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13/2/2014

Ed Atkins

Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich

In his work, which includes videos, video installations, texts and drawings, British artist Ed Atkins (born 1982, lives and works in London) explores the virtuality of our contemporary visual world and its profound effect on the reality of our embodied lives. His High-Definition videos and powerful soundtracks question their own technical accomplishments, promises and ideologies. Atkins begins, often with the idea of his chosen media’s paradoxical capacity to realistically reproduce our material world in decidedly dematerialized ways. Alongside the last four videos Atkins has produced, and a selection of collages and writings – he will premiere a new large-scale installation for this presentation, which is his first institutional solo show in Switzerland.

The latest digital imaging technologies provide something of a starting point for Atkins’ work. The High-Definition (HD) format of the videos and their soundtracks present a succession of incredibly precise images to the viewer, all unintentional imperfections eradicated, along with any semblance of real anima. This unilateral focus on technical representational perfection is contrasted starkly with the invisible, incorporeal absence digital formats, which can no longer be perceived tangibly. The disembodiment of the medium – the stripping of its physicality, the work’s indexicality – is partnered with a process of “living” reality becoming “dead” digital code. This deferral, this flattening, spiriting away of a somatics of media and its consequences is physically avenged in Atkins’ works, attempting to reconcile this discrepancy formally and thematically, through metaphoric extensions of terminologies and techniques. As a point of departure, much of the works take some figuration of a cadaver and its encumbents – disease, sensuousness, death – as their protagonist or avatar. Ultimately, much of the work’s content and presentation is in the employ of affectivity, of just how visceral an experience might be had with the work. Atkins’s digital compositions are characterized by rich, saturated colors, high-precision editing rhythms, languorous fades, tight shifts in focus, and the montage of a wealth of material, much of which could be characterized as having the quality of stock.

The multi-faceted interrelations between text and image play an important role in Ed Atkins’s work. The artist’s interest in implicit and explicit visual and physical word games is widely evidenced in his works: in the course of his search for a grammar of visual representation that desires a sufficient representation of a real body, but which cannot avoid repeatedly failing, obscuring it. It’s at this limit, on the brink of semantic and syntactical collapse, that he writes. Us Dead Talk Love (2012) is Atkins’ first multiple projection and surround sound video work. It also marks the beginning of his use of computer-generated figures within an almost exclusively computer generated and sourced scenario. The work consists of two free-standing screens, which are placed apart from each other at a slight angle so that the projection which overshoots the screen is visible to the viewer. Atkins calibrates the projector’s light in such a way that it does not fall exactly within the width of the screen but extends beyond its edges into the exhibition space and thus generates a certain spatial ambience. The work begins with the tragic-comic, po-faced love song “Johanna” from Tim Burton’s 2007 film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd (1979) – which might be understood as a cipher for the work entire: karaoke’d voices through shaven headed, decapitated heads trying so hard to speak of love, to conjure an intimacy through a possible memory and a materially arresting moment of discovering an eyelash beneath their foreskin; love is summoned, always-already a specter in the process of its recollection and its telling. Cliché is never far away, artifice understood as essential to the possibility of righteously failing experience in the process of its attempted representation. The floating, emoting heads twitch and quiver with both the failure of hardware and emotional melodrama – often at the same time. The video, like much of the other work in the exhibition, affects typically authenticating gestures to a point of ludicrous excess: scratched film, lens flares and blurs, skips and flashes are all faked: vestigial aspects of an analogue, material past of the medium, now rendered meticulously in After Effects, Premiere and Maya.

Ed Atkins created the large-scale installative work entitled Ribbons (2014) for the top floor of the Kunsthalle Zürich. The triple projection, which extends across three exhibition spaces, is contained by a soundtrack that encompasses the entire spatial scope of the presentation and allows the individual projections to fuse into one, jagged work. As is the case in Atkins’ earlier works, this multiple projection is sustained by the artist’s peculiar, fractured narrative pacing which subjects computer-generated footage and stock footage, templates and familiar blockbusting tropes, to a ruthless, libidinous editing rhythm. The work mixes elements from cinema, music and literature – and alongside conspicuously generic referents, there are works that in the process of research and making, informed the work in more or less oblique ways. The films Husbands (1970) by John Cassavetes and Robert Bresson’s Le diable probablement (1977) for their wayward, histrionic performances; Catherine Malabou’s reflections on metamorphoses of being, Marguerite Duras’ alcoholic transfiguration and “destructive plasticity” in her Ontologie de l’accident (2009); the textual interlocution and spiritual possession of The Changing Light at Sandover (1976) by James Merrill, with its Ouija literature. Atkins borrows the invocation of the supernatural with the digital, obsession and performance from this epic. Text functions similarly interjectionally in Ribbons, chorusing, amplifying, dismissing or advertising the feelings and thoughts of the protagonists, who lurk in a limbo-like set beneath a table, behind walls or off-screen – they are drunks, rejected, toys, lacking agency, effect; they are trolls: those monstrous excluded of internet society whose anonymous recourse is notoriously to abuse of named and figured people online; those whose purpose is irritation, upset. One way in which Atkins might be positing these figures is as symptomatic of a late-capitalist situation where political agency has been so successfully diminished, where social media demands our coherent and acceptable presentation according to the prevailing, prohibitive models – and where deferred responsibility and consequence might be conflated with increasingly dematerialized labor and relationships.

