapes in the forms of video, installations, photography, sound compositions and works on paper. His works are presented internationally through residencies (Asia Art Archive), group and solo exhibitions (Blindspot Gallery, Art in General, Tate Modern, Para/Site, 2P Contemporary). He currently holds a position of Assistant Professor and Director of the PhD programme at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Global Finance Walk Radio Report
RYBN.ORG (2021)
Phainologies,
Global Finance Walk Radio Report
RYBN.ORG (2021)
This sound piece is a report from the “Global Finance Walk” workshop, held in Berlin on the 21st of august, 2021, led by RYBN.ORG together with Laura Calbet on the invitation of Supermarkt Berlin and ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Berlin) (1). The workshop took place a few weeks before Berlin's referendum against real estate speculation ("Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co.") (2), held on 26th September 2021.
Participants of the workshop were invited for a psychogeographic dérive in the newly constructed residential neighborhood of Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. For their walk, the participants were equipped with a GPS loaded with geolocalized information on the urban developers of the neighborhood. The audiotour exposed to the participants the private equity investments, development funds and corporate networks in charge of the extreme financialization of the urban area. After the walk, participants gathered in a park and discussed together of the transformation of the urban landscape under extreme financial pressure, and in the perspective of the coming referendum.
The sound piece presents excerpts of the workshop conclusive discussion, mixed with phone messages let by the participants on a dedicated voicemail. The piece was broadcasted on the day of the referendum on Berlin's community radio RebootFM, 88.4 FM (3).
Workshop participants: Alejo, Estefania, Doma, Bernd, Caroline, Diana, Inke, Karen, Gerry, Laura, Pekko, Stéphanie.
(1) http://www.skulpturenpark.org/re-turn/ & https://www.zku-berlin.org/nc/de/timeline/global-finance-walk-offshore-tour-operator/ (2) https://sites.law.duq.edu/juris/2021/10/18/berlins-housing-referendum/
(3) https://reboot.fm/2021/09/26/global-finance-walk-radio-report/
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RYBN.ORG is an artistic, experimental and independent research platform created in 1999, and based in Paris.
http://www.rybn.org
Dr. Amy Hale
Esoteric Art, Women Artists: Evolution and Confluence
Hosted by Dr. Dean Kenning and recorded on 03/03/22
This talk will explore the changing category of esoteric art from the “Occult revival” of the nineteenth century to the present day, with a focus on the women who have pioneered and innovated within the genre. I will be addressing women’s visual art, performance and installation in exploring the different contexts in which esoteric art has emerged and how it has been received, ranging from early movements such as Symbolism and Surrealism, to the impact of Theosophy and Spiritualism. We will look at artists such as Florence Farr, Hilma af Klint, Georgiana Houghton, Ithell Colquhoun, and a wave of contemporary artists such as Tai Shani who are reconfiguring the boundaries of this exciting and fluctuating genre.
Dr. Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, and culture. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave Macmillan).
www.medium.com/@amyhale93
www.amyhale.me
Dr. Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist writing about esoteric history, art, and culture. Her biography of Ithell Colquhoun, Genius of the Fern Loved Gully, is available from Strange Attractor Press, and she is also the editor of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave Macmillan).
www.medium.com/@amyhale93
www.amyhale.me
2021
The 2021 iteration of the Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme continued our programme of ACTS, inviting selected practitioners to consider what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge.
ACT IV (15/11/21) Alice Gale-Feeny, and mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson, ACT V (13/12/21) Rindon Johnson
Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)
Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)
Alice Gale-Feeny (2021)
Edited by Alice Gale-Feeny. Performances and writing included by Manuela Albrecht, Svenja Buehl, Michaela Gerussi and Alice Gale-Feeny.
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‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’ is thirty minutes long. About the length of the performance practice ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ (2021). It is a work that uses recursion as a method of writing and re-writing a framework for being with objects, and with each other.
