frieze blog

By Chris Fite-Wassilak

Postcard: ‘Generation – 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’

Perth Train Station. Photograph: Chris Fite-Wassilak.

‘Which way are you voting on 18th September?’ The man behind me is recounting an encounter with Scandinavian colleagues who have an interest in Scottish sovereignty. We’re on a small 40-seat plane about to land in Wick, on the north eastern coast of the Highlands, and it’s evident that more than half the passengers on board work together in the burgeoning sustainable energy industry that’s rushing to establish itself up here. The North Sea’s oil reserves have long been leverage for proponents of independence, and air and wave energy have become the next focus; the man didn’t say which way he’d be voting and seemed more bemused that they’d care – but, of course, the Scandinavians, who he was speaking to about manufacturing wind turbines, are interested.

Orkney from above. Photograph: Chris Fite-Wassilak

I’m on my way to the extremities of the British mainland for a different, but not altogether unrelated reason. It’s worth remembering that the referendum on Scottish independence wasn’t announced until last year; by then Scotland already had the Ryder Cup, the Commonwealth Games and the dubious tourism board creation ‘Homecoming Scotland’ (similar to Ireland’s 2013 ‘The Gathering’, an innocuous, semi-regular ‘event’ designed to convince American descendants to bring their cash back to the old country) planned for 2014. Within Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games programme, Russian doll-like, is the adventurously titled set of events that make up Culture 2014, which in turn contains ‘Generation’: a cross-country grouping of over 70 contemporary art exhibitions and performances that has been two years in the making. The subtitle is ‘25 years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’, but thankfully there are no appeals to the usual suspects – the fall of the Berlin wall, or rise of the World Wide Web, etc., to justify that parameter; it is ‘simply’ billed as a nationwide survey – a celebration and, sometimes, a more heavy-handed assertion of the importance of a set of artists who have lived and worked in the country over the past quarter of a century. Over the course of a press trip lasting five days, I saw 25 exhibitions by over 80 artists across seven towns, from Stromness, on the southwest of mainland Orkney, to Edinburgh and Glasgow; technically, I only saw about a third of the whole thing. What ‘Generation’ is depends on who you talk to; it is definitely more concerned with the past than that future, favouring mostly existing works and more established artists, but within that its porous structure offers innumerable entry points and any number of vignettes could serve as the kernel of some kind of equally valid insight.

Jim Lambie, ‘Zobop’, 1999, opening at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.

Our taxi driver from Wick up to Thurso, not far from the island’s northernmost point, has a bright rainbow dyed into her short hair and she tells us that she thinks only Scottish people who live in Scotland should get to vote. ‘What about if you moved here when you were three’, a colleague counters. ‘Or what about those Scots living abroad?’ ‘That’s true,’ the driver grants us hesitantly. Over the course of the week, this passing comment kept coming back to me: the selection of artists who make up ‘Generation’ seems to rely on similar questions. An oft-repeated fact when touting the successes of Scottish Contemporary art is the number of Turner Prize winners (six) and nominees (18 – not including three out of this year’s four nominations) who lived, studied, or were born in Scotland. ‘But if they gain independence,’ one artist pointed out after one of many such roll calls over the course of the week, ‘they can’t qualify for the Turner anymore, can they?’ Our first visit of the week is to a show of old work by the 1996 winner Douglas Gordon, in a small room of the Caithness Horizons, a museum in Thurso’s old town hall complete with a display of local historical artefacts on one floor and an information centre for the nearby decommissioned Dounreay nuclear reactor on another. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Berlin-based Gordon is the central figure for ‘Generation’ and 24 Hour Psycho (1993) its point of origin – his name crops up incessantly, and his work appears in three of the program’s major exhibitions. While it’s always great to get a chance to see (at least a small segment of) 24 Hour Psycho, his solo show at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art is just one piled-up installation that crams together almost two decades of work on over a hundred old TV screens. ‘Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 to Now’ (1992–2006) is a swaggering attempt to stage a retrospective, almost self-destructing as each video merges with the next and their sound all swirls together into one uneven hubbub; it also a simply lazy rehash. Up in Thurso, it feels more like an attempt to export and propagate what Hans Ulrich Obrist labelled the ‘Glasgow Miracle’, as if the artistic ferment of the mid 90s had been delivered, unheralded, from above.

Douglas Gordon, Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now. Douglas Gordon, ‘Pretty much every film and video work from about 1992 until now’. Courtesy: Studio lost but found, Berlin.  Installation view Static Gallery, Liverpool, 2011

Ask the curatorial committee of ‘Generation’ about what the starting point for the project was, though, and they’ll point you to a different figure: Steven Campbell. While unwillingly associated with the previous generation of the ‘New Glasgow Boy’ painters including Ken Currie and Peter Howson, both his over-reaching sense of installation and his international career, particularly in New York, seems to have inspired younger artists’ ambitions. Recreated in the National Gallery of Scotland (NSG), Edinburgh, ‘On Form and Fiction’, his 1990 exhibition at the Third Eye Centre (a Glasgow multi-media arts centre that became the Centre for Contemporary Arts) is the earliest work featured in ‘Generation’. Considered a turning point in Scottish art, the installation seems, for many, to be the survey’s spiritual home. Two long wooden benches sit in the middle of the dimmed room, surrounded by eight large paintings and the walls covered with ink drawings. Between the surreal panels we might piece together a nightmare narrative of love, escape and betrayal, as Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin’s ‘Je t’aime…moi non plus’ plays on loop from a radio. At the launch of the project the other week, artists and curators gathered in the room reminiscing: the original 1990 installation had more paintings, and hundreds more of the drawings, which couldn’t have fit in the one room here at the NSG. The original included branches hanging from the ceiling, while Campbell sometimes played the song live; the show had also toured to Aberdeen, Llandudno and Southampton.

Steven Campbell, ‘On Form and Fiction’, 1990, installation view at National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2014

Campbell passed away in 2007 having only just begun exhibiting again after a long hiatus. This recreation is a corrective to the ‘Miracle’ memory banks, although, as with much of ‘Generation’, which involves the restaging of numerous influential works, it’s hard to imagine what its original impact must have been. And while the nationwide spread of the project is commendable, some pretty odd spaces have been chosen for resurrection of certain pieces. Often cited in relation to the success of a number of Glasgow artists is David Harding and Sam Ainsley’s ‘environmental art course’ at Glasgow School of Art, which began in 1985 and is still running, where students were encouraged to consider ‘context as 50% of the work’. I kept thinking of this as I saw Clyde, the giant thistle mascot for the Commonwealth Games named after Glasgow’s river, running around the city’s streets of posing for photos, or the Perth Museum’s Ryder Cup and taxidermied animal displays sitting next to a series of Alison Watt’s poised and silent canvasses. Beagles and Ramsay’s creepy Ventriloquist Dummies Double Self-Portrait (2003) sit on benches, looking blankly out of the small room that they’ve been given in Glasgow’s People’s Palace, which abruptly abuts a gift shop that also houses an information display on the Red Road flats. (That’s also another story: https://www.glasgow2014.com/press-releases/dramatic-end-red-road-creates-bold-symbol-games-celebration-city-rebirth though the bizarre demolition spectacle has since been delayed until after the games.)

The Pentland Firth. Photograph: Chris Fite-Wassilak

Some of the true highlights of ‘Generation’, though, are away from the established scenes and narratives of Edinburgh and Glasgow, where contexts mingle more productively. After taking a windy, rocking ferry with a group of middle aged German motorcyclists across the Pentland Firth from Scrabster to Stromness, we visit the Pier Art Centre for a short morning. Pier houses its own fantastic collection of Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis paintings, Barbara Hepworth sculptures and a growing contemporary collection, in addition to a programme of regularly changing exhibitions. Artists Zoë Walker and Neil Bromwich have collected a body of work that starts with a video Walker made while on residency in Orkney in 1998, where she repeatedly tries to launch herself into the air with a partially unfurled parachute. Their new board game devised for Pier, Game for Change (2014), turns the questions of trade and energy that have shaped the islands into an allegorical quest, shrouded in language that mixes myth and corporate motivational speaking. They plan to use Stromness Shopping Week (Orkney’s oldest of many festivals, dating back to 1949 to encourage postwar spending) to get people playing and will stage a series of events around the game’s barely-fictional realm of ‘Orcadia’. We make a quick visit to Maes Howe, an intricate prehistorical tomb that was later grafittied by filthy-mouthed Vikings, before hopping on another small plane heading south.

The Ryder Cup and Alison Watt, Perth Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph: Chris Fite-Wassilak

Several days and a train ride down to the mouth of the Tay later, Dundee offers the most appropriately raucous and prismatic view on the week. While ‘Generation’ makes much of collaboration in the Scottish art scene, the survey is by and large defined by solo presentations. Here, both Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and the Cooper Gallery stage parallel on-going collaborative exhibitions. At the Cooper, ‘Studio Jamming’ brings together several Scottish artists’ groups—Henry VIII’s Wives, Ganghut, Full Eye, and Graham Eatough and Graham Fagan—and just lets them do what they do, all housed within a series of primary coloured structures designed by Mr. Nightmare of Participation himself, Markus Miessen. While I was there, Ganghut were attempting to make sense of ten years’ worth of work that might yet become an ‘archive’. They were also making jam. Down the road, the DCA’s ‘Continue Without Losing Consciousness’ featured the drawings of Rob Churm, several installations by Raydale Dower and the painted newspaper pages of Tony Swain. The show, taking its title from a performance instruction by Erik Satie, is a sort of absurdist salon. The collection of mostly wall works is a reserved enough exhibition in itself, and each artist sticks to a few designated walls each. Swain’s 4-metre long A Feud is Due (2014) is an impossible jumble of landscapes, waterfalls and trees painted on to the photographs of mountains and muddy rainforests underneath. At the back of the large main gallery space, Churm’s My Bridge (2014) starts with the same A4 print of an image of a set of stairs, drawing over it eighteen times to make a kaleidoscopic set of dream sketches; some swirl with waves and triangles, in another a set of fingers reach towards guitar strings. With all the space amidst these flighty sketches and half-formed collages, it begins to feel like a sort of zine-in-formation. An empty stage in the smaller gallery will host a series of gigs and performances throughout the exhibition, drawing on each of the artists’ own bands and guests like the Rebel and sci-fi writer Steve Aylett. The silent, hovering potential of the stage as it sits in the gallery adds to the sense of open unease.

Orcadia & Other Stories – Walker & Bromwich, Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich, ‘Game for Change’, 2014. Photograph: Pier Arts Centre

Throughout the week, there were plenty of mini-moments that felt as if they contained a crucial insight into ‘Generation’—to shamefully simplify a few of them: Ross Sinclair, sitting there singing the Beta Band’s ‘Dry the Rain’ amidst his Real Life Rocky Mountain (1996) installation, replete with a bestiary of stuffed animals and fake rocks, telling us that it’s all made up anyway; Roddy Buchanan’s Sodastream (1995) video in which he simply drops every flavour of Garvies soft drinks smashing to the floor, like much of his work a reminder of the point and pointlessness of defining things according to some set identity; or a moment in Cara Tolmie, France-Lise McGurn and Kimberly O’Neill’s sputtering performance Nos Algae’s (2014) at Tramway where a pre-recorded video shows a close-up of hands washing vigorously in a sink, pulling out until we can see that it’s two of the performers intertwined, acting as much as possible like one person, opening up the performance as a sort of blind, but intimate, guessing game.

Cara Tolmie, France-Lise McGurn, Kimberley O’Neill, Cara Tolmie, France-Lise McGurn, Kimberley O’Neill, ‘Nos Algae’s’, live performance, Tramway, Glasgow, 2014. Courtesy: the artists; ohotograph: Alan McAteer

Part of ‘Losing Consciousness’ provided, at least from my own stranger’s perspective, another one of ‘Generation’s epicentres. One of Churm’s black and white pen drawings, part of the Pramé Cluster, 2014, seems like a serene landscape of rolling hills capped by a setting sun until you read the text around the image: ‘Nostalgiosphere: They dropped a dome on every town.’ Next to it is 1/10000 second (Piano Drop image no.1665 and image no. 1898) (2014), two large photographs by Dower, one of an empty floor and the other of a grand piano falling at an angle, about to hit the floor. A few small shards of what’s left of the piano sit on a low plinth nearby with the title Untitled (Repercussion) (2011/2014); the photographs are framed in the piano’s wood. From here, between the imagined sound of the smashing piano and an unsettling future vision, ‘Generation’ appears multivocal, uneasily nostalgic, unmoved by the idea of unity, partially absent, unfinished, and raw.

‘Generation’ runs at multiple venues across Scotland until October 2014

By Gemma Tipton

Eva Rothschild, 'Someone and Someone', 2009, installation view as part of 'Vestibule', Merrion Square, Dublin. Aluminium, enamel paint, 4.5 x 4 m. Courtesy: the artist, Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, and Modern Institute, Glasgow; photograph: Evan Buggle

What is it with Dublin, art and rainbows right now? First it looked like a coincidence: Mark Garry’s ‘Mound II’ (2014), a framed arc of coloured pigments, was ethereal and barely-there at his pleasantly gentle Kerlin Gallery exhibition. This rainbow was echoed in the muted diffuse prisms in Diana Copperwhite’s paintings; paired with canvases by Danny Rolph in a very strong show at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery that balanced the sharper edges of Rolph’s abstraction with Copperwhite’s more dreamy pieces, creating elegant conversations between the two distinct styles of working. But by the time I came upon Eva Rothschild’s ‘Someone and Someone’ (2008), a huge, playful multi-coloured arch, surprising visitors to the normally sedate Merrion Square in the Georgian heart of the city, I began to wonder what was going on.

Mark Garry, Mound II, 2014, powder pigment on gesso, 101 × 72 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

Rothschild also has a solo show at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (to give the space its full cumbersome title that no one ever uses), but the Merrion Square piece is part of the ‘Vestibule’ project. Curated by Aoife Tunney, this one-off independent summer event is a fun intervention in which works by Rothschild and Aleana Egan – both large arches – seem to be giving the trees and carefully tended borders something to think about. Rothschild’s in particular tempts you to consider the space it frames as being somehow different: the focus created by the archway intensifies the view within like a picture frame, it beguiles you to walk through into otherness.

‘Vestibule’ is perfect for a public art project aimed at many different groups. That said, the third piece in the installation was kind of irritating. Daniel Gustav Cramer had buried a ball in the park. Obviously you had to take it on trust that he had actually buried the ball, though I’m told it is verifiably there. It’s one thing to persuade Dublin City Council to allow contemporary art into one of its most historic green spaces, over or under ground, it’s quite another to let the public attack it with spades in quest of elusive artworks.

Isabel Nolan, foreground: Nothing new under the sun, 2014; background: “The sky is not bounded by a fixed edge!”: an illuminated rug arranged to accommodate a medieval mind., 2014, installation view at Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Courtesy: the artist, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

Anyway, back to those rainbows: as we know, there’s been a major recession across the world in recent years and Ireland has suffered more than most. The contemporary art market was flattened, and boom time art euphoria became an almost embarrassing memory. But there’s something on the wind. Things are changing, turning up. The galleries Kerlin, Green on Red, mother’s tankstation and Kevin Kavanagh have been returning from the art fair circuit upbeat and red dots have been appearing at exhibitions in Dublin – in the galleries still retro enough to employ them. Green on Red are also moving, following the end of their lease on Lombard Street, to a new, larger space at Spencer Dock. A gallery upscaling? Unthinkable just two years ago.

So is it something a little biblical? Like the rainbow appearing after the great flood that (almost) destroyed the earth, are these rainbows catching onto a new more optimistic zeitgeist?

Giorgio Griffa, Dalla terra al cielo, 1979, acrylic on canvas,
2.4 × 2.2 m. Courtesy: The Douglas Hyde Gallery; photograph: Davey Moor

At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Isabel Nolan’s solo show ‘The weakening eye of day’ included rainbows, of course, in an exhibition that told a story from the birth of the universe through to the pathos of individual death. Clusters of spheres of plaster and jesmonite in pale pastel shades, The effect of its past and the cause of its future (2014), are sited in one room, while in the next similar forms burst forth to create the colourful constellation of Nothing new under the sun (2014), in which nine ceramic bowls approximating a solar system.

Meandering through to the exhibition’s conclusion, The weakening eye of day (2014) is a huge scrolling loop of steel, overlooked by a vast black and white photograph of a donkey in a graveyard. It’s a gentle and poignant conclusion to the energy of the previous rooms: the cycle of life bringing you to the ultimate end. But wait, walk back through, and you find yourself moving from death to rebirth. Your route offers a choice: pessimism or optimism, it’s all a question of perspective.

There are yet more prisms of colour in Giorgio Griffa’s unstretched canvases hanging on the Douglas Hyde’s walls. And though I thought I’d come to the end of the rainbow at ‘A Modern Panarion; Glimpses of Occultism in Dublin’, a group show at the Hugh Lane, curated by Pádraig E. Moore, there they were again in Bea McMahon’s ‘The Self-Pleasuring Series’ (2014). The occultism in question is seen through the eyes of contemporary artists including, alongside McMahon, Dorje de Burgh, Gunilla Klingberg, Garrett Phelan, Richard Proffitt and a film work by Derek Jarman.

Bea McMahon, Self Pleasuring Series No. 7, 2014, 24 × 33 cm, colouring pencil on paper.
Courtesy: the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin

McMahon’s drawings are edgy pencil sketches, alluding to odd patterns in science and nature, mysterious forces, the pull of physics. Interestingly they echo drawings Nolan showed a couple of years ago at her exhibition at The Model, Sligo, in 2011, and are of a piece with Garry’s current work too: attractive works, easy on the eye and yet with a hinted, and somewhat fey intellectualism that adds both edginess and possibly desirability to the object.

Emerging into the city sunlight, the nagging sense of déjà vu I got from all that occultism, and from McMahon’s series of drawings, revived a stronger memory than that of Nolan’s drawings. I was reminded of being in Massimiliano Gioni’s ‘The Encyclopaedic Palace’ at last year’s Venice Biennale. There Aleister Crowley, Hilma Af Klint, Emma Kunz, Anna Zemánková, and their colleagues had filled rooms in both the Giardini and the Arsenale with mystical, symbolic and often crazily strange rainbow drawings.

So which is the stronger influence? The trends and whims of the global art world, or a more localised sense of Irish recovery? Whichever it is, in a city whose galleries and public spaces seem suddenly full of rainbows, how can you feel anything but optimistic? On the other hand, too many prisms can pall after a while, and the show of the summer for me is on at the Temple Bar Gallery: Caoimhe Kilfeather’s ‘This attentive place’ is a perfectly judged installation meditating on space, memory, atmosphere and how objects can become animate with inchoate meaning when ideally placed and considered. And not a rainbow in sight.

By Elizabeth Rush and Juan Manuel Echavarría

Juan Manuel Echavarría and The War We Have Not Seen

El Testigo (The Witness), 2011

Since Juan Manuel Echavarría’s birth in 1947, Colombia has not known a single year of peace. The largest and most consistent conflict in the western hemisphere, the Colombian civil war has cost hundreds of thousands of civilians their lives, and has displaced millions of others. Peace talks began in 2012, but the progress is slow and requires so much more than a signature. Colombians are wondering, how, if at all, can their society heal from a half-a-century-long, grotesquely violent civil war?

Echavarría is a novelist-turned-artist who has been asking himself this question for much of the past two decades, resulting in a fragile and understated oeuvre that attempts to distill some wisdom from the violence that has shaped Colombian experience for the last half a century. In Echavarria’s care, Colombia’s violence takes on an ephemeral and quotidian form. He turns the grotesque into the everyday, massacres into child’s play. Always he errs on the less sensational side of war, choosing to depict instead the ways in which it turns everyone – perpetrators and civilians alike – into victims.

In 2007, Echavarría began a groundbreaking project to show the war from the perspective of those who inflicted its unprecedented violence. He started running workshops in Bogota, teaching ex-paramilitaries and guerrilla deserters to paint. The results are terrifying and beautiful mostly for the naivety with which they were executed. Imagine scenes from a brutal rape, from the demolition of a village, from a mass execution seemingly painted by a child. Almost all of the soldier-artists learned to hold a gun before a pencil, went to war instead of to school and their lack of education shows in the naïve style of their paintings. All of the images in the book are drawn from experience, each depicting a different personal account of the war. In one image, three cartoon-like figures are publicly executed while civilians workout and soldiers train. You get the feeling that each of the figures wears a smile because the painter did not have the skill to depict anything else. In another, five dismembered heads float alongside various roughly sketched arms and legs in an amoeba-like puddle of blood. Black stick figures surround his heap of childishly transfigured carnage. The three round humps of a primitively drawn mountain chain loom above, imbuing the scene with an elemental and enduring quality.

