calendario eventi  :: 

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29/1/2013

Three exhibitions

Lisson Gallery, London

Mark Boulos
No Permanent Address

‘The characters in my films wrest their agency from the structures that would control them, including language, reason, gender, God, capital, and the state. Their action is also performance: they rebel against the small roles society has cast for them, they reimagine who they are, then they perform their greater selves. Thus my work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, or between mythology and history’.
Mark Boulos

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present the UK premier of US artist Mark Boulos’ film, No Permanent Address (2010), from 30 January – 9 March 2013. The film will show alongside a new installation intrinsically linked to this earlier work.

For No Permanent Address, Boulos spent eight weeks living in the Philippine jungle with two guerilla squads of the New People’s Army (NPA), a Communist insurgency which is currently designated as a terrorist organisation by the EU and USA. The resulting work ruminates on the persistence of Communism beyond its supposed death, focussing on the powerful personal narratives of the soldiers. In conjunction with the film, the artist will present a series of large-scale photographs dating from his time in the jungle.

The film’s title intentionally mirrors the initials of its subject whilst referencing the necessarily peripatetic existences of the NPA, who abandon any fixed address and notions of home in order to avoid capture and death at the hands of the Philippine army. Members follow the theories of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and willingly relinquish their personal desires and property, devoting themselves entirely to the Party and embracing an ascetic lifestyle.

Rather than depicting military skirmishes with the Philippine army, Boulos gives us a more subtle, distinctly human portrait of the NPA, interspersing shots of the army trekking through densely vegetated coconut groves and undergoing weapons training, with emotionally evocative stories of love, family and sacrifice from individual members of the army. One soldier describes being forced to watch the murder of his family, giving rise to his joining of the NPA. Another discusses the importance of holding your allegiance to the party above personal relationships and ensuring that, ideally, any relationships formed outside of the party bring more civilians into the revolutionary fold.

The triptych-like presentation of No Permanent Address takes it from the realm of documentary into an immersive aesthetic experience. The three screens often show the same shot slightly desynchronised, highlighting the fact that no single reality is total but is instead fragmented and unclear; we can never really experience something in its completeness.

The last scene of No Permanent Address ends on a deeply unsettling note, with defensive preparations underway for an anticipated attack by the military, a reminder of the constant danger that members live in. Although they evaded that attack, this summer Boulos received news from the Philippine Communist Party that most of the people featured in his film had been killed. This discovery forms the basis for a new work in the basement of 29 Bell Street that serves as a memorial to the NPA members he lived and collaborated with.

The installation comprises an LCD monitor showing unused footage from Boulos’ earlier work, taken on his very last day with the NPA as the sun sets. As darkness falls, members dissolve into grainy blackness, a haunting reminder that whilst they lived their lives striving for invisibility as if already ghosts, now they are hidden for ever. This video is the last known image of these people before their death. It is juxtaposed with a wall projection showing jungle trees bathed in golden light from behind, redolent of the idealism of the NPA’s beliefs, and a monitor displaying the death notice from the Communist Party received by Boulos.

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Gerard Byrne
Present Continuous Past

Lisson Gallery is proud to announce Present Continuous Past, a solo exhibition by Gerard Byrne, 30 January – 9 March 2013 at 52-54 Bell Street. The works on display examine the conditions that underpin the artistic process and methods of cultural production. They have been selected to act as a thematic adjunct to the Whitechapel Gallery’s major survey of the artist’s work, to open on 17 January 2013.

Visually rich and intellectually complex, the work of Gerard Byrne examines the slippage between time and the act of image creation. Using film, video and photography, Byrne confronts the inherent challenges of the visual record, demonstrating that whilst images are fixed in time they are also interpreted in flux, a situation that both creates and distorts our knowledge of what came before. The camera inhabits a temporal vacuum, able to capture or create moments chronologically and geographically distinct, such as 1960s Leeds or 1970s USA, and present them as either historical fact or fiction.

Characterised by a laconic humour, Byrne’s projects examine the ambiguities of language and of what is gained or lost in the translation from text to image. By reconstructing historically charged conversations, interviews and performances, Byrne tests our perception of the past and the present, and the relationship of textual to visual information.

In the video work Subject, Byrne takes the Modernist architecture of the University of Leeds – conceived in 1960 by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, architects of London’s Barbican Centre – as a starting point for a broader examination of the radical changes in post-war UK society and of the dialectic relationship that exists between individuals and the built environment that surrounds them. Using a cast of actors playing 1960s university students and a script derived from written material acquired by the university library in the same decade, the film attempts to re-inhabit the architecture at the moment it was first envisioned. However the line between historical documentation and fiction is blurred by a soundtrack that both substantiates and undermines the proof of the naked eye, leaving the viewer suspended between times, uncertain if what they are seeing is historical evidence or a construct of the artist.

The ongoing series Images or shadows of divine things will also form part of the exhibition at Lisson Gallery. Referencing a text by the 18th century American theologian Jonathan Edwards, the work meditates upon an American orthodox theological tradition which perceives the natural world as clear evidence of the Divine and as a series of sequential 'images', each of which is pre-figured in the bible. Intrigued by the way in which this once influential theology effectively negates the very idea of history and change over time, Byrne presents a series of monochrome images of the United States, that while made over the course of the last seven years, evoke the photographic grammar of American mid-century photography and appear to depict an earlier time. The images enact the historical inertia of Edwards’ belief system and raise fundamental questions about how we construct the past as a 'different' place. Like Subject, the series challenges our understanding of photographic truth and of the role of the image in interpreting the world.

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Richard Wentworth

Lisson Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of works by seminal New British Sculpture artist Richard Wentworth, from 30 January – 2 March 2013 at 29 Bell Street. This will be his seventh solo exhibition with Lisson Gallery. In 2009 Wentworth also curated the acclaimed exhibition Boule to Braid at the gallery.

A leading figure in contemporary British Sculpture, Richard Wentworth continues to radically challenge the way we think about the material of the world. His artistic language confronts the way in which objects are used and experienced in the everyday, acquiring independent meaning whilst being tied to systems of grammar and usage.

Working with ready-mades and often incongruous found items, Wentworth transforms, juxtaposes and manipulates them into arrangements that subvert their intended use and undermine their supposedly routine and ‘fixed’ nature. He organises his imagery to be ‘read’ as a text and as a means of negotiating the protocol of forms. The viewer is encouraged to acknowledge the agency of the object and the dialectic relationship that exists between man and things.

The exhibition at Lisson Gallery will feature the ambitious site-specific installation A Room Full of Lovers (2013), informed by Gaudi’s calculations for the structure of the Sagrada Familia, Barcelona. The installation, consisting of a steel chain anchored high above and falling in catenaries all the way around the gallery space, explores the role of gravity and perception as artistic tools. The work encloses the viewer and binds them to the spatial and linear narrative of the chains; implicated in the loops and material divisions are the highs and lows of human social and physical relations.

A new series of photographs will be presented alongside the sculptural work in the exhibition. Here the (generally urban) motive is examined as though a ready-made. Everyday objects, geometries and uncanny situations are brought to the viewer’s attention. Wentworth casts light on the uneasy qualities of the mundane, which punctuates the city streets, his favoured space of conception.

Image: Mark Boulos, Commander, 2010. Photograph

For press information and images please contact:
Toby Kidd and Amy Sutcliffe at Pelham Communications
Tel: +44 20 8969 3959 Email: toby@pelhamcommunications.com and amys@pelhamcommunications.com

Opening: 30 January 2013 h 12.30 – 13.30

Lisson Gallery
29 & 52-54 Bell Street, London
Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm
Free Admission

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