Recursion is about addition and recalibration. New knowledge destroys a previous model, and writes a new one. 'Speaking through events creates new starting points'.
Through a practice with objects, the work asks what becomes of us as we practice writing about and with, a series of containers, that we spill in and out of.
I wanted to work on a series of live screen recordings where I (re)compose a series of videos that were made to accompany the performance 'Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)', as well as retrieving earlier recordings from the studio when the work began on my own body, working solo. I bring the live performance documentation next to the videos - creating loops within loops, densifying a practice that is already about the emergence of material between bodies objects and voices - and I am testing how they operate in a flattened compositional space of the screen. Trying to broaden that space to include my own body when editing.
In the original performance we were dealing with edges and boundaries. But edges and boundaries mean different things in the context of the online space; within screen(s).
I am also dealing in some way, with an archive of live performance documentation. I’m trying to think through what an online ACT may be in relation to the multiple time periods in which these documents span, and the editing process itself; looking at multiple videos at once as a form of accumulation and recalibration, asking what 'forms' emerge when I do this.
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Alice Gale-Feeny is an artist and writer working with performance, dance, facilitation and video. She is interested in devising frameworks for emergent processes to take place; where language and material form, construct and transform realities and build fictions, leading towards live outcomes that continue to recalibrate through their presentation. She draws from perspectives within the fields of New Materialism, Posthumanism, Somatics and Semiotics to think through bodily and linguistic relations.
Her most recent performance ‘Begin in the Middle (Neither Me nor the Bucket)’ was presented at Seventeen, London in August 2021 on the invitation of David Hoyland, as part of Performance Exchange, curated by Rose LeJeune. Alice is a Lecturer in Ba Fine Art at Kingston School of Art. She lives and works in London.
www.alicegale-feeny.com
Performers in ‘Using share screen in new calls with myself (performance recalibration)’
Manuela Albrecht @manualbrecht
Michaela Gerussi: @mgerussi
Svenja Buehl: @svenjabuhl
How to be Afraid?
mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson (2021)
Excerpt from 'How to be Afraid?' online performance by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson with collaborators Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Amy Voris from May 28, 2021. Video edited by George Maund.
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‘How to be Afraid?’ investigates the afterlife of the transatlantic slave in relation to body, time and space. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in in a number of international contexts.
This iteration explored somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of the past year and how it has shifted perspectives and realities.
The project revolved around the nature of fear itself. How do we navigate this time when political and societal pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from a fear of intimacy, if we are afraid, after a year of lockdowns and physical distancing?
Due to pandemic circumstances, this project was delivered transatlantically in hybrid mode, with mayfield brooks based at Center for Performance Research in New York and Mary Pearson and other collaborators at Siobhan Davies Studios.
This iteration of How to be Afraid? was co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), The Bluecoat (Liverpool) supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust.
mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are faculty at Movement Research NYC and Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. brooks is also the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award in dance granted by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black (IWB).
Mary Pearson is a performance maker and dancer/researcher working with Contact Improvisation and related dance practices, comedy, visual art, voice, and devising. Her solos FAILURE, The Sand Dog Cometh and FoMO, mofos! have toured internationally. Fascinated by collaboration as a complex and coordinated practice in survival, Mary is co- curator of Con|VERGE, REMIX collaborative performance residencies at Ponderosa Dance (DE). She teaches improvisation as a FAILURE Lab in universities and art contexts such as Improspecjie festival (Croatia), contactfestival Freiburg (Germany), WCCIJam and PADL West (CA, USA), Ponderosa P.O.R.C.H. summer school (Germany), and Live Art Bistro (UK). As a qualified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, she facilitates release of trauma held in the body.
