Through Symbolic Worlds
dal 12/6/2011 al 15/7/2011
Segnalato da
12/6/2011
Through Symbolic Worlds
International Project Space - School of Art Bournville Institute of Art and Desi, Birmingham
The artists explore the relationship between subjectivity and abstraction in various forms: Emily Roysdon's use of choreography and gesture as means to exploring freedom of movment and potential for public forms of political expression; Stephen Willats's development of cybernetic systems that inquires the relationships between society and the individual; and Banu Cennetoglu's perfomative taxonomies which engage with the production and distribution of the photographic image.
Through Symbolic Worlds is an exhibition that pivots around three artistic positions and bodies of research by Banu Cennetoğlu, Emily Roysdon and Stephen Willats. The exhibition takes its title from an essay by Willats in which he examines how the world, as it is constructed out of a matrix of encoded signs, affects our perceptions, behaviours and beliefs. While the growth of information and networking technologies has given rise to new hybridised forms of physical and digital public space and a proliferation of forums for ‘being public’, individual subjectivities have become increasingly abstracted rather than articulated and defined. Employing a variety formal and conceptual frameworks, the artists in Through Symbolic Worlds explore the relationship between subjectivity and abstraction in various forms: Emily Roysdon’s use of choreography and gesture as means to exploring freedom of movment and potential for public forms of political expression; Stephen Willats's development of cybernetic systems that explore the relationships between society and the individual; and Banu Cennetoğlu’s perfomative taxonomies which engage with the production and distribution of the photographic image.
Stephen Willats’s From My Mind to Your Mind (2005), a multimedia work comprising photographs, text video and sound, traces a journey from a suburban high street to a local park through various levels of documentary information collected by a group of artist collaborators. A questionnaire which accompanies the work invites viewers to project themselves into the reality that the system represents through a series of questions. The work becomes a vehicle for interaction, wherein the established model is only completed through the investment of the viewer’s own subjectivity.
With a similar interest in the coded structures embedded in public space, Emily Roysdon is represented by Sense and Sense (2010), a project developed in response to Sergels Torg – the main public square in Stockholm used notably for all planned public protests in the city. The square’s sunken topography allows all the activities which take place within it to be viewed from above, rendering it a panopticon-like space. Using the square, with its iconic geometric floor pattern as a stage and framework, Roysdon collaborated with the artist MPA to create a site-specific performance recorded as both a two-channel video (shown in this exhibition) and a series of photographs. The spare choreography of MPA’s laboured movement across the sqaure, juxtaposed with the random movement of other passers-by, invokes a dialectic of ‘planned use and improvisation’ within the public space of the city, and the possiblities that reside in both for the articulation of subjective positions.
First presented at the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, Banu Cennetoğlu’s CATALOG (2009–) is a book comprising 450 of the artist’s photographs organised into fifteen categories: composition, colour, assumption, negotiation, operation, vanity, adjustment, excursion, caution, love, seizure, exploit, act, invasion and replacement. Moving between personal photographs, documentary images of politically charged zones and more immediately iconic images such as those of the attack on the World Trade Centre, CATALOG employs an organizing system that simultaneously resists any definitive system of categorisation.
Banu Cennetoğlu (b. 1970 in Ankara, Turkey) lives and works in Istanbul. Recent solo shows include Guilty Feet Have no Rhythm, Kunsthalle Basel (2011) and Sample Sale BC 2010, Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul (2010). She has been part of numerous group shows such as Second Exhibition, ARTER, Istanbul (2011), La revanche de l’archive photographique, Centre de la photographie, Geneva; and Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010). In 2009 Cennetoğlu co-represented Turkey at the Venice Biennial together with Ahmet Öğüt.
Emily Roysdon (b 1977) is a New York and Stockholm based artist and writer. Recent solo exhibitons include POSITIONS, Art In General, New York (2011); If I Don’t Move Can You Hear Me? Matrix 235, Berkeley Art Museum; Sense and Sense, Konsthall C, Stockholm (both 2010). Recent group exhibitions include Abstract Possible, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Manifesta 8, Murcia (all 2010). She is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and artist collective, LTTR.
Stephen Willats (b. 1943) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include COUNTERCONSCIOUSNESS, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2010); Cybernetic Still Life, Balice Hertling, Paris; In and Out of the Underworld, European Kunsthalle, Cologne (both 2009); The Speculative Diagram, Casco Projects, Utrecht (2008); Person to Person, People to People, Milton Keynes Gallery (2007). Recent group exhibitions include Aftermath: Objects from Projects, Chelsea Space, London (2011); Getting Even, Kunstverein Hannover (2009); A Town (Not a City), Kunsthalle St Gallen; Manifesta 7, Rovereto (both 2008). Willats is also the editor of CONTROL magazine.
Image: Stephen Willats, 'Imaginary Journey', 2006
Preview Monday 13 June, 5–7pm
International Project Space IPS
School of Art Bournville Birmingham Institute of Art and DesignMaple Road, Birmingham B30 2AA
Opening hours
Wednesday 12-7pm
Thursday-Saturday 12-5pm