Like the other works in the exhibition, Ribbons is often singularly determined to make contact, to have some kind of effect – often at the expense of typical sense-making content. The desire is connection at any cost; a kind of recklessness and incoherence comparable to the spouting of comment trolls. In this contact, the moral imperative is a luxury; a cycle and a site of abuse, love, hate, tenderness and violence are both symptomatic – a kind of bipolarity – and conditioning of the terms of engagement. Technologically speaking, the work pushes further into a computer- generated situation of horrendous accuracy and physical fantasy. Working in collaboration with a CG animator, and employing software whose exclusive purpose is the accurate recreation of fundamental physical process (FumeFX for smoke; RealFlow for liquids) Ribbons is an even more fully-realized attempt at the barricades of empirical authenticity. Returning to the motif of karaoke, Ribbons features a series of songs, each more melancholic, indulgent than the last, performed by the avatar trolls in various stages of drunken resignation, surrounded by the detritus of their downfall. Ribbons unspools and tightens in a multitude of modes and manners. Identity, society, alcohol, psychosis and obsession loop indefinitely in a performance of complete affection.

Publication
To mark the opening of the exhibition, a first artist monograph including texts by Ed Atkins, a conversation between the artist and Beatrix Ruf and an essay by Joe Luna is published by JRP|Ringier, Zürich, in cooperation with the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf and the Kunsthalle Mainz.

Un-like: 3-part symposium with and by Ed Atkins / SATURDAY, 1. MARCH

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Slavs and Tatars

For the future public library space of Kunsthalle Zurich the artist group Slavs and Tatars invites to the installation and programme «Lektor». The project comprises an audio work of the same title, as well as «Mother Tongues and Father Throats», a carpet on a platform for visitors to pause, to listen, and to reflect on the notions of language and translation, geography and governance, pasts and presence. In addition to these artworks, a series of events is launched, furthering the dialogical framework of the project: three screenings of screwball comedy movies, live interpreted to German; an encounter between a scholar of medieval political literature and a contemporary political commentator; and a lecture-performance by the artists themselves, followed by a conversation with a translator of theory.

Encouraging a constant shift of speakers and listeners «Lektor» welcomes a wide audience to engage with its subjects and situations.
O goodly Justice! it is better to listen than to speak.
An experienced sage has remarked that rather than speaking,it is important to listen and to understand.
–Yusuf Khass Hajib, Wisdom of Royal Glory, verse 984

In the space that is to become its public library, Kunsthalle Zurich is presenting a new version of the artist group Slavs and Tatars’ two-channel audio work Lektor, together with the launch of a new series of programmes and theory. Where in a near future the written word will make itself available to the visitors of exhibitions, this exhibition actualises the written word by way of the voice: an Uighur voice reading excerpts from Kutadgu Bilig (Wisdom of Royal Glory), and a voice-over of an updated German translation. Words from a seemingly distant place and past are channelled to our here and now, exploring the promise of language(s). Slavs and Tatars, who devote their work to "the area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China", write: "The importance of Kutadgu Bilig is difficult to overstate: it is to Turkic languages what Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is to Persian, Beowulf to English, or Nibelungen to German. By placing Turkic literature and ideas of statecraft on an equal footing with their counter-parts in the Arabic and Persian traditions, Kutadgu Bilig looked to the east with as much vigor and conviction as Atatürk looked to the west some eight hundred years later with his secularizing language reforms, among them Romanization of the Turkish alphabet."