George Maund is a cross-discipline artist, performer and broadcaster based in Liverpool, north west Europe since 2005. His most recent set of work is subtitled 'Psych Capital' and deals in subversive mixed-media interventions into and concerning the realm of neoliberal encroachment on 'the counterculture', taking inspiration (or lack thereof) from billionaire wellness retreats and late-stage capitalism's strange excesses and obsessions. In working life George has moved from touring musician to programming 'in-person' live music venues, to facilitating online iterations of performance and hybrid events, specialising in remote audio-visual broadcasts that retain an air of playful flair with room for creative manoeuvre for collaborators and audiences alike. George has been part of the team behind the Popular Music Show - UK radio's longest-running alternative music programme - at BBC Merseyside since 2017, currently presenting on a bi-monthly basis. He currently hosts and/or co-hosts several shows out of Melodic Distraction, Liverpool's internet radio station.
mayfield and Mary’s collaborators:
https://annegaellethiriot.tumblr.com
https://www.amyvoris.com
https://www.toussainttomove.com
http://www.sekechimutengwende.com
The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)
The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves (recorded live event)
Rindon Johnson (2021)
For the event, Johnson shared insights into the research process behind his new Chisenhale commission, The Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, as well as some of his references and ways of working in an experimental online format. Recording made on the 13th of December 2021.
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Chisenhale Gallery presents Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves, a new commission and first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Berlin-based artist Rindon Johnson. The first iteration of this commission — Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies — was presented at SculptureCenter, New York, earlier this year. Johnson’s exhibition is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter.
Moving between physical, object-based works and immersive, virtual space, Johnson’s work cuts through assumed realities and examines how virtual and physical spaces are intimately aligned. His work is couched first in language; in the ways that language fails, contradicts or empowers. Through modes of expression spanning publishing, virtual and augmented reality, to working with materials such as leather, wood and stone to create sculptures and installations, Johnson’s works explore the impact of capitalism, climate and technology on how we see and construct ourselves.
Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves is commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery and SculptureCenter, New York.
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Rindon Johnson lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Selected exhibitions include; Law of Large Numbers: Our Bodies, SculptureCenter, New York (2021); Away with You, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; This End The Sun, New Museum, New York (both 2020); Circumscribe, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (All 2019); New Black Portraitures, Rhizome, Online; and NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (both 2017).
www.chisenhale.org.uk
2020
The 2020 iteration of the Stanley Picker Public Lecture Programme invited selected practitioners to consider what it means to stage an online event as a way to distribute artistic knowledge. For ACTS, our first online presentation programme, we invited a number of artists to consider formats of and approaches to virtual acts.
ACT I (7 Oct) Jenna Collins, Stephen Sutcliffe, Steven Warwick
ACT II (4 Nov) Bill Leslie, Daniel Shanken, Matt Williams + MOBBS
ACT III (2 Dec) Barby Asante, Emma Hart, Joey Ryken
Cymbeline (2020) Stephen Sutcliffe
Glasgow based artist Stephen Sutcliffe creates film collages from an extensive archive of British television, film sound, broadcast images and spoken word recordings which he has been collecting since childhood. Often reflecting on aspects of British culture and identity, the results are melancholic, poetic and satirical amalgams which subtly tease out and critique ideas of class-consciousness and cultural authority. Through an extensive editing process Sutcliffe’s works pitch sound against image to subvert predominant narratives, generating alternative readings through the juxtaposition and synchronisation of visual and aural material.
Stephen Sutcliffe (b.1968, Harrogate) is an artist who lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2019). Talbot Rice Edinburgh, Hepworth Wakefield (2017), Rob Tufnell, London (2015), Tramway, Glasgow (2013) Stills, Edinburgh (2011), Whitechapel Auditorium (2010), Cubitt, London (2009) and Art Now, Light Box, Tate Britain (2005). Group exhibitions include: Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Cubitt, London, Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon and Gaudel De Stampa, Paris (2015). In 2018 he participated in the Manchester International Festival in collaboration with Graham Eatough on a film for the Whitworth Gallery, for which they won the Contemporary Arts Society Award.