From the series ‘The war we have not seen: a historical memory project’, 2007

Echavarría’s most recent body of work, ‘Silencios’ (2012–13), is a suite of 12 photographs each taken in a different abandoned schoolhouse in Montes de Maria, a beautiful mountainous area in rural Colombia. Fearing violence, the majority of those who lived in Montes de Maria abandoned their homes in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Each of the images in ‘Silencios’ chooses the empty blackboard as its subject. Some also feature an animal – a pig, a termite den, a cock – who have taken up residence in the disintegrating schoolhouses. In other cases the viewer can see traces of a human presence. The images illustrate the re-appropriation of civic space by animals and individuals desperate to survive in a political climate that has put an end to education. At once gorgeous, engrossing, and painful to look at, ‘Silencios’ chronicles the timid signs of life that are beginning to accumulate at the periphery of rural Colombian society as the violence wanes.

ER Give me the context for your work. How did Colombia’s war shape the environment that shaped you?

JME Look, in the Colombian Republic in the 19th century there were nine civil wars. In the 20th century we have had 60 continuous years of civil war and in the 21st we have had 14 years of war. We never seem to be able to interrupt those cycles of violence. They just keep going on and on. I grew up in Medellin, which was to become a violent city with the narco-trafficking, but in my youth, it was extremely peaceful even though rural Colombia was at war.

ER Your first ideas of violence must have come not from the imaginary realm of movies or novels, but from somewhere closer and more real. What was that like?

JME I never saw the war on television, but I did hear about it on the radio, so the violence I knew wasn’t visual it was oral. I couldn’t forget the stories that I heard. When we are young we sometimes trap things in the net of our unconscious. There is a word planchar, which is to iron. I remember that I would hear things like: ‘The conservatives have gone into liberal town and they have planchar-ed the liberals.’ I used to go into the laundry room where the help was ironing the pants and somehow that association stayed in my mind. I remember thinking: ‘My god, it must hurt! Planchar another human being must hurt because I can see that it burns.’ Somehow, in childhood, those pants – my father’s pants – were being ironed and I would say, ‘Well, that’s a human being’.

Corte de Florero: Maxillaria Vorax, 1997

ER One of your earlier photographic series, ‘Corte de Florero’ (Flower Cut Vases, 1997). Did it originate from that childhood net of memories?

JME Absolutely. In the 1950s the perpetrators would do transgressions to their victims’ bodies, which were called cortes or cuts. I was seven or eight and I would hear about them on the radio. A very famous one was called the Corte de Corbata, or the necktie cut, in which the perpetrator would slice open the throat of his victim and bring out the tongue. So that image is there in my head, trapped always. I was able to transform those cortes into my ‘Flower Cut Vase’ series, which are images of flowers made with human bones. Each piece takes its name from one of those famous cortes, and tries to mimic what they might have looked like in form. Of course, back then everything else in my life was so peaceful. I would go pick tangerines from the trees. Life was normal but somehow there was this vivid, violent invasion of that normality.

ER Your work refuses to participate in violence in its own terms, but rather draws that violence into a mundane realm – the realm of flowers for instance. This seems closer to the way violence is experienced when it happens everyday in your country, at close range, for half a century. Is this a conscious choice?

JME When you are dealing with something so delicate, so sensitive, so visceral, as violence in art you have to ask, how do I represent it? I have chosen the indirect look, la mirada indirecta. Goya, in his ‘Disasters of War’ series (1810-20), always has a title underneath. In one work he is showing a massacre and below it he says no se puede mirar (you cannot look at it). I think what he is saying is through the transformation that art permits, you can look and feel and think about the horror of war.

ERThe War We Have Not Seen, a more recent project, is a collection of paintings made by soldiers who have defected. It illustrates the naturalization of violence from the perspective of those who inflicted it. How did this project come about?

JME The stories of the perpetrators of Colombian violence are completely absent from our society. I mean, how can we expect to make sense of the war without their stories. When I began working with these people in a two-year-long series of painting workshops, they would say to me: ‘Who wants to listen to my story? I am a perpetrator.’ But those perpetrators, as I would learn, are also victims. They often enter war for one of two reasons: because of vengeance or because of a lack of education. In the absence of education they held a rifle before a pencil. War did that to them. And that is why they paint in such a simple manner, because they barely know how to hold a writing instrument. In their hands, horror scenes appear as naïve stories.

ER That naivety is precisely what is so overwhelming about the work. We see a painting of a town by a river, where each of the buildings is represented in a flat two-dimensional manner. On the bridge over the river are four bloody circles with two dots for eyes and a line for a mouth. Blood pours from where the neck would be. Down in the flat blue river below four headless bodies float. All around this scene are uniformly painted homes one after another, illustrating complete uniform normality. It’s haunting, really. The scene is so violent and yet the painting appears as though a child made it.

JME Correct. The naivety of these paintings is the result of a lack of schooling. Some of the painters were displaced from their villages as we see in the other series of photographs, ‘Silencios’. I will say this again because it is very important. The brush allowed them to talk about their experiences, things that many of them had never shared with anyone. It distanced them from their own experience with the horror of war. Art speaks in the spaces that our culture silences.

Silencio con Grieta, 2010

ER‘Silencios’ explores the same theme from a completely different angle, from the ruination and slow rebirth of a rural region in Colombia, Montes de Maria.

JME Montes de Maria is a huge area in Colombia that is remote and has little infrastructure. This area is completely ravaged by war. And when I say ravaged by war I mean a whole population of peasants there were forced to leave their homes and their land. Sometimes I would spend hours and hours walking in the hot sun on a path to get to a village and see no one. I went mostly alone and over three years built very important relationships with people there that I learned to trust. And they learnt to trust me, learnt to trust that I am an artist not a government agent. These people are fantastic guides because some of them are ex-guerillas who fought in Montes de Maria. And some are ex-military soldiers who fought in Montes de Maria. They stop me sometimes and say: ‘Look at the top of that mountain, there was the camp of the guerilla.’ This project is really about touching the geography of war, touching the people who have fought in the war, the people who are victims of the war, and connecting them. Often at the end of a day we all sit down together and eat and drink beer and I hear their stories.

ER They are okay talking with one another, these ex-guerillas and ex-paramilitaries?

JME Absolutely, they even have the other’s mobile phone numbers.

ER Are you surprised by that? Is that amnesia or something beautiful, human, in the spirit of survival?

JME I think it means understanding that they are not enemies anymore and that someone else made them into enemies. One of the ex-guerrillas, Miguel, enters the guerilla when he is 15. Tell me if at that moment he is not a victim of the war?

ER I agree he is both a victim of the war and of circumstance. How did he get there?

JME He gets there because the guerillas would come near his house. He lived far out in the mountains where there was no Colombian Army. The guerillas would come and say to the mother, ‘Give us a hen’. They were hungry. They would then say, ‘Give us water’. And that is how they begin. Finally they say to the mother, ‘You know your son could be in our army’. Both the guerillas and paramilitaries take young children into war. I will tell you a story I heard from Miguel. The guerillas were doing an internal investigation. But in the guerillas as in the paramilitary an internal investigation usually ends in execution, as it was in this case.

ER Not surprising.

JME The young soldier who was going to be executed had a brother in the same company. And Martin Caballero, the guerilla leader in this particular area, has the brother execute his own brother. He is forced to do it. A few weeks later the brother who killed his own brother runs away from the guerillas and he enters the opposite force of the far right paramilitaries. These two brothers came from a village called El Salado, where the civil population was stigmatized as being collaborators of the guerillas. A few months later, the far right performs a huge massacre in El Salado that lasts for three days. They kill the civilians in the football field so that everyone can be a spectator of the horror. And it is the brother who had to kill his brother who goes to the massacre of El Salado and tells the paramilitary: ‘She was the girlfriend of a guerilla soldier.’ So they murder her. ‘She would sell water to the guerillas.’ They kill her. He came from the village and he was the informer of the village. It was one of the most horrific massacres done in all of Colombia. Anthropologists have studied it, people study it and here we have this story of one man that tells us exactly how war works.

Silencio Azul, 2010

ER I have never lived through anything like that, so I am a little surprised that killing one’s own brother turns this man even more into the act of killing and into the act of turning against one’s people. I thought he left the guerillas to escape that, but he becomes …

JME Immersed in vengeance. Immersed in vengeance because that is what the cycles of war have done in Colombia.

ER And then when does it stop?

JME Correct, correct, correct … correct, correct, correct … correct, correct (his voice fades). Is the story clear?

ER Yes, yes.

JME Thank you, because it is an important story. In that horrific story there is a web and the Colombian war is like that. Everything is tied together.

ER So why photograph schoolhouses? How do they fit into this web of the Colombian war that you are documenting?

JME There is a lot of silence in Colombia about certain aspects of the war. And when you enter these abandoned schools you feel that silence in the absence of the voice of the children. In any school anywhere in the world when we learn how to say the alphabet, we say aaaaaah, beeeeeee, ceeeeeeee…

Silencio Dorado, 2010

ER Yes and we learn to sing alphabet songs.

JME Correct, so when I see these empty blackboards and the vowels written on the wall above them I feel that these schools were enveloped by silence, embalmed by silence. I feel that these schools are saying: ‘How long I have been waiting for you to photograph me, so you can speak about my silence?’

ER What does it feel like to be in one?

JME In many of the schools there is nothing but abandonment. Emptiness. But the most disturbing ones are those that have become pigsties or corrals for other animals.

ER There is a fantastic video of a donkey standing in front of a blackboard in one of these abandoned schoolhouses. The donkey’s tail is brushing away flies, its skin twitches, and the hoof stomps. It is only two minutes long but it is also so powerful, especially the noise of the donkey’s hoof hitting the ground in an otherwise silent exhibition. Why break the silence of the exhibition with that sound?

JME I didn’t put the donkey in the school. He was there. I placed myself in front of the blackboard to take the photograph and he placed himself in front of the blackboard. I did the video, because I was so impressed that there was a living thing, of its own volition, in this abandoned school!

ER And this was rare in the schoolhouses?

JME Correct. I asked Gabrielle, the person who took me to this school, why is the donkey here? The school hadn’t been turned into a corral – there was no food, no gate barring the donkey’s exit. He said: ‘That donkey is here because he once brought a child to the school everyday and he picked up the child at the end of each day. He has come back for that child but the child is no longer here. He waits everyday for that child who never comes.’

ER Does the piece have name?

JMEUna lección. A Lesson.

Testigo Limón, 2010

ER Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced people in the world. Close to 10% of the population. To be internally displaced, what a ghoulish term, it sounds like being lost within oneself. What lessons did you learn about how to make sense of the loss of a self and home place from shooting Silencios?

JME In these photos there is a double displacement – first the displacement of the children and of the population who used these schools, and then the displacement of those who have come into the schools now that the violence has subsided to make the classroom into their homes. I prefer the term forcefully displaced instead of internally displaced because internal displacement is almost a euphemism, a way of softening the tragedy. Forceful displacement is truer to the act.

ER I see, the term forceful displacement carries coercion with it. When we hear this term we know that leaving the home has ceased to be a personal choice.

JME Exactly. One displaced woman said to me a sentence, an oral metaphor, ‘Nosotros nos llevamos el tronco, pero dejamos las raíces allá.’ Translated it means, ‘we brought our trunks but the roots stayed there’. That is an image of physical, of spiritual and psychological mutilation. And I think it is the most perfect metaphor that I have heard about forceful displacement.

ER I see in your images the small dignity of those who have been forcefully displaced through the everyday objects that adorn the classrooms they have appropriated – a calendar, a hair comb, a neatly folded pair of trousers. When you could focus only on horror you also bring this dignity in and with it comes a tiny bit of hope. I don’t know if hope is the right word.

JME I think the right word is dignity. Because when I go to these places and I see families living in what used to be classrooms and I see how much love and care there is in that new home.

ER The way the objects are arranged by the families seems very intentional, very careful.

JME Yes, and nothing is superfluous. They have just what is necessary – the toothbrush, the toothpaste, the toilet paper. We see humanity at its essence. Imagine being displaced four times, and you continue to have a dignified space to live with your family. There are some small miracles. And there is hope in that because despite the violence and every horror we have inflicted on each other, life returns to these spaces once again. Earlier you asked me about the sound of the donkey’s hoof, and why I chose to have it interrupt the silence in the exhibition. I forgot to answer that question but I would like to answer it now. When that donkey touches the ground with his hoof he is saying, ‘I am here. Look at me. I am present.’

By Gemma Tipton

Mark Garry, Mound II, 2014, powder pigment on gesso, 101 × 72 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

So is it something a little biblical? Like the rainbow appearing after the great flood that (almost) destroyed the earth, are these rainbows catching onto a new more optimistic zeitgeist?

Giorgio Griffa, Dalla terra al cielo, 1979, acrylic on canvas,
2.4 × 2.2 m. Courtesy: the artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York; photograph: Jean Vong

Bea McMahon, Self Pleasuring Series No. 7, 2014, 24 × 33 cm, colouring pencil on paper.
Courtesy: the artist and Green on Red Gallery, Dublin

By Vivian Sky Rehberg

Postcard from Amsterdam: a unique cultural collaboration

Fouad Bouchoucha's installation 'Landscape', 2014, as part of 'Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo'

‘Trouw Invites…’ is an initiative of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and De Verdieping, the cultural foundation associated with TrouwAmsterdam, a club / restaurant / cultural platform that, in its own words, specializes in ‘progressive art and culture’.

Located in East Amsterdam (Amsterdam-Oost) on Wibautstraat – once known as Amsterdam’s ugliest street – TrouwAmsterdam, which opened in 2009, is an important, cutting-edge fixture on the Amsterdam club scene, hosting concerts and DJs, exhibitions, screenings and culinary events.

TrouwAmsterdam, photo: Ronny Theeuwes

The cultural platform is named after the industrial Trouw building it occupies. The structure once housed the printing presses for the daily newspaper Trouw, founded in 1943 as an organ of the Protestant Resistance during World War II. It has recently been sold and TrouwAmsterdam will vacate those premises in January 2015, but the link between the Stedelijk and De Verdieping is a durable one, which pre-dates the re-opening of the museum and its new annex designed by Benthem Crouwel Architects in 2013.

The Trouw building, Amsterdam

As the brain-child of Olaf Boswijk, Trouw’s owner; Kim Tuin, director of De Verdieping and co-initiator of the project ‘Trouw Invites…’ and Hendrik Folkerts, the Stedelijk’s Curator of Performance, Film & Discursive Programs, the collaboration is partially driven by a desire to broaden and diversify the audience for contemporary art and culture, or at least to recognize the fact that there is no ‘given’ audience or public for either – rather, one that must be cultivated and nourished.

‘Trouw Invites…’ follows upon ‘Stedelijk at Trouw: Contemporary Art Club’ in 2013, which revolved around monthly interdisciplinary, thematic programs (Motion, Utopia, Data) that featured musicians, thinkers, dancers, media and visual artists, including Cyprien Gaillard, Camille Henrot, Hugh Howey, Sarah Morris, Geert Mul, Nederlands Dans Theater and Jimmy Robert. The new project will consist of three monthly episodes, which I’ll cover on the frieze blog, exploring the themes of temporality and transience, which will run until 30 November 2014.

For ‘Trouw Invites…’ TrouwAmsterdam and Stedelijk reached out to international institutions (Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Beirut in Cairo, and The New Museum in New York) and offered them the possibility to curate ambitious site-specific projects in the very spacious basement of the building. The only basic parameter was that the installations would be open during evening opening hours to all visitors of the club or restaurant.

I couldn’t make it to the opening of Fouad Bouchoucha’s inaugural project, titled Landscape, which was curated by the Palais de Tokyo’s Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, but I was generously welcomed during the broad light of day by Boswijk, who described the multi-institutional collaboration with a passion matched only by his insouciance about what might come after TrouwAmsterdam’s closure. Descending into the lower level of the club, with its grittier, yet still achingly hip interior, a few posters modestly indicated the entrance, via a lipstick red antechamber, to Bouchoucha’s installation.

Fouad Bouchoucha’s installation ‘Landscape’, 2014, as part of ‘Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo’

One enters the space through dark curtains, then climbs a few stairs before being confronted with a dingy, grey mist that almost entirely obscures the architectural features. Bouchoucha indicates direction and leads the spectator toward a frontal view by placing a railing in front of a set of thick columns, the bases and tops of which are buried in the mist. But with no visual means of apprehending distance or depth it is impossible to grasp anything but a very abstract notion of the space in which one is standing. Granted, this disorienting experience was probably enhanced by the fact that I am virtually night-blind and there were only three of us standing in the space at the time, and the club beyond was silent, but it was still impressive, in an anti-James Turellian-way.

Bouchoucha says he was inspired by writer René Daumal’s unfinished cult book Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, which was published in 1952, eight years after the author’s untimely death at the age of 36. Daumal’s Mount Analogue, which traces an expedition to an inaccessible but geographically located mountain peak, also motivated filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain (1973) and jazz composer and musician John Zorn’s 2012 eponymous album.

Bouchoucha guides us toward this mysterious, remote, allegorical mountainscape by setting up a promontory from which we can ponder the possible vastness of the fictional geography that lies before us and then destroys any sensation of groundedness one might have gained by randomly puncturing the air with a terrifyingly loud blast of sound that recalls the single boom of an explosion or shot. The last chapter of Mount Analogue is titled ‘And you, what do you seek?’ If spiritual access to the great beyond was an aim of Daumal’s drug experiments, pataphysical associations, and esoteric ways, Bouchoucha’s Landscape effectively keeps the unknowable, here eerily figured as a menacing, un-apprehended and therefore incomprehensible vista, and any answers to Daumal’s final question, at a safe enough distance.

‘Trouw Invites…Palais de Tokyo’ at TrouwAmsterdam

‘Trouw Invites… Palais de Tokyo: Fouad Bouchoucha’ lasts until 3August 2014. The following two programmes are ‘Trouw Invites… Beirut: Rayyane Tabet’ (4 September 4 to 5 October; and ‘Trouw Invites… New Museum: AUNTS Performance Collective’ (6 November to 30 November 30 2014).

Vivian Sky Rehberg is an art historian and critic and a contributing editor of frieze. She is Course Director of the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.

By Jennifer Higgie

Gerhard Staebler, Change, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

Flying into Bergen is not like flying into London. As the plane loses altitude the colourful wooden houses perched on the shores of Norway’s wild, rocky coast come into focus and the surprise is, they’re real, not the figment of some long-dead children’s writer’s imagination. It’s hard to believe that such a quaint harbour town is so deeply immersed in, and welcoming of, the wildly unpredictable vagaries of experimental music. (But then that’s Norway: apparently the country hosts almost one music festival a day.) For once a year for the past ten years, Bergen has been transformed into a place that the Borealis Festival, whose tenth birthday it is this year, describes as: ‘a meeting place, laboratory and development space for adventurous music and ideas’. I had never been to the festival before, and sadly I could only spare a few days but by the end of my stay I had only two regrets: 1) that I hadn’t seen and heard the entire, fascinating programme (I was especially sad to miss Free Exercise, a new work by Marina Rosenfeld, and a ‘guided listening session’ on the history of magic and the occult in music by Rob Young) and 2) that I had forgotten to bring an umbrella. For Bergen’s other claim to fame – apart from music – is that it is the rainiest city in Europe, which sort of means the world. Try and buy an umbrella, though, as I did, and you are doomed, because everyone in Bergen wears Goretex, a material that is a stranger to my skin. A friend of mine once had an exhibition in Bergen and he said, quite seriously, that you couldn’t hear the speeches because of the rustling of Goretex-clad members in the audience. (This is getting off the point, but what was really weird was the amount of hairdressers in Bergen. They were everywhere! This was pointed out to me by the reviews editor of Gramophone magazine, Andrew Meller, and he was right. His great blog on Borealis can be found here: http://www.moosereport.net/borealis/)

But back to the Borealis Festival. This year, it was once again programmed by composer and performer Alwynne Pritchard, who has been its dynamic artistic director of the past six years; her replacement, Peter Meanwell, was formerly a producer at BBC radio 3, and I can vouch for the fact that he knows a terrifying amount about the different ways human beings can express themselves via that loose category we call ‘music’. Along with Meanwell, there’s recently been something of a migration of British talent to Bergen: Martin Clark, formerly Artistic Director of Tate St Ives, became the Director of the Bergen Kunsthalle (replacing Solveig Øvstebø, who relocated to Chicago to become Director of the Renaissance Society) and Ed Gardner is the Principal Guest Conductor of the Bergen Philharmonic.