Language is fundamentally dependent upon translation, from the written word to its sounding in space and vice versa, or in the transfer from one geographical space to another. These facts bridge the centuries as well as latitudes engaged by the piece; Lektor outlines the mechanisms of power at work in the translation inherent to language. At the same time this cycle of investigation by Slavs and Tatars into the different practices and techniques of translation looks for the cracks that moments of imagination may cause. The Gavrilov technique for example, that is often used in Eastern Europe for live single-voice-over-translations in cinematic screenings while elsewhere for news reports mainly, leaves a gap between the original and local language, so that the actors’ audible performance is to be merged with one’s apprehension of the spoken content in a trans-cultural process of perception and interpretation. A US-American, a Polish, and a former-Soviet screwball comedy movie, screened and live interpreted in German at Kunsthalle Zurich (see titles and dates below) will displace and demonstrate this experience of the real "lector".

The power at stake in language and listening, translation and transformation, recitation and reconciliation is particularly striking in Wisdom of Royal Glory, an 11th century example of a genre of political commentary called "mirrors for princes". A dialogue of a Sufi dervish and a vizier to the king, the epic poem contemplates the role of the spiritual life in relation to the state. Or in the words of Slavs and Tatars:
"Also known as advice literature, “mirrors for princes“ were guides for future rulers, a genre shared by Christian and Muslim lands, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Machiavelli’s The Prince is the most widely known example). At a time when the overwhelming majority of scholarship was devoted to religious affairs (jurisprudence, theology, etc.), these texts carved out a space for statecraft. Today, we suffer from the very opposite: a secular rage to know it all. There’s no shortage of political commentators around but a notable lack of intelligent, eloquent discourse on the role of faith, the immaterial, or what Rudolf Otto would call “the holy other,” in public life." The Kunsthalle Zurich’s programme Reality Check, a series of encounters between non-art experts within the specific space and subject of an exhibition, will give insight into historical research on medieval political literature and discuss it in relation with contemporary challenges of faith, etiquette, and ethics in public policy from the perspective of political commentary and journalism.

The presence of Slavs and Tatars will particularly shape our listening and understanding here: "Guests are invited to sit on Mother Tongues & Father Throats, a carpet which pictures a diagram of letters of the Arabic alphabet and the corresponding parts of the mouth used to pronounce them. A nod to the Uighur language’s guttural gravitas, Mother Tongues & Father Throats turns to the throat as a source of mystical language—often eclipsed by the tongue’s profane, everyday speech." The final word will be given to Slavs and Tatars for a lecture-performance titled The Transliterative Tease (see date and time below), further exploring cinematographic language practices, namely transliterature (the conversion of scripts) as "a strategy equally of resistance and research in notions of identity politics, colonialism, and liturgical reform". The artist will be joined by Stefan Nowotny, a theorist of translation and translator of theory, for a round of Questions & Answers – a dialogic format that stands as a title for this new series of conversations with artists and producers.
In its quest for overarching and understanding, this exhibition and programme invites a constant shift of speakers and listeners. It cordially invites you.

Slavs and Tatars is a faction of polemics and intimacies devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia. The collective’s work spans several media, disciplines, and a broad spectrum of cultural registers (high and low) focusing on an oftforgotten sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. Their solo engagements include GfZK, Leipzig (2014), Dallas Museum of Art (2014), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2013), Secession, Vienna (2012), and MoMA, NY (2012). Their work has been exhibited in group shows at the 9th Gwangju, 3rd Thessaloniki, 8th Mercosul, the 10th Sharjah Biennials, Centre Pompidou, and Tate Modern. Slavs and Tatars has published Friendship of Nations: Polish Shi’ite Showbiz (Book Works, 2013), Khhhhhhh (Mousse/Moravia Gallery, 2012), Not Moscow Not Mecca (Revolver/Secession, 2012), Love Me, Love Me Not: Changed Names (onestar press, 2010), a translation of the legendary Azeri satire Molla Nasreddin: the magazine that would’ve, could’ve, should’ve (JRP-Ringier, 2011), and Kidnapping Mountains (Book Works, 2009).

Communications / Press & Events
Martin Schmidt Tel: +41 (0)44 2721515 schmidt@kunsthallezurich.ch

Press information: Friday, 14 February, 12 noon
Opening: 14 February, 6–9pm

Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270 8005 Zurich
Opening hours
TUE/WED/FRI 11 AM – 6 PM, THURS 11 AM – 8 PM, SAT/SUN 10 AM – 5 PM, MON CLOSED
PUBLIC HOLIDAYS: Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, 1 May, 10 AM – 5 PM
Admission:
Adults CHF 12.00
Reduced CHF 8.00
Combined ticket with Migros Museum CHF 20.00
Reduced combined ticket CHF 12.00
Children up to the age of 16 free

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