He has been shortlisted for the Jarman Award twice and in 2012 he won the Margaret Tait Award. This year he has had two books published published, ‘at Fifty’ (Sternberg Press) a monograph and ‘Much Obliged’, (Book Works) a kind of autobiography. He has recently curated an exhibition of items from the Herbert Read Archive at the Brotherton Library in Leeds University with the arts group Pavillion, which is accompanied by a new video, 'City of Dreadful Something'.
Internal Dissolve (2020) Jenna Collins
Jenna Collins’ practice speculates on the impulses sublimated in small extracts of minor-speech and equivalent objects, encouraging them to flourish. Recent work has focused on the technological as a site of political, poetic and philosophical potential. The moving image, in all its current divergent forms (understood as a broad sphere of activity rather than merely a specific media outcome) is one such site, which the artist engages with in reflexive video, sound and text artworks.
Jenna Collins lives and works in London and Yorkshire. Recent solo, group and collaborative exhibitions, screenings and broadcasts include, September Garden with We Are Publication (WAP) at Camden Arts Centre, (2020). The Hold, with WAP at The Stanley Picker Gallery, London (2019). Technologies Of The Self, SUPERLUX, Aberdeen (2019). We.Are.Cut.Up. with WAP, Pratt Institute, New York (2019). Two External Light Sources with Alice Rekab Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin (2018). We Are the Road, London International Film Festival, London (2018). Late Junction, BBC Radio 3 (2018). Cafe OTO, supporting Heretics, London (2018). TLC with 0s+1s, Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba and the Gotland Art Museum, Sweden (2017). The Grand Alliance, Quick Millions, London (2016). Plague of Diagrams, with Rachel Cattle, ICA, London (2015).
Collins holds a PhD (AHRC) from The Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston School of Art and is currently writing, ‘One, 2,3’, a novel for Joan, a new publishing project supporting interdisciplinary artists' writing.
A Year Without Summer (2020) Steven Warwick
A Year Without Summer
When someone makes a statement, one must ensure that it is accurately communicated.
This can be ensured by articulating the sentence slowly, clearly, and at an audible volume
Sometimes a sentence is wilfully obscured, this leads to its meaning being altered.
This wilfully altered sentence could take someone’s words out of context
This sentence out of context could make someone appear to say something they didn’t intended to say
Or worse, they could be accused of saying the opposite of what they first uttered.
This can be construed as a lie or falsehood
This can be construed as a defamatory comment towards an individual or group.
This sentence in term could itself be a legal allegation of defamation of character
Or as it alternatively known, character assassination.
This wilful twisting of a person’s words can create a new perception of character of the now accused, in a positive or negative light.
This new found light or reading of the perceived character could lead to them being ostracized or excommunicated from a group or community.
Without a chance to defend oneself against accusations, the sentence can further alienate the accused inside or outside of a community.
Language and words can be used to convince and influence others in an argument of rhetoric.
In an argument or debate it is important to listen to the other side even if one doesn’t agree with what is being said.
Hyperbolic statements should be contested by the asking of further questions to verify a claim of a consensus of truth.
Without access to a variety of sources, it is difficult to make an informed choice or opinion.
Gossip is a transmission, a currency and an abstraction of a perceived set of behaviour.
Steven Warwick performs a text at a public bench in Berlin which allows sound/speech to refract along the perimeter of the bench in a similar way to the Whispering Gallery at St Paul's Cathedral in London. The Text concerns the viral transmission of language and it's accompanying mutations as it travels.
Steven Warwick is an artist, writer and musician based in Berlin. His visual practice constructs situations with interweaving narratives across various media such as performance, installation, sculpture, plays and films. He also has recently collaborated on projects including the “Mezzanine” musical performance series choreographed with dancers, the artist duo Elevator to Mezzanine which has produced exhibitions, artist books and recently a Western musical titled "Performing America (Iconic America)" . The audiovisual performance- lecture series “Fear Indexing the X- Files” was issued as a book by Primary Information.