The festival’s theme this year was ‘Alchemy’, which was justified in the press bumpf thus: ‘In its quest to transform base metals into gold, alchemy evolved a wealth of scientific and spiritual theories, beliefs, practices and rituals from which this year’s programme has evolved. Transformation in its broadest manifestation has always been relevant to artists, but the specifics of alchemy have provided even more localized and remarkable starting points for the musicians we have worked closely with this year. These specially commissioned pieces explore not only the core subject of alchemy, but also ritual, magic and the supernatural … the Festival will be covering subjects ranging from the ancient Leyden papyrus (an instruction manual for extracting precious metals from everyday materials), the transformation of sound through matter, and the art of recording voices from beyond the grave.’ I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of thing that sets my pulse going.

François Sarhan, The Last Lighthouse Keepers, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

Venues for the Festival were scattered all over Bergen. The first night of my visit we walked through the charming, rainy streets to an old tuna-canning factory on the edge of the bay that has been turned into an arts centre, the USF, to see and hear François Sarhan’s new work The Last Lighthouse Keepers. We all sat on red cushions in the middle of floor, surrounded by large photocopies and mobiles roughly taped to the walls and hanging from the ceiling: a huge hand pouring liquid, pianos, ladders and clocks (yes, Surrealism 101). Four performers – Céline Bernard (foley artist), Mark Knoop (on piano), Adam Rosenblatt (percussion) and Sarhan himself – then proceeded to create an moody narrative about dislocation and creativity that swiftly moved between absurdity, farce, and suddenly touching moments of vulnerability. Sarhan – in a standard classical music black suit but with bare feet (everyone had bare feet I assume to better signify dream state/openness/unconventionality), stood in front of the piano. To the accompaniment of a piece for solo piano that evoked, in turn, a Satie-esque lyricism, minimalism and echoes of Gershwin, Sarhan intoned lines including ‘It has always been a source of amazement’; ‘there’s not a real moment when I decided … to become a musician’; ‘I think I was formatted totally formless’, etc. Eventually, after an inspired marimba performance, and an increasingly frenzied dance of performers around the room tearing everything down, peace reigned. I thought it a curious work: inventive, compelling, even, at times, moving, but also a little corny (clocks and ladders?). In an interview afterwards, Sarhan (who has collaborated with William Kentridge) explained his thought processes, declaring that ‘the real artists are the lighthouse keepers’ and, warming, to his metaphor, explaining that ‘as lighthouses are becoming redundant with GPS, nobody needs what we do’. Describing a paradox that became familiar at Borealis, Sarhan spoke of how, in his opinion, we need stories in order both to explain reality and to escape it. His role as ‘the actor’ in The Last Lighthouse Keepers embodies an-all-too familiar strategy in the art world of being unable to express something with words, and so employing images to do the job. Here, however, the music was more interesting than the images – but then I guess it was a music festival.

Felix Kubin, Paralektronoia, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

Next on the agenda, back at the packed Landmark venue (next to the Kunsthalle) was Felix Kubin’s amusing and rather wonderful lecture/performance Paralektronoia, an updated version of his 2004 radio play about electricity, ghosts and paranoia, based on interviews with various characters – from scientists to artists and other people whose jobs I wasn’t entirely clear about, but who regularly heard disembodied voices (one woman explained that she was ‘actually like an antenna’). As Kubin declared a tad defensively at the beginning of the piece: ‘I am an artist, not a scientist and an artist can do whatever they want to do’. I loved Paralektronoia, not least for its sympathy for the dead and for its sonic surprises. As one of his contacts declared: ‘I think ghosts have a difficult time these days. It is difficult for them to be left alone.’

Kurt Johannessen and Simon Phillips, Biblioludium, 2014, performance ephemera, Borealis Festival, Bergen

The next day, I walked through the rain to the Bergen Public Library to hear/see Biblioludium, a collaboration between pianist Simon Phillips and Norwegian poet Kurt Johannessen that was held in a small crowded room that steamed slightly with the damp from everyone’s clothes. The piece apparently developed from two simple questions: Could a sentence become a score? What happens if a poem drowns in the sound of a piano? What transpired was an exercise in distilled minimalism, if that’s not a tautology. (It somehow seemed more minimal than minimal.) Here’s what happened: Johannessen, in a black tshirt, a jacket, and a sweet, faintly bewildered smile, tapped the microphone, as if testing its sound. This went on for a while; Philips then took up the rhythm on the wood of the piano. Johannessen then slowly gave out pieces of paper to every member of the audience, and smiled warmly at them. I, too, was smiled at and given a slip of paper, which had one sentence on it, but it was in Norwegian, which I don’t speak. (I gave it later to a local person I met, who promised to translate it for me and email me, but they never did. Sad.) Apparently they were poems. Johannessen drank water if the exertion got too much. Seemingly random notes were played at unexpected intervals on the piano. At one point, Johannessen lit a torch and asked a member of the audience to get under it with him. I’m not sure what happened under there but they emerged eventually. Then, Johannessen worked his way back through the audience again, handing out more paper. One man said ‘no’ to the note, and shook his head, as if bored or disgusted by the performance. I don’t know what he was so mad about; he could have left. Despite my incomprehension, there was something rather great about it all; the way everything slowed right down and clarity, for once, wasn’t privileged over a kind of enigmatic delicacy.

From there, we walked back to USF to see a screening of the 2002 film A Bookshelf on Top of the Sky: 12 Stories About John Zorn by Claudia Heuermann. I had three problems with it: a) I was totally drenched from the rain, which had turned into snow, and so a little preoccupied with trying to get dry, and b) the film was shot by someone whose hands shook the whole time, and so I got travel sick in about ten minutes c) John Zorn came across as possibly the most arrogant man alive. So I left, went back to my hotel, had a hot shower and dried off. By the way, I should mention the incredible hospitality, and the helpful army of volunteers: the festival put on a free vegetarian kitchen for visitors to the Festival, and the soup was delicious.

Fausto Romitelli, An Index of Metals, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

A while later I returned to the USF for possibly the most talked-about and anticipated performance of the Festival: the Italian composer Fausto Romitelli’s An Index of Metals, performed by the BIT20 Ensemble, which comprised 11 amplified instruments conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. The soprano was Christina Daletska, who had something of the Viking about her. Romitelli died of cancer at 41 ten years ago; An Index of Metals was the last work he composed (Kenka Lèkovich’s wrote the libretto) and it is full of foreboding, anger and a terrible sense of inevitability. It opened beautifully, with repeated, anguished phrases, like a heartbeat gone wrong; projections of abstract patterns that evoked mutating cells drifted in and out of focus. Daletska’s voice was like sunlight in clouds that gradually developed into an operatic howl. As it developed, however, I had problems with its melodrama; it was pitched so relentlessly at an acute level of emotional anguish that despite its power, it grew wearisome at times, and at moments, veered too close to rock opera. Also, I thought the mix was bad; the levels were all over the place, but nonetheless, I’m glad I heard it. It was brilliant, moving, flawed. Terrible to think of this young composer’s potential, stopped, so tragically, mid-flow.

We then all trooped back over to the Kulturhuset for Bass Drum, a 90-minute performance by Morten J. Olsen, a rather wonderful percussionist who lives in Stavanger, further down the coast in Norway. He was positioned in the middle of an empty gallery, with (you guessed it) an enormous bass drum. We sat around the edge, watching, listening, as he did all manner of things to it with a huge variety of objects, from domestic items to what looked like hand-made sculptures (I could be wrong). I found it hypnotic, soothing even after the anguish of An Index of Metals.

At midnight next door, in Landmark, was the most joyous 90 minutes or so of the festival: the magnificent US band Deerhoof, whose sheer inventive brilliance is matched by drummer’s Greg Saunier’s repartee (he is eerily like Jim Carrey) and Satomi Matsuzaki’s manic dancing (on two occasions she bought the stack of amps down, but no-one seemed to mind). It was immense fun. They seemed like nice people, too. They had such an early morning flight they decided to stay up all night. Rumour had it that Saunier, accompanied by a mug of Earl Grey tea, was seen vacuuming the venue in the wee hours.

Øyvind Torvund, Constructing Jungle Books, 2014, performance documentation, Borealis Festival, Bergen

The next day was my last day, and I was lucky I got to see/hear Øyvind Torvund’s commission for Borealis, Constructing Jungle Books, a sonic collage of music inspired by the composer’s research into jungle field recordings from the Berlin Natural History Museum. It was performed by the 24 or so members of Berlin’s Splitter Orchester in an atmospheric, crumbling old warehouse on the edge of town, overlooking the water. As the rain fell steadily outside, the music evoked time travel as much as travel into a jungle: a harpsichord, a cellist, a double bass, a guitarist and a flautist shared the stage with a man playing a spoon and turntable. The composition comprised samples of other music – both from centuries ago and last week – other animals, other places, the howls of wild animals, the faint intimation of crickets and birdsong and a trombone’s lament. It stayed with me as I flew back to London, later that day. When I landed, I thought: next year, I want to return.

By Mike Watson

Teatro Valle, Rome

In Rome, few things are as constant as its near incessant heat. As for governments, both on a national as well as local level, the only thing that seems constant about them is that they constantly change. Italy has had 46 different governments since 1946, as opposed to, for example, just 14 in the UK.

On the level of local infrastructure, things remain barely more consistent. The Comune di Roma – Rome’s Council – is effectively the same office that was already presided over by the Emperors of Ancient Rome. Whilst the intricate machinations of power may not be as brutal now as they were then, the common tendency for incoming, new mayors to demonstrate their will to change things by sacking all of the directors of the city’s cultural and heritage spaces, followed by a slow re-selection process, inevitably proves damaging to continuity. In the months since Mayor Ignazio Marino entered office, in April 2013, such a situation has had a detrimental effect on Rome’s contemporary art scene, leaving the MACRO– Rome’s museum of contemporary art – with a caretaker director and a makeshift programme. The last director, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, was asked to clear his desk in July 2013, two years after taking over from his predecessor, Luca Massimo Barbero. With Rome’s former cultural hub now operating a barebones programme run by a skeleton staff, its four resident artists – Guglielmo Castelli, Nemanja Cvijanović, Anna Franceschini, and André Romão – have managed against the odds to produce impressive residency shows. However, this was not enough to save Rome’s assessor of culture Flavia Barca from being relieved of her position on May 26th following eleven months of obfuscation over the MACRO’s future.

MACRO museum, Rome

With the Comune di Roma’s debt standing at over 850 million euros, people have naturally been left asking if there might be alternative forms of management for the arts, which can sidestep the Kafkaesque machinations of State and regional governance. In Italy in the last three years, just such an alternative has been seen in action with occupied spaces such as Teatro Valle (Rome), MACAO (Milan), Teatro Garibaldi Aperto (Palermo), SaLE Docks, Morion and Teatro Marinoni (Venice) who have all to varying degrees explored the notion of the ‘commons’, or bene comune (‘common good’).

This idea of bene comune finds its roots in article 43 of the Italian Constitution, which provides for the management of ‘essential public services, energy sources or monopolistic situations which have a primary public interest’, by the State, public entities or communities of workers. That article has become the focus of intense debate, since a group of theatre workers occupied Teatro Valle – Rome’s oldest functioning theatre, built in 1726 – in June 2011 and declared it a bene comune one day after the public voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to make the water system a common good, rather than privatizing it. The theatre worker’s unique solution has been to establish the theatre as a private foundation – the Fondazione Teatro Valle Bene Comune ¬– open to and owned by anyone and everyone, with status as an associate with decision making status costing a nominal ten euros (with this money being raised to cover the cost of establishing a foundation). After living relatively comfortably alongside the right wing administration of Giorgio Alemanno, the left wing mayor Marino has asked Teatro Valle’s occupiers to lower the curtains and vacate the building, so that it may be publicly tendered – effectively auctioned to the highest private bidder. Marino does so despite Teatro Valle’s provision of an ongoing free programme, involving contributions from renowned international actors, artists (Tino Sehgal, as well as the collectives Chto Delat? and VOINA), activists, academics and politicians (amongst them former Italian presidential candidate Stefano Rodotà), activities that have ignited no less than a Pan-Italian bene commune movement. As Teatro Valle remains defiant, the outcome of the developing battle for its future will be crucial in shaping Italy’s cultural landscape.

The mayor’s call for eviction followed the occupation, by around 50 theatre workers from Teatro Valle, of the offices of Rome’s assessor of culture on July 3rd, where they held a press conference detailing their summer programme. The ‘happening’, entitled ‘Summer Holidays’ was not least held to highlight the fact that Rome’s council had at that point been without an assessor of culture for over one month, hampering the delivery of a programme of contemporary art in Rome. The occupiers – dressed in beach gear and holding parasols, buckets and spades and other beach paraphernalia – also repeated calls for a direct meeting with Marino, before returning ‘home’ to Teatro Valle in the evening. One day later the Mayor’s office issued a simple statement saying that, following a period of uncertainty in Teatro Valle’s management, which ‘the previous Mayor has not wanted to deal with’, it is now necessary to ‘return the theatre to the Roman public’. To this effect a sale of the theatre will be held in conjunction with MiBACT (Italy’s ministry of culture and tourism). This decision ignores guidance for the theatre’s future detailed in a 97-page document commissioned in March 2013 by the serving minister of culture. That dossier, subsequently compiled by a panel of experts under Marino’s tenure, in conjunction with Teatro Valle’s occupiers and respected theatre directors, concluded that: ‘It’s important to allow the values and experience that Teatro Valle Bene Comune has produced to become part of the genetic code for a future management solution.’ In response to the Mayor’s statement effecting the sale of Teatro Valle, the activists replied the following day saying that if the Mayor sees no value in ‘any kind of encounter or dialogue’, then he must take responsibility for any eventual forced removal by the police. Given the dire situation within the arts in Italy, with museums often running without a direction or budget – as is the case not only with Rome’s MACRO, but also, for example, with Turin’s Castello di Rivoli – closing the innovative and highly influential Teatro Valle would send a profoundly detrimental signal for the future of the Italian arts both at home and abroad.

Article 9 of the Italian constitution states that ‘The Republic promotes the development of culture and scientific and technical research. It safeguards landscape and the historical and artistic heritage of the Nation.’ In this light and given the success of Teatro Valle Bene Comune as a unique cultural space with an international reputation, the battle with the Council of Rome has effectively become one over who has true legitimacy with regard to arts management in a city with a rich cultural history. A new assessor of culture, Giovanna Marinelli, was appointed on 14 July. One day later, she called for a ‘return to legality’, convening a meeting between herself, Marino, occupants of Teatro Valle, and Ugo Mattei, a legal scholar at the forefront of the Bene Comune movement at Teatro di Roma. Since then, Marino’s absolute determination to put an end to what has been a rich and productive cultural phenomenon has been made even more clear. This is hardly surprising as, after all, Teatro Valle and the bene commune movement not only make the case that culture is an inalienable human right, but set a precedent whereby if an art space can be run as a bene commune, so too could possibly a hospital, a school, even perhaps a financial system. They therefore directly challenge the traditional definition of ownership and the role of the State or governing body: in this case the Rome Council.

On 28th July at a meeting attended by Giovanna Marinell, Marino Sinbaldi – the President of Teatro Roma – and occupants of Teatro Valle, the latter’s request to continue managing Teatro Valle at least in collaboration with Teatro Roma and the Rome Council was refused. The occupiers of Teatro Valle – who have vowed to contest their eviction peacefully – left the theatre itself on 11 August, but continued occupying the foyer to press for further negotiations. From 12 August Teatro Valle has been closed, with the keys handed over to the Comune of Rome. It is unclear what level of involvement the occupiers will have in its future, but negotiations and campaigning will continue to ensure that a valuable experience will not be forgotten. What seems possible, following Mayor Marino’s demands that Teatro Valle be ‘returned to the public’, is that his own office will continue or end depending on his ability to convince the public that it is him – and not the theatre’s occupants – who are acting in the public interest. But in any case, a new convincing model of cultural management has been born in Italy, which sets a precedent that may go far beyond culture alone.

Mike Watson, while he did not have an active role in the development of the theatre and delivery of its programme, is an associate supporter of Teatro Valle, under the terms of the statute which can be seen here (Italian only).

By Hansi Momodu-Gordon

The Black Cultural Archives: An Independent Intervention

Aerial view of Black Cultural Archives, Windrush Square, Brixton. Photograph: Edmund Sumner

Three thousand people gathered in Windrush Square, Brixton, to celebrate the opening of the Black Cultural Archives’ (BCA) bespoke new building. As I stood among them, listening to the voice of Linton Kwesi Johnson, I was moved beyond words. Yet, the only way to really understand the gravity of that moment in July 2014 is to consider the time, in the not so distant past, when the archive was first established.

New BCA heritage centre building. Photograph: Edmund Sumner

London in 1981 cuts a somewhat different shape to the relative cohesion of today’s late-multiculturalist society: the founding of the Black Cultural Archives took place after a succession of events set London’s young black communities in opposition to the Metropolitan Police Service, erupting into the Brixton uprisings of April 10–11. Thatcherism, the pinnacle of National Front support at local elections, overt racism and large-scale unemployment all weighed down Britain’s young black people. Many of them were born in Britain – the sons and daughters of the ‘Windrush generation’ so called after the arrival of the Empire Windrush ship, that carried the first group of migrant workers from Kingston, Jamaica, docking in Tilbury, Essex in 1948. Encouraged to come to Britain to replenish the work force after the Second World War, many of these early migrants settled in Brixton and other parts of London. A generation later, overwhelmingly negative representations or complete omissions of the black experience in the media and other national institutions fuelled deep-set feelings of exclusion, disfranchisement and alienation as a generation of young people fought to set their own terms for what it might mean to be both black and British. Out of this moment came the urgent need for black communities in Brixton, London and across the country to take the narration of their history into their own hands. And the first wave of ephemera, photographs, documents and the occasional object, were the items placed in the care of the BCA because people within the community judged them to be of importance to a communal history and shared a concern for posterity.

BCA artistic director Paul Reid speaks to the crowd at the launch, 24 July 2014. Photograph: Sharron Wallace

Around this time, at the margins of Britain’s art scene, from Wolverhampton to London, a group of radical young artists – including Sonya Boyce, Eddie Chambers, Lubaina Himid and Keith Piper – was forming and asserting it’s presence as the nascent British Black Art Movement. It is worth remembering that landmark exhibitions such as ‘The Other Story’ held at the Hayward Gallery in 1989 in which curator Rashid Araeen brought together the United Kingdom’s first retrospective of African, Caribbean and Asian art did not come to fruition until the end of the decade. That year also saw Jean-Hubert Martin’s ‘Magicians de la Terre’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou and La Villette, Paris, which was to irreversibly shake up the story of a hegemonic Western art history; but in the early 1980s the turn towards diverse and inclusive programming within mainstream cultural organisations was still a way off.

