calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/9/2014

Two exhibitions

Lisson Gallery, London

Marina Abramovic: White Space

Taking its title from an early, immersive sound environment, White Space presents a range of historic works by Marina Abramović, most of which have never been exhibited before. Featuring two important sound pieces, previously unseen video documentation of seminal performances and a number of newly discovered photographs, all dating from 1971-1975, the exhibition reveals the artist's first forays into a performance-based practice dealing with time and the immaterial, themes which have again become central to her current work.

First realised in 1972 at The Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade, White Space was a room lined with white paper containing a tape recording of the artist repeating the phrase “I love you”. Visitors were instructed to “Enter the space. Listen.” Never since recreated, this work forms the centrepiece of this display of rare, formative Abramović works, which nevertheless relate thematically to her recent decision to strip down her practice to its essence and empty out the Serpentine Gallery for her long-durational performance there, entitled 512 Hours. A second audio work installed in its own environment, The Tree (1971) can be heard just outside the gallery, in its central courtyard, where a number of speakers blare out an artificially amplified repetition of birds chirping, the insistent recording perhaps referring to the recorded pronouncements of Josip Broz ‘Tito’, Yugoslavia’s revolutionary socialist leader of the time, whom Abramović’s parents fought with and eventually served under, as military officers in the Communist government.

Consisting of a series of 28 photographic works partially obscured by white correction fluid, also played on an accompanying slide projection, Freeing the Horizon (1973) represents Abramović’s enigmatic and systematic erasure of a number of important buildings from the Belgrade skyline, many of which, coincidentally, the artist later discovered were physically obliterated by the NATO bombings of 1999 as part of the Kosovo War. Three other later works from this series will be presented in new formats: Freeing the Memory is a film projection with sound, depicting Abramović’s attempt to recall every Serbian word she can, in a continuous stream of language, for over an hour. Freeing the Voice sees her lying prone on a white mattress with her head tilted back, screaming until she loses her voice, while Freeing the Body (all 1975) follows another of her own tightly-scripted scenarios: “I move to the rhythm of the black African drummer. I move until I am completely exhausted. I fall.”

Also on show in her second solo exhibition with the gallery is a newly remastered and previously unseen film version of Rhythm 5 (1974), which was captured by the artist’s brother, Velmir Abramović. As the artist lays on the floor, in the middle of a burning five-point star (the symbol of Yugoslav Partisans), she loses consciousness due to a lack of oxygen resulting from the fire and has to be rescued by concerned onlookers. Then, as now, Abramović reveals, through her performative works and experiential situations, how heightened states of being and awareness can be achieved simply through the conjunction of her body, her voice and her presence in a space – or, conversely, through the absence of all of the above.

---

Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg: The Gates of the Festival

A new series of works and a new direction marks this inaugural exhibition of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg at Lisson Gallery. Sculptural interventions, projections, neon, film and music are interwoven throughout the spaces in an immersive installation, eschewing video screens or static objects for animated surfaces and pulsating environments. Merging audio-visual and multimedia elements, Djurberg & Berg’s debut show with the gallery melds together as one continuous or total work of art, albeit constructed of discrete events and individual experiences.

One room presents an installation of 10 waist-high urns, standing in two rows, entitled Gas, Solid, Liquid. Each pot contains a small, unique animation relating to the possible contents, as well as a specially composed piece of music, which vibrates and resonates deep within the ceramic vessel. In another gallery, light, projection and beat-laden musical soundtracks transform four functional-looking white tables into luminescent, performing sculptures, collectively known as Fever Dreams. Their horizontal tops are impregnated and enlivened by flowing depictions of amoebic organisms, malleable matter and clouds liquefying back to rain and seawater, while the table legs appear to be leaching out the film’s corresponding colours. Both of these bodies of work relate to a previous exhibition called The Black Pot, shown at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow in 2013, when the artists began experimenting with newly abstracted animations and ambient electronica within a darkened, womb-like environment, in order to depict the cycle of life.

The central installation at Lisson Gallery, entitled The Gates of the Festival, reveals the importance of Berg’s music as a unifying force for their collaborative work, his scores and compositions having accompanied Djurberg’s work for the past decade. In this exhilarating, multi-sensory, surround-sound work, 12 neon shapes hung from the ceiling are illuminated according to notes or tones programmed by Berg, with different frequencies performing certain actions – the sounds seemingly controlling or ‘playing’ the installation. Across the walls, three abstract, crayon-drawn video animations add to the all-enveloping atmosphere, punctuated by the moving image of a gangly claymation bird, being projected in the round on a slowly revolving carousel.

Feathery, flying creatures of this kind – created from wire, foam, clay and fabric – featured in Djurberg & Berg’s previous touring exhibition Parade, which featured 80 bird-like sculptures as well as stop-motion films, but also represent their abiding interest in the darker niches of the natural world, further glimpsed here in a smaller animation of the morphing wings of a butterfly, given a psychological depth by its visual relationship to squirming Rorschach blots. Just as Djurberg & Berg produce art symbiotically to create their own singular and beguiling world, the ideas, sounds and images they conjure also propose a synaesthetic interrelationship between the realms of the visible, the audible and the imaginary.

For press information:
Gair Burton or Diana Babei at Rhiannon Pickles PR Tel: +44 (0)7402 784 470
Email: gair@picklespr.com, diana@picklespr.com

Opening 16 September 2014, 7-9 pm

Lisson Gallery
27 Bell Street, London
52 Bell Street, London
Opening Hours: Monday-Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm

stampa

permanent link