Warwick’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze and Urbanomic. His visual work has been shown at KW Berlin; SMK, Copenhagen; Steirischer Herbst, Austria; The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Lars Friedrich, Berlin ; Cleopatra's, Brooklyn; Beach Office, Berlin ; Balice Hertling, New York. As a musician working under his own name and, previously, as "Heatsick", he produces and performs a hybrid live/ DJ set, releasing recordings with the club/experimental label PAN and has played at Berghain, Berlin; London Contemporary Music Festival; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Issue Project Room, New York; and the Mutek and Unsound Festivals.
Netmancer (2020) Daniel Shanken
Enter .NETMANCER
Please note, NETMANCER opens a new browser window.
Produced with assistance from telega.org
Produced with assistance from telega.org
Using keywords selected by chance, NETMANCER is a browser-based application that locates and plays random YouTube videos in real- time. Within its constructed window, floating videos drift off-screen to be replaced by more videos, a process that can be interrupted and manipulated by the user's mouse. As well as zooming in and spinning the video cluster, the user can unmute and play the audio, solo or in concert, building narratives derived from the search engines that advise YouTube's video hub. With every ‘refresh’ new videos appear, collide and multiply. If there is an overload of calls to YouTube, a video of a burning log appears and replicates instead; it might refresh right away but you may have to come back the next day when YouTube lets us in again.
Daniel Shanken is an artist living and working in Hong Kong and London. He is currently finishing his PhD at the Contemporary Art Research Centre at Kingston University and is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU. He works across disciplines to create installations, video, sculpture, sound, and media. His practice examines relationships between technology and cognition, focusing on ‘in-between spaces’ with fluid definitions. He explores ways in which meaning and perception are generated and altered through environmental, cultural, and material interactions. In his work he aims to render these exchanges by examining the possibility of alternative readings and outputs. His work has been exhibited at venues such as ICA London, Art Basel Hong Kong, Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, CFCCA Manchester, V Art Center Shanghai, and Kiasma Helsinki. www.dshanken.com
A4503.17.08.20 (2020) Matt Williams + MOBBS
Matt Williams is a curator and PhD candidate (AHRC) at Manchester School of Art. His ongoing research and curatorial projects exist at the intersection of art and society with an emphasis on contemporary sound art practices.
MOBBS is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in London who specialises in sound design and music composition. He presents a monthly show on NTS Radio and has released an extensive body of work via various aliases. He has screened moving-image works as part of Camden Art Centre's offsite public programme at Cork Street Gallery (London), Spazio Maiocchi (Milan) and performed live at Tate Modern (London).
Score for Six Small Sculpture (2020) Bill Leslie
A series of small sculptures are placed in front of the camera. Each object was made in response to household objects used earlier this summer during lockdown, in a video made as part of a Digital Residency with Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center. The aim was to catch the spontaneity and playfulness of the original objects. The result, something like a set of odd instruments and children's toys which are played for the camera, creating an ad hoc choreography of movement and sound.
Bill Leslie puts sculptures in front of cameras to see what can happen. Often small, handmade and playful, his objects and films explore the relationship of sculpture, camera and person. The objects he makes are invitations for play and physical exploration using the camera as an onlooker, instigator and conspirator. A presence which changes the way we think and act towards sculptures.
He has shown work in galleries, project spaces including Tate, Barbican, Wimbledon Art Space, The Royal Standard, Arnolfini and ASC Gallery. He finished a PhD at Kingston School of Art earlier this year titled ‘Good Enough Sculptures: What Happens When Sculptures are Made to be Filmed?’
Coal After Audre (2020) Barby Asante
Barby Asante’s meditation Coal After Audre, has been created in remembrance and reverence of the power of poetry for black women as expressed in Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay Poetry is Not A Luxury. For Lorde poetry is “the quality of light by which we scrutinise our lives”. Coal After Audre reflects on Lorde’s poem Coal from her 1968 First Cities collection and an Alexis Pauline Gumbs quote from her 2020 book Dub: Finding Ceremony, which asks “How do you write a poem about coal?”