Jessica Huntley (1927–2013), publisher of radical Black Literature. Courtesy: Black Cultural Archives Collection; © Neil Kenlock

From these beginnings, the Black Cultural Archives have transitioned from a grass-roots initiative into a forward looking organisation that is both archive and heritage centre. Housing a collection of 7,000 books and 31 cubic meters of archive material spanning five centuries, a reading room, exhibition space and the obligatory cafe and gift shop, the BCA’s new premises have taken pride of place on the corner of Windrush Square. Inaugurating the exhibition space is ‘Re-Imagine: Black Women in Britain’, which sets out to give us ‘a glimpse of some of these women, the traces of their lives lying in the vaults of national archives, libraries and museums of across the United Kingdom’; a sentence from the accompanying exhibition booklet that sets the agenda for the centre itself as a space for and means of navigating the various narratives of the archive. The exhibition space is partitioned and filled with vitrines and large-scale photographic reproductions. The first work you come across is an excerpt from John Akomfrah’s film Peripeteia (2012), projected beside a drawing entitled The Negress, Katharina (1521) by German painter and print maker Albrecht Dürer. Akomfrah’s piece offers a poetic imagining of a wondering young woman reminiscent of Dürer’s sitter, lost to the wild countryside whilst the sky glooms between dusk or dawn and the sound of wind whips steadily. The full length piece takes as its starting point two portraits made by Dürer in the 16th century – a man and a woman with compassionately rendered, distinctly Negro features which offer an early depiction of African experience in Europe. The exhibition portrays a selection of women – among them Doreen Lawrence, Florence Mills, Olive Morris and Mary Seacole – with significant stories often spanning many locations – from Africa, the Caribbean, the U.S and the U.K. The audio guide and wall texts tackle a complex and charged history from the perspective of the women who lived it. For audiences seeking to understand the important contributions that black women have made to the cultural, political and social fabric of Britain, the exhibition is enriching and informative. Yet, whilst the abundance of reproduction photographs did well the illustrate the point in hand, the art work of John Akomfrah certainly elevated the debate to a more nuanced aesthetic and made for the most rewarding encounter.

Mary Seacole (1805–1881), pioneering nurse who travelled independently to assist the injured of Crimean war. Courtesy: © Mary Seacole Trust

The next exhibition ‘Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s–1990s’ is the culmination of a partnership between the BCA and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), and is curated by BCA Trustee Kimberly Keith. The project began in 2007 with the aim to increase representations of the black experience within the V&A collection and has led to the acquistion of fine art photographic prints by 17 artists in total, 13 of African and Caribbean descent, amounting to 135 individual images. The project ‘Staying Power’ demonstrates the way in which the BCA archive and its representatives have been able to intervene within mainstream museum processes to form counter narratives and expand the canon. A selection of these new acquisitions will form part of the next exhibition that will take place at both the V&A and the BCA in Spring 2015 and include works by Charlie Philips, Ingrid Pollard, Yinka Shonibare and Maxine Walker amongst many others. Keith explains that ‘a lot of the material chosen for the exhibition at BCA deals with social history, community, identity’ – topics that resonate throughout the BCA’s archival holdings.

The opening of the BCA as both archive and exhibition space has the potential to promote and engage a new generation of artists who are once again re-negotiating what it means to be black and British. I put this point to Keith, who in response had this to say:
BCA is about partnerships, collaboration, remaining relevant to the community, if that is teaching about how history and the archive can inform arts practice, how arts practice and product can inform history and culture, I believe those are central to what we are doing. It’s a great big experiment, and I am looking forward to watching it unfold.

_____________

Conversation with Kimberly Keith, Trustee, Black Cultural Archives, 8 August 2014.

Title borrowed from ‘Independant Intavenshan: The Island Anthology’ by Linton Kwesi Johnson, 1998

By Cicely Farrer

Shilpa Gupta, Where do I end and you begin, 2012, neon, installation view at The Old Royal High School, photo: Stuart Armitt

During a panel discussion on themes of community and the commons as part of the opening day of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Canadian curator Kathleen Ritter cited the necessity for ‘incoherence’ when understanding narratives of the past and, in this case, those of the Commonwealth.

Although not the stated thematic, the notion of ‘incoherence’ provided an appropriate framing of the selection of works and artists in the festival’s central exhibition, ‘Where do I end and you begin’, which posed timely questions about the history and current status of the Commonwealth, and about the parallel notion of the ‘commons’. Edinburgh Art Festival is an annual event that was launched in 2004 and runs concurrently with the International Festival and the Fringe – a period when the city is taken over by a multitude of theatre and comedy professionals and aficionados, along with a plethora of tourists. Exhibitions, performances and talks take place throughout the month, and, as with neighbouring citywide festival Glasgow International, emerging Scotland-based artists are foregrounded alongside those with more established international profiles. In the summer that Glasgow hosted the 20th Commonwealth Games and with the referendum of Scottish independence pending, revisiting the position of nations states – particularly Commonwealth countries – within the global economic system certainly seemed apt.

Mary Sibande, The Allegory of Growth, 2014

‘Where do I end and you begin’ started at the City Art Centre. Contributions from 21 artists – including Mary Evans, Antonia Hirsch, Uriel Orlow, Mary Sibande, Shannon Te Ao and Yvonne Todd – hailing from the Commonwealth countries of Canada, India, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK were installed across four floors. Allegory of Growth (2014), South African artist Mary Sibande’s latest work involving her fictional alter-ego, ‘Sophie’, enigmatically welcomed visitors to the exhibition, her sprawling purple silk underskirts reaching out like intertwining tentacles crawling towards the audience. Sophie has found multiple forms in Sibande’s practice, symbolizing the black woman as active subject and contending histories of female oppression and exploitation. Questions of ‘common experience’ and ‘shared identity’ were proposed throughout the exhibition, frequently articulated in relation to the body. In her highly staged photographic series, ‘Ethical Identities [Vegans]’ (2014), New Zealand artist Yvonne Todd questioned stereotypes and preconceptions about veganism. Directing soft pastel coloured lights on her subjects, who were sought out through adverts placed in newspapers and online, to produce eerie portraits, Todd makes light of the often unfounded expectations that exist around how people choose to live, look and dress.

Amar Kanwar, The Sovereign Forest, 2011- 2014,  installation view at The Old Royal High School, photo: Stuart Armitt

The exhibition expanded offsite where Amar Kanwar’s ongoing installation The Sovereign Forest (2011–) was mounted in the Old Royal High School, a 19th century building on Calton Hill overlooking the city. The Great Hall of the school was converted into a debating chamber in 1968 in preparation for the 1979 referendum for devolution in Scotland but as this did not come to pass, was never used as such. Kanwar’s sumptuous HD film, The Scene of Crime (2011), was projected on a large screen in a pitch black, never been used, debating chamber. Focusing on the grief of loss in a place of conflict, The Scene of Crime uses long panning shots of the terrains of the east India state Odisha (formerly Orissa) cut with scenes of civic clashes. Since 1999, Kanwar has been filming the conflicts in various villages and towns in Odisha which continue to take place between the people and state police in response to commercial acquisition of and industrial construction on the land. By way of these protracted images of natural beauty, The Scene of Crime instilled a sense of ‘slow time’ memorializing the landscape, its ecology and the relationships that existed within and with it. Also at the High School, looming, barely legible, above the building was the exhibition’s statement piece, Shilpa Gupta’s nine-metre neon light sculpture Where do I end and you begin. The text-based sculpture traces the words of its title, questioning the relationship between the self and the other. However given its eponymous status, and its frequent utterance in the catalogue and public programme, the work became an uncomfortable icon, its overuse affecting (for me) the subtleties of the piece itself.

The festival itself spread far beyond this central exhibition, with a broad spectrum of exhibitions taking place across the city, many of which form part of the other major art event taking place in Scotland this summer, GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland. Edinburgh Art Festival sits in partial contrast to this compendious national survey, providing a global scope to situate the practices of the GENERATION artists.

Tessa Lynch, Raising, 2014, view of action at Jupiter Artland

On the outskirts of Edinburgh in the sculpture park Jupiter Artland, Glasgow based artist Tessa Lynch invited participants to perform Raising (2014) – a collective action of constructing a barn. As I arrived in the heavy rain, approximately 15 volunteers were beginning to erect the wooden frame of a fragmented barn according to an instructional maquette. Lynch’s project invokes an ancient tradition, practiced in England until 17th Century, ruling that if you could build a home and light a fire in a place before sunset, you could claim the land as your own. The declarative action raises questions of what constitutes public space and how communities can occupy it. It felt especially pertinent in Scotland where, according to a report published earlier this year, 432 individuals own half of the land.

Katie Patterson,Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (91,800g), 2014
found meteorite, cast melted and re-cast back into a new version of itself, 40.6 × 33 × 22.9 cm

Back in the city, at Ingleby Gallery, Katie Paterson’s six reformed meteorites (‘Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky’, 2013–14) lined the floor in an exhibition of works relating to cosmology and aiming to prompt a form of ecological thinking. Originally bought from a meteorite-dealer in Arizona, they were melted down and cast into new forms, one of which was sent back into space in an unmanned rocket on Tuesday 29 July. Paterson’s meteorites, much like her other works, take shape through a process of extensive research into physics and cosmology, and carefully orchestrated collaborations with scientists. Concerned with the physical position of her works in time and space, Paterson is particularly attuned to the longevity of her art objects. For instance, in her 100 year long project, The Future Library (2014–) (represented in this exhibition with an editioned print depicting the growth rings of a tree), she has planted a forest in Norway. After 100 years, the forest will be harvested to provide the paper for an anthology of books to be written, one per year, each by a different writer, until 2114. (The first writer is Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood.)

Katie Paterson, Fossil Necklace, 2014, installation view at Ingleby Gallery

Magic was on the cards at Rhubaba Artists’ Studio in Leith. Artist (and trained sleight of hand magician) in residence, Augusto Corrieri (otherwise known as Vincent Gambini) narrated the disputed story of Gambini’s Famous 4 Ace Trick while performing a complex card trick, as his two-channel video installation Diorama (2013) played alongside. Lamenting card tricks and illusion as a form of low art largely overlooked by critical attention, Corrieri explains, in a text accompanying the exhibition: ‘Perhaps its because magic’s basic premise is a little absurd: from *the start you are attempting to do something that the audience will not understand. Talk about an unemancipated spectator!’[ref].

Augusto Corrieri, Diorama, 2013, video still

Of course, during festival season, illusion and spectacle in all it’s forms is almost unavoidable. As with other events grouping multiple exhibitions and performances without a strong overaching theme or framework, the divergence between the show and artists on show at Edinburgh Art Festival was large. This did not detract, however, from the overall experience – as the chaos and cacophony of the city’s liveliest period attest, sometimes diversity and incoherence can be a compelling experience.

By Bart van der Heide

_Ger van Elk, The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.- Marken, 1971/1999_

The influence of Dutch artist Ger van Elk on the burgeoning stages of conceptual art in the 1960s remains undisputed. In 2009 van Elk, who passed away on 17 August 2014, was awarded a prominent position in the exhibition ‘In & Out of Amsterdam’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was dedicated to the European pioneers of this international art movement.

Van Elk was an active member of ‘Art and Project’ – the influential bulletin issued by the eponymous gallery – between 1970 and 1987, participated in three Documentas (numbers 5, 6 and 7), and represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennial in 1980. His work has been collected from early on by major institutional collections, after its inclusion in the influential exhibitions ‘Op Losse Schoeven’ at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1968, and ‘When Attitudes become Form’ at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969.

Ger van Elk, The Symmetry of Diplomacy (Portrait), 1971 However, van Elk never chose the obvious approach. While developing close bonds with artists such as Jan Dibbets, John Baldessari, Gilbert and George, or Piero Gilardi, he never committed either to a close friendship or to one of the dominant styles they were associated with. Instead, he favoured the position of critical observer and, sometimes, provocateur. He fluidly incorporated elements from Arte Povera, Pop Art, Fluxus or Minimal Art into his work. On top of that, he embraced classical media and art historical themes, exactly when many of his contemporaries saw renouncing tradition as the only possible way forward. This made separation an inherent part of van Elk’s career, both professionally as well as personally, which may even have contributed to his virtual disappearance from the international art market over the last two decades. Looking back at van Elk’s oeuvre, one could even go as far as saying that separation and parting company, beyond the merely anecdotal, became a conceptual and aesthetic conviction.

To start with, Ger van Elk separated subject matter from its artistic representation. For him, the depiction of truth was inherently unreliable: the more realistic an image appeared, the greater the lie. Hence, from an early stage in his career he anticipated the postmodern understanding of images as political, moral, intellectual and emotional constructions. As a result the artworks of van Elk celebrate artificiality and become a critical investigation into their own deceptive qualities.

Ger van Elk, The Adieu. 1974. Gouache and ink on colour photograph (in irregular quadrilateral frame), 132 × 84 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

The starting point of van Elk’s artworks are often autobiographical, using documentary photography, film and self-portraiture as templates. Yet subject matter is neutralised, and the influence of artist intention on a work’s meaning is diminished as well. Take, for example The Adieu (1974). A series of different photographs shows the artist himself waving goodbye to his audience. Each of the photographs is hand-painted and drawn upon, and set in oddly shaped frames, creating the optical illusion that one was looking at the work from an extreme angle. In the centre of the image stands an easel supporting a canvas, depicted in a similarly extreme, yet differently tilted angle. On the canvas, the waving artist appears on a tree-lined country road, similar to the ones appearing in 17th century Dutch landscape paintings. Behind the canvas, a heavy dark curtain is half-opened to reveal a monochrome background, or a suggestion of a clouded sky. The title of the work, already a linguistic construction of two languages, still suggests the subject of the artist’s depiction, but in the final outcome of the work, this is overruled by the extravagantly elaborated composition; accordingly the work itself claims sovereignty.

In his recent series of painted photographs, entitled ‘Conclusion’, a sort of portrait of the artist is similarly taken as a conceptual starting point, yet here this aspect is both thematically and visually made opaque. The base of a ‘Conclusion’ is a photograph of a site that bares a special memory for van Elk. This photograph is printed on canvas and stretched over a thick frame. In the finished work the remnants of this image can only be seen on the sides of the canvas, as the front side of the picture is concealed behind monochrome layers of paint. Hence, these works continue van Elk’s incorporation of perspective deformations, because each ‘Conclusion’ is shaped by the angle in which it can be observed to the full.

Echoing a tradition going back to Marcel Duchamp, the shift of perspectives that consistently reoccur in van Elk’s oeuvre symbolise an artist stepping back in order to leave a space for the spectator to enter. The introduction of a variety of stand points (either towards his own work or to the historical references he sources from) can in this light be seen as his rejection of a singular point of view. But van Elk has shown us that referencing, outsourcing or commenting alone are not enough to question authenticity. The blunt artificiality of his works underline the role a work of art plays in engaging the visitor’s attention. Experiencing an artwork by van Elk is most of all a visual play of seduction and curiosity. In doing so van Elk provides an important model for a young generation of artists dealing with authenticity in today’s image production.

Ger van Elk, The Missing Persons, Conversation Piece, 1976. Coloured photograph, 106 × 124 cm. Collection Nigel P. Greenwood, London.

Yet continuing Duchamp, the disappearance of an autobiographic subject does not mean invisibility. In his retouched photograph The Missing Persons, Conversation Piece (1976) for instance, a speaking person is erased within a conversing group. Despite his absence, the group is still looking at him. Similarly, Ger van Elk will continue to engage us even after his death, as long as we take the time to look at his work. However, for myself as an admirer who has been continuously influenced by van Elk, the ultimate realisation of his Adieu would ideally have been postponed as far as possible. With his passing, the world says goodbye to one of the most prolific, creative, courageous and stubborn geniuses of his generation.

By Noemi Smolik

Kazimir Malevich, Self Portrait, 1908-1910, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Kazimir Malevich, who is the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern until 26 October, is generally considered a difficult mystic. Most scholarly attempts to explain the artist are tinged with a creeping unease – never fully admitted to – regarding the supposed inscrutability of his works and writings.

Why is that the case? Is it the leaden seriousness? Heaviness really does sometimes pull so hard at his writings that anyone schooled in dialectics might actually be tempted to assume the opposite: what seems so heavy could in fact be light – absurd exaggerations indicating parody. Hold on a minute: Malevich as an artist guided by notions of the absurd?

Malevich began his artistic career with impressionistic, symbolic, fauvist paintings. His pictures of Russian peasants adopted elements of icon painting, before he moved on to cubist, cubo-futurist and so-called ‘alogic’ pictures. In keeping with the modernist credo of progress, these works have often been presented as a linear sequence of individual styles. From 1910, if not before, however, Malevich was painting in several styles at once. There are cubist works from 1911 – not only from 1913, as most exhibitions have tried to suggest – and during the same period he also produced the peasant paintings, and alogic pictures.

Malevich was not the only Russian artist to take this unusual approach. As a major 1913 retrospective of the then pre-eminent painter Natalia Goncharova in Moscow showed, she too painted in several styles simultaneously: impressionist, saints after icons, portraits in the style of Japanese woodcuts, strange cubist statues based on Scythian legends. And she did this deliberately, as the critic Ilia Zdanevich stated in a lecture given during the exhibition, in order to undermine the progress-based claim to hegemony and leadership being exerted by Modernism as it spread from the West.1

In Moscow at the time, a whole generation of young artists, poets, musicians and scholars was revolting against the Western model of linear progress and modernization. Their allegation was that this model served as an intellectual justification of Western culture’s claim to superiority over all other cultures, ethnicities and religions. The revolt was accompanied by an increased appreciation of Russian tradition as embodied in icons as well as in the oral tradition of fairytales, songs, incantations and sayings. The tendency was expressed not least with deliberately provocative statements such as the following one by Goncharova: ‘Now I am going to shake the dust from my feet and distance myself from the West, as I consider its levelling attitude to be superficial and insignificant. My path points towards the origin of all art – towards the East. The art of my country is far deeper and above all far more important than anything I know in the West.’2 Remarks by Malevich himself reveal a similar spirit: ‘It is commonly said that Tsar Peter deservedly came to be called “the Great” because he smashed a hole into the non-objective cube towards the West, throwing open a window to the light. I on the contrary accuse him of having destroyed unity by letting in a destructive culture, opening the window to a highly dubious and suspicious light.’3

Many Russian artists of the time – amongst them an unusually large number of women – considered Russia’s own traditional art to be a priceless source of potential renewal. As Ivan Punin, the most influential theorist before the October Revolution of 1917 and a lifelong friend of Malevich explained in 1913, in an article entitled ‘The Paths of Russian Contemporary Art and Icon Painting’: ‘We believe that the icons, in their great and living beauty, will lead contemporary art to achievements that will differ decisively from those experienced in recent decades by European art.’4

Aiming to subvert the dominance of Western culture, the Moscow artists adopted a strategy of the provocatively absurd. Beginning in 1912, Goncharova would stroll down Moscow’s luxurious Arbat Street painted in gaudy colours. In the evenings, she performed with her partner Mikhail Larionov at Cabaret No. 13.

Goncharova/Larionov, Still from Drama in Cabaret #13, 1914

These events were a wild mix of manifestos, singing and shouting, during which the performers painted each other and the audience, who were sometimes also spat on. These were already Dadaist spectacles of the kind staged three years later, in 1916, by Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janko, at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Malevich admired Goncharova for her crude style of painting Russian peasants, but also for her performances. He, too, would turn up at openings with his face painted, sometimes with a yellow wooden spoon sticking out from his jacket pocket. As late as 1923, at the opening of his own exhibition in Warsaw, he provocatively wore bright purple tights and a purple women’s stocking as a tie around his neck.

At the same time, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov began giving readings – nowadays one would call them performances – during which he recited, shouted and sang his texts, accompanied by wooden spoon percussion, and declared himself Chairman of the Globe (something Hugo Ball would also later do). Khlebnikov, who was the driving force in Moscow at this time and whom, with his pure sound poems, were a role model for Malevich’s own ideas of the non-objective or non-representational, published a series of manifestos with his friend Aleksei Kruchenykh that bore titles like ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ and for which Malevich was invited to provide illustrations. In 1913, with the manifesto ‘On Artworks’, he founded Zaum (literally ‘beyond mind’, variously translated as transreason, transration or beyonsense), a movement that aimed to subvert Western pictorial concepts (shaped by a rational relationship between image and reality) by means of elements that elude reason – dreams, the unconscious, illusion, faith and laughter. As Malevich wrote to the composer Mikhail Matyushin during preparations for the staging of his opera Victory Over The Sun: ‘We have now come to reject reason. We have rejected it because another is ripening within us that can, in comparison with that we have rejected, be called zaum and that also constitutes laws and possesses meaning. Only when we have realized this can our works be founded on a truly new, transrational law.”5

Victory Over The Sun, composed by Matyushin, with a libretto Kruchenykh, a prologue by Khlebnikov, and with sets and costumes by Malevich, premiered in 1913. During the piece, the audience was subjected to barely intelligible screaming, deafening sounds, blinding lights and even the spit of individual actors, in a show of absurdity outstripping even the later plays of Samuel Beckett. This raises the question of whether it was actually intended as a tribute to Futurist modern rationalism, as it has often been assumed – or whether it was in fact a parody?

Lady at the Poster Column, 1914, 71 × 64 cm, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

During the preparations for this spectacle, which can be seen as the high point of the Zaum movement, the motif of the square appeared for the fist time in Malevich’s work, as part of a stage set. Subsequently, monochrome squares of colour appeared in his Zaum paintings, which he also referred to as ‘alogic’ pictures. They include the painting Lady at the Poster Column (1914) in which two squares (yellow and pink) appear against a background of geometrical constructions and letters. But the key work here is the painting Partial Eclipse in Moscow (1914-1915) that includes not only a collaged (but crossed out) newspaper photograph of the Mona Lisa (that icon of Western pictoriality) but also a white square overlaying a black square. This painting from Malevich’s Zaum period is where we must look for the roots of his square – and not, as previously assumed, in his pictures painted in the style of Western Cubism.

Partial Eclipse in Moscow, 1914-1915

A small drawing from 1915 helps to shed more light on Malevich’s approach. It shows a rectangular outline into which the word ‘derevnja’ (village) is inscribed. Under this figure, Malevich notes that it is better to write the word ‘village’ than to paint a village because the word immediately enables anyone to imagine a village in all its details. The drawing is entitled Alogisme 29: Village. As well as anticipating the conceptual art of the 1960s, it also shows that Malevich did not share the Western modernist view of non-objective – he never used the term ‘abstract’ – pictures as pure abstraction. The possibility of figurative associations was ever-present, and many of Malevich’s ‘suprematist’ paintings have titles to that effect.

Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions, 1915, 53×53cm, Russian Museum, St Petersburg

The red square on white ground that he painted in 1915 has the full title Red Square: Painterly Realism of a Peasant Woman in Two Dimensions and not, as the usual abbreviation has it, just ‘Red Square’. Another painting with a black and a red square from the same year is called Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack – Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension. Combined with the non-figurative forms, these titles, too, testify to a playfully absurd approach on the part of the artist.

Suprematist Transformation of a Peasant Girl, 1930–32, 100×75cm, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Malevich also used the ‘suprematist’ label for his figurative pictures painted after 1928, most of which depict peasant women. It is thus quite simply wrong when, as in almost all exhibitions to date, these paintings are shown separately from the non-objective works. For even during this period Malevich was also painting non-objective pictures, and it is outrageous when, for example the title of the figurative painting Suprematist Transformation of a Peasant Girl is suppressed and the work from 1930-32 is simply labelled as ‘Woman With Rake’, as in most publications and catalogues to date. One can only marvel at the insolence with which mainly Western Malevich scholars ride roughshod over the original titles.

But it is not only the titles that point to an idiosyncratic, at times absurd element. Following the example of Khlebnikov, who invented new words, included mathematical formulas and flouted grammatical rules, Malevich’s texts are full of absurdist neologisms and expressions, images and similes, many of which are lost in the often unsatisfactory translations.

Malevich concluded his artistic output with realistic portraits of his mother, his wife and his daughter. In almost identical style, he had also painted his father – but in 1902 (a picture from the Khardzhiev Collection). Malevich had arrived back at his point of departure. Perhaps this loop, and his re-dating of paintings, can also be understood as an absurd project in itself, intended as a parody of the belief in linear progress.

This view is supported by the fact that Malevich had a long-standing friendship with the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who, not least inspired by what was going in art, studied the culture of laughter, Russian folk tradition and the Middle Ages, developing his now renowned theory of laughter and parody as a strategy of revolt. To this one can add the little known fact that during his 20 years as director of the State Institute for Artistic Culture in Leningrad, Malevich provided performance space for the artists and writers of the OBERIU group, also known as ‘Absurdists’, who carried on in the Dadaist vein of Goncharova, Larionov and Khlebnikov.

Those involved in these performances included Vladimir Tatlin who in 1923 succeeded in staging Khlebnikov’s Dada play Zangezi at this Institute. Khlebnikov himself was already dead, starved to death while fleeing arrest in 1922. Tatlin’s work, too, is marked by strong Dadaist and absurd elements. Malevich’s friend, the theorist Punin, had already noted this in his 1921 monograph ‘Tatlin (Against Cubism)’.6 The artist Ivan Puni even described Tatlin’s Monument for the Third International (1920/21) as an ‘ideological absurdity’.7 The absurdists who performed at Malevich’s institute really did wish to undermine the credibility of the rapidly spreading, supposedly scientific materialism with their absurd actions. To one of them, the absurdist Daniil Kharms, Malevich gave a copy of his own 1922 treatise ‘God is not defeated’ – which in this context can only be understood as an angry parody on historical materialism’s exclusive claim to truth. The dedication he wrote to Kharms in his book reads: ‘Go forth and hinder progress’.8

When Malevich died in 1935, Kharms read his poem ‘On the Death of Malevich’ at the funeral, a gesture understood by most of those present as a sign of revolt. It was to be the last public appearance by this poet and OBERIU co-founder before he disappeared forever into the prison system.

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

1 Natalia Goncharova, exhibition catalogue, Opelvillen, Rüsselsheim, Kunsthalle St. Annen, Angermuseum Erfurt 2010, p. 15.
2 Natalia Goncharova, Manifest 1913, quoted from E. F. Kowtun (ed.), Istorija knižnavo iskusstva (a history of the art of books), Moskow 1989, p. 32.
3 Kasimir Malevich, Suprematismus – die gegenstandslose Welt(Suprematism – the non-objective World), Cologne 1962, p. 99.
4 Ivan Punin, ‘Puti sovremennovo iskusstva i russkaja ikonopis’ (The Paths of Russian Contemporary Art and Icon Painting), in: Apollon, Moskva 1913, Volume 10, p. 50.
5 Letter to Mutjuschin, in: Sieg über die Sonne (Victory Over the Sun), exhibition catalogue, Berlin 1983, p. 39.
6 Cf. Ivan Punin, Tatlin (protiv kubisma) (Tatlin, against Cubism), Petrograd 1921.
7 Ivan Puni, Sovremennaja životopis (Contemporary Art), Berlin (Frenkel’) 1923, p. 31.
8 According to the executor of the Kharms estate, Michael Meylac.

By Tom Morton

Nevin Aladağ: Art Space Pythagorion, Samos, Greece

Beeline, 2014, installation view at Art Space Pythagorion, Samos

Like many of the Greek islands in the Eastern Aegean, Samos plays host to two very different types of visitor. By day, tourists arrive on ferries and chartered flights, to soak up sun and sweet Samian wine (beloved of Lord Byron), and perhaps make an improving excursion to the Temple of Hera, solemn consort of Zeus. By night, crowded landing craft float silently towards the beaches. They contain refugees fleeing conflicts in Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. Some of these boats capsize in the Mykale Strait, a treacherous channel that separates Samos from mainland Turkey, and the rest of the Asian continent. Others are intercepted by Frontex, the EU’s border guard. If they do reach safe harbour, it is likely that their passengers’ next stop will be an overcrowded detention centre in Vathy, the Island’s main port.

Beeline, 2014, installation view at Art Space Pythagorion, Samos

Entitled ‘Borderlines’, and curated by Marina Fokidis, Nevin Aladağ’s solo exhibition at Art Space Pythagorion included several works that took Samos’ geographical – and political – boundaries as their departure point. For Beeline (2014), the Turkish-German artist wound a series of wooden reels with 1430 metres of black fishing rope, a measurement that mirrored the distance between Samos and the nearby Turkish coast. Invited to perch on the reels, visitors could look out of the gallery’s picture window, across the sea towards Asia Minor, and listen to High Season (2014), a recording of sunlit beach life (carefree laughter, gently sloshing waves) that faded into an altogether more menacing soundscape, in which anonymous sailors landed, under cover of darkness, on a deserted shore. Nearby, Aladağ’s video Borderline (2014) featured footage of the churning furrow behind a ship, filmed from its rear deck, creating what we might think of as a kind of maritime drawing, albeit one that, once inscribed, became almost immediately erased. This was interspersed with shots of the ship’s GPS position, which showed it to be plotting a course along the marine border between Greece and Turkey. The same waters, we should note, salt the coastlines of both nations. Their fish might be served up in a Samian taverna, or blacken on the grill of an Anatolian ocakbaşi.

Borderline, 2014, video, installation view at Art Space Pythagorion, Samos

In addition to these new pieces, made during Aladağ’s stay on Samos as the guest of the German Schwartz Foundation, Fokidis also presented a sharply focused, beautifully installed, and carefully considered selection of works from the artist’s back catalogue. In her early video Voice Over (2006), we see a pair of teenage boys – the children, like Aladağ, of Turkish immigrants to Stuttgart – singing traditional Anatolian love songs, and laments for the lost homeland their parents left behind. Shot with a night vision lens, and dressed in rapper’s beanies, they project a toughness that’s at odds with the passion of their performances, just as their mournful singing echoes strangely against the bland, somnolent streets of their Northern European home.

Session, 2013, video, installation view at Art Space Pythagorion, Samos

Music – and geographical uprooting – also featured in the video Session (2013), the strongest work in the show. Here, a number of percussion instruments beat out a rhythm, seemingly without the aid of a human hand, against the architecture and surrounding deserts of the Emirate of Sharjah. Each of them reflecting the musical heritage of one of the Kingdom’s communities of immigrant ‘guest workers’, these instruments brought the sounds, if not the compositions, of India, Pakistan and Iraq to the Arabian Peninsula. Here Sharjah itself – its canals and its car parks, its trees and its sands – became a performer, playing with alien drums and rattles, bells and tambourines. If Session is about power and adaption, about the question of who pays the piper and who calls the tune, it is also about unintended consequences. Like people, music cannot be bound by borderlines. It travels, borne on uncertain winds.

By Tom Newth

Que ta joie demeure (Joy of Man's Desiring), (2014)

Tom Newth interviews Canadian filmmaker Denis Côté about documentary cinema and his latest film ‘Que ta joie demeure’ (Joy of Man’s Desiring)

Heads were scratched, a couple of years ago, over what to make of Denis Côté‘s semi/non-documentary Bestiaire (2012). The bulk of the film was concerned with looking at animals in an off-season Quebec safari park, clattering around their stalls, or simply standing and staring. No context was offered, no invitation to identify with the animals or, heaven forbid, anthropomorphise; instead, Côté‘s project was to find a fresh way of looking at what conventionally might be treated as either a ‘cute’ subject, or one on which to hang tired bugbears about zoos, and man’s relationship to animals in general. The result was strange and hypnotic, and the fact that it is so hard to pin down, both in its effect, and what kind of a film it actually is, suggested that there was interesting further work to be done along these lines.

With the disarming narrative of Vic + Flo ont vu un ours (2013) coming in between, Côté has returned to the practice of Bestiaire for his latest film, Que ta joie demeure (Joy Of Man’s Desiring, 2014). The subject this time is a sliver of the workforce, operating large Dr. Seuss-like machines in a series of factories (the different locations are never specifically delineated, beyond implication by the various products turned out – several critics assume it is one massive plant, producing mattresses, cutting metal, and packaging coffee). The approach is, initially, rigorously hands-off; was this intended therefore as an extension of Bestiaire?

Bestiaire (2012)

‘The various audiences for Bestiaire wanted to talk mainly about the animals, whereas my starting point had been an obsession with looking and observing. I felt therefore that some abstract questions had been left unanswered, so I decided to look at something that is less obviously appealing than animals: the act of working. This is why in the end the films look like some sort of diptych. I think that with every new film, I try to find ways to approach and twist the realities I’m filming. I am also looking for new ways to approach people who don’t share much with my reality. I like those human adventures. A lot of documentary filmmakers are content with finding a reality and filming it for what it is. This is not enough for me. I find a reality, and I twist it to make it my own. You can’t put a label on a hybrid object like Que ta joie demeure. It’s not really an account of what factory work is; it’s not a reflection on life; it’s staged and real at the same time. It doesn’t fit any reality. It’s mine. It’s very artificial, and it’s far away from any social doc we usually see. At least, I hope so. So, just as Bestiaire is not really a film about animals, neither is Que ta joie demeure really a film about workers – such a film would have demanded things like interviews, or a more obviously humanist approach. As in Bestiaire, the intention was more cerebral, abstract. I’m interested in the act of working, the idea of work; thus one must make austere choices, leading to an abstract result. Both films are dehumanized, or de-animalized – some people will obviously say that I missed an occasion of making warmer films but I disagree.’

Que ta joie demeure (Joy of Man’s Desiring), (2014)

Certainly there is little joy present in Joy Of Man’s Desiring, but neither is there an exaggerated sense of gloom, or even monotony – we observe the strict regularity of the machines and their operation, and listen to the clanging symphony of rhythms they produce, but measured editing denies the easy effects of hypnotism. However, whilst the similarly studied avoidance of easy anthropomorphism in Bestiaire creates for the animals a certain self-contained dignity, the humans here are (initially) treated in a similar manner, at the risk of casting them simply as automated extensions of the machines they operate. Côté‘s strategy to combat this diverges from that of Bestiaire, using actors instead of filming real workers, and gradually introducing scripted scenes and careful staging:

‘I felt that Bestiaire did what it had to do, and that there was no point in making the same film in another environment. My observational style had to go somewhere else. There is observation in Que ta joie demeure, but also some humour, and I question some clichés about life. The last “act” of the film is filled with these things: the sorts of banal ways in which we discuss our work (being depressed, being tired, the need to change job). I thought the film needed to morph from being simply observational, to a somehow twisted narrative, so the dialogues were written. Some things in the film are accidental, some are staged. Hopefully the audience is trying to guess.’

Filmmaker Denis Côté

Here is where the exaggeration comes in – art, if you will – prompting us to consider the implications of complaining about the work one continues to do, for a living wage, to support a child; to state blithely that one does indeed feel concern for the business as a whole, for the management, which in this environment at least, seems a thousand miles away; to be depressed about this low-level monotony when the option is… what? Côté‘s title is just as exaggerated in the opposite direction:

‘The Bach sonata is called Jesu, Que ma joie demeure. I twisted this sort of very poetic title (we would never normally use such an elegant expression in French) into something a little misleading, but no less poetic in the end. I see the title as some sort of word of encouragement to the worker. The film is not supposed to be depressive or bleak; it’s not supposed to be a condemnation or an anti-capitalist manifesto. It is not a social film with a message. Yet work is undeniably at the center of our lives. Sometimes it’s rewarding, sometimes it’s debilitating, sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it hurts. The film is one long prayer to the worker, saying ‘keep up, my friend’. I think that those people who think the film is depressing or dark are those who are inclined to make an unthinking, instinctive judgment about the type of work we see in the film.’

It should be noted that the type of work we do see is particularly restricted in scope. Apart from the various factory workers at their machines, we see occasionally a woodshop, the only hint of anything like artisanal work (although the woodworker is engaged mostly in the banalities of melamine-trimming). Certainly the scope of the film is so confined to factory interiors that we wonder about the differences in outlook and environment that might have been illustrated by the manual work of, say, fruit pickers, either mechanised or even by hand, and whether or not the mostly dour outlook of the characters here presented is not linked directly to their enclosed, airless environment.

‘At first I wanted to film all kinds of works and activities, but at some point, you need to find an aesthetic focus. Filming a lawyer or a receptionist would potentially not have given me very much, cinematically speaking. I went for industrial environments where the body is explicitly solicited; where repetition becomes poetic; where machines are noisy and expressive. Then I imagined interiors only. Going out becomes a goal or a dream. There’s certainly something out there – liberty? fun? danger? – but the film denies that ‘outside’ world.’

In fact, this is like any other Côté film, disguised as a film about work and workers: its real focus is, once again, a small community of people and their restricted, out-of-the-way environment. That we are being privileged – Côté, too – with a glimpse into that world, is indicated by the opening monologue. A female worker speaks over her shoulder to an unseen listener who, judging by the words addressed, may be a new colleague; yet the tone is intimate, almost as one would address a lover. That she stresses the need for trust, and that one may find good things here in this place, remind us too that her words are also directed of course to the film-maker behind the camera and, by extension, to the viewer-visitor.

‘I like the opening. It sets the tone, and at the same time the viewer is completely at a loss. It has that “what am I going to watch” edge, I think. [Actress Emilie Sigouin] is addressing a co-worker as if she were some sort of boss. She also embodies the idea of talking smoothly to workers, keeping them happy, promising things. But she is “the film” itself as well, talking to the audience, saying something like “if you’re open-minded, I’ll bring you somewhere special.” Even if we don’t completely get it, the film introduces itself as a three-level monster.’

Carcasses (2009)

One of the pleasures of Côté‘s oeuvre is the way his films wriggle out from easy categorisation, existing simultaneously on these different planes. The documentary element has always been present, particularly in the form of exploring sequestered communities – the curious, careful gaze from a distance seems to catch something singular and mysterious beneath the surface of these tucked-away realities. Yet it was with Carcasses (2009) that Côté really started to push his way towards a new form, rupturing the observational (the solitary life of a junkyard guardian) with unexpected narrative intrusions. It was also around this time that he started to concentrate more on framing, locking down the previously jittery camera to create the increasingly precise tableaux (most beautifully in the Josée Deshaies-shot Curling, 2010) that in much of Que ta joie demeure achieve a science-fictional strangeness in their choice of detail.

‘Mini DV was the trend around 2004-2005, and the Dogme films were still influencing a significant number of new filmmakers. There was this obvious handheld camerawork choice going on. At some point I thought, there’s no way the films are more dynamic or true just because the camera has a nervous style. So I slowly changed. I like the tableau-style approach. The viewer has to enter a very still shot that is not telling him on what he should focus. He must do the job. I like an active audience. A moving camera usually guides your eye, your emotion, your conscience. I think that with Carcasses, Bestiaire and Que ta joie demeure I found what I was looking for, meaning observing a reality and making it my own, using a fixed frontal camera in the vein of directors like Ulrich Seidl or Nikolaus Geyrhalter. You look at something in a very dry and static way. You don’t want to editorialize, or make a social comment about what you film, and in the end, the audience is going to give you their own reading; the film takes its own revenge on you by “saying things” that were not consciously in your head (the bleak colors and the cages of Bestiaire are “talking” in this way, as is the repetitive nature of manual work in Que ta joie demeure and so on). That said, for all their similarities, these films certainly do not form a coherent trilogy, and I don’t feel the urge to make another one. But as far as documentaries, loosely-speaking, are concerned, I also like to watch those impossible, hybrid films. I find them fragile and beautiful in their weaknesses. I was totally hypnotized by Two Years at Sea by Ben Rivers (2011). It was unconscious for sure, but coming directly out from the womb of Carcasses! I also like to follow the Sensory Ethnography Lab filmmakers; of course my style or name have been connected to a film like Leviathan (2012) which I love.’

Curling (2010)

Another pleasure of this work is that, despite superficial similarities to the new observational furrows being ploughed by the HESL filmmakers, Côté is resolutely going his own way, mixing larger narrative productions with smaller, three-man-crew operations like his latest, fearlessly trusting that his audience will look at these objects with the same attention and inquisitiveness as that with which he films. This is due, in part, to his having come of age as exactly that sort of audience-member, whilst simultaneously parlaying his love of cinema into a long stint as a critic with ici magazine. Despite this, however, it is remarkable how little in debt to other filmmakers his work seems to be, how few influences are readily discernible – the cinema of Denis Côté is his own.

‘I briefly studied film and always wanted to be a director. But I was also a grade-A cinephile. Meeting other cinephiles under various circumstances and at various events got me in touch with the worlds and people of radio and newspaper film criticism. I became a film critic by accident, for nearly a decade, until 2005. So of course I carry a long cinephile heritage. I was obsessed with it for a long time, until my third or fourth feature maybe. Then, instead of watching everything just to have an opinion, I started watching only films that could really bring me something. I don’t remember copying a scene from a favorite film or imitating a director’s style. But people know I’ve been a film critic, so they love to say silly things like “oh Elle veut le chaos is in black and white, so it’s an homage to Bela Tarr”. All I’m sure of is that my cinephilia was really sparked by the turn-of-the-century kind of postmodernist masters like Abbas Kiarostami, Jia Zhang-Ke, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Tsai Ming-liang, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Romanian wave, Dogme films, and so on. If you add to that an admiration for very different filmmakers and signatures, like John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Dario Argento, Maurice Pialat, and Robert Bresson… it makes quite a cocktail in the end. There are tons of them, yet no clear influences at the same time. Nowadays, I’m just busy with my own shit. I go to festivals and it’s all about me, me, me – interviews, Q&As, and stuff. The cinephile in me is slowly losing the battle, but maybe it’s a good thing for future projects. I don’t overthink everything anymore. My films are made fast and instinctively. I’m not an intellectual. I’m very down to earth and pragmatic in real life. I talk a lot, I contradict myself, and I collect paradoxes. I’m not living the arty poet life. But when I sit down to write a story, it feels like I need introspection, silence, slowness. I need to ‘get serious’. Every film is a therapy, I’d say, but I don’t think about it too much – it’s dangerous.’

By Carol Yinghua Lu

Pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, 2014

On the evening of 26 September, I was invited to speak in the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai as part of their lecture series on the relationship between art and society. Focusing on the historic origin and development of participatory practices and social intervention in the field of contemporary art in China, in my hour-long talk, I tried to provide an account of Chinese contemporary art that is informed by the ideology of Socialist Realism that has emerged since 1949. I discussed how such a discourse has structured our perception of the past as well as the present events and the future. I cited the example of the exhibition earlier this year, ‘Hans van Dijk: 5000 Names’, at UCCA, Beijing, in which the exercise of self-censorship on the part of the institution to downplay the relevance of Ai Weiwei to the history of Hans van Dijk, and to leave the Chinese artist’s name out in the press release, drove Ai Weiwei to withdraw from the exhibition. Unsurprisingly, Ai became a target of criticism for many of the artists involved with the institution, who blamed him for making a scene, yet few addressed the problem of self-censorship and the deliberate omission of historic details.

I went on to ponder the fact that many members of the Chinese art world have become indifferent to such fundamental issues as institutional and state power, justice, equality, individual rights and so on. All they could talk about was how Ai is always trying to turn things into political events so that his career might benefit. I also discussed the recent event in Songzhuang in Beijing where police closed down an independent film festival on the opening day – 23 August – and two of the main organizers were taken to the police station and released on the same evening. Although many people sympathized with the festival’s organizers, there were also voices which warned the art world not to stress the political nature of the event and to ask people to turn their attention to art and not to politics – some pointing out the film programme was not so great after all. Before long, everything died out and people returned to their everyday WeChat messages of exhibition announcements and personal anecdotes.

Working and living in one of the most politically loaded countries in the world during one of the most explosive periods of history, I have become increasingly perplexed by the political unresponsiveness of many of my colleagues. I often sense a tendency to resist politics on the grounds of ‘what use is it’, or ‘it’s not like we can change anything’ or ‘if we address politics in our line of work, aren’t we leaving art out and following the same logic as the communist party to instrumentalize art as politics’ or ‘let’s forget about politics and focus on art’. There is also a prevalent scepticism about hidden motivations and personal gain that makes some people feel that they should remove themselves from making judgments or taking sides. Curiously enough though, in such a general sense of distrust, it would seem that everyone is suspect, except for the state.

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 30 September, 2014

Two days after my talk at the Rockbund Art Museum, news broke via WeChat messages and Facebook: pro-democracy activists, scholars, students and citizens had taken to the streets of Hong Kong and launched a peaceful and determined protest outside the government headquarters, occupying several major city intersections and demanding the central government in Beijing to recognize the right of Hong Kong to choose its own Chief Executive and requesting the current one to step down. The direct trigger of this movement was the decision of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) in August on proposed electoral reform for Hong Kong. As was widely reported, ‘instead of allowing civil nominations, the NPCSC made it clear that a 1200-member nominating committee, which would remain nominated by the business factions and strictly controlled by Beijing, would elect two to three electoral candidates with more than half of the votes before the general public can vote upon, which is seen as effectively screening out any pro-democracy candidate.’ Two days into the protests, demonstrators and un-armed citizens, mostly young students, were met with tear gas from the local police force in pouring rain, which led supporters to distribute umbrellas to those who were in the square. Thus ‘Umbrella’ became a name and symbol for this civic movement.

In mainland China you could feel the tension this unrest in Hong Kong was generating. There was a heightened sense of fear over impending recriminations from Beijing. After all, this was the last week leading to the celebration of the National Day on 1 October. In Beijing, most people were preparing to leave town for an extended week-long holiday. I visited Tiananmen Square on 30 September and saw a new portrait of Mao on the gate, and on the opposite side, a large flower statue was newly installed on the square. Mao’s Mausoleum was closed to the public and would remain closed the next day. There was a great sense of tension in the air.

The Mausoleum to Mao Zedong, closed to the public, September, 2014

On the same day, a few more posts about what was happening in Hong Kong showed up on WeChat, with images and information about the protests. There also gradually emerged diaries and commentaries written by individuals participating in the protests in Hong Kong, along with occasional media coverage. It is almost impossible, though, to learn anything about the situation in Hong Kong through the mainstream media in China, as it is under the supervision of the central government. In the national news coverage, protesters are described as being manipulated and brainwashed by Western institutions and powers, and are represented as damaging Hong Kong’s social fabric. The real issue at stake are never clearly addressed. This is the rhetoric that most mainlanders have heard – and believe in. I was not surprised by any of this. Most people have accepted the official idea that social harmony is the pre-condition to personal prosperity and thus any obstruction towards securing a harmonious society in China is a crime committed towards the well-being of the public. In the meantime, there is almost no access for most people to gain information about the situation in Hong Kong in order to form their own opinions. Over the last week, I have had to hold my tongue about Hong Kong over breakfast with my dad, or otherwise our conversation inevitably ends in one of the fights we always have, which tend to go like this: ‘When life is so much better in China now, why do people still want to demand more and cause so much trouble?’

Pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, September 2014

I have become accustomed to such reactions from family and friends, who never pay much attention to politics and have convinced myself not to judge them too quickly. What I was not prepared for were the reactions of most of my colleagues in the art community in light of recent events in Hong Kong. In the following days, except for occasional re-tweets of facebook posts and media reports, most of the content people circulate within the circle of friends on WeChat is the usual stuff: exhibition announcements, daily activities and remarks on weather, pollution, the clear sky, the red moon, crowded tourist sites, food, re-tweets of didactic readings, certain public notices – you name it. Yet, among the commotion of self-expression and self-promotion, there was a noticeable disregard towards what was happening in Hong Kong, as if there was a consensus not to talk about it. The exercise of staying non-committal appeared so deliberate and ubiquitous this time around, that even those people who tend to offer an opinion on almost all art-related and social events have chosen to remain quiet. The decision to not discuss Hong Kong seems to have been agreed upon by artists across all generations – including the supposedly political artists who had witnessed, or were part of, the protests of the 1980s – as well as those from the younger generation, many of whom have had years of education and exposure in America and Europe.

Also surprising has been the sporadic cynicism towards the motivations of the Hong Kong protesters among people who had once been sympathetic towards the pro-democracy movement. Some artists and critics began to write on WeChat quotes and short sentences, not referring to Hong Kong directly, but implying that those who had joined the protests were just ‘stupid people’. Another young colleague began a WeChat discussion in private with an artist who was circulating information about Hong Kong and asked him why he was not suspicious of the motivations of the protesters. She wrote: ‘I don’t understand how people like you can make a decision to take a stand so quickly because I can’t seem to form my opinion about what is going on in Hong Kong. Let us not forget the people are not always innocent.’ Within a few minutes, an article was circulating that was written by a sociologist who, through years of research and interviews, found that Mao was not the sole mastermind/sinner of the Cultural Revolution, but the masses had contributed significantly to the destruction. In another words, in any social upheaval and revolution, the people can easily turn themselves into trouble-makers and inflict irreparable harm on society. Some also shared the view that Hong Kong suffered economically in recent years, which is the fundamental cause to the current frustration among Hong Kong citizens and the protestors.

Poster for the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests

This silence and denial has shocked me so much that I have been spending days trying to understand it. Such silence does not just happen. I know that my colleagues all read the different international voices you can access in China via subscriptions to expensive VPN services. Compared to most people, my colleagues are well informed. Yet, they still want to look away and not get emotionally involved, for the sake of a supposed critical distance. I feel the pressure of being one of the few people here who is openly expressing an opinion and I can’t stop wondering how the colleagues who I have shared so much time with and have had so many discussions with, can remain so seemingly unconcerned. Perhaps some appear indifferent out of fear of the authorities and I know some have become completely cynical about any kind of political protest. Others think that by removing themselves from taking sides, they can appear critical and wise, as if they’re not swayed by popular opinion.

I shared my disappointment with another colleague who had got himself into several arguments with left-wing intellectuals by showing his support of the protests. We both realize that it has become harder and harder to discuss politics with friends and colleagues. It’s as if the art community is withdrawing from the political and social realm and no one feels apologetic about it. In its absence, there is an unconstrained enthusiasm and willingness to commit oneself to the commercial sector without taking any moral responsibility. In recent days, posts about new auction records in the sales of contemporary Chinese art in Hong Kong were flooding WeChat. There were cheers and celebrations – as if there were no tomorrow.

By Craig Hubert

CITIZENFOUR: An interview with Laura Poitras

Edward Snowden in CITIZENFOUR (Laura Poitras, 2014)

The story of Edward Snowden’s massive leak of confidential National Security Agency (NSA) documents in June 2013 is a story we know well. The thematic arc has been sketched out in the news media over the last year, its particulars, for better or worse, picked apart and scrutinized even as questions remain unanswered. For example: Why would a young man with a lucrative job, less than a month short of his 30th birthday, risk his entire life to share a large collection of documents that had the possibility of being met by the general public with a shrug of apathetic indifference?

This question is not directly answered, but rather deeply felt in CITIZENFOUR (2014), the new film from artist and documentarian Laura Poitras, which goes on general release in the UK and US at the end of this month. A bulk of CITIZENFOUR focuses on her trip to Hong Kong with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, both at the time working for the Guardian newspaper, for their initial meetings with Snowden. As the two journalists ask questions in the tense atmosphere of the hotel room, Poitras stands in the background, quietly filming everything and, in a sense, capturing the most clear-eyed and unobtrusive portrait of Snowden that we’re likely ever to see; a combination of fear, bravery and intelligence that’s been missing from most of the weekend magazine profiles and talking-head critiques of the leaks.

While Greenwald and others have received the lion’s share of journalistic plaudits regarding the breaking of the of the Snowden story, it was Poitras who planted, in fact, the seed of what was to come. She was Snowden’s first point of contact, and helped bring the leaked documents to the attention of Greenwald, who had a reputation for fearless and aggressive reporting on whistleblowers and mass surveillance. Poitras had already been working on a film about the NSA and whistleblowers following the Wikileaks scandal, and had provocatively held a ‘Survillance Teach-in’ as part of her inclusion in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, featuring privacy advocate Jacob Appelbaum and NSA whistleblower William Binney (who both appear in CITIZENFOUR). After meeting with Snowden and filming their initial encounters, Poitras followed the story, interested not only in the moment of risk, but in what comes after and possibly what is still to come.

CITIZENFOUR premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 10, and at a hotel in Manhattan two days later, Poitras sat down with frieze to talk about the film, the experience of putting together the footage under intense scrutiny, and what images can do that words cannot.

Laura Poitras (2012)

Craig Hubert: How does it feel to finally have the film out?

Laura Poitras: It feels a little surreal. We had a really small circle of people who knew what was in the film, and now I’m sitting down and talking to strangers, and they knew what happened in the hotel room. It’s a bit of an adjustment period, but it’s also great.

CH: Was there sadness in letting it go?

LP: It’s not sad, no. I think it’s more of a relief. We didn’t rush the film in any way but we didn’t want to hang onto it any longer than needed. We wanted to get it into the world as soon as we could. It’s the right time.

CH: The film began before Snowden ever reached out to you. Can you talk about the origins of CITIZENFOUR, and where your research began on surveillance?

LP: I started shooting the film in the spring of 2011, and I was interested in a number of themes; I was interested in journalism, the surveillance state, the work that Wikileaks was doing at that time, in the wake of the disclosures they had made, and how that had changed journalism. But I wasn’t quite sure what the focus would be — often times I have some general themes and am not quite sure how it will all come together. Anyway, I made a trip down to Rio de Janeiro to meet with Glenn [Greenwald], because I was really interested in his writing and the fact that he was doing this influential reporting totally off the grid, this sort of outsider journalism. I just thought, that’s really interesting. I’m going to document that, without knowing where that would fit into a larger film. So I just went, and it’s actually the very first scene in the film. Looking back on it, it’s pretty interesting because Glenn was in the middle of writing about whistleblowers when I was down there, which then becomes the theme of the film. At that time, I also started filming with William Binney from the NSA and started documenting the Utah data center that was being built.

CH: Why film the construction site?

LP: I’m a verité filmmaker, so I like to film things happening in real time, and I thought, well, the NSA is building the biggest data repository, let’s film it. It will be a good record to have. Around that time I also started doing some filming with Julian Assange and Wikieaks, and Jacob Applebaum, who’s a privacy expert and someone who trains activists and is a journalist. So I was following similar themes that come into the final film. Then I did the short film on Bill Binney, for the New York Times, and I think that’s probably how I got on Snowden’s radar, I guess. It was published in August 2012, and then I started receiving anonymous emails in January 2013.

CH: There was a period of five months before you traveled to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. During the time, was there a sense that this anonymous person would end up finding a way into the film?

LP: I wasn’t approaching it in that way. I would have made the film if Snowden never entered my life, but I would contextualize it a bit differently. I’d been in correspondence with an anonymous source for five months and what they were telling me they had evidence of, and the risk they were taking, was really shocking, and occupied a lot of my thoughts. When it became possible, or when he agreed to a meeting, there was no way I wasn’t going. I wasn’t thinking of it as part of the film or not part of the film. I knew I was going to document it. That’s just what I do. At that point I had seen documents, so I knew the magnitude, and I knew this a big deal, and a big deal for journalism in terms of the scope of what it would reveal.

Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, in CITIZENFOUR (Laura Poitras, 2014)

CH: I want to jump ahead, following the meeting with Snowden in Hong Kong that takes up a large chunk of the film. Once you had this material and returned to the film you were making, did your process change?

LP: When I was in Hong Kong, I definitely felt my role was as a documentary filmmaker and that I was documenting what was happening, which was the reporting that Glenn and Ewen were doing. I wasn’t spending time looking at documents or thinking about any of the print reporting. After leaving, when I got back to Berlin, it became quite obvious that my obligation now was to make sure that the reporting continues. There were few people that had access to the documents — there was Glenn in Rio, and then I had it, so that’s when I teamed up with Der Spiegel newspaper to start working with them. I shifted my focus from editing to reporting, but I was working with an editor who started watching the footage that I shot, and she was processing that while I was reporting. I’ve been doing this long enough that I understood that what I shot in Hong Kong was a unique historical record, but I also knew that I wanted to continue filming the fallout. So I was filming, reporting, and editing. All those things were happening simultaneously.

CH: I noticed in the credits that the artist Jenny Perlin is listed as one of the editors on the film.

LP: Yeah. She’s a friend and actually one of the few people who were in the know about what was going on while I was being contacted, before I went to Hong Kong. She was in Berlin, she and her family were there on a sabbatical, so we hung out a lot in Berlin and she helped out with assistant editing and other stuff. She’s awesome.

CH: Can you talk a little more about the collaborators who worked with you on the film?

LP: This was a huge, amazing collaborative experience, in terms of people who were willing to take risks to work on the project — there were some scary times where we thought there was potential that somebody would raid the editing room to get the footage. I had an amazing editor, Mathilde Bonnefoy. Did you ever see Run Lola Run [1998]? She cut that, so she’s a kickass editor and gave so much to the project. It’s really our creative collaboration that you see on the screen. Her husband, Dirk Wilutzky, is the producer, and they just created this safe space in Berlin. We kept the media away, we kept everyone away, so we could just do what we needed to do. We had a really tight space that we definitely kept — it was clear that we were breaking news, and we could say, none of that matters, what do we want to do to tell the film and keep this a place where we’re not being reactive? Because the danger is if you start to react to what the news is doing you’ll make something that won’t have legs. I’m not trying to break news with the film. I’m trying to tell a story that’s going to resonate in five or ten years.

CH: Even so, minutes after the film premiered most of what was discussed about the film was the news it broke, that Snowden was living with his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, and the possible confirmation of a new leaker.

LP: Like I said, we’re not trying to break news with the film, but both of those things are really part of the narrative and have to do with Snowden’s actions. No matter what was leaked, or what kind of disclosures made, at the end it was as much about the story not being over. There’s not just one, not just two, but other courageous whistleblowers who are coming forward to expose things that they think the public has a right to know. It’s not just about a closure on Snowden’s narrative. In terms on Lindsay, I had heard that she had joined him, and I thought this was important to include in the film because you see him in Hong Kong – as the disclosures start to hit and as it becomes a big, huge story – at the same time she gets a knock on the door. In that moment, you really understand the personal sacrifice that he made and, after he revealed his identity, the media just ripped into her in a really horrible, aggressive way. I felt like the fact that she joined him related to all that and seemed like a really powerful statement about their relationship, and her ability to navigate what was probably a really difficult time.

Edward Snowden and Lindsay Mills, in CITIZENFOUR (Laura Poitras, 2014)

CH: It was handled beautifully, and provides one of the most moving images in the film — the two of them cooking together, filmed outside their kitchen window from a distance. It says everything that needs to be said about the moment without saying much at all.

LP: I wanted to show maximum respect for their privacy and not open up some new chapter that would feed the mill that’s already been trapped in.

CH: You mentioned the other courageous whistleblowers that are now coming forward because of the risks Edward Snowden took. I wanted to ask about Snowden’s influence on art, where surveillance has now become a major topic for artists of different mediums to explore.

LP: I’d love for you to send me some names of who is doing good stuff. I’ve been in a bit of a tunnel. I think it’s awesome if it starts to funnel its way down, but I’m always a little bit skeptical if the art world is following more fashion trends. I’m so excited that Trevor Paglen’s work is in this film, for me he’s a total inspiration as an artist. He took lots of time off to film these sites that we include in the film, and he’s the real deal. If you want to look at art that’s looking at surveillance, Trevor is the person who’s setting the bar for everyone else. But yeah, these are always tough topics because the art world stuff can be somewhat trend driven and not substance driven. I actually consider myself an artist, and identify as an artist, but also identify as a documentary filmmaker and am interested in real world consequences and real world impacts and real world risks. Some art engages that and some art seems to try to float on the surface.

CH: You’re putting together one of the inaugural exhibitions at the Whitney Museum’s new space in 2016. Have you started work on that?

LP: It’s the thing that I know is going to be the next big project I do. I want to take a little bit of time and space so that I don’t feel like I’m doing anything that anybody expects me to do, and figure out how I want to explore it. It’s on my mind. Now that this project is done, as soon as I can carve out a little space to think about what direction I want to take that in. But one of the things I’m super excited about is ways of working with themes that I’m interested in that aren’t so bound to plot, because they are such brutal decisions you have to make when you’re looking at plot. For instance, in the Hong Kong section of this film, the first day of our meeting was a four-hour that I filmed. Obviously we can’t sustain a four-hour interview in a documentary, so you have to make these brutal choices about what you need to say here, and that means massive amounts of material can’t be contained within a linear narrative. I’m interested in having much more non-linear relationships to an audience, where the audience gets to decide how much time they want to invest in something, rather than me saying, sorry, you’re only going to get six minutes of this four-hour interview.

CH: Can a film say something about Snowden that words cannot?

LP: I totally believe in the power of images to inform in a different way than words inform. It allows you to speak in more emotional terms and with more subtext that give people an emotional connection to issues rather than just an intellectual connection. There’s a lots of information we have about surveillance, but when you see somebody who’s willing to risk their life to expose it then you have to factor in, OK, that’s a pretty extreme thing to do. It will have a different impact.

By Sara Knelman

Brighton Photo Biennial: Communities, Collectives & Collaboration

Martin Parr, 'Rusholme. Manchester. England. 1972', included in 'Magnum Photos: One Archive Three Views', De La Warr Pavilion © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

The fifteen or so shows (plus an extensive programme of events) that make up this year’s Brighton Photo Biennial, under the banner ‘Communities, Collectives and Collaboration’, revolve around the potential for images to bind us together. If the act of clicking the shutter to make a picture is most often a solo venture, photography is also a fundamentally collaborative medium, invested in the participation of subjects, the engagement of viewers and all the possible ways of conveying meaning through photographs in the public sphere. In Brighton, these themes are developed and explored through otherwise unrelated subjects, from Italian politics, to marine ecology, to authorship on the Internet. This is the second edition of the BPB since the team at Photoworks has taken over direction of the programme, and although the absence of a single curatorial vision means there is, at times, an ironic lack of connection between exhibitions, looser associations allow for an interesting mix of practices and chronologies, incorporating new commissions alongside some powerful explorations of archival material.

‘Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy’, installation view at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery. Photograph: Nigel Green

The festival gains critical mass in central Brighton, where venues are all within easy walking distance from one another. At Fabrica, the space closest to the sea, Simon Faithfull’s installation Reef (2014) takes us under water to see and hear the phenomenon of a sinking ship. Faithfull, who describes his practice as ‘investigating the world as sculptural object’, has staged the wrecking of the Brioney Victoria, a small fishing boat, off the coast of Dorset. Video footage shows the ship as it slowly takes on water and disappears from sight; cameras mounted inside take over the documentation of its journey. An edited cut of the sinking plays out on a loop from a raised screen mounted to the railings of the gallery’s mezzanine, while below, television screens on plinths show a live-feed of the ship’s ongoing transformation from vessel to artificial reef. When I visited, the underwater cameras had malfunctioned and the screens instead showed a loop of murky images gained while operational. The year-long duration of the project leaves time for correcting technical failures – though I wonder if some secrets of nature are better left invisible.

If Faithfull’s project required a team of experts to execute, Erica Scourti’s So Like You (2014) at the University of Brighton Gallery invites a more active participation in the generation of images. Scourti feeds personal images into Google’s Search By Image engine (where an image, rather than a word, serves as the initial search term) to find other pictures with similar digital footprints – titles, tags and other data embedded in the images. She traces some of them back and invites the people who made them to take new pictures that respond in turn, this time consciously, to some of her other images. As viewers we see a slideshow of these new pictures, partly obscured behind layers of tags and other information embedded in them, such as where they were taken and the make of camera used. If this is hard to follow, it’s because the project seems designed to obscure and complicate, rather than untangle, the webs of exchange, re-use, appropriation and influence that make authorship and originality so murky in relation to the networked image.

Simon Faithfull, ‘Reef’, installation view at Fabrica. Photograph: Nigel Green

As with Faithfull’s Reef, collaboration is crucial to Scourti’s process, but the execution and ultimate creation is attributed to the artist alone. The thematic heart of the biennial, then, is Circus Street Market, where hundreds packed in for the launch party, and which is showcasing ‘Five Contemporary Photography Collectives’. The term ‘collective’, which tends to imply a relation – aesthetic, ideological or otherwise – among the work produced by group members, seems too loosely appointed here. In some instances the label appears to be a means of cross-marketing more than anything else, and as a consequence, these selections looked more like disconnected group shows. The sparse captions also left some more challenging images – in particular from the series ‘La Sala Negra’, by two members of Barcelona-based RUIDO Photo, which depicts the pandemic violence across three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala – without sufficient context. Sputnik’s dynamic look at post-Soviet life, and ABC’s bureaucratic, imageless book-museum (displayed apart from the other four collectives, and to better effect, at the University of Brighton Gallery), stood out for their inventive and thoughtful approaches to collaboration. In theory, the site itself has a neat resonance, as a historic market place for community gathering. But the relatively small and makeshift displays seemed lost in the vast architecture, which calls out for something monumental and site specific to animate it.

‘Five Contemporary Photography Collectives’, installation view at Circus Street Market. Photograph: Nigel Green

The photographic archive offers another sense of collective understanding, and three shows revolved around the retrieval and reinterpretation of archival material, thinking through both the collectives that contributed the original images and the different lenses that have shaped them. A modest show at Dorset Place Gallery organized by the photo-historian David Mellor, ‘Real Britain 1974: Co-Optic and Documentary Photography’, gathers pictures by the Co-Optic group, whose members included Gerry Badger, Fay Godwin, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen and Martin Parr. The centerpiece is a set of 25 postcards that counter typically romantic tourist-friendly imagery with views of ‘real’ Britain, a black-and-white social landscape, many of which have since gained iconic status.

At Brighton’s Museum & Art Gallery ‘Amore e Piombo: The Photography of Extremes in 1970s Italy’ also looks back nearly forty years, at a more expansive and perplexing set of images. The so-called ‘Years of Lead’, a period that culminated in domestic terrorism and intense strategies of political propaganda, are here re-lived alongside images of a burgeoning celebrity culture, all taken by the Italian press agency Editorial Team Services, and now part of the collection of the Archive of Modern Conflict. To say they depict the events of the time is only a half-truth: the lines between fiction and reality were so effectively blurred by the theatre of war that the circumstances around many key events, even those plainly pictured, still remain unclear. A selection of press prints, as well as news footage, film clips and books, take over the gallery’s high-ceilinged library. In a striking display, the prints stand in wooden frames dispersed along tall gridded bookshelves that line the room. A compelling floor installation at one end commemorates the still-mysterious kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, the architect of the Historic Compromise between Italy’s Communist and Christian Democrat parties, by the Red Brigades in 1978. It’s an emotionally charged show with plenty of fascinating pictures. A catalogue and essay in the Photoworks Annual by curators Roger Hargreaves and Federica Chiocchetti lend further insight into this tumultuous period and remarkable archive.

The theme carries through at the De La Warr Pavilion, a short train-ride along the coast in Bexhill, which takes up the most imposing of documentary photo archives, Magnum. Before digital technology took over, Magnum relied on a functional archive of prints to disperse their images. ‘Magnum Photos: One Archive, Three Views’ asked anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards and artists Uriel Orlow and Hannah Starkey to mine boxes of existing prints – about 68,000 taken between 1950 and 1995 – and make selections that both reflect personal interests and illuminate the cultures and agendas that shaped the archive’s historical development. The restrained selections showcase 130 images, beautifully displayed as three discrete image-sequences, labeled only by geographic place-name (there are take-away sheets with full image-lists available). Starkey’s take, for example, pulls out images of women made by both sexes, beginning with a knockout Eve Arnold self portrait. Left uncaptioned on the wall, the photographs leave the viewer to move from image to image trying to guess the gender of the photographer in each case, and wondering if it matters. It does, of course, in the larger scheme of things. Though made over a period that saw intense social and political progress for women – documented, in fact, in Magnum images like Leonard Freed’s Women’s Liberation (1970) – women made up less than five percent of Magnum-represented photographers.

If that’s a staggering but believable statistic, then Douglas Gordon’s deeply disturbing two-channel projection, Hysterical (1995), showing footage from a 1908 medical enactment of treatment for female hysteria, is a reminder of the not-so-distant yet unfathomable depths of patriarchal control. Gordon’s work is part of ‘Twixt Two Worlds’ at the Towner in Eastbourne, another regional partnership, alongside the De La Warr show and ‘The Amazing Analogue: How We Play Photography’, at Hove Museum and Art Gallery.

Though uneven, as exhibition programmes on this scale tend to be, there are some great pictures to be seen here if you’re willing to devote the time. What’s missing, in the end, is recognition of the downside of collaboration. There’s a pathological optimism in the view presented by the biennial, which itself hinges on strategic partnerships and collaborations tied to funding opportunities – the reality for a publicly funded arts organization, especially a relatively small one without a dedicated space. But it would have been interesting (and honest) to take a look at that reality, and the steep challenges currently faced by art and institutional practices. Other ‘C’ words, like Corporate, Committee and Compromise, might come to mind.

By Nick Warner

Folkestone, 2014. All photographs taken by the author

Marching eagerly out of Folkestone train station on a beautifully overcast Sunday morning, triennial map in hand and umbrella under arm, I was immediately confronted by a white billboard with black text – ‘Earth Peace’. The billboard, one of several new works produced for the third Folkestone Triennial by Conceptual art megastar Yoko Ono, strikes me as a confusing and slightly irrelevant opening to the festival, and thus, perhaps, a pertinent point of entry for a discussion of it.

Regional arts festivals such as Folkestone’s raise a number of contentious issues, as far as I can see. In large cities, it would not be a prerequisite that the artists work directly with their locale. In Venice, Berlin or even Liverpool the audience may not necessarily expect site specificity, save perhaps from those artists for whom this is their modus operandi. More established arts festivals can more readily be perceived as independent from the places that host them. Yet, where such periodical, multi-venue art exhibitions are initiated on the ‘peripheries’ of the contemporary arts landscape, these events become heavily laden vessels of social and economic obligation. My instinctual criticism of Ono’s foremost greeting to London’s day-tripping art audience would be that nothing about it is specifically directed at, or relevant to, the town whose name is above the entrance to the station. The triennial’s literature on Ono’s contribution enthusiastically refers to the artist’s one-time appearance in Folkestone in the glory days (1966) and describes the works as ‘conceived specially’ for the event, yet there is no real engagement with the town or its population. Another of her works, Skyladder (2014) is an instruction displayed on an interior wall of Folkestone’s Quarterhouse theatre, which invites viewers to ‘Bring a ladder they like. Colour it. Word it. Take pictures of it. Keep adding things to it. And send it as a postcard to a friend.’ A neat call back to the recurrence of the ladder in Fluxus and earlier Conceptual practices, but realistically achievable as a participatory artwork?

Yoko Ono, Earth Peace, 2014

I think this is the contention that I’m dancing around: My inclination is to think that artworks within an economy such as Folkestone’s should have some agenda for broadening participation, for engaging with audiences less exposed to contemporary art and for making a subject of the town itself, in order to educate those it brings in to visit. However, far be it from me to speak on behalf of the people of Folkestone, and further still be it from me to penalize anyone, anywhere, for publicizing earth peace on a billboard.

Continuing the art-going-cum-orienteering exercise embraced enthusiastically only on occasions such as these, my associate and I encountered, within five minutes of the station, the works of Folkestone natives Diane Dever and Jonathan Wright, and local art collective Strange Cargo. Both Strange Cargo’s architectural intervention, titled The Luckiest Place On Earth (all works 2014), and Dever and Wright’s series of sculptures, which punctuate the Triennial map’s route right down to the harbour front, are heavily thematized by Folkestone-specific ideas. The Luckiest Place On Earth subtly transforms the passage of a road beneath a railway bridge into a ‘lucky gateway’ via the installation of four 3D-printed figurines, high on the bridge’s supporting walls. Each figurine embodies the quotation mounted beneath its respective shelf – statements provided by the four winners of a local poll asking Folkestone residents why they feel fortunate. On into deepest east Folkestone we found the first of Dever and Wright’s Pent Houses, a series of five Becher-esque water towers that follow the subterranean Pent Stream, the stream that originally filled Folkestone’s iconic harbor and which turned local mills’ wheels in post-medieval industry. The work’s title alludes to the value of subterranean water in real estate – the wordplay referencing both high-class residential properties and the conveniently titled stream.

Jyll Bradley, Green/Light (for M.R.), 2014

Another homegrown artist, Jyll Bradley, produced a sculptural installation on the site of the town’s old gasworks.Green/Light (for M.R.) comprised a circular arrangement of wooden poles supporting an intricate web of coir twine in the fashion of a traditional Kentish hop garden. Within the hop garden, which follows the exact circular footprint of the gasworks’ original structure (coincidently decommissioned the year of the artist’s birth), were further vertical poles, though the inner uprights were aluminum poles adorned with translucent yellow Perspex, pastelled in daylight, aglow at night. Visited shortly after the first of Dever and Wright’s water towers, the work suggested an underlying ecological thesis to the triennial, more prominent still if, like myself, you’d wandered over to inspect Bradley’s rural/urban Stonehenge mash-up having spied it from the dizzying heights of Marjetica Potrč and Ooze Architecture’s The Wind Lift– a wind-powered elevator built into the arches of the immediately adjacent Foord Road Viaduct. Power comes from a corkscrewing wind turbine that utilizes the viaduct’s shape to harvest maximum energy, chiming not only with the ecological concerns of Bradley’s piece, but also nodding to the town’s more prosperous days – the viaduct, and the railroad it supports, signifying the advent of Folkestone’s maritime prowess.

Marjetica Potrč and Ooze Architecture, The Wind Lift, 2014

By this point my appetite for a concise curatorial agenda sprinkled with local trivia and historical discourse was near-satiated, and after a quick stop and some iPhone Googling in an attempt to understand ‘hybrid design studio’ roofoftwo’s Whithervanes: A Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS) we continued, now with a second series of artworks to try and keep track of. The ‘Whitervanes’ take the form of white, headless chickens and sit atop carefully selected buildings around Folkestone. The chickens, it transpired, tracked the production of fear on the internet by monitoring the use of certain keywords, chosen in collaboration with Folkestone locals through workshops, on Reuters newsfeeds. The chickens reacted to the early worrying they aggregate by spinning and lighting up. Amusingly, it was possible to provoke such ‘headless chicken’ antics with a smart phone, just by standing nearby and engaging in a bit of casual fear-mongering on twitter.

Emma Hart, Giving It All That, 2014

Emma Hart’s triennial commission escaped the site-specific paradigm by being wholly isolated from the predominantly open-air festival. Her contribution, a body of work titled Giving It All That, occupied two floors of a fairly decrepit apartment in central Folkestone. The installation involved sculptures, photographs and videos, and details Hart’s own insecurities about social awkwardness and the flimsiness of her own publically performed facade. Awkward, gangly ceramic wineglasses stood atop awkward, gangly tables, which were in fact long, repulsive, cartoon arms stretching from the floor to hold trays at table height. Sweat patches surrounded the base of each arm and spillages abounded on the trays, in dusty room corners and in the stairwells. Laptops were held on bizarre metal frames that forced my associate and I to move in illogical ways around the space, peering over banisters to watch layers of imagery accumulate behind oversized wire hands. More bizarre arms extended in rows from one room’s walls, each holding up clipboards for tear shaped ceramic eyes to glare at. The clipboards, facing the wall, couldn’t be viewed, save in the reflections in the mirrored eyes.

Gabriel Lester, The Electrified Line, 2014

Hart’s sculptures are absolutely personified, and are implicated in a sort of cruel experiment on the audience – staging various encounters in which the viewer is being served, monitored, are unable to view things clearly – in order to elicit very particular emotions: embarrassment, frustration, humiliation, cringing. Is cringing an emotion? Drinks are offered and spilt, rambling and self-conscious monologues unfold from nervous speakers, moving around the space is difficult and feels inappropriate. Everything is inviting you to knock it over and make a scene.

Having made it to the seafront, we found that works are dotted around the harbour and pier, and continued extensively along the seafront to the west. The triennial’s centrepiece, Gabriel Lester’s The Electrified Line, squats on the railway lines. Visible from various viewpoints on the downhill walk from the train station to the sea, the Chinese-style pavilion created a hectic bamboo nest for children and triennial visitors to scramble around in before having their chips on seafront. The railways lines, now out of use, cross the harbour to the docks. While a quick jaunt into the structure afforded pleasingly dissected views of the seascape, the piece was best viewed from the docks themselves, looking back down the lines from further along the harbour. Fingers curled tight and white around the wire fencing that now blocks the train lines off, I stared at the mass of sticks, imagining myself as a speeding train smashing through them.

Tim Etchells, Is Why the Place, 2014

Also out on the harbour is Tim Etchells’s Is Why the Place, two neon text works that hugged the curving walls of the now-derelict Harbour Railway Station’s two platforms. While I embraced the opportunity to wander around the derelict station for the first time in three years, I couldn’t help but feel that the station and its wonderfully enticing tracks-to-nowhere are the triennial’s trump card, already played in 2011. Nonetheless the site concretizes the accumulative nature of the festival: with commissioned works from previous editions gathering as part of Folkestone Artworks, the organizations permanent collection, old works are shown alongside new. Etchells’s text – ‘Coming and going is why the place is there at all’ – not only occupies a derelict station, but a derelict station with a Paloma Varga Weisz sculpture sitting innocuously on the tracks.

I am still at sea, as it were, about how to approach Folkestone Triennial. Should we expecting to learn something about the town and its history, or is it only fair that regional locations should be able to have periodical, public arts programming without the obligation to subjectify their locale? If the former, then some of the pieces here were woefully amiss; if the latter, then others feel fairly clichéd. The triennial’s theme was ‘Lookout’, which, though perhaps apt for a town whose economy has historically relied on maritime trade, nevertheless remains uninspiringly vague. In spite of this mundane thematic and the fact that some works seemed out of sync with – or out of place in – Folkestone itself, their considered placement and the general level of engagement with the town’s historic and contemporary population that this encouraged, allowed for a satisfying, informative and exciting day of art viewing.

By Dan Kidner

Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language, 2014. All images courtesy: BFI London Film Festival

This year’s London Film Festival offered the perfect opportunity to take stock of the state of contemporary cinema and, in particular, the place of adventurous, forward-thinking films within this vast ecosystem. The LFF may not have been able to boast many premieres – much of what was screened had been shown elsewhere this year – but it made up for this with the sheer range of work shown. Once I got used to the infuriating festival brochure – which groups films in categories such as Love, Dave, Journey and Thrill – I found that there was plenty to impress from the spectrum of moving-image production.

The first of a number of films to impress this year was Russian director Aleksei German’s extraordinary Hard to be a God (2013). This epic tale of muck and madness freely adapted the 1964 science fiction novel of the same name by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. As in the book, Anton, an ‘observer’ from a future Earth, is sent to a planet that is almost identical to ours except that culture hasn’t progressed beyond the Middle Ages – although the plot quickly becomes irrelevant. For the most part, the camera is so close to the actors’ bodies and the fluids that drip, flow and spurt from them, that you can almost smell them. When the camera does retreat to take in a whole scene, the actors continue to piss, shit, fight and drag whatever weaponry or machinery that is close to hand through the mud, as if they had been given simple instructions about how to move and express themselves, rather than any kind of script. German died in 2013 and his wife and long-time screenwriting partner, Svetlana Karmelita, and his son Aleksei A. German, also filmmaker, oversaw the post-production. It is a fitting tribute to all involved that Hard to be a God is as uncompromising and searching as anything in German’s small but perfectly formed oeuvre.

Aleksei German, Hard to be a God, 2013, film still.

Another filmmaker stretching and reinventing cinematic forms within what can broadly be called narrative cinema is Filipino director Lav Diaz, who was represented at the festival by his new film From What is Before (2014). Known as much for the length of his films as for their subject matter (the recent social and political history of the Philippines), From What is Before has a running time of just under six hours. Like German, Diaz builds worlds for his characters to inhabit, but his narratives are tighter. Set in the early 1970s on a small island in the Philippines before martial law is introduced and as Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship is being established, From What is Before tells the story of a group of villagers being driven from their homes by a series of mysterious events. First, cattle are inexplicably slaughtered and then a man is found dead at the side of a road. At the centre of the film are a woman and her learning-disabled sister. Rather than simply operating as metaphors for the collapse of community and suppression of opposition to the dictatorship, their plight, and those of the other villagers, serves as a portent, driving the narrative forward and keeping the audience spellbound. From What is Before is virtuosic filmmaking: experimental, searching and vital. It is an example of what narrative filmmaking can do; it would have been unthinkable without digital technology, which has allowed Diaz to think way outside the frame of the constraints of tradition film production and exhibition.

Lav Diaz, From What is Before, 2014, film still.

Both German’s and Diaz’s films appeared in the ‘Dare’ strand of the festival, as did Jean-Luc Godard’s latest, Goodbye to Language (2014). Godard’s first foray into 3D subverts all the expectations that one might have of the medium. The film is wilfully awkward and at times painful to watch – as if we’re bearing witness to the birth of a new cinematic language. Actors are cut off at the legs or neck or shot from odd angles, their bodies crowding the frame or half disappearing from it. Like German, Godard is also preoccupied with bodily functions and uses the 3D technology to stress mind / body separation and the materiality of cinema itself, as both an art form and an experience. In his 1968 film Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning) Godard famously voiced his desire to ‘return to zero’, to throw away the conventions of cinema and unlearn what had been learnt. Almost 50 years later he has thrown down the same gauntlet to those working with digital technologies. At certain points, through superimposition of images in 3D, the film threatens to induce a collective epileptic fit in the audience – at these moments the audience in unison either rip the 3D glasses from their faces, or bow down to avert their eyes. No more fitting reaction, perhaps.

Also preoccupied with the relationship of mind to body is Emily Wardill’s When you fall into a trance (2013), which screened in the Experimenta strand. Fittingly dedicated to the memory of the late artist, curator and writer Ian White, with whom Wardill shared many preoccupations, When you fall into a trance traced the fault lines that open up in the psyches of a neuroscientist, her patient, Simon, who suffers from a loss of proprioception, and her lover, who is possibly a US spy – when they are put under stress. Wardill uses warped mirrors and splits the frame with various devices and, as with Godard’s Goodbye to Language, explores the limitations of language and ideas untethered from the physical body.

Emily Wardill, When you fall into a trance, 2013, film still.

Other highlights included Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s clever and funny L for Leisure (2014), which pointed a way out of the mumblecore cul-de-sac for North American independent cinema, and Argentine Lisandro Alonso’s new film, Jauja (2014). Both films featured in the ‘Journey’ strand and were as interested in the landscapes through which their protagonists travelled as they were in the journeys themselves. L for Leisure is set in the early 1990s and follows a group of young graduates during their spring, summer and winter breaks from university teaching jobs and research positions. Kalman and Horn create a weird hermetically sealed world occupied by white middle-class kids oblivious to the world around them, however much they talk about world affairs and culture. They are not doomed in the same way as the protagonists in a Whit Stillman film, for example; they have simply been condemned to live in a sundrenched 16mm world where they water ski, roller blade, smoke nutmeg (to get high) and, in a particularly hilarious scene, improvise a fashion show using the contents of a bag of denim samples.

Jauja is Lisandro Alonso’s fifth feature and his first period film as well as his first film with trained actors. Viggo Mortensen takes the central role, as a Danish military engineer stationed in Patagonia during Argentina’s Conquest of the Desert at the end of the 19th century. The film dramatically shifts focus towards its conclusion, with a temporal and spatial rupture that recalls Alain Renais’s Providence (1977), which similarly explores the processes of cinematic storytelling and realism. With his third film, Fantasma (2006), Alonso promised much. He has an eye every bit as restless and probing as Michelangelo Antonioni’s, which he combines with a reflection on cinema’s past and future, and a sense of what it might say about his country’s own culture and history that matches Resnais. After his last film Liverpool (2008), which felt like a step backwards, Jauja lives up to his early promise.

Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, L for Leisure, 2014, film still.

Although ostensibly one of the programming strands, Experimenta is effectively an adjunct to the main festival. Its stated purpose is to represent both ‘experimental cinema and artists’ film and video’. And while this is not uncommon – most film festivals annex the experimental work in one way or another – at the LFF it starts to look odd when so many films in the main programme could rightfully claim to be at the forefront of ‘experimental cinema’. This year the Wavelength programme at the Toronto International Film Festival, which operates in much the same way as Experimenta, included Jauja and From What is Before, both of which featured in the main programme here in London. Similarly Godard’s film could have easily slipped into the Experimenta programme, just as Wardill’s arguably could have gone the other way. There were other films of note in the Experimenta strand that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the main programme, such as artist’s Eric Baudelaire’s Letters to Max (2014) or filmmaker Gabriel Abrantes’ short film Taprobana (2014).

However, there were also films that – were it not for the relative autonomy of the Experimenta programme – would not have been shown within the context of a major film festival at all. These included a programme of beautifully restored Los Angeles’ artists’ films from the Academy Film Archive; Phil Collins’ Tomorrow is Always Too Long (2014), a beguiling and bewildering hallucinatory city symphony for Glasgow, that sees the users of the city’s public institutions – such as schools, prisons and hospitals, as well as presenters on an imagined open access TV station – burst into song – and Steve Reinke’s Rib Gets In The Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three) (2014), which begins with an image of a man with a phone up his arse and ends with an animated adaptation, ‘for children’, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1891).

Steve Reinke, Rib Gets In The Way (Final Thoughts, Series Three), 2014, film still

It is not entirely clear what the answer is to these vexed questions about definitions and categories. It is clear, however, that there is a crisis of sorts over the definition of artists’ film and video, and much confusion over its relation to the type of cinema made by the likes of Diaz, Alonso and Godard. There was an attempt to address this across two panel discussions entitled ‘Artists’ film and its Contexts’, which was held as part of the Experimenta programme, but phrases like ‘artists are returning to the cinema’ were uttered without acknowledging that whether they were actually there in the first place, and if they had left, there was no discussion about why. It is true that some artists now make narrative films (however fractured those narratives might be), and documentaries that have running times of around 90 minutes, without letting go of their gallery practice or moderating their ideas and vision to fit conventional Hollywood grammar. And, of course, with cheap digital cameras and high-end home editing suites, many filmmakers now are able to make the films they want to make without compromise. There are echoes here of Peter Wollen’s claim in his seminal essay, The Two Avant-Gardes (1975), that ‘film history has developed unevenly’. In the 1970s one solution (as much as it was one) for many was to try and hold this fragile and splintered community of ‘avant-garde’ filmmakers together under the rubric of ‘independent film’. This was not the answer, just as it isn’t now, but it might be worth having a closer look at this history to see if it’s possible to learn from it.

By Agata Pyzik

Walerian Borowczyk, La Bête (The Beast, 1975), film still. All images courtesy: Daniel Bird

He was a Polish designer who trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Arts in postwar Krakow. He co-created a phenomenon, which was later called the Polish School of Poster (and included such masters as Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cieślewicz). He invented his own kind of animated film, and then created a unique erotic/symbolic cinema which, he believed, combined his art and obsessions; although his films were never simply a cheap thrill, he was labelled a pornographer. He was Walerian Borowczyk, whose work is now available in its all glory, with the Arrow Academy DVD release of ‘Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection’ – which includes his six greatest films.

Born in 1923, Borowczyk, who was commonly known as ‘Boro’, was a self-obsessed megalomaniac who never ceased to hold a grudge against his native Poland, which he left in 1958 after his sensational success at the Brussels Expo 58, where he won the international competition with Dom (House, 1958) – the stupendous, Surrealist animation he made in collaboration with his fellow graphic designer Jan Lenica (the soundtrack is by Wlodzimierz Kotoński, of the PRES electronic studio). The film’s combination of uncanny, sardonic humour, mastery of collage technology and its combination of realism, retro and the abstract made it look unlike anything before or since. After Dom, Borowczyk went to France, made acquaintance with members of what was later called the Left Bank Group, and met some key characters in his life: the owner and producer of Argos Films, Anatole Dauman, and the Surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, whose novels Boro would later adapt (such as La Marge, 1967). Paris in the late ’50s was not unknown territory for Polish artists – the likes of artist and theatre director Tadeusz Kantor and the painter Jerzy Kujawski had pilgrimaged there since the end of the war. But it was Boro who became the most significant Polish artist working in postwar France. He embraced certain aspects of the French cinema – for instance, in 1972 he collaborated with the legendary actor Michel Simon on Blanche– while remaining within a tightly closed niche of his own obsessions.

Walerian Borowczyk, Dom (The House, 1958, excerpt)

Boro’s first truly foreign endeavour was Les Astronautes (The Astronauts,1959), an adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s 1951 novel of the same name. Chris Marker is listed as co-director, but the film was, in fact, a solo work; Marker lent his name to help Borowczyk establish himself in a new country. Its unmistakeable aesthetic ushered in Boro’s complex graphic technique – painterly touches meeting ultramodern collage (and the electronic sounds of Andrzej Markowski), with cut-and-paste graphics that echoed the 19th century, suggesting that at heart Borowczyk was a Victorian. The provenance is confirmed by early feature films, such as Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love, 1968), in which cartoon characters that look like cardboard cut-outs are thrown into an atmosphere of lust and power. The usurper king of the eponymous island is a tyrant over both his subjects and his beautiful wife (played by Ligia Branice, Borowczyk’s lifelong companion and collaborator), whose heart and body longs for her young and handsome low-born lover. The story can be read as Boro’s take on Stalinist rule in the Soviet Bloc. But here, things get complicated, as Borowczyk’s focus wasn’t just oppression, but desire as the force that rules the world – something that is withheld, wasted, misguided or fatal, yet unstoppable. The French understood this, as Borowczyk’s interests corresponded with those of the French Surrealists: desire, sexuality, a death-drive, religion, all were seeped in his Polish Catholicism and reacted against it. Like the Surrealists, Borowczyk was interested in female desire – powerful heroines are central to his films, as the only creatures capable of love and a commitment to desire, for which they’re ready to risk their lives and without which they don’t exist. Blanche, the heroine of his 1971 medieval adaptation of the same name, provokes pernicious desire in every man she encounters – the king, his page, her senile husband, his son – but is betrayed by all of them and remains pure, despite reciprocating the love of her stepson. Ultimately, she chooses death rather than a world without love. Blanche is a tribute to Boro’s ongoing interest in the Middle Ages, and the film’s meticulous tableaux vivants evoke Gothic painting. The incredible recreation of medieval music sung in Latin in Blanche made it a pioneer of historic cinema.

Walerian Borowczyk, Blanche, 1971, film still

According to Boro, we’re not masters of our souls. There’s a Sadeian element to his work; his heroines often experience turmoil, and the fulfilment of their desires inevitably leads to death. As with Sade, one of his major targets is hypocrisy. Boro held a grudge towards his native Poland for censoring his films and not recognising his genius, but he still returned there to make his masterpiece Dzieje grzechu (Story of Sin, 1975), an adaptation of a novel by the Polish realist writer Stefan Żeromski, which tells the story of a poor, beautiful girl living in fin de siècle Warsaw, who is let down by a man she loves and falls victim to all kinds of crooks, hustlers, pimps and perverts. Before he died of heart failure at the age of 82 in 2006, Borowczyk released his erratic autobiography, titled What I Think Looking at a Naked Polish Woman. It was an incoherent, yet fascinating farrago of Polish obscurantism about his work, interspersed with clips from the French press testifying to his genius. It contains also slightly distasteful attacks at the hipocrisy of Story of Sin’s lead actress who accused him of a ruthless drive to make pornography.

Beauty in Borowczyk is either convulsive or doesn’t exist. Although on the surface his best-known film, La Bête (The Beast, 1975) is an exploitation flick – its unembarrassed exposure of its naked heroine is brazenly titillating – its nature is more Sadeian and Victorian than 1970s. The scenes in which porn actress Sirpa Lane’s 18th century aristocrat feels ultimate pleasure ‘riding’ the enormous phallus of the titular bear-like beast, are as shocking as they are funny. Its message of following pleasure, no matter how bestial, to its end was echoed five years later in Possession (1981) by another Polish eccentric, Andrzej Zulawski. In the film, housewife Isabel Adjani gravitates to the Berlin Wall only to find pleasure in the arms of a bloodthirsty gigantic octopus. As with Zulawski, a horror of marriage made its way into Boro’s hilarious animated feature Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal’s Theatre, 1967), in which the title’s couple engage in eternal infernal marriage games.

Walerian Borowczyk, Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (Mr. and Mrs. Kabal’s Theatre, 1967), film still

But it was atmosphere and appearance that were crucial to Boro’s films. His features all reveal an obsession with colour, texture, rhythm and music. It was an approach that was developed originally in the Eastern Bloc, where animation was a way for artists to escape censorship and the boring restrictions of the Socialist Realist period. Yet even if Boro didn’t want to make art for the masses, he knew the power of scandal. Unlike exploitation and soft-porn cinema, which also often used costume drama as a pretext for picturesque sex scenes, films such as 1974’s Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales) (with Paloma Picasso as the ultimate vampirella, Elizabeth Bathory) reveal a perverse mixture of Enlightenment rationalism and the revelation that there is nothing rational in desire. It was Kant avec Sade, in the words of Roland Barthes.

Walerian Borowczyk, Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales, 1974), film still

The interviews in ‘Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection’ reveal a ferocious, passionate artist, speaking clearly about his art and obsessions in French, his second language. His underlying seriousness makes it clear that Borowczyk was not merely an exotic cousin to the exploitation cinema genre that exploded after the late ’60s and the sexual revolution, or another great, lost schlock director newly available on DVD, to file alongside Alenjandro Jodorowsky or Jean Rollin. Rather more impossibly, he could be filed as an erotic mirror to the sublime work of the likes of Paradjanov (or even Tarkovsky).The Borowczyk of the erotic shockers was still the artist who made avant-garde shorts in 1950s Poland. Impossibly talented, infinitely curious, perversely morbid, he was an author of exquisitely beautiful pornography who communicated with the sacred and understood the nature of the profane.

Walerian Borowczyk, Une collection particulière (The Particular Collection, 1973, excerpt)

By Krzysztof Kosciuczuk

Piotr Lakomy's 'Tomorrow Will Be Smaller' at the temporary space of Galeria Stereo, Warsaw

Over the last few years the Warsaw Gallery Weekend (WGW) has grown from a string of low-key, sequential openings into a – still fairly modest – well orchestrated event that attracts galleries and gallery-goers from Poland and beyond. With state institutions joining in to open exhibitions and host special events on the occasion, as well as panels with seasoned international collectors sharing insights on their practice, one can safely say that WGW is making its mark on the Polish (and hopefully international) art scene. Now that the dust has settled, I’ve assembled a few picks of shows in the fourth edition of WGW that are worth taking note of. (And, lest anyone wonder, they’re listed in alphabetical order).

‘Imagorea’ at Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

‘Imagoria’ at Foksal Gallery Foundation
With their premises in the midst of a radical makeover, Foksal Gallery Foundation briefly moved in to a newfangled building built for the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts on the bank of the Vistula that was yet to be officially opened. In one corner of the buildings grey, concrete-walled lobby stood a wooden cage-like structure designed by architect Andreas Angelidakis; its interior housed a mesmerizing collage of several dozen paintings by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski. This was the second iteration of a massive survey, ‘Imagorea’, held earlier this year by the municipal gallery BWA in the city of Zielona Gora. Presenting works made by Ziolkowski since early 2013, the show offered a good chance for the Warsaw audience to become acquainted with the artist’s recent work. This was a mixture of abstract shapes, biological forms, portraits and landscapes that felt surprisingly coherent when presented en masse.

Installation view at Monopol, Warsaw

‘Andrzej Partum / Zbigniew Warpechowski / Roman Dziadkiewicz’ at Monopol
If I had been really pressed for time (as many of my colleagues often are) Monopol may not have made this list, quite simply because one had little chance to see the show on the Gallery Weekend. Well past noon on Saturday the place was still shut, but displayed signs of a long and successful opening the day before. However, since (unlike some of my colleagues) I go past Monopol several times a week, I heroically tried to forget this (for the time being) – the WGW takes place once a year and if you go to the lengths of participating, make sure you are in the gallery when it happens, not elsewhere. But enough nagging. Launched early this year, Monopol is a new arrival on the Warsaw scene, but their scope of interest seems quite defined and ambitious, representing, in large part, artists born in the 1930s. This show sought to draw out the personal connection between Zbigniew Warpechowski (born in 1938) and Andrzej Partum (1938–2002). The former is a father figure of Polish performance and a student of the Krakow Technical University and Academy of Fine Arts; the latter was a maverick, self-taught artist, musician and poet born and raised in Warsaw. Seemingly poles apart, the artists established a close relationship, which was brought to the foreground here through archival materials with the help of a younger-generation Krakow artist, Roman Dziadkiewicz. A ‘gem in the process of polishing’ – the expression used to describe the exhibition by Marcin Krasny in the magazine Obieg– aptly sums it up.

‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram, Warsaw

‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram
For the group show ‘Zombie Formalism’ at Piktogram/BLA (the latter stands for Bureau of Loose Associations), curator Michal Wolinski went out on a limb to combine works by four diverse artists: Szymon Malecki, Tomek Sacilowski, Jacek Sempolinski and Kajetan Sosnowski. Taking its cue from the eponymous text by Walter Robinson, the show could be read as taunting the idea of exhibitions based on far-fetched juxtapositions and formal affinities that, in the end, seem to ‘sit well together’. Except, in this case, the two younger artists (Malecki and Sacilowski) have received no formal training, and their works are displayed alongside those of two major historical figures of 20th-century Polish painting (Sempolinski and Sosnowski), concerned with issues of colour and abstraction. While questioning the nonchalance of superficial market practices aimed at bestowing unexpected formal genealogies upon new artists, and thus offering them a safe landing in the world of art, Wolinski drew viewers’ attention to artistic practice itself. It is the focus on the process, he seems to suggest – the treatment of the material, be it chemical, photosensitive, or physical – that is at the heart of the game.

Antje Majewski at Pola Magnetyczne

Antje Majewski at Pola Magnetyczne
Pola Magnetyczne, or Magnetic Fields, a gallery on the northern fringes of the well-to-do villa neighbourhood of Saska Kepa, opened its doors in December 2012. Since then it has already earned a reputation as a site of singular presentations. With each visit, the space on the first floor of the house (home not only to the exhibition space but to the gallerists as well) seems utterly different. This time is no exception. Arriving to see the solo presentation by Antje Majewski, I was greeted and offered tea by the gallerists, after which we stepped into the exhibition space. ‘What is your first memory of a museum?’ asked Patrick Komorowski, as my eyes wandered across a low plinth topped with what seemed like fairly random findings from a Sunday stroll through a flea market and a forest. I gave him an honest answer: it was a small municipal museum in my hometown. It was only a few minutes into our conversation that I realized he had changed roles, making a perfect segue into a scripted narrative – a short story written by Sebastian Cichocki of Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art. Taking me on the journey on which I had unwittingly embarked, Komorowski guided me through a fascinating tour of Majewski’s The Museum in the Garage– a medley of objects from the Museum of Prehistoric Thira in Santorini, the Ravensbrueck Memorial Site and the studio of Jeanne Mammen, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt as well as the artist’s own collection. None of them random, each and every one of them with a story waiting to be told.

Piotr Lakomy at Galeria Stereo
After their move from Poznan, Galeria Stereo hadn’t enjoyed their new Warsaw exhibition space in a modest, Modernist pavilion for long before they were forced to look for another venue. For WGW they came up with an unlikely site: what used to be the largest printing facility in the Polish People’s Republic. For his show ‘Tomorrow Will be Smaller’, Piotr Lakomy produced a group of minimal sculptures and installations involving light, colour and mass-produced building materials that blended seamlessly with the post-industrial nooks and crannies, inviting viewers to re-examine it time and again.

Erwin Kneihsl, guest appearacne of SVIT (Prague)

Erwin Kneihsl at Svit
For the first time (and hopefully not the last) WGW witnessed a gallery from abroad parachuting into the event. Prague’s SVIT made an appearance with works by the Austrian photographer and filmmaker Erwin Kneihsl. Presented in an empty apartment in a tenement house overlooking the most salient of Warsaw’s monuments, the hulking Palace of Culture, this forgotten rocket left sitting on its massive landing pad made Kneihsl’s Universe look very much at home. Several dozen black-and-white works were hovering in mid-air on nylon thread. Clusters of aircraft, churches, suns or moons, and one intensely orange (if memory serves) gorilla appeared like offhand snapshots taken by an amateur. Much like the artists presented at Piktogram, Kneihsl is interested in the physical and chemical processes that lead to the emergence of an image.

Aneta Grzeszykowska at Raster
Aneta Grzeszykowska’s ‘Selfie’ was a powerful series of photographs that originated as sculptures. The artist used pig skin to painstakingly model fragments of her own body, most notably, her head. Shot against backgrounds of smooth, toned leather, the eyes, fingers, lips and chins form a fragmented self-portrait in which carnality and objecthood play the lead roles. The show marks another stage in the artist’s exploration of her own identity, which she began with the series ‘Album’ (2005), in which she erased her figure from over 200 family photos, and continuing in different forms and media, including video and hand-sewn sculptures. Here, the body is both fetishized (modelled, painted and photographed with obsessive attention to detail), as well as degraded (through the emphasis on using animal remains).

Warpechowski at Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw

To be sure, there was plenty to be seen outside of this selection. The exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art – ‘Private Settings’ (a compelling show of post-internet art featuring stars of this trend, such as Ryan Trecartin), and Maria Bartusova’s ‘Provisional Forms’ – as well as the retrospective of Warpechowski in Zacheta, are worth noting. This year’s edition of the Warsaw Gallery Weekend is meaningful for a number of reasons, one of them being the decision to formalize the collaboration between the growing number of spaces participating, which resulted in the establishment of an association of art galleries (SGS), whose role is to coordinate the event as a common effort. Apparently, the organizers take their job seriously, and so, I hope will the gallerists. I’ll be there to see the next move, and I hope many others will be, too.

Krzysztof Kosciuczuk is a writer based in Warsaw, Poland.

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