Lorde’s Coal takes the metaphor of coal as black fuel to create the and express the words being spoken “from the earth’s inside”. Coal After Audre takes this metaphor and reimagines coal as a much-maligned and rejected fuel, in a moment when words are difficult to find, yet somewhere within the ancient wisdom of coal; within its compressed matter of everyday life, there is light. The light that is attempting to make itself seen through the darkness.
Barby Asante is an artist, curator and researcher. Her artistic practice is concerned with the politics of place, space and the ever-present histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism. With a deep interest in black feminist and decolonial methodologies, Barby embeds within her work notions of collective study, countless ways of knowing and dialogical practices that embrace being together and breathing together. Through collective writing, re-enactment and creating spaces for transformation, ritual and healing Barby has developed a practice of re-collecting, collating, excavating and re-mapping stories and narratives that are often unspoken, invisible or buried with the archival document.
Her recent exhibitions and projects include: Declaration of Independence: For Ama. For Aba. Diaspora Pavilion, Venice, 2017, BALTIC, Gateshead 2019, Bergen Kusthall 2020, Brent 2020: Black Togetherness as Lingua Franca with Amal Alhaag, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, 2018 and Baldwin’s Nigger R E L O A D E D, INIVA, London, 2014, Nottingham Contemporary 2015, A Language to Dwell In: International James Baldwin Conference, Paris, 2016, GOMA/ Glasgow International 2018, Somerset House, London 2019.
Online Viewing Room Only (2020) Emma Hart
The lengths some people will go to, to get you to view their online exhibition is unreal. Also, switching from a real life exhibition, to an online viewing room is confusing. What are the demands being made on you now? Is it the sculptures that need your physical presence but can’t have it, or just the artist craving your attention?
This video is made with the documentation of Emma Hart’s exhibition Be Some Body at The Sunday Painter, 2nd Oct - 19th Dec 2020. Due to the changing restrictions brought in to combat the pandemic the exhibition opened and then closed and then opened again. The photographs are by Lewis Ronald.
Emma Hart lives and works in London. In 2016 she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. In 2015 she was awarded a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award for Visual Art. In 2022 Hart will realise her first permanent sculpture for the public entrance of the UCL East, Pool Street West building, on Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Hart received an MA in Fine Art from the Slade in 2004 and completed her PhD in Fine Art at Kingston University in 2013. Hart is a lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.
23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders (2020) Joey Ryken
23 Muddles & Mômo's Magical Murders is a video montage examining the artist's drawing series 23 Drawings to Muddle Magic, as well as dictation-drawings made in magical conversation with Antonin Artaud's drawings from some of his many notebooks. The audio is a fragmented montage of trance induction drones composed for drawing-based psychomagical rituals, or what the artist terms 'Octochronoplasmancy'.
This video is intended as an act of enchantment, and a perpetually imminent means to conjure apocalyptic ghosts. However, the artist takes no responsibility for supernatural anomalies that may occur as a result of viewing.
Joey Ryken (b.1976, Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist based in London, UK. Their art practice and academic research explore experimental approaches to occult magic and hallucinatory experience, using drawing, sound, moving image, text, and absurdist performance. Prevailing research themes include drawing as a process of magical invocation; audiovisual media as hallucinatory witness; and performance as abstracted magic ritual, exploring entrancement within music sub/cultures and intercultural subjectivities.
Ryken has recently completed a PhD in Art Research at Kingston School of Art, titled Bodies of Pure Intensity: Drawing as Magical Apparatus. They perform as guitar-noise avatar Me/Mi MôMo Mu, and is a collaborator in the speculative Boricua diaspora art collective De Nada Unidos. Ryken has exhibited, performed and produced events in idiosyncratic locations throughout the US and in the UK, as well as at major arts institutions in the UK, including ArtSway, Camden Arts Centre, Gasworks, Goldsmiths, ICA, Somerset House, and Stanley Picker